The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source(runningwithscissors.com)

242 points by davemo 9 years ago | 77 comments

1wd 9 years ago |

"the CDude class, which is the main, player-controlled character in the game."

"CDoofus is the class for the enemy guys [...] Started this file from from CDude and modified it to do some enemy logic using the same assets as the sample 2D guy."

"COstrich is the object for the ostriches wandering about in the game. class COstrich : public CDoofus"

Hilarious. Reminds me of CBruce in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: "Their code [...] originally written for Apocalypse[...] a Playstation game featuring Bruce Willis, which, we learned, is why in Tony Hawk the code for the classes of skaters is called CBruce."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131563/postmortem_trey...

"Project: Nostril (aka Postal)"

Any idea what RSPiX Blue, Cyan, Green and Orange layers are?

mgurlitz 9 years ago | |

From Postal Overview.txt: "The game is built on top of our cross-platform library, called "RSPiX" (pronounced "risp-icks"). RSPiX is organized into several levels, from low-level to high-level functional. Each level is named after a color." (https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...)

In summary, blue provides graphics/audio/input functions, cyan is a UI framework (with printer support), and the distinctions between green and orange "become rather blurry at some points."

j_s 9 years ago |

POSTAL Redux is currently $1.43 (84% off) on Steam; reminds me of Contra. Reviews say the only unexpected down side is load times; hope they can tighten that up.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/401680/

Edit: I think the big "feature" is co-op.

jakebasile 9 years ago | |

Postal REDUX and Postal 2 are great games, but I strongly suggest you do not buy Postal 3. From the developers of Postal 1 & 2:

> Okay, I’m going to level with you – don’t buy Postal III. You’d regret it. Hell, you’d regret playing it for free. It’s a sometimes boring, other times frustrating, unfinished, borderline-broken mess, and we can’t do anything about it.

source: http://runningwithscissors.com/?page_id=853

edit: for fun, click on the "(Don't) buy on Steam" link on that page.

Insanity 9 years ago | | |

Clicked on the "Don't buy on Steam" button, was worth it! These guys have a sense of humour that is quite inline with what I find funny :-)

Alupis 9 years ago | |

For me, Postal 2 was the peak of the franchise.

It's goofy, and has it's fair share of [sometimes funny] bugs, plus it has first person view.

It's currently on sale for $0.99 on Steam[1]

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/223470/

jakebasile 9 years ago | | |

It is amazing how much objectionable content they put in that game while still maintaining a satirical black comedy tone instead of a "trying too hard" feel. The tagline was "it's only as violent as you are!" as it is possible to complete all your tasks without violence.

At one point, it has you protecting the developers of the game from anti-violent video game protestors who want to solve their problems with violence.

You can use cats as suppressors for your weapon.

You can urinate at will, and can discover you're infected with gonorrhea, for which you can get medicine.

Really, a great game for those with an open sense of humor. Postal 2 is a great example of why games shouldn't be censored.

krylon 9 years ago | | |

Postal 2 was one of the funniest games I ever played.

Also, the movie was practically the only movie adaptation of a video game that did not totally suck. (It got there using the same indiscriminate crude humor of the game, but it did not pretend to be anything else.)

joaodlf 9 years ago |

This reminds me, I actually had some contact with the guys behind RWS many years ago, I was a young man and very excited about HTML/CSS and design in general, I ended up designing their forum (it was running on IPB): http://tinyimg.io/i/5GTDNgx.jpg

Postal 2 is one of my favourite games ever. Had a blast in both single player and online. Me and my friends still talk about it after all these years!

uncletammy 9 years ago | |

I spent a lot of time on that forum! In fact, I just dug through my email from 2003 looking for my photo contest submission (I didn't win but I got an honorable mention) and I found an email that I had sent to the webmaster complimenting them on the new layout. I guess that should have gone to you ;)

joaodlf 9 years ago | | |

I wasn't a huge regular, just kinda lurked for most of the time.

I remember those forums being absolutely relentless... Definitely one of the far corners of the internet!

qwertyuiop924 9 years ago |

Wow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS.

This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of technology. If you open source your engine, that doesn't have to happen.

Take a look at Doom. New content for Doom 1 and Doom 2 is still being released by the community, long after competitors like Duke3D have stopped. Why? Because Doom has a passionate community, and many modern, open source engines that make running the game on new systems a piece of cake.

pyromine 9 years ago |

This is completely off-topic, but in the vein of talking about old games. Does anyone have any suggestions for games that scratched the same itch as the old school RTS games like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations?

