While email and instant messaging are great ways to stay in touch — and are nearly ubiquitous — those “killer apps” are just a little dull. After all, why send email to your brother when you can just as easily reach out and “frag” him?
While email and instant messaging are great ways to stay in touch — and are nearly ubiquitous — those “killer apps” are just a little dull. After all, why send email to your brother when you can just as easily reach out and “frag” him?
Indeed, multiplayer games may become the true “killer app” of the Internet, offering entertainment, competition, and interaction, all in mind-bending alternate realities. Multiplayer games let people from all over the world meet and kick the snot out of each other. Many computer games already offer local area and “wide area” multiplayer game play, massively-multiplayer games like Everquest are enormously popular, and all next-generation consoles will leverage broadband connectivity.
But you don’t have to lay out big bucks for proprietary hardware, online subscriptions, and expensive CD-ROMs. All you really need is a personal computer and a little bit of open source software. Amateur game development is enormously popular these days, with almost all genres of gaming — role-playing, strategy, action, and card and board games — available online for free. And don’t let the word “amateur” fool you: the folks building open source games take their work and their gaming very seriously.
This month, Linux Magazine Editor Martin “Super Giant Robot” Streicher and SourceForge Site Director Pat “Bullseye” McGovern try to keep up with the developers of MegaMek, a network-enabled implementation of the classic BattleTech board game. As you’ll see, building MegaMek is a both a passion and a pastime…
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