Build and Shoot

Iceball is an open source, heavily moddable/scriptable engine and game inspired by Ace of Spades Classic. It will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The project was started by GreaseMonkey and development is credit to its contributors.

Although the game is still in early development stages, it's already quite playable! Currently the gameplay resembles AoS Classic, but Iceball is essentially a separate game that will change as new features are added. It has its own server software and client modding capabilities -- it can't play on PySnip/pyspades-based servers (e.g. versions 0.75, 0.76, 0.x, etc.), but AoS Classic maps are supported.

• Windows download: http://iceball.buildandshoot.com/
• Source repo: https://github.com/iamgreaser/iceball/

In GreaseMonkey's own words:

iamgreaser wrote:

OK, so what is Iceball, anyway?

This calls for a history lesson.

Iceball was an attempt at giving old AoS a future. Having been frustrated with the 0.75 rifle's spread ever since finding out just how terrible it was, the sheer amount of skids with aimbots and just everyone terrible about AoS, and knowing damn well that it couldn't be fixed since I realised that Jagex were throwing the 0.x series out, I decided to start work on Iceball.

There were some aims to avoid the situation that 0.x ended up in:

• It had to be open source, so that anyone could change things.
• It had to be heavily moddable without requiring updates to the client, so that servers could make it into whatever the hell they wanted. (For example, 3D snake. Yes, BR actually did that.) In doing so, the actual game code is written in Lua and sent from the server to the client.
• It had to be hack-resistant. If someone comes up with a hack, server owners can defend against it by working out how it works and changing a few things to make it break.

Oh, and finally:

• It had to be safe to run. A lot of the difficulty in getting stuff to work here is due to the sandboxing required - you absolutely cannot write to clsave/pub/, but if you were to load a config from clsave/vol/, that's writable by anything, so it's not safe to use for anything other than temporary stuff.

I started work on it on the 1st of November, 2012. On the day AoS 1.0 was released, a build called "iceballfornoobs-004" was released, which had at least the start of a GUI system made by triplefox. Not much of the game was there by that point, but networking was in place and you could build things and kill people.

Later versions added just about all of the base AoS gameplay, some sound, and actually synced the map... and these are the versions that still maintained compatibility with the -004 client. After a while, I got sick of the bugs in -004 (PMFs, the Iceball equivalent of KV6s, were doing their Z buffer comparisons incorrectly and appearing in front of walls that they shouldn't), and dropped support for that version of the client.

The rest, they say, is h-

((PIANO))

Original release thread: http://buildandshoot.com/viewtopic.php?t=60

Well this should move IB forward! +1

Nice

It's still alive? And more so, got its own forum section. Neat.

Keep up the good work. :)

I haven't been on BnS in quite a while, but last time I checked, Greasemonkey had left the forum in frustration(hearing this from others of course) and Iceball was dead. I wonder what's changed.

This thing is finally back? Did grease come back or did someone else pick up?

DanielG129 wrote:

I haven't been on BnS in quite a while, but last time I checked, Greasemonkey had left the forum in frustration(hearing this from others of course) and Iceball was dead. I wonder what's changed.

Time

Omen267901 wrote:

This thing is finally back? Did grease come back or did someone else pick up?

Iceball isn't tied to Build & Shoot; development restarted elsewhere, and some people here are in the other places. Most Iceball communication happens on IRC, and its official home is currently the BnS subreddit (run by different people).

Edit: By official home, I mean that's where we post announcements, updates, events, etc.

DanielG129 wrote:

I wonder what's changed.

People want to play iceball, so he started development again.

this is neat

This seams like the true successor to 0.75,we have the capability to upgrade and much to much more success then 0.75 and it looks like it has more pottential then BnS.How are we gonna get new players to flock to it and will it run on Grandmas Rig?

I would say that the minimum requirements will cover most of the BnS community.

If it can run minecraft, it definitely can run iceball. Iceball is much less of a RAM hog, and you can get away with a less powerful CPU, but you need a good enough GPU.

We need a few things done before calling it a game, so if you can give us a hand, don't hesitate!

EDIT:
To clarify, the new raspberry pi should be able to run it.

I would gladly help.What do you need a hand with?

Wow, I've been playing Build And Shoot for a while (after a friend bought 12 copies of 1.0 and gave me one) and I just noticed this.... Serves me right for not paying attention to the forums.