Write Your Own Freenet-based Game

lhdentra writes "Linux Journal is carrying an article by Brandon Wiley of the Everything Over Freenet project explaining how you can create your very own turn-based game, running over Freenet. He claims it's faster than playing chess by post."

balloons and honey pots

What Freenet provides in this model is simply a balloon and honeypot ("So it does!" said Pooh. "It goes in!" "So it does!" said Piglet. "And it comes out!" [machaon.ru]) which I think most people are aware is all that Freenet is at the moment (and unfortunately it currently seems to have a rather big hole in the bottom of the honey put to boot).

Brandon's creative ways of adding any service on top of this limited base are fun, but they aren't really specific to Freenet as equivalent protocols would work over any system that provides a secure way to put things in and take things out. In fact, it is pretty easy to see how TCP could be implemented over any such system be enumerating each packets name (it would be faster than rfc1149 anyways...)

&& oskar sandberg

Quote

From the freenet chat description [sourceforge.net]:

• In case you're wondering, yes, we know that chatting over Freenet is a fairly insane idea due to the lag. We're going to do it anyway because we are in fact insane.

--

I can see it now...

Searching...
Found [1,103,038] hits for chess.
Displaying 1 - 5
1. Chess_Christina_Ass_Chess_Porn_Britney_MP3_Wares_g ames
2. Christina_Ass_Porn_Chess_Britney_MP3_Wares_games
3. Christina_Chess_Ass_Porn_Britney_MP3_Wares_games
4. Christina_Ass_Porn_Britney_Chess_MP3_Wares_games
5. Christina_Ass_Porn_Britney_MP3_Wares_games_Chess_C hess

G.H.

Re:Namespace corruption?

Since there is no centralised namespace, there isn't really anything to get corrupted. Plus, there is no permanence in Freenet, so the files only stay around for as long as they are requested (eg, the First In-Freenet International Chess Championship might hang around for a while, but a quick private game probably won't). Also a large amount of requests is very good for Freenet - more activity means more organisation and faster responses. Basically, a very good thing.

Re:But

Dear root,

Go left.
Aim up.
Select rocket launcher.
Fire.

Until next week,

Joe Fragger.

technology

Technology is driven by two factors:

1. Its ability to enable sex.
2. Its ability to enable game playing.

With anonymous porn, freenet clearly had the first all set up, but now that it has the second, there are no more obstacles to its widespread adoption.

Thank you for reading

Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057

Re:Nice, but...

And you enforce "The point" how? Are Freenet users going to somehow be more honorable than everyone else? Is this like Marxism's "point" that absolute power, if just in the hands of a different group of people, would be a wonderful thing?

Games are, by the nature of most of them, competative. The more anonymous they get, the more they get dominated by those who don't wish to play fairly by the rules - because on the one hand you have lusers who just want to feel the momentary thrill of having "won" (even if, in the case of Chess, it's Fritz or Crafty or Junior who won) and on the other hand you have people actually interested in the game who don't want to deal with the former, so the only one's left are the lusers and the naive.

In RL situations, cheating is rarely a viable option - the ways to cheat are fewer and the chance of getting caught are higher. Go into a digital world - be it the equivilant of Chess or Paintball - and all of a sudden it's both easier to cheat and harder to get caught. You can't have your laptop next to you in over the board chess, and you can't use a dupe bug on your pellets in paintball. You can on ICC or in any of the myriad of FPSs and the like. And you're much less likely to get caught with much less effort to hide yourself. And what happens? People cheat more. Golly, what a surprise.

So this is somehow going to get better in a totally anonymous environment? Never happen. Well, barely ever happen. What will happen is the owner of the freesite will make it known that he wants to play chess and dozens of adolescents (maturity-wise) will flock to his site and test out CM8000 against him.

Or, for a slight decrease in anonymity - the operaters of the site know who you are, but none of the other players do - the owner of the freesite can play on ICC or USChess live or any of a number of other sites, and have reasonable cause to believe that the people who just beat the crap out of him were, in fact, better than him, and not just fronts for a chess engine he could play without logging on at all.

Complete anonymity and playing competative games that require a LOT of work to become even marginally skilled at for real just don't go together well.

Someone else mentioned the idea of proof of concept - and, indeed, the people behind this don't seem to see it as a particularly serious endeavour. As a way to see what can be done on Freenet, great. Looks cool, and maybe there are some games that will fit nicely on it (turn based strategy-war games spring to mind). As a way to play a game like Chess online, however, it's a complete wash.

Namespace corruption?

Doesn't inserting potentially millions of tiny, one-time-use files onto the Freenet risk corrupting the namespace? Is there an advantage to having your chess moves live forever? Seems to me like TCP/IP or HTTP are much better choices, because the transferred data doesn't take up space once the game is over.