The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source | Hacker News Reader

The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

runningwithscissors.com

242 pointsdavemo77 comments

"the CDude class, which is the main, player-controlled character in the game."

"CDoofus is the class for the enemy guys [...] Started this file from from CDude and modified it to do some enemy logic using the same assets as the sample 2D guy."

"COstrich is the object for the ostriches wandering about in the game. class COstrich : public CDoofus"

Hilarious. Reminds me of CBruce in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: "Their code [...] originally written for Apocalypse[...] a Playstation game featuring Bruce Willis, which, we learned, is why in Tony Hawk the code for the classes of skaters is called CBruce."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131563/postmortem_trey...

"Project: Nostril (aka Postal)"

Any idea what RSPiX Blue, Cyan, Green and Orange layers are?

From Postal Overview.txt: "The game is built on top of our cross-platform library, called "RSPiX" (pronounced "risp-icks"). RSPiX is organized into several levels, from low-level to high-level functional. Each level is named after a color." (https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...)

In summary, blue provides graphics/audio/input functions, cyan is a UI framework (with printer support), and the distinctions between green and orange "become rather blurry at some points."

POSTAL Redux is currently $1.43 (84% off) on Steam; reminds me of Contra. Reviews say the only unexpected down side is load times; hope they can tighten that up.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/401680/

Edit: I think the big "feature" is co-op.

For me, Postal 2 was the peak of the franchise.

It's goofy, and has it's fair share of [sometimes funny] bugs, plus it has first person view.

It's currently on sale for $0.99 on Steam[1]

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/223470/

Postal 2 was one of the funniest games I ever played.

Also, the movie was practically the only movie adaptation of a video game that did not totally suck. (It got there using the same indiscriminate crude humor of the game, but it did not pretend to be anything else.)

I think the part that cracked me up the most was Boll's dying words: "I hate video games!".

It is amazing how much objectionable content they put in that game while still maintaining a satirical black comedy tone instead of a "trying too hard" feel. The tagline was "it's only as violent as you are!" as it is possible to complete all your tasks without violence.

At one point, it has you protecting the developers of the game from anti-violent video game protestors who want to solve their problems with violence.

You can use cats as suppressors for your weapon.

You can urinate at will, and can discover you're infected with gonorrhea, for which you can get medicine.

Really, a great game for those with an open sense of humor. Postal 2 is a great example of why games shouldn't be censored.

> You can urinate at will

Just don't do it while looking straight up - unless you're on fire, that is.

I'm very pleasantly surprised to see people who can appreciate the humour on HN.

So what you're saying is that it's the video game version of Cards Against Humanity.

I think CAH does tread into the TryHard zone, but that's personal taste. They're similar in method but different in feel.

I think CAH is going for the shock factor, while Postal is like an extended penis joke

Remember that if you urinate on somebody with the gonorrhea urine it will instantly kick them into the vomiting state, which can be useful if you don't treat it--I seem to recall that as an optional sidequest.

Postal REDUX and Postal 2 are great games, but I strongly suggest you do not buy Postal 3. From the developers of Postal 1 & 2:

> Okay, I’m going to level with you – don’t buy Postal III. You’d regret it. Hell, you’d regret playing it for free. It’s a sometimes boring, other times frustrating, unfinished, borderline-broken mess, and we can’t do anything about it.

source: http://runningwithscissors.com/?page_id=853

edit: for fun, click on the "(Don't) buy on Steam" link on that page.

Clicked on the "Don't buy on Steam" button, was worth it! These guys have a sense of humour that is quite inline with what I find funny :-)

This reminds me, I actually had some contact with the guys behind RWS many years ago, I was a young man and very excited about HTML/CSS and design in general, I ended up designing their forum (it was running on IPB): http://tinyimg.io/i/5GTDNgx.jpg

Postal 2 is one of my favourite games ever. Had a blast in both single player and online. Me and my friends still talk about it after all these years!

I spent a lot of time on that forum! In fact, I just dug through my email from 2003 looking for my photo contest submission (I didn't win but I got an honorable mention) and I found an email that I had sent to the webmaster complimenting them on the new layout. I guess that should have gone to you ;)

I wasn't a huge regular, just kinda lurked for most of the time.

I remember those forums being absolutely relentless... Definitely one of the far corners of the internet!

Wow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS.

This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of technology. If you open source your engine, that doesn't have to happen.

Take a look at Doom. New content for Doom 1 and Doom 2 is still being released by the community, long after competitors like Duke3D have stopped. Why? Because Doom has a passionate community, and many modern, open source engines that make running the game on new systems a piece of cake.

It's not in their interest. If people stick to old games, they have less time to play others and buy less games.

But if people stick to old games, they can make content packs for old games, and people will still buy them (and relatively cheaply, too).

Alternatively, you can keep updating your games until the end of times like Valve does.

On a serious note, the thing about Doom and other Id games is that they used to release the complete toolbox along with the game, allowing anybody to create content on-par with the base product.

