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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

This is reminiscent of the Tribes 2 development, when the developers revealed they lost the original Tribes source code, and thus the physics calculations.

Beta testers constantly complained that falling didn't feel right, jetting and skiing (the game's main movement) was slow and soupy. Players were leaking videos and photos showing the differences in motion.

At one point, Dynamix hired a top player to playtest, as he "remembered the best" how it felt. All to reclaim the physics calculations of some game from the Leisure Suit Larry company.

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As a matter of fact, there is still a regular group of Tribes2 players online. This past Memorial Day weekend, I booted up a VM, d/l'd the ISO's, etc. and played a capture the flag match for a few hours... eventually with 16+ on the same server.

The game is 16 years old... old enough to drive a car and it's still being played!

Killer soundtrack, too!

REALLY?? I wonder if there's a Tribes 1 revival group...

Tribes 1 was an absolute favourite in my household growing up. It was the first real viable, extendable MMO fighter I'd played. I don't know if I've had as much fun in a similar format (and I enjoy [like the odd ice cream treat] some modern ones like BF1). Maybe it's just sentimentalism. It was the first game I got my younger siblings into, and they became obsessed. More than me... haha...

SHAZBOT!

Tribes 1 was open sourced a number of years ago and is free to play. Tons of mod servers and vanilla still exist and of course SHAZBOT!

You got me excited for a few minutes, but...no, Tribes 1 was not open sourced. The game was released as freeware though, along with a lot of the other Earthsiege and Tribes games.

They can be downloaded here as iso files: https://www.tribesuniverse.com/

Well... there goes my night.

Get it up and running / working. Snap Crackle Pub is the 'main' server nowadays it seems. You're in luck, as it seems tonight 8pm EST there's gonna be a special event going on?

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https://www.reddit.com/r/Tribes/comments/6vmsqu/tribes_2_sma...

Smackdown in Tribestown happening Tomorrow at 8pm EST on SNAP LAK Server. 67.222.138.13:28000

Midair guys are coming over to Tribes2 to play a few games and warm up for the Closed Beta Release of Midair. Should be a good time. If you need a copy of the game preconfigured check out my Tribes 2 Config here. Join us in Discord for more info.

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...and download the map pack here => put in prog files / dynamix / tribes / maps / etc. => http://t2.branzone.com/

oh apparently it wasn't open sourced but the source has been floating around online for quite some time http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-679947.h...

Tribes 1 was the first FPS I played after about...Star Wars Dark Forces, I think. It's the first game that I had the opportunity to play on a LAN, and it's the first game that I remember using mouselook in.

We had a community center near home, with about 10 gaming PCs. Tribes was a huge favorite, especially with all the different mods that were available.

We switched almost completely to AVP when that came out, though.

>We had a community center near home, with about 10 gaming PCs. Tribes was a huge favorite, especially with all the different mods that were available.

You just reminded me. I had a real slack-off sort of teacher(s) in my 9th and 10th grade communications labs, and Tribes would run on the old Dell boxes they had in there for whatever work. We had a whole system worked out with a watcher and everybody playing over LAN in the lab whenever the teacher stepped out of the room. I'd forgotten all about it.

I just downloaded AVP (the original), I think it was available on GoG / Steam? Works pretty well with Parallels on Mac, VM + Windows evaluation license!

Yep, I see it on GoG and Steam.

I had an interesting experience with that. I'd borrowed the game from a friend, and it didn't play nicely with the integrated SiS graphics chip on my computer (performance was fine, but a lot of elements of the game didn't render). I contacted Fox Interactive's support team. They asked for my address, and I got a "replacement" copy of the game a few months later. To be clear, I didn't ask for a replacement, and stated that I was borrowing the game from a friend. Still, a nice surprise.

Also, the engine itself was open-sourced years ago, and a Linux port was made. It should be perfectly possible to clean up some bitrot and get it working on modern systems, including natively on the (x86) Mac. Makes me curious if it would run on the PPC Mac that I've got in my closet.

