LINUXGAMES

What weekend is not complete without a little news on Wine. Russ Spooner has this to report to us.

It seems as though the latest OSS drivers 3.9.2e have fixed all thesound skipping problems playing games under Wine! I have tested Bladerunner (extensively), House of the Dead and Mortal Kombat 4. Not only does the sound no longer skip, but the games run quicker! Also I have finally got House of the Dead to run perfectly well I loaded House of the Dead under windoze and switched the controller over to keyboard for player 1 (no joy with joystick; Ideas?)

I am still working on a hack for Carmageddon2… :-)

I’m using Valentine’s Day WINE with:”-nodga -debugmsg -all” for Bladerunner and House of the Dead

“-debugmsg -all” for MK4

Pretty cool stuff, Wine is really starting to show itself as a method of playing games under Linux.

Gameblitz!, a gaming site based in the Land-Down-Under commonly known as Australia, has posted an article on the recent rise of gaming software for the Linux platform. Thanks to Samantha Amjadali for the heads-up.

Eden Li has released version 0.1.11 of his GTK+ based Kali client for Linux.

ChangeLog:

-Chat area no longer resizes arbitrarily
-Added ignore feature
-Better ‘/help’ command
-Fixed server connect bugs
-Added welcome dialog for first time users
-Fixed server dialog bug
-Preparations for message windows (modularizing chatarea and entry widgets), it’s not implemented yet, but should be by next release.

The source is located at http://gtkali.netpedia.net/gtkali/gtkali-0.1.11.tar.gz.

A new version of Wine has been released for the general public usages and abusage. I do not think that there will be a lot of new games working under this version considering this release renamed all the Win32 functions and types to a new naming convention which should not affect performance at all. Then again, I might be wrong. Thanks to Matt Herbert for pointing this out.

Version 0.51 of the Nintendo Entertainment System emulator NEStra has been released. The ChangeLog is as follows:

Corrected one-screen VRAM mirroring
VRAM mirroring can now be set via command line options

The source is available from here.

LxDoom has been brought up to version 1.34. This is a maintenance release which does the following for you.

More MBF stuff imported (including the enhanced skies support)
Status bar scaling for hires modes
Performance improvements
Bug fixed

This will be the one of the last releases of LxDoom being that the author has reached all of his goals of this project. This is barring any major bug issues of course.

A new version of the LinuxGames hosted mHockey has been released for the public consumption. New features include:

- Sound effects. Still need a good way of mixing, though…
- A keyframe animation system used for things like stopping and shooting, which makes those types of things look much more natural.
- New, more detailed models
- The usual bug fixes and introductions…

A couple people pointed it out to us that GameSpot News has an article on the upcoming Team Fortress 2 from Valve software that also mentions the release of TeamFortress Classic and the Linux Half Life server. I’m not aware of a set date yet, but in the article it does state:

At the same time Valve releases TF Classic download, it will also release its Half-Life Linux server.

Today’s Avsim has posted an interview with Curtis Olson of the Flight Gear project. It’s a pretty good interview covering the basic “what is this project all about, how did it get started, and how’s it going” type of thing.

On the main page of the official FreeCiv page they have announced that a QT port has begun in addition to the GTK port in progress. They also stated that the GTK port will be officially included in the 1.8.x releases of FreeCiv itself. And one final note, they are really looking for volunteer graphic artists to improve and make patches to the current tiles that the game is using for graphics. You can download the original tile set in the native Gimp xcf format, so have at it!

Loki Software will have a booth at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Jose and they will be showing a pre-release version of Civilization: Call to Power and accepting pre-orders. Too bad I’ve got school or I think I’d take an early spring road trip right around March 2nd.

Christian Schaller wrote in with news of a non-playable Hopkins FBI demo release. Hopkins FBI is an adventure game featuring hand-drawn animation being developed for Linux, OS/2, BeOS, and Windows. The 28 meg demo is available here; a playable demo is to be released shortly.

An Austrian group known as Futureware 2001 has set up shop, and is preparing to start work on developing entertainment software for Linux. A user-group mailing list has been set up by the developers; to subscribe, send an email to majordomo@luga.or.at with “subscribe futureware-user [NAME]” in the body of the message.

Slashdot.org updated regarding the third release in the 2.2.x stable series of the Linux kernel. The kernel.org mirror list is available at ttp://www.kernel.org/mirrors/; the patch and complete source should be at all mirrors shortly.

Version 0.11 revision 057 of the open-source 3D engine Crystal Space has been released. There are many fixes and new features in this latest release; the ChangeLog is available from here. As always, the source code and related files can be downloaded from http://crystal.linuxgames.com/beta.html.

The all mighty TeleFragged, the website that got me started in this website gaming madness, has launched “what I would have to say is incrediable” new look. If you got a moment, take a peek at what is new on the old TeleFragged.

A regular contributor at LinuxGames, FrostKing pointed out three Elite gaming projects which will hopefully be ported to Linux.

The first is Elite Legacy which is a remake of the 80′s classic using 3dfx technology to breath new life into this game. The Linux port is only probably as stated on the author’s info page.

The second is also another attempt to remake the classic “Elite” game. This one is open source development unlike the previous one mentioned.

Finally, if you have not had enough Elite,check out the Gallileo project which is another opensource ‘Elite’ project.

If you are interested in playing the original version of this game, check out one of the original author’s website.

I just updated the UltraHLE under Linux/X HOWTO to include a bit of information that the author dethnite sent to me:

as of today, Sunday Feb21, the new CVS wine fixes problems wherekeyboard and mouse input was needed to make sleeping threads active.

Killbossa sent in some very interesting figures explain basically why Valve and other compaines in general should look into porting games to Linux from a financial stand point. I have an article almost done that will discuss this issue in whole which will be posted in a few days.

Approximately 8 million users and the fastest growth of any OS last year
so lets assume a few things:
1 % of users of linux would buy TeamFortress 2(estimate)
8,000,000 * .01 = 80,000
80,000 * 30 (cost per game?) = 2,400,000
take away 2/3 for sierra’s cut, shipping etc.(estimate)
so $2,400,000/3 = $800,000
So $800,000 is not enough to hire some porters?

This of course leaves out the fact that since HalfLife will not run underLinux I won’t buy it (since I can’t run it). Nevermind that our numbersare growing all the time as well. Think about it.

Just something to think about on this Monday morning………….

A thread has appeared on DatumPlane concerning a possible server port of Starsiege: Tribes to Linux. There is nothing offical from Dynamix at this point in time about a port but according to a thread post there it is possible to run Tribes 1.0(unpatched) with Wine. This may warrant further investation. Thanks to Blake Steel for pointing this one out to us.