I have long thought that a "Hack The Gibson" game based on the 3D renderings in Hackers would be an entertaining concept but I lack some of the requisite skills and the time to make it happen.
"Fun fact : the filenames you’ll see in the game are lifted from your hard drive, and 8.3ified for formatting and retro-chic reasons!"
So in order to play the game it will scan my whole hard drive? In my point of view this is unacceptable. But i like the idea and the look of the game. Maybe i give it a shot in a VM environment...
It's not the first game to feature doing this and you certainly wouldn't play these kind of games without knowing that this is happening (since that's the main gimmick of these games) so you can't really complain about their behaviour when it's been made quite clear beforehand.
But if you really wanted to play this game without it viewing your porn collection / whatever, then you can always manage it with ACLs, chrooting or even virtualisation. It's not hard to sandbox processes and/or deny read access to specific sub-directories these days - even on home user orientated machines.
It might have been nice if someone had pregenerated a list of files from, say, a fresh BSD installation, and then randomly chose locations to put target files, and had that as an option (rather than using your own data).
Maybe, but what would you gain from that? You don't get paranoid traversing directory structures with bash, rsync, find, cmd.exe nor Windows Explorer. Nor do you complain about games that have file browser built in for loading and saving games (Eg OpenTTD).
These guys haven't been secretive about the nature of the game so it seems to me that the complaint here is strictly arbitrary.
BTW, given that it's GGJ game, there should be source code somewhere available (all Global Game Jam entries have to provide source code and all assets on CC BY-NC-SA or compatible license).
If you have a real issue with that then you probably should take it up with the lack of sand-boxing / fine grained permission granting in general purpose computers.
If any of you are interested in games with a hacking theme, check out Uplink. It's an oldie but a goodie. There's some surprising tricks you can pull once you figure them out by yourself.
Maybe 10 or 15 years ago I had a VAIO laptop that came with a cheesy 3D file browser. I can't find a link to it or screencap anywhere. Anyone remember this? Files were spun around like a tornado thing.
They should have given a shout-out to fsv, which you can still install and run on your Linux boxen to give you that Jurassic Park file navigation feel: http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
> "I learned a bit later that this GUI was not made for the movie, but actually existed on SGI workstations and was ported to Linux as well, so it’s more legit than it looks!"
(the words "ported to Linux" link to the Wikipedia article on FSV)
heh