Osmos Released!
May 1st, 2010 by CrusaderThanks to c3rb3rus and our other readers for notifying us about the following:
Only some days ago a Linux port of Osmos was started and now the port is already finished! On April 28th Hemisphere games announced in their blog:
We’re excited to announce that Osmos has been successfully absorbed by Linux, and is now available! Our newly initiated, one-man Linux warrior, Mr David Burke, has done an amazingly quick and solid job on the port, and it’s been running smoothly on a wide variety of Linux distributions and machines. (Big thanks to all our beta testers!)
In Osmos your objective is to grow your mote by absorbing other motes. Propel your mote by ejecting matter behind you, which shrinks you again!
Osmos has very moderate hardware requirements:
- 1 Ghz Processor
- 512Mb Ram
- Video card needs to support OpenGL
- Sound card (driver) with OpenAL support
In addition Hemisphere games wants to share their experience about the Linux port and the statistics about the Linux sales:
1) Dave plans to write a post-mortem on his experience with doing the Linux port. Expect to hear his thoughts and feelings (and possibly gripes) on the subject in the next week or so.
2) This port is also an experiment for us as a studio. Specifically, is it worth porting games to Linux? We hope the answer is yes, but we’ll find out soon enough. And you will too. We plan to publish statistics on our sales and downloads on all three platforms in about a month’s time.
Osmos can be bought for 10$ at their homepage.
Download demo: [ www.hemispheregames.com ]
May 1st, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Interesting looking game… Unfortunately, the demo won’t run for me… It croaks at load time with:
May 1st, 2010 at 1:56 pm
>./OsmosDemo.bin64: symbol lookup error: ./OsmosDemo.bin64: undefined symbol: ov_fopen
Check if libvorbis is installed.
May 1st, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Purchased. Glad to reward a great game, and Hemisphere Games support of Linux.
May 1st, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Yep, I’ve got libvorbis… However, I do have libvorbis.0 (0.3.1), and I wonder if maybe it’s looking for libvorbis.1? I did have to do a similar trick just to get it to run that far at all: it was linked against libopenal.so.1, and I only had libopenal.so.0 installed with the system (CentOS 5.4), and no newer version available via yum, so I compiled my own version… I suppose I could try the same with libvorbis, but it’s starting to get to the point of not being worth the trouble… ;-/
May 1st, 2010 at 5:17 pm
libvorbis 1.0 was released in 2004, and it’s now at 1.3.1. Perhaps it’s time you upgraded? (Still, I agree they should include required libraries with the game so people don’t have such issues.)
Anyway, this is a fantastic game; fun, atmospheric and with a great soundtrack too. Well worth the $10. Runs perfectly here.
May 3rd, 2010 at 6:07 am
Actually, if you ldd it, you’ll see it’s linked against libvorbis.so.0, so that’s not it… It seems to be something from libvorbisfile.so.3 (which I also have)… Presumably, some newer version (but same major version#) must’ve added ov_fopen(), and it just doesn’t exist in the version I have… ;-/
I managed to ‘fix’ it via horribly ugly kluge: stick the implementation of ov_fopen() (it’s a tiny, trivial function that’s just a cover for fopen() + ov_open()) into the new local libopenal I had to build anyway… Better that than trying to replace all of the system libvorbis* stuff, anyway… With that trick, I finally got it running, anyway!
May 3rd, 2010 at 7:49 am
Hey Agrajag,
Dave Burke from Hemisphere Games here (the creators of Osmos).
As you saw, Agrajag, the Osmos .deb and .rpms do indeed include package dependency mojo; Osmos requires libvorbisfile.so.3. I’m not sure why your libvorbisfile is missing ov_fopen, it’s been there since v1.2.0 of that lib (early 2007 sometime). In any case, glad you managed to get it working somehow!
Ahh, the mysteries of Linux audio! ;-)
Thanks for supporting Linux gaming everyone! We hope the Linux version of Osmos does well enough that we can continue to port our games to the platform in the future.
Happy Osmoting all,
Dave
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:48 am
I actually grabbed the tarball, because I’ve found it’s usually the easiest way to go with stuff like games, or really most non-distro-provided packages… I’m on CentOS 5.4, so not exactly your bleeding edge gaming distro… ;-) That’s surely why the system libraries are behind the times… (The libvorbis version is 1.1.2, plus whatever patches Red Hat has backported, so that explains the missing ov_fopen()…)
May 4th, 2010 at 6:59 am
Hi !
I had to lauch the game with “aoss OsmosDemo” in order to get the sound to work :-)
(Ubuntu 10.04, Pulseaudio server uninstalled)
May 4th, 2010 at 7:00 am
BTW I also get this on the terminal, even when sound works: bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
May 4th, 2010 at 7:56 am
Hi torturedutopian,
That error is a sign that PulseAudio is misconfigured on your machine (which likely has something to do with you need to run Osmos in aoss). I’ve added config settings to Osmos that work around audio issues like this; for details, please visit the FAQ and forums at our website.
Thanks!
Dave
Hemisphere Games
May 4th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
>Ahh, the mysteries of Linux audio! ;-)
The mysteries of odd people, hiding their source code, so that people can’t just fix/rebuild it if needed.
>In any case, glad you managed to get it working somehow!
Sounds like a mockery.
May 5th, 2010 at 4:50 am
@sinister13 ah the oddness of people thinking everything under the sun needs to be open source, it’s a commercial game, go figure
May 5th, 2010 at 5:38 am
>ah the oddness of people thinking everything under the sun needs to be open source, it’s a commercial game, go figure
How on earth the free (as in freedom) source code would prevent it to be commercial?
May 6th, 2010 at 10:17 am
@sinister13 from that comment alone you have a lot to learn, now why don’t you go bug id software for not giving us the source code to say quake 4 eh?
May 6th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
>from that comment alone you have a lot to learn:
Oh man, how clever you are!
>why don’t you go bug id software for not giving us the source code to say quake 4 eh?
Do you think id are gods and can’t be wrong? They are selling their engine and getting some money from it, but it doesn’t make their business more ethical.
They are selling the blob to a people all around the world and this is not ethical. People have the right to control their computers and developers of proprietary software are taking away this freedom.
Here’s a better question: would you refuse to buy a game if you liked it and found out that its source code is freely available?
BTW, go learn here now: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/ryzom-free-software . (This is MMORPG, but anyways…)