I've been searching for years but never found anything that eclipses the classics.

cr0sh 9 years ago |

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful comments in the code.

I remember when the source code for Descent was released; not only was the code somewhat opaque (unless you were experienced with portal-style engines), but there were hardly any kind of comments to help guide you along.

SwellJoe 9 years ago | |

Reading some of the docs in the source tree makes it apparent it's been ported to a bunch of platforms and for a bunch of different markets, and it looks like a lot of people have touched the code over the years. With an experienced hand guiding the process, that usually leads to good quality, in terms of re-usability, stability, and code comments. Being 19 years old is also good for quality...even if it's huge and scary and difficult to wrap ones head around in a short time, somebody has run into every possible edge case and weird compatibility issue in all that time, and they've probably fixed it. Old code bases aren't really fun to work on, but they are usually really productive to work on.

stygiansonic 9 years ago |

There are some interesting notes about how the multiplayer was originally implemented:[0]

"Once the game is running, everything is peer-to-peer. The only information the peers send each other is the local players' input data, which is encoded as a 32-bit value (where various bits indicate whether the player is running or walking, which direction, whether the fire button was pressed, etc.). No position, velocity or accelleration data is transmitted. NOTHING else is transmitted."

In order for this to work, they had to make sure all memory was initialized to the same values, so that each client had the same known starting state. They also had to use the same PRNG, initialized to the same state, so that a known, deterministic pattern would be produced. But eventually they ran into a problem that couldn't be solved in software: The FPU of different CPUs would not return the same results for the same inputs:

"However, dispite our best efforts, there was still a serious flaw lurking behind the scenes that eventually caused serious problems that we couldn't work around. It seems that different Floating Point Units return slightly different results given the same values. This was first seen when pitting PC and Mac versions of the game against each other in multiplayer mode. Every once in a while, the two versions would go out of sync with one another. It was eventually tracked down to slightly different floating point results that accumulated over time until eventually they resulted in two different courses of action on each client. For instance, on the PC a character might get hit by a bullet, while on the Mac the same character would be just 1 pixel out of the way and the bullet would miss. Once something like that happens, the two clients would be hopelessly out-of-sync."

0. https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...

crack-the-code 9 years ago |

Awesome! Now just give me Diablo 2, and I will be content for life.

mixedbit 9 years ago |

Does the release include the original game assets, or do assets need to be purchased (like with Doom releases)?

SwellJoe 9 years ago | |

I dunno, but Postal is $0.49 in the Steam sale right now, if you need the assets.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/232770/

a3_nm 9 years ago | | |

Even if they are available for $0.49, having them under an open source license would be very different. (It would make it possible, e.g., to modify them and ship them in other games.)

foxhop 9 years ago |

I still have my original copy from 19 years ago, when I was 12 years old! : )

picture: https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/814612135150055424

ionised 9 years ago |

Many a fun time I had with the Postal level editor, placing ostrich-dispenser-dispensers around the map in great number and watching the ensuing carnage after a few well-aimed napalm canisters.

Insanity 9 years ago |

Reading this, as well as the comments in this thread makes me want to play the game again. Might fire it up over the weekend and I will surely go through the code for a while!

It was a nice late-christmas present ;-)

foxhop 9 years ago | |

I bought Postal Redux on Steam last night for under $2 and played to level 5. Still a very playable game!

nercury 9 years ago |

Reading the source code of this is sure sobering. All files and code lines are there for the single purpose - to ship the game.

BillinghamJ 9 years ago |

Misread the title as saying "Portal"! Pleasantly surprised however - I never played Postal.

aaronsnoswell 9 years ago |

I thought the title said 'Portal', not 'Postal'. Disapointed :P

erikj 9 years ago | |

It would be amazing if Valve made Source Engine open source, but that would require them to replace Havok and perhaps other middleware.

foxhop 9 years ago | | |

Many games from this era were free homebrew Half-life mods. I think Valve should do more to promote hacking and modding their games.

Counter strike was created as a mod by the community as well as day of defeat.

Endy 9 years ago |

Is there any word on a DOOM-style sourceport happening?

Circumnavigate 9 years ago |

This game is one of my favorite classics.

grendelt 9 years ago |

"I regret nothing."