One of our loyal staff members and token Canadian is leaving lg.com for the Big Room. eh has helped us out a lot over the past couple months, and we wish him the best of luck in whatever endeavor he pursues (moose hunting, etc. :)). Thanks eh!
James Ell wrote in with a Starsiege: Tribes forum posting by Tim “Slacker” Gift of Dynamix which states that although Dynamix doesn’t have the resources to commit to a Tribes 1 Linux port, out-of-box support is planned for Starsiege: Tribes 2:
Our server capacity has so far grown proportionally to our player count and has consistently stayed ahead of player demand. Will this trend continue without a linux port? We do have limited resources (money), should we spend it on TRIBES 2 (TRIBES 2 will support Linux and Mac OS right out of the box) or should we spend it on porting TRIBES 1? How much does a TRIBES 1 native linux port really do for our community? Would getting TRIBES 2 out sooner be better? I think I would rather spend it on TRIBES 2, as long as the server operators can hold out (still want to look more into WINE).
BetaBites recently put together a Fire and Darkness FirstLook article that gives a good summery of the project along with some screenshots and a bunch of optimistic comments.
The third release candidate of SDK for the 3D gaming engine Genesis3D was recently released and the engine itself has been Open-Sourced under terms of their own license, theGenesis3D Public License. Our thanks goes out to the numerous people that mailed us this news.
We would like to welcome Adventure Gamer to the TeleNation. Adventure Gamer is a website dedicated to the adventure gaming genre providing the latest news, reviews and previews and they just opened their doors today so head on over and take a look around.
Peter Dineen sent in a response from Sierra concerning a Half-Life Linux port (a Linux server port has been mentioned previously as being targeted for a release around the same time as TF Classic):
We can’t officially say yes, but the last time I talked to the guys at Valve they were planning on adding Linux support possibly as soon as the next update. Keep an eye on our website for any information on when updates will be posted.Chris P. ~Sierra Tech
Bnetd is a project to develop an open-source Battle.net server daemon. New features in version 0.4 include:
Added user account support (including passwords and stats), ad banners now work (PCX only), and all the known /-commands were implemented, as well as a few more. Also, support was added for a bnetd tracking server.
Bnetd 0.4 is available from here.
id Software’s Graeme Devine updated his .plan today with news regarding the expected approximate release date for Quake 3 Test:
I know a lot of you are looking at the end of the month as a fixed date for q3test, but we’re probably looking to be within a few weeks of that date rather than exactly on it. We’re working on it; I just want to keep expectations in line with reality.This is a test of Quake 3:Arena, not the demo. With this test we’re looking to see how well the brand new networking and graphics code works, and while we’ve run this through a QA process here and at Activision, this is not code that is of release quality in speed or gameplay. Please do not look upon this as the “demo” of Q3A.
Thanks. I now return you to your regular programming.
Previous statements by id employees had indicated a late March release date for Q3Test, which will be available for the Linux platform as well as Windoze.
Hans de Goede has unleashed yet another iteration of the venerable arcade emulator for Linux, X-Mame, upon the world. Changes in version 0.35b8.1 include new support for TNK3, ASO, Athena, Fighting Golf, Bermuda Triangle, Psycho Soldier, Chopper I, Caveman Ninja, Tumble Pop, Speed Coin, and Sky Chuter, plus other minor bugfixes for other roms. The source archive is available from http://xmame.retrogames.com/download/xmame-0.35b8.1.tgz.
Among today’s round of Freshmeat updates was the release of Heretic for Linux version 1.0b1, which is based on the relatively recent source release from Raven Software. The changelog can be read from here; highlights include the addition of music support. The source code can be downloaded from http://samuel.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~wertmann/heretic/src/, or, if you prefer precompiled binaries, those are listed here.
The folks at crystal.linuxgames.com have released the fourth source tree in the beta 0.13 series of their LGPL’ed 6DOF portal based engine. New features/bugfixes include the addition of freelook under Linux. The tarball is available from here.
Linux World’s Nicholas Petreley has written The Penguin Brief column for this week ok the subject of gaming under Linux and how that area really needs to be improved before Linux is totally accepted.
Thanks to Nelson Rush for pointing out the Linux server port of Turok II. It is unclear if there is a client port at this point in time, but a server port is always a step in the right direction.You can grab the server and see what it has to offer.
Version .31 of the battle.net server emulator Bnetd has been released. This version adds support for Diablo and the Brood War Expansion pack along with various bugfixes, memory leak fixes, and new features. If no bugs are found in this it will become the .40 release.
Version 0.1.3 of the adventure game engine MAGE has been released. This version uses the new GTK 1.2 rather than 1.0 and also has bunch of bugfixes.
Loki Entertainment Software has announced a release date for the Civilization: Call to Power Linux port of April 26. Consequently, the beta test which was originally due to end today has been extended to an indefinite future date before the port of CTP goes gold.
Michael K Vance was the first to write in pointing out that there is a fair amount of bugs in the newsly released 2.2.4 kernel, most notably one that causes system hangs with some kernels compiled with egcs rather than gcc. You can read Linus’ response that he posted to the kernel mailing list if you’re really curious.
The base tiles for FreeCiv have been updated so head on over to their graphics section and enjoy those new pretties.