Quick question: Do the rules of the contest allow multiplayer games which access the network not to download resources, but to transmit steering and synchronisation commands, chat messages and the like?
Cheers
Wolfgang
“I’m a ****ing starship, I’m allowed to cheat!”
GCU Arbitrary, Culture Craft
A: The rules don’t prohibit it, but network games tend to do very poorly in judging. We’ve had several examples over the past few years (e.g. IsOlation Net), but none of them have gotten even close to winning. IsOlation Net got 45th place (out of 50) and Bombnet 4k got last place.
Scores: http://games.datadino.com/4K_2005/scores.html
Spreadsheet: http://games.datadino.com/4K_2005/4K%20Scores.xls
I wanted to ask this for sometime now. Why did the 2 judges disqualify this entry (IsOlation)???
“No one online to play with …”
LOL. I mean… what did u expect. millions of gamers waiting in battle.net to play this game? Probably the judge could have opened 2 windows of the same game to try out the gameplay etc.
If you’ve got 50 games to judge, anything that doesn’t work immediately “out of the box” is bound to get scored badly. The trouble with network games, is that there isn’t room for fancy client-server stuff, so you are almost bound to have to enter the IP address of the other player. This means you need two computers, unless your game also allows a port to be specified. Plus, unless the game is turn based, it’s a bit difficult to play by yourself, when judging, and not great fun really.
So, you could enter one for the fun of it, but don’t expect a great score 
If it were otherwise, I’d be entering one. I was wondering how it would be judged if I entered several different 4k games that ran in the same battle space. Still it isn’t going to happen, at least for 4k.
Alan