LINUXGAMES

Geoff Simmons wrote in to inform us that SNES9Express is now up to version 1.21-1. SNEX9Express is a graphical front end to everyone’s favourite SNES emulator, SNES9X. It offers checkboxes for many of the SNES9X setup options, as well as sliders and the ability to save profiles. Highlights from the ChangeLog include:

• Fixed a problem that was causing the snes9express window to not actually disappear while running snes9x
• Added No-Cache, Interpolate, and Sync options to the Sound tab
• Started work on a ROM browser, not finished yet mind you
• Added random tip to the help menu

Go forth and download!

Loki’s Michael Vance has announced on the Linux Myth 2 newsgroup that the version 1.3a patch for Myth 2: Soulblighter has been released. Here’s the announcement:

Is on ftp://ftp.lokigames.com/pub/patches/myth2 (I think that’s the URL). Here’s the skinny:

- Fixed linking problem that prevented the Glide binary from running on SuSE 6.2 and Debian (Slink).
- Many compatibility fixes for various window managers
- Various networking / Bungie.net fixes.
- Keyboard bugfixes. The correct key names now appear in the keybindings configuration panel.
- Much better cut and paste support with other X11 applications.

I also made a bugfix and an optimization improvement to Fear, but it wasn’t important enough to get in the README ;). The patch is a binary delta, should apply pretty easily.

Please report any problems to http://fenris.lokigames.com, or if there’s some really boneheaded bug in the patch, email me privately and I’ll try to have it fixed ASAP.

Finally, the latest snapshot of Xfree86 has been released. It now supports i740, 3dfx Banshee and Voodoo 3 video cards. Check out the release notes and the Documention for further info. I will be downloading this one tommorow and testing it out myself. :)

Nikos Vasiliou released version 0.3 of Anachronism, a Qt-based real time strategy. You can download this new release here. Highlights from the ChangeLog include:

• Unit and bug fixes
• Sound effects and music added
• Instructions for porting to Qt 2.0 included in the README

Gizmo3D, a high performance 3D scene graph and visualisation toolkit is up to version 0.92 now. Changes include:

• Improved animation support
• Can read 3DS files with animation sequences
• Texture, state, and distance sorting now done in a separate pass

Pick up Gizmo3D 0.92 here

Loki Entertainment Software updated their main page this evening to announce that they will be sending copies of the Myth 2 demo to Linux user groups participating in Linux Demo Day ’99. If you haven’t had a chance to download the demo or order your copy yet, drop by your local LUG (the list of Demo Day LUG’s can be found here) and check it out.

Brandom “GreenMarine” Reinhart updated his .plan asking a question of the Linux gurus out there and a little status update on the port.

If I create a new joinable thread (pthread_create) off of my main process, should the results show up in ps as two entries or three? I’m only creating one additional thread to handle sound mixing, but I’m seeing three “UnrealTournament” entries in the process list. Its weirding me out. I’m pretty damn sure I’m only creating one process, so I wanted to make sure the ps results were correct. (I would have expected two entries.) Chalk this one up to my newbiedom in the Linux world.

Anyway, the Linux port is doing very well. Sound code is done except for interpolating panning (right now panning is absolute and therefore very abrupt if the player is spinning quickly) and a crash that I’m having a hell of a time tracking down. I just need to take a step back and dive back in with a fresh perspective.