LINUXGAMES

The Linux Game Development Center has posted an interview (by Anni Hienola) with Erno Tuomainen of the Legend of Saladir project. Erno describes how the development for his ASCII RPG has proceeded, his programming experience, and coding philosophy.

In a new installment of Halflife.Org’s Yappin with Yahn, Valve Software coder Yahn Bernier fielded a question regarding the lack of a Half-Life and TF2 client port for Linux. Yahn gives a long-winded response that boils down to lack of resources for projects that aren’t mainstream enough to guarantee a profit… but there may be light at the end of the tunnel:

So we get around to the underlying question, will Valve be doing a Linux client port? A definite maybe. We’ve referred developers interested in a Linux port to Sierra. If a Linux client port gets the green light, we’ll certainly make a public announcement to let the community know.

Thanks to Ratchet for the heads up.

Kathryn Sorhaindo sent in the following press release:

Loki Entertainment Software Launches New Website

TUSTIN, CA — July 26, 1999 Loki Entertainment Software, the leader inbringing best-selling PC games to the Linux platform, announced today thelaunch of their new website, www.lokigames.com. The launch is the latestchapter in Loki’s ongoing efforts to bring the best of the PC gamingworld to the Linux operating system.

“Our new site is a visual testament on the world wide web to the validityof Linux gaming,” notes Scott Draeker, president of Loki. “We offerworld-class products and support and now a stunning website to match.”

Loki’s website is a completely new design from the ground up and offersnews, updates, information on Loki products, downloads and all the othercomforts of home. The site is fully operational now, and Loki willcontinue to add new features in the coming months.

About Loki Entertainment Software

Loki works with leading game publishers to port their best-sellingWindows and Macintosh titles to the Linux platform. Loki’s port ofCivilization: Call to Power was released to rave reviews in May, and thehighly-anticipated port of Myth II: Soulblighter will debut at theAugust LinuxWorld in San Jose. This year alone Loki plans an additionalsix titles, including Railroad Tycoon II (Gold Edition), Eric¹s UltimateSolitaire, and Heretic II. Privately held and headquartered in OrangeCounty, California, Loki takes its name from the Norse god of mischief.For more information visit their website www.lokigames.com.

Media Relations Contact:

Kathryn Sorhaindo
Loki Entertainment Software
250 El Camino Real, Suite #42
Tustin, CA 92780
(714) 585-4357
press@lokigames.com

John “Pagan” Scott updated his .plan with regard to IRC queries about the possibility of a Soldier of Fortune Linux port:

The IRC chat the other night was a lot of fun, thanksfor so many people turning up! There were a fewcommon questions that I’ll give the official linehere – please bear in mind that this is the officialline and not necessarily my opinion.

1. Will there be a Linux port ?
There are no plans at the moment, however, werealise that this will increase the number ofservers out there and will be a big support forthe Win32 users. It all really depends on howmany units are sold, we are not in the fortunateposition of being able to support an OS becauseit would be cool to do so.

Loki Entertainment Software has launched a brand new site design courtesy ofJohn Grantham. Until the DNS catches up, you can reach it at http://209.223.115.151/. Loki has also announced they are now accepting orders for their second ported title for the Linux OS, Myth II: Soulblighter. You can order your copy of this excellent 3D real-time tactical fantasy game from Loki’s Myth II Product page.

Hans de Goede has released X-Mame 0.36b1.2; changes for this release of the Unix Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator can be read here.

0.36b1.2 sources

Johns updated the ALE Clone site to announce that Josh Cogliati has released a playable beta that includes its own terrain and unit graphics. Previous releases of ALE Clone, an implementation of the classic RTS game Warcraft II for Linux, had required the graphics files from the registered PC version of Warcraft II to run. You can view which unit graphics have been completed at the Clone Graphics Page; the source for the beta is availableat http://www.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/clone/fclone.tar.gz.

Peter Amstutz has released version 0.7 of King of the Hill, his libGGI-based multiplayer artillery game. Changes in 0.7:

-radius damage bug fixed
-command line parameters to set screen resolution
-support for 15/16/24/32 bpp color depth
-fixes to the automake/autoconf build system
-a few protocol changes

You can reach the new KOTH mailing list at koth-d@crud.net; the new source tarball is located at http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~tetron/koth/koth-0.7.tar.gz.

Dave Lawrence wrote in to announce that a new version of X-Tux has been released for the general public. Changes include:

Cleaned up the code drastically.
New entity types (flamer, vi, COBOL monster)
New effects, such as the new fireball and a new way for rabbits to die.
Sound FX, using ESD (GNOME)
Much easier to modify and or add new features to the codebase.

The source code can be downloaded from http://www.adelaide.net.au/~philaw/xtux-src.tar.gz.

Tommi Leino wrote in to announce the release of the Majik 3D version M2 source. Majik 3D is a project to develop an open-source 3D RPG for Linux; Milestone 2′s features include multiplayer and chat support. You can grab the new tarball from ftp://majik.netti.fi/pub/majik3d/client/sourcemajik3d-M2.tar.gz. If interested in developing for this project, you can read how to join the mailing lists here.

