Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games | Hacker News Reader

Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games

gamedate.org

341 pointsmsuniverse202653 comments

Reminds me of a 2011 reddit post (obviously in the format of a rage comic) that led to the formation of r/playdate, although that shifted to just looking for people to play games with over the years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j8hpz/idea_for_subr...

I love seeing the original concept brought back with a cool UI.

I remember the formation of /r/playdate! Good times, I remember getting very drunk on voice chat, I barely remember what we were playing, maybe CSS

Love the old school steam inspired ui.

First game I noticed was deadlock which technically isn't even released yet. That's fine though. Deadlock is a game that is really good to play with a fixed group. So I'd say this site is good for even more than dead games.

Nice work!

The first thing I searched for was Deadlock, but was saddened when I realised they weren't talking about Deadlock: Planetary Conquest

Ha funny I had a similar idea I was calling ‘GameFlock’ but game date is much better.

To the creators I think there is something here worth continuing to push and try to find traction. As a game developer this is just a matchmaking algorithm with a week to month long wait time :)

My plan was to try to prime the pump with a few popular games and reaching out to existing communities to make them aware and possibly help organize the software/tools to help onboard new players.

For example Ultima Online has Outlands. Tribes2 has a popular discord that arranges matches. I imagine WoW classic and I know C&C Generals have active communities on Discord and I think they’d be willing to work with you to help prime the pump.

Then once you’ve got that critical mass of usage hope that players will participate in other games outside their main passion to make other game dates a success.

The developer made a video explaining the project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFBCNnOhYgs

Love this forum UI/UX. It's clear, snappy, intuitive. How far we have fallen.

That said, allowing posts with no auth is a choice.

You can always turn it off.

It's nostalgic, but good lord does it need a bit of contrast...

Seems pretty readable to me. The information density is high, there are slight box shadows in interactive elements. We need more like this.

A dark red LIVE against a military green background... Again, it's nostalgic, I loved steam back then, but this isn't winning any design award.

> this isn't winning any design award

Good. I prefer interfaces that care more about being concise and usable than about winning design awards.

You can be concise and have good contrast. "Winning any awards" is a manner of speech.

Try another theme, looks great I think. Black or dark blue is crisp

I had to scroll all the way down in order for the bottom panel to appear. Then I was able to change theme. Good it has themes, but it just highlighted another problem in the design of the website.

The dark blue theme is indeed neat.

I thought this is a sort of campaign / kickstarter site to prioritize which dead games are in highest demand, in pursuit of reverse engineering and building servers for them.

that early steam UI aesthetic has sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole...

https://archive.org/details/steam_10-08-2004

a rabbit hole, at the end of which is an imgui theme, and me was^H^H^Hspending entirely too much time extracting actual fonts, color codes and other minuscule details.

what's better, i have absolutely no issue with that theme being my new default!

I love how stylised it is while remaining more responsive than the vast majority of websites today.

WIP: https://seidt.quest/s/dampf/

it uses a lightly modified @mori2003/jsimgui[1] and renders to webgpu. i can change that to webgl2 if anyone's browser fails because of that.

the fonts actual fonts appear to be tahoma and verdana. however, my imgui bindings couldn't bake the fonts at a specific size.

what i found interesting is running msiextract[2] on the above linked steam.msi revealed a TrackerScheme.res file with exact RGBA colors and layout configuration (borders, scrollbars, etc) for many widgets.

there's a lot left in there but i need to climb out of this hole for now. have fun!

[1]: https://jsr.io/@mori2003/jsimgui

[2]: https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.11&query=msiext...

StarCraft 1 let you take your computer to anywhere and connect on the LAN with anyone, or even dial-up directly to your friend's phone number.

In StarCraft 2, Blizzard like every other corp wanted to see and control everything we do so you have to go all the way through the internet and lag even if you sit right next to each other. lol if the connection goes down!

Even on the PS5 when I hand a visiting guest the throwaway DualSense I have to bump through a clunky UI of choosing a user or "Quick Play" and wait while it spins up a whole new home screen and other crap for them, and then warnings about DLC or whatever in Mortal Kombat etc, just to have a short 2 minute beat-em-up session.

Sigh

"Quick Match" and ranked queues destroyed multiplayer gaming for me.

To be fair, multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays that you can't really blame the companies for not supporting it. You don't really need "greedy corporate fucks" explanation for this; it's just that you don't want to develop, support and test features that maybe 0.1% of the user base is going to use.

