even 10 years down the servers should still be open just as the world wide web never changes.
If it is expensive for gaming companies or sony and microsoft can we make servers open source so people can host them and can we have this as legal? The world will be a much better place. People will actually play with each other rather than the world be so isolated and everyone is alienated. Depression is caused by that in part. I know people can still choose to be antisocial by playing only online with strangers but you can play with your Facebook friends
There should be a boot disc for old games that allow you to host online servers online or something
I guess if ps1 and ps2 games come on ps4 you can share play them with others
Is it possible to make gaming servers of future games permanent?
If we are going to go down the track of games as art, we need to start a preservation effort now.
If I study painting, music or architecture I can still experience all the seminal works from those forms. But there's a reasonable chance that the next generation of game creators may never get to play the original Super Mario Bros or Doom or <insert classic game here>.
If I study painting, music or architecture I can still experience all the seminal works from those forms. But there's a reasonable chance that the next generation of game creators may never get to play the original Super Mario Bros or Doom or <insert classic game here>.
But there's a reasonable chance that the next generation of game creators may never get to play the original Super Mario Bros or Doom or .
Thankfully, a stunning number of games from that era are emulated many times over, and the only barrier to widespread archival and distribution is IP rights.
It's more modern games with a significant server component that represent the bigger issue. While a few games like World of Warcraft have had their servers reverse engineered, the majority of these games from the last decade (especially on console) are just sort of hanging in limbo...
You may not notice, but it is constantly changing. There is new infrastructure, new server types, new operating systems, new versions of underlying protocols, such as people quietly being moved over to IPv6 without realizing it, browsers moving from HTML4.0, then HTML4.01, XHTML, HTML5, ... also new attack vectors for attacks, and new types of attacks.even 10 years down the servers should still be open just as the world wide web never changes.
Consider ten years ago many people and businesses were making the transition from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. Many people had 3D graphics hardware, but it was still not ubiquitous, DX9 and the newfangled shader languages were still relatively new on the market. The "mobile web" meant feature-phones that had web browsers on them and tiny screens; 176 × 208 was common, some QVGA (320x200) screens were common on windows mobile, a few Windows Mobile phones were on the market but neither iPhone or Android existed.
Servers running unmodified today from a decade ago would be completely overrun with old Internet-based attacks. If their servers have been updated from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 to Server 08, 12, and now Windows Server 16, there would be minor programming tweaks and changes made on each one. If the servers were on an other OS like Linux there would similar have been a large number of transitions, updates, migrations, and similar tasks done to maintain the servers.
Eventually technology may reach a point of stability for both hardware and software, a point where today's computer, next decade's computer, and even next century's computer are still interchangeable and interoperable. But we are not at that point, nor will we be for many decades at least.
Eventually technology may reach a point of stability for both hardware and software, a point where today's computer, next decade's computer, and even next century's computer are still interchangeable and interoperable. But we are not at that point, nor will we be for many decades at least.
Of course this is where projects like DOSBox come into play.
'Ancient' software doesn't need to be updated to run directly on the latest and most current hardware and on 'open' systems that are exposed to the wild, but rather on dedicated sandboxed systems. We don't need to update old software to fix vulnerabilities in it directly, but rather we build secured systems to encase the old and maintain as general of a simulation systems as we can while moving forward.
This approach has the great advantage in that we don't need the rights to modify the existing software, or to put the time and effort into giving individual attention to specific programs. Having system emulation for legacy software's prime advantage is that it should, in theory at least, allow you to grab any title from that era and have it run correctly. Because lets face it, there are a lot of small old gems out there that really weren't that great in the grand scheme of things, but are kind of special to smaller groups. Odds are those outlier titles aren't going to get specific attention to update them to allow them to run on modern systems on their own.
But, as for the servers? Well that is possibly something that is best handled by a museum like foundation. I'm starting to think that we're getting to the point in time where an effort needs to be made to preserve games history, and having a central organization who can approach companies to work out firm licensing deals between legal entities may be the most effective way to go about it.
I don't see anybody having addressed this, but there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what servers are, how they operate, and how to make them.
