The weekly WorldCharts results are in and I have to start getting some christmas cards ready for all the people who have voted for LinuxGames for the last few weeks. We are up to #7 now and I can only say thanks a million. Now please keep Voting for us and thanks again for all your loyal support.
Not sure if we have mention this one before but nuku has shown me a link to a cool side scrolling game called L.O.S.E.R. Corp.Grab your copy and enjoy this side scrolling, networkable treat.
I recieved a rather interesting email from David Banz concerning the Rogue Squadron game. It seems that Factor 5 who developed the game for LucasArts develops with very little OS influence on their code and I have port of the game completed. Problem is that LucasArts is not interested which is a shock to many of us. I would hope that they would at release it as a non supported product.
First I would like to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Lakini and Crusader are both home for the holidays, so I am solo here for a while till they get back. The Search Engine will be up probably later this weekend. I have not found a method of parsing the old news in the database yet though so the engine will probably reflect new news only.
Acheron wrote in to inform us that Lyra Studios is seeking programmer volunteers to port their real-time multiplayer RPG Underlight to Linux. The announcement can be read at http://ld.sloth.org/narcophile/. If interested, e-mail Lyra Studios at martin@lyrastudios.com.
On a side note, I’m taking off for the Thanksgiving holidays for the remainder of the week. Raven will be holding the fort here until I return, so please direct any mail meant for the LG staff to him for the time being. Thanks.
Bobz pointed out a section from Jeremy Blackman’s .plan update from yesterday talking about the dedicated server port.
First off, a big thanks to all those who’ve sent in e-mail supporting the Linux port. :) The server port is underway. I am currently working with egcs instead of g++, and I am also trying to decide if I want the server to run background and lack a control panel, or use X11 and run with a panel similar to the Windows one. I am thinking of creating two binaries, one that acts as a daemon, and one as an X11 app.
My thoughts, here comes the hate mail, are that he should work on a console port with some frontend as an option. I see no real value in doing an X11 app, considering most servers do not run X11 on them… at least from my ‘experience’.
Zoid, the porter of Quake2 to Linux, has been announced as the porter of the Half-Life dedicated server. Portax, the head dude over at ValveWorld, forwarded this email to me.
Zoid is working on the Linux port of the Half-Life dedicated server.Once he’s finished with that he’ll be addressing some console relatedfeatures that people have asked for that should make the dedicatedserver easier to administer.
Now if we could get them to make a client, I would be happier.
Rev has done it again. He has developed some sweet wallpapers for Linux users or even the poor Linux user who is forced to use Microsoft operating systems at work. These are a must for LinuxGames fans.
First I would like to thank all the people who have voted for LinuxGames on theWorldCharts for the last few weeks. We have gone from #83 to #38 to our new home at lucky #13. If you have a moment, give us a vote for continuing support and making LinuxGames your #1 site. Thanks again.
The folks at the Free Trek project have released version 0.0.9 of their open-source multi-user network space battle simulator. The bug fixes include:
- OpenGL code rearranged to display everyone in the game. It was dropping some people before.
- Mutexes now work on the P&V semaphore principle.
- Messages sent from the server are now queued before they are sent out to the clients. This stops the server from choking when there are many commands to send.
- Mutexes were interfering with each other, across programs.
- Mutexes do not get allocated in the clients. They are not needed.
- Problems with the targeting commands are half fixed.
The version 0.0.9 compressed source archive can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.linuxgames.com/freetrek/free_trek-0.0.9.tar.gz
Christian Schaller wrote in to let us know about the Flight Gear aerodynamic flight simulator. Flight Gear utilizes 3D acceleration (under Mesa in Linux) and has been released under the GNU Public License. The most recently released stable source code and scenery for the simulator can be downloaded from here.
As those of you using a graphical browser have noticed, LinuxGames has a new color scheme and logo courtesy of ReV, one of the many talented graphical artists at Telefragged. This also marks the debut of the new LinuxGames news system Raven has been developing, which will soon give you the ability to search our daily updates.