The best I got was BFBC2, BF3 wasn't as good for me (too much griefing, overpowered, non-fun, skill-mismatch). I have hope for BF1 but haven't gotten in to it.

The crazy thing is that with T2 technology, they technically support(ed) 128 players in the same map! Epic, epic, epic, epic, on a scale that can't be imagined today for melee / team combat.

Or maybe that's just my nostalgia and lack of a Windows PC kicking in. 8v8 doesn't do it for me compared to Tribes. Eve looks awesome but it's not as punchy, crunchy, or visceral.

Any random game recommendations to recapture that feeling?

BF1 can be downright hairy. That's what drew me in. You can't get 128 to my knowledge, but there are regularly games with 64 players. It's probably the closest thing. (plus a bit of nostalgia from BF Vietnam and 1942 with my siblings as well)

For altogether different reasons I really enjoy Star Wars Battlefront.

I'm not a huge gamer, though. There's probably something out there that I'm not aware of. I did buy a Windows PC/gpu just so I could do some gaming, though... (well, and for some basic VR dev project)

Noting else quite does it for me like T2 does/did, I know a lot of it is nostalgia but the game is also just clean. Somehow it looks and feels better than many modern games to me. I still think the UI (buggy as it was sometimes) looks great, it still feels futuristic and game UI's 10 years later look like trash.

Having in game mail, IRC, and an actual clan system I think was awesome and ahead of its time as well.

If you're into team-based base building games.. opensource too, http://tremulous.net asymmetric teams FPS + RTS

I can remember playing it with my Voodoo card. T2 had Glide support and with that on, you could see much further than players with OpenGL cards.

I'm not surprised, because get things lost to history all the time, but do you have a source?

Love T2, I'm not affiliated directly (aside from being an KS backer) but if you liked the tribes franchise, take a look at Midair, a game being developed by a lot of former T2 players (although from what I understand, it has more of a T1 feel or a blend of the two): https://www.playmidair.com/

Wasn't the mountain surfing/skiing a physics bug, that they liked so much they just kept in the game?

Same thing with bunny hopping in Quake, Half-Life and subsequently Counter-Strike. For an even deeper cut there are at least for older CS-games a sub-genre of surf maps specifically about navigating large areas with lots of pitfalls through that feature (previously bug).

I believe they took pains to prevent the bunny hopping in Quake 3.

Indeed they did try that with a patch, but it had unintended consequences with "regular" movement feeling clunky, so they reverted it. It seems bunny hopping is a tightly linked side-effect of the set of physics rules that make those games "feel" good.

Why wouldn't they just sample the game repeatedly to reverse engineer the physics?

Tribes original certainly remained in play while tribes 2 dwv was happening.

Yeah I could see using this to match physics and gameplay feel for games. Their example uses MegaMan physics and is quite close. It might be a good analysis tool as well to make sure gameplay tweaks to physics, lighting, etc between versions or when comparing changes almost like a gameplay diff.

The Leisure Suit Larry company was Sierra. Loved playing those games! Hero’s Quest, later renamed to Quest for Glory was probably my favorite. The physics in those games were amazing for the time, so I’m not surprised.

Sierra were the producers, Dynamix were the developers. Of course, things seemed muddled when both Sierra salesmen and Dynamix developers were hanging out on the internet forums with us players. I think Sierra bought Dyanmix at one point.

Sierra was both a publisher and a developer led by husband and wife team Ken and Roberta Williams. The first Leisure Suit Larry came out in 1987. Sierra didn’t acquire Dynamix until 1990, and they had nothing to do with Larry. Dynamix was known more for flight simulator games like Red Barron. The only forums around then were on Usenet and BBS’s. I used to run one of those BBS's. Fun times!

Or they could just have disassembled the original to try and recover the original calculations

If only they hadn't lost the source. It's apparently since been found at GarageGames, a game dev company started when Dynamix/Sierra fired all the devs after T2 was released.

Never expected to see tribes mentioned on hackernews!

Next up evercrack er Everquest.

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