True, but Duke Nukem 3D did the same thing (actually, id didn't release any tooling for Doom: id's internal DoomEd was written in Objective-C for NeXT machines, so it wouldn't have been much use in any case. They didn't start releasing their internal design tools until a bit later, meaning that DN3D did it first), and DN3D's community is virtually dead, while Doom's continues to thrive.

I was about to point out that Marathon: Infinity did it first, but it turns out DN3D beat it by about half a year. The fact that Marathon: Infinity included the game editor on the disk was a huge deal at the time though.

Obligatory name-dropping of Marathon, the greatest game to be virtually ignored by all gaming analysis/histories.

Now I can play it on my Linux system.

It looks like it's been available for Linux for a while. Steam has it for Linux, and the compatibility info shows Ubuntu 12.04...so, I would guess the port happened many years ago.

That's not necessarily true. Many games show the version as 12.04 because the original Steam OS is based on it.

Postal had a very early linux port, I remember playing in the early 2000s. I think it was one of the games ported by Loki Software before they went bankrupt (ahead of their time I guess).

I remember I had some problems with sound in it because of the in-kernel sound driver for my laptop's sound chip didn't deal well with mmap()ed access, which the game required. I used the proprietary OSS audio stack which had a driver that didn't have that problem. Of course it was only an evaluation version and would shut off the sound after some minutes of play.

Kind of glad these things are rarely an issue on the linux desktop anymore :)

If it weren't so sad, it'd be hilarious how long it took for sound to even be close to usable on Linux. Only in the past couple of years has it become reasonable to use Linux for any kind of serious audio work (and it is still weaker than Windows and Mac on many fronts, though the latency and RT issues have been resolved for some time). I started trying to use Linux for audio in 1995, when I was still going to school for audio recording. Only now is it actually something that one might consider doing real work with.

It's always been such an afterthought, and always so flaky. For me, it was the one thing that kept a Windows partition on most of my systems through all those years.

Most things work nowadays. Oxenfree doesn't, but that might just be my system config.

Ah. Whoops. My mistake...

This is completely off-topic, but in the vein of talking about old games. Does anyone have any suggestions for games that scratched the same itch as the old school RTS games like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations?

I've been searching for years but never found anything that eclipses the classics.

How about AoE and RoN? AoE II (the remastered HD version) is available on Steam as in RoN. AoE II HD currently 75% off.

They are still publishing updates to Age Of Empires, not sure the quality though:

http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2148/

To quote a review: I grew up on AoE2, and these expansions have really brought life into the game as a whole.

The AOE2HD port is reasonably well done, and they've even released new content for it. It holds up.

Maybe the single player campaign but 3vPC multiplayer just sucks and will dc/hang easily.

Unfortunately the same holds true for 0AD as recommend by someone else.

But both still wonderful games.

AoE2 has been a staple of my entire family gamers and non-gamers alike for 20 years now. My ~50 year old parents played with my wife an I in a big 4 person game over Christmas. The updates have definitely improved the balance. Huns cav archers are a little more expensive, fire ships beat galleys beat demo ships beat fire ships, better AI. All great improvements imo.

0ad: https://play0ad.com/

Is an open source game very similar to AoE, I've enjoyed playing it.

Maybe take a peek at the Wargame series. The latest is Red Dragon, but my personal favorite is AirLand Battle.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/251060/

If you're looking for something more sci-fi, Sins of a Solar Empire is pretty good:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/204880/

It may be only tangentially related to the genre, but Factorio has stolen far too many of my hours and is definitely worth the $20. It is engaging and challenging like no other game I've played in the past couple of years.

Factorio is good, but drones are cheat.

The drones are only available after a certain tech level and require a lot of power to operate on a large scale. They have pros and cons like all the other tech. You need a balance of drones with well planned conveyer belt layouts to do really well. +1 for factorio, biggest non-baby timesink I've had in years

Create very compact base, with 3 drone towers around it, so drones will be in fly for much less time. Automate everything, up to drones. Profit. Solar power solves problem with energy. Only mining is left, which is easy to layout with drones. Most of the time after drones I'm watching or laying out solar panels and batteries just for fun, until launch.

>...and is definitely worth the $20

One thing I love about Factorio (aside from everything else), is the pricing model. It never goes on sale, and never will. That means the usual agonizing over "should I buy it or wait until a sale?" is non-existent. More developers should adopt that model.

> It never goes on sale

I'm betting it will one day. I'm waiting.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140

That's fine. I still think it will. It's not like I don't have 10,000 other ways to spend my time and money while I wait.

Try Cossacks 3. It can simulate 10 000 units in one battle.

I recommend relatively obscure game Magic & Mayhem. Although not 100% strategy, it has controllable units and isometric view and that feel.

Also Majesty and Dungeon Keeper.

Maybe try Planetary Annihilation: Titans?

The original Planetary Annihilation was developed by the people that made the classic Total Annihilation RTS. After delivering the Kickstarted game, they further revised it into the "Titans" verison, and gifted the upgrade to the initial backers.

http://www.uberent.com/pa/

Currently on sale for $6 on Steam too!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance[0] is, IMHO far superior. I've put far too many hours into both.