Linux Today is reporting on User Friendly’s new Linux-based BBS, where they are running one of the greatest games any BBS op would ever have the pleasure of hosting, Trade Wars. UF has made Trade Wars info link page here; you can get to the BBS simply by heading to bbs.ufies.org via telnet. I used to spend a lot of time playing Trade Wars and Red Dragon Inn when not hunting for Doom WAD’s, so it’ll be fun to mess around with TW again :)

cube from our fellow Telenation site Bot Epidemic posted an interview with Xatrix’s Ridah with a question about the Kingpin mod source code release:

Cube: Is the Kingpin source code going to be appearing soon, or is the intention to have the game patched a couple of times to remove any lingering bugs before a release?

Ridah: That’s the intention. I expect to have the code out within a week, but that depends on how things go with the patches.

Loki Entertainment Software have added a splash page to their main site with the words “WATCH THIS SPACE” and the message:

Tomorrow is a big day at Loki.
Keep your eye on this space.
Think of it as “the quickening”…

And say your farewells…to say hello to a new beginning

Something big is in the pipeline, so be sure to check them out during the day…

LinuxGames has a mirror up of the Linux Kingpin client and server files, as impact.frag.com is currently down… all of them can be found on the LinuxGames ftp server at ftp://ftp.linuxgames.com/kingpin/:

kingpin-1_10beta_glibc-1_i386.rpm – Linux 1.10 Client Binaries – rpm (1.4 mb)

kingpin-1_10beta_glibc-i386-unknown-linux2_0_tar.gz – Linux 1.10 Client Binaries – tar.gz (1.4 mb)

kingpin-dedicated-glibc-i386-unknown-linux.tar.gz – Linux Dedicated Server Distribution – NOTE: You need the 1.10 server binary below to run an up-to-date server (11 mb)

kpded-1_10beta_glibc-i386-unknown-linux2_0_tar.gz – Linux Dedicated Server 1.10 Binaries (714 kb)

Joe Groff has released version 1.17 of his Sega Genesis emulator DGen/SDL. Changes include:

-Save RAM implementation has been overhauled, so now games with overlapping ROM and save RAM (like Phantasy Star IV and Sonic 3 + Knuckles) can save games correctly. Many thanks to Steve Snake for helping me make this work right.
-Crude PAL mode support, give the ‘-P’ option to use it. Doesn’t work very well yet.
-I made some changes that should (hopefully) make DGen run properly on big-endian platforms, but I don’t have any way of testing it. If you have a PowerPC, SPARC, or other big-endian system, give it a try and help me iron out the wrinkles. :)
-Window is now emulated properly, so Herzog Zwei split-screen and other little bugs should be fixed. Thanks again to Steve.
-A little bug that caused SDL to complain about not being able to initialize sound, even if bool_sound was false in dgenrc, was fixed. This should help all you folks without sound cards.
-Assembler tile rendering is now in place for the new raster effect engine. A small but noticeable speed increase. :) [PKH]
-All the SDL-dependent stuff has been separated into the sdl/ directory, and I wrote a little platform-dependent (pd) API so you can attach an interface for your favorite Unix-like operating system and toolkit. :) If you want to do a port to BeOS, MacOS X, QNX, etc. this should make your life easier. I also hope to have raw Xlib and SVGAlib interfaces to replace SDL, and thus require one less thing to download. :)
-Improved sound writing method, by Daniel Wislocki . He says this improves flaky sound in 44kHz, and also fixes the problem of the emulator being too fast. I have a very slow computer, so I have to take his word for it. ;)
-I also removed most of the messages dgen makes (except for errors), so that it is quieter. If you liked having all those messages, tell me and I’ll put them back in. ;)

The source for 1.17 can be downloaded from http://www.humboldt1.com/~ognir/dgen-sdl_1.17.tar.gz.
DGen also requires the Simple DirectMedia Layer to compile and run.

David Chisnall wrote in to request help in starting development of the Universe project, which he envisions as a “networked space combat and trading simulation game”. Coders, artists, and 3D modelers are all welcome.

ReV has generously created a button for use in linking to the Tiberian Sun for Linux petition. Feel free to grab the button for use on your own sites:

Link to: http://www.linuxgames.com/cnc2_petition.shtml

Ragnar Ouchterlony has announced that a RealTimeBattle competition will be held on September 11th. Here are the robot submission guidelines:

• Submit the robots torealtimebattle@telia.com
• The robot executable should be sent in one of the following formats:
  • An executable in linux ELF format compiled with either libc6 or libc5 (note thatour libc5 isn’t the latest and we cannot garuantee that everything works correct withlibc5)
  • Compilable sources in C, C++.
  • The robot could be written with a language, such as perl or python, that iscompiled run-time.
• If the program requires something special to compile or run, please write so inthe email you send us.
• If you want to send sources in a language that we do not have, please contact us and convince us to get thelanguage.
• Remember to write the author of the robot and the author’s mailaddress somewherein the mail

LinuxGames has opened up a new forum for people playing Kingpin under Linux. This is for people who are having questions or a problem and cannot find an answer. Make sure you check out Gangland for the lastest in Kingpin news.

The Loki Portal Site updated with news of an article in Computer Currents about the upcoming Myth 2 Linux port by Loki Entertainment Software. Loki’s mission to bring quality retail gaming titles to Linux is explained, and the article also includes a nice quote from Alexander Seropian, Bungie’s CEO, about their decision to have the port made:

Alexander Seropian noted, “Linux is a growing platform for computer enthusiasts, and Bungie is a growing company for game enthusiasts – it makes a lot of sense for us to make Myth available for Linux.”