This is not an accurate assessment in the StarCraft II case. It was released in 2010, and LAN play was definitely still popular. I remember because I was part of a University club/society that was running ~200 person ~3 day LAN parties at the time, and I recall the intense loathing we had for how incredibly difficult Blizzard had decided to make it to actually play the game you had paid for, on your own network.

If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

> If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

THIS!!! Such gaslighting: "Oh look fewer people are using the thing we said we wouldn't support"

Games like StarCraft, CounterStrike, Warcraft 3/DotA etc were definitely popular at the time of SC2's launch and still are played in "cybercafes" etc.

Hell that LAN environment WAS the reason StarCraft got so hugely popular in the first place, before Blizzard got jealous and wanted to have their fingers in everything, and people still continued to play Brood War after SC2's launch.

Now, when the servers inevitably get graveyarded permanently some day, how is anybody gonna play SC2 or any of the always-online games?

> it's just that you don't want to develop, support and test features

Just let one player's machine host some of the same server code they use for their internet services?

> multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays

WHY?? Literally everybody has phones now, but how many local multiplayer games are there? Imagine if you could just bop your phone to your friends' and immediately start playing something together. The technology and social saturation has never been more favorable than now, but as always it's corporate greed/spying which is the biggest antifun cancer everywhere.

jackbox.tv has some really fun party games for that, if you've got the audience for that.

To be fair, so is couch co-op and yet I always appreciate developers who go the extra mile of giving me the ability to play alongside a friend.

Every time I read something like "you can't blame companies for not supporting it" I think "I can blame companies for not letting me support it".

It was the "greedy corporate fucks" entirely though?

LANs empowered gamers with full ownership and a better ability to self organize player communities and tournaments. The always online model was heavily hamfisted by Activision Blizzard who wanted to launch their esports ambitions with SC2, seeing the KR broodwar scene as missed revenue. Look at the failed Overwatch League (OWL), Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and even reforges of classic RTS.

DOTA/League spawned from lan/bnet use map settings games and arguably Dota rise to success started in Lan cafes before hitting mainstream success on bnet.

I acknowledge that many likely don't ship Lan because it's being seen now of days as extra, but I think that's pointing to the consequence as the root cause what the major entities wanting control and ownership on their platforms. It didn't used to be an extra feature 0.1% used, we were pivoted into this to profit larger corps and it's not a tinfoil hat conspiracy, it's just following where the real money was and investors want to be middlemen on platforms.

> To be fair, multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays that you can't really blame the companies for not supporting it.

Yeah literally nobody has kids, siblings, friends. Those are all things of the past! (i'm being sarcastic)

There's a security problem (and hence legal liability) when two people know each other's IP addresses.

There's also a complex networking situation when people are behind NATs, firewalls, etc.

These problems had been solved for a long time before publishers decided to needlessly kill self-hosted multiplayer. Don't let them gaslight you into believing that the online requirements are about anything else but their greed.

Also, I'm pretty sure players still know each other's IP addresses these days. I don't have any insider knowledge about this, but I'd be very surprised if today's multiplayer games took the latency hit of funneling actual game state through their servers, rather than just using them for matchmaking.

There's also the problem of cheating which creates a reputational issue for the game and frustrates players. Many multiplayer games suffer from cheating.

Yeah, not to mention that you even needed to connect to their servers to play the fucking single player campaign. I hated that so much, and then it more or less became the standard for many AAA single player games to come...

I refused to purchase any Blizzard game or product after Legacy of the Void, until I made the mistake of getting Diablo 4 on the PS5, just because I wanted to play a polished overhead hack-&-slash with a gamepad, but it was so meh I have no interest in the D4 expansion or anything else by Blizzard again.

Man. I miss this Hitman multiplayer mode. I can't believe they killed it. So quickly too. The game launched with it and it was gone within three years I think.

Dystopia just refuses to die huh. Another cool source engine based cyberpunk themed multiplayer game is NEOTOKYO. No idea if it's still alive tho.

Oh wow! That was a fun one.

wow neotokyo such memories streaming back in totally forgot it =} followed it from starting as a tiny mod out on some dev forums wayback when..there were some cool mods back then but this one always stuck in my mind!

Apparently the whole game is being ported by the community to a newer source engine version https://github.com/NeotokyoRebuild/neo. It requires the original mod to be installed for assets but other than that it seems to be rebuilt from scratch.

Really cool initiative! Just created one for tonight for Warcraft 3 TFT custom games. Just to see.