Only play the community-maintained version[1], Forged Alliance Forever. Over the years it's improved upon and polished the Steam version in virtually every respect.

PA: Titans is still a good game, different enough to be fun, and a great deal for the money. It's just not quite in the same league as games like SC:FA, Age of Empires II: HD or Factorio.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/9420/

[1] http://www.faforever.com

Zero-k? www.zero-k.info

Most of this year, i have been busy being a benevolent ruler of my tropical islands in Tropico 4. Got it for free on some sale (i think Humble Bundle).

Planning to finish the campaign by the end of this year and then will probably proceed onto "Tropico 5 - Complete Collection" on Steam.

http://wz2100.net/

Check out Empire Earth and its sequels.

The Civilization and Anno games let me scratch that same itch

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful comments in the code.

I remember when the source code for Descent was released; not only was the code somewhat opaque (unless you were experienced with portal-style engines), but there were hardly any kind of comments to help guide you along.

Reading some of the docs in the source tree makes it apparent it's been ported to a bunch of platforms and for a bunch of different markets, and it looks like a lot of people have touched the code over the years. With an experienced hand guiding the process, that usually leads to good quality, in terms of re-usability, stability, and code comments. Being 19 years old is also good for quality...even if it's huge and scary and difficult to wrap ones head around in a short time, somebody has run into every possible edge case and weird compatibility issue in all that time, and they've probably fixed it. Old code bases aren't really fun to work on, but they are usually really productive to work on.

There are some interesting notes about how the multiplayer was originally implemented:[0]

"Once the game is running, everything is peer-to-peer. The only information the peers send each other is the local players' input data, which is encoded as a 32-bit value (where various bits indicate whether the player is running or walking, which direction, whether the fire button was pressed, etc.). No position, velocity or accelleration data is transmitted. NOTHING else is transmitted."

In order for this to work, they had to make sure all memory was initialized to the same values, so that each client had the same known starting state. They also had to use the same PRNG, initialized to the same state, so that a known, deterministic pattern would be produced. But eventually they ran into a problem that couldn't be solved in software: The FPU of different CPUs would not return the same results for the same inputs:

"However, dispite our best efforts, there was still a serious flaw lurking behind the scenes that eventually caused serious problems that we couldn't work around. It seems that different Floating Point Units return slightly different results given the same values. This was first seen when pitting PC and Mac versions of the game against each other in multiplayer mode. Every once in a while, the two versions would go out of sync with one another. It was eventually tracked down to slightly different floating point results that accumulated over time until eventually they resulted in two different courses of action on each client. For instance, on the PC a character might get hit by a bullet, while on the Mac the same character would be just 1 pixel out of the way and the bullet would miss. Once something like that happens, the two clients would be hopelessly out-of-sync."

0. https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...

This is also how the original Doom's networking worked[0], and still used to implement RTS networking[1] where the number of entities to be synchronized is very large compared to the amount of input.

0. http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_documentation/The-DOOM-III-N...

1. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on... 1500 archers is the classic treatment but also see dissenting opinion here: https://medium.com/@treeform/dont-use-lockstep-in-rts-games-...

Awesome! Now just give me Diablo 2, and I will be content for life.

Does the release include the original game assets, or do assets need to be purchased (like with Doom releases)?

I dunno, but Postal is $0.49 in the Steam sale right now, if you need the assets.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/232770/

Even if they are available for $0.49, having them under an open source license would be very different. (It would make it possible, e.g., to modify them and ship them in other games.)

Oh, I agree. I just wanted to point out that it's on sale, and so cheap that anyone wanting to play with this should grab it.

I still have my original copy from 19 years ago, when I was 12 years old! : )

picture: https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/814612135150055424

Many a fun time I had with the Postal level editor, placing ostrich-dispenser-dispensers around the map in great number and watching the ensuing carnage after a few well-aimed napalm canisters.

Reading this, as well as the comments in this thread makes me want to play the game again. Might fire it up over the weekend and I will surely go through the code for a while!

It was a nice late-christmas present ;-)

I bought Postal Redux on Steam last night for under $2 and played to level 5. Still a very playable game!

Reading the source code of this is sure sobering. All files and code lines are there for the single purpose - to ship the game.

Misread the title as saying "Portal"! Pleasantly surprised however - I never played Postal.

I thought the title said 'Portal', not 'Postal'. Disapointed :P

It would be amazing if Valve made Source Engine open source, but that would require them to replace Havok and perhaps other middleware.

Many games from this era were free homebrew Half-life mods. I think Valve should do more to promote hacking and modding their games.

Counter strike was created as a mod by the community as well as day of defeat.

I do believe that almost all of Valve's games started out as mods.

One could make an argument that all of their games started out as mods, in one way or another.

Is there any word on a DOOM-style sourceport happening?

This game is one of my favorite classics.

"I regret nothing."

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