I've recently been chatting with someone who is enthusiastic about an Ubuntu Community Gaming Server, and wanted to run it past you lot to get opinions/ideas.
The idea is that a physical server would be provided which would run servers for a number of popular games. The game servers would be run in rotation on a schedule, and not all the time. The reasons for this are social and technical. If all games run all the time there is less incentive for people to meet up at a particular time/day to play. This has been shown with the LUGRadio guys having their game server up on two nights a week. Having a game server up only on specific days means people are more likely to set time aside to play, and also more likely to set aside time to play with the same people. Rotating the day however gives people the opportunity to play with different people (whoever is available on that day). One of the problems with having a particular game up on a specific night is that people often have other things they need to do in "the big blue room", "meatspace" or "real life", and these occur often on a particular day. So one way around this is to rotate the games so that they don't always come up on the same day each week. For example in the first week the game Enemy Territory might come up on a Monday, but on the second week it would be on a Thursday. This (I believe) would mean that people would potentially try new games "I'm only available on Wednesday night, so will play whatever is available that day", but also allows for the "meatspace" problem outlined above "I'd like to play game 'foo' but I can't do Wednesdays". On the subject of games, there is an argument that the server should run only Free (as in speech) games, and this I can understand. However it would probably be the case that the gaming server would run a combination of Free and non-Free games. It also makes sense that people should be able to play games that are in the repository - as well as those that are installable from external 3rd party download sites. Experience tells us that gamers are not averse to installing software from 3rd party vendors (whether free of cost or not) and so it probably doesn't make sense for us to prescribe that people should _only_ be able to play games that are in the repository. However we need to cater for both groups (in my opinion). The following games have been considered for inclusion as they have free server software (an important criteria for the gaming server is to not have to pay out for each game):- Tremulous, Warsow, Nexuiz, Open Arena, Alien Arena, Enemy Territory. In addition there are some more conventional (non first-person shooter) and less resource intensive games that could be included such as:- Bzflag, Atlantik, Armagetron. Yes, there are already servers for all these games available online. However this would be an Ubuntu community effort. A way to bring gamers into the Ubuntu community, and to bring Ubuntu community members to gaming. Of course there's also the "You can put a bullet through popeys head on Wednesday" which might attract a few people too. :) Thoughts, ideas? Cheers, Al.
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