Any person, with a network connection, can create and host a server. They can provide any services they choose to host on that server. A server is merely computer which can provide services to others. There is nothing terribly special required to create a server, you just need the know how. Some servers have resource heavy requirements, such as an MMO server needing to serve anywhere from several thousand users to several million (simultaneously). Not only will that server likely need to be a cloud of servers in order to accomplish such a feat, chances are each server in that cloud will need powerful hardware in order to process the huge quantities of requests and crunch all the data required. Then you've got all the network architectural requirements for such an undertaking. You would need massive throughput to provide all those users service at the same time as one another. I haven't worked on any MMO, researched any of their servers, or even heard word of mouth on the matter but I'd suspect you might need a connection of 1Tbps or higher even.
There is even lots of open source operating systems for dedicated servers. I've been meaning to test drive FreeBSD for years now. A flavour of Unix directly related to BSD which was created at Berkeley. Of course you can host servers on your gaming PC as well, no need for a fancy OS. Again, you just need the networking know how. Open some ports on your router, and start up your server software for whatever service you want to provide. You might have trouble hosting an MMO however, with a run of the mill PC, though you might be able to support 3 or 4 users. I would suggest sticking to 2d games like ragnarok, or terraria/starbound, maybe even minecraft or other voxel based games.
edit:
I should add that if server software for hosting the game isn't available you have three options.
A) Hope the developers don't shut down the servers.
B) Hope the developers release the software when they shut down the servers.
C) Reverse engineer the software.
If it is expensive for gaming companies or sony and microsoft can we make servers open source so people can host them and can we have this as legal?
What if the server code contains proprietary code the games developers do not want to open source? What if it contains thirdparty code, or needs thirdparty libraries to run that are not opensource?
While I do would welcome old games keeping to run, just as old singleplayer games do as long as you can run them on compatible hardware, I do see that this will most probably, in many cases, will not be as easy as a company putting their code on the web and granting an opensource license. There would be a cost involved in transforming the code, replacing third party code, potentially removing parts that shouldn't be opensourced (altering the game because of that), and that is before the whole legal stuff, or actually hosting the code on a website for download is involved.
Why in the world would a company do that? Is it to make the very few players happy their old online game still has (which is most probably a very low count given they want to switch off the servers)? What is the gain for developer from doing that? Its not like that low amount of diehards would be less likely to buy another game from the company if they do not do this, most sensible people are aware that the online game they play today is a time limited expierience. And its not like there will be a big impact from the move, as most probably not that many people care.
It certainly IS interesting to some people, though these come more from the modding and garage game development scene, as well as devs eager to poke around the work of other people. Having gotten the source code and green light to oogle at it as much as you want can teach you a lot about how other people solve the same problems you might face yourself with your development. THAT is why some studios release old engines and game code as opensource.
Then there is the thing with re-releasing very old games for 20-30$ on newer platforms. That might not be big hit with online game currently, but you never know how this space will look in the future. Maybe a re-release of SW Galaxies can rake in some cash in 2020? Of course that possibility is gone once you opensource it.
Also, homebrew servers are not exactly rare... if the community is dedicated enough, getting the code is actually not even that much needed. All that is needed is the server logic, which can be reverse engineered. Now, that IS highly illegal of course.
But rather than ask a developer to expense THEIR money to hand out opensource code, it would be better to ask them for the permission to build a community driven reverse engineering of the original server.
It might still be a NO because the company is using some of the mechanism on newer online game servers, and having a community poke their nose into the servers traffic might still give them nightmares no matter how old the game is. But at least you are not asking the developer to spend THEIR time and money to allow an increasingly small population of players to continue playing a game that no longer brings them any revenue.
The time and money factor for the companies is where a "Game Preservation" foundation could really work well. With a large enough userbase of gamers supporting it with small subscription/donation, then it becomes practical to turn to companies and say "Hey, that old game that you don't find profitable to run anymore. License the server support over to us, and we'll give you a bit of cash every month and make sure the project doesn't vanish into time."
Company gets to keep their loyal old fan base happy, gets a new platform to push out news of their 'new and exciting thing' that is coming down the pipe next, and cultural academics don't lose the ability to go back and look at stuff in an actual functioning way.
Games really are kind of a unique oddity in this regard. You can always read a book if you can read the language, and movies are easy enough to drag along in new storage formats as time moves on, but the interactive nature of games? Well that's really rather unique.
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