I have no idea what I'm doing but I'm doing it!

It's like what Gamespy was back in the day, or XQF. THe All-Seeing Eye (ASE) was pretty good too but is defunct. Maybe XQF is still around.

Those provided a list of servers for game servers, for games that didn't have a centralized list of servers.

This is amazing.

Would love for this to take off instead of having to join a bajillion LFG discord servers.

In Australia we have https://dadlan.au/ monthly. Physical presence and remote is OK.

Would love to see Steel Sentinels by FubOrb on here.

I like that this is targeting forgotten games with low player counts (since im new and not famous) Have you considered gamifying session creation (e.g., showing estimated wait times or crowd-sourced player counts) to make join-up easier? And I also like your 98.css style!

This is a cool website, and it looks great too

But it definitely could use some better moderation

Speaking of dead games, why cant more older games be open sourced so the community can pick it up and make it alive again

Is this restricted to only games that use steam Master Server Query Protocol?

I hope this becomes popular

I absolutely freaking LOVE this UI. Bravo.

Neotokyo! If there's one thing I could ask everyone to take away from this thread it's that the Neotokyo soundtrack by Ed Harrison (2 cds worth!) is a fucking masterpiece and even if you don't play any of these games go listen to it please. I much preferred playing Dystopia back in the day but holy fuck does the Neotokyo soundtrack slap.

I want to recreate the server for Peter Molyneux's "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?", but put a life changing Rightward-Facing Cow from Ian Bogost's social commentary game "Cow Clicker" inside the cube, instead of a huge disappointment and a pack of broken promises and lies and hype and literal promises of godhood and credits and royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981916

DonHopkins on July 4, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Cow Clicker (2010)

A decade ago attempted to troll Peter Molyneux at the Unity3D "Unite 2012" conference after his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of his "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" Cube Clicker game, jokingly guessing that the big secret inside the box was a cow, but he just didn't get the joke, even after I explained it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380418

DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bullfrog After Populous

His Cube game was the epitome of dopamine addiction games, all that was wrong with Zynga/Facebook games, the rage at the time. Nothing at all original about that: a total cop-out of game design.

When Peter Molyneux gave his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of Cube at the Unity3D Unite conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, I chatted him up afterwards and attempted to troll him by guessing that the big surprise in the box was a cow.

I don't think he got the point that I was trying to make an ironic reference to Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which is a parody of and social commentary on dopamine games.

I tried to explain the joke to him, and he still didn't get it. At least Ian Bogost had the self awareness to design Cow Clicker in the service of making a critical statement about game design, and the capacity of shame to be embarrassed when it was an accidental run-away success.

Unite 2012 : Keynote - Founders & Peter Molyneux (The BS starts at 1h 8m 21s -- It's been 8 years since I saw this live, and it's much worse than I remembered, especially now knowing how it turned out!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AY4fJ66xA&t=1h08m21s

>1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on."

http://www.cowclicker.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

>In the wake of a controversial speech by Zynga's president at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2010, Bogost developed Cow Clicker for a presentation at a New York University seminar on social gaming in July 2010. The game was created to demonstrate what Bogost felt were the most commonly abused mechanics of social games, such as the promotion of social interaction and monetization rather than the artistic aspects of the medium. As the game unexpectedly began to grow in popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming trends, such as gamification, educational apps, and alternate reality games.

>Some critics praised Cow Clicker for its dissection of the common mechanics of social network games and viewed it as a commentary on how social games affect people.

https://qz.com/34024/life-really-is-a-game-with-a-lot-of-cli...

>Life really is a game—with a lot of clicks—and then you die

>Curiosity is just the latest in a series of social experiments that rely on user interactions with seemingly no point. Of course, Zynga is the king of this phenomenon, providing games full of sticky and addictive action that encourage more clicks for the sake of clicks. Arbitrary value becomes real value, even when it’s not meant to. Just ask Ian Bogost, who created the satirical social game Cow Clicker that went on to such absurd popularity that he felt compelled to continue developing it, trapping himself in an ironic loop that refuses to end. In Cow Clicker, you literally click one cow every six hours to collect Mooney, which lets you buy other cows to click on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27324466

DonHopkins on May 29, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatan...

Is Peter Molyneux a scammer? Or just a pathological liar who believes his own hype? He made some fantastic games in the past, but then...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux

The Lesson of Peter Molyneux

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...

Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...

Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...

>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?

>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...

>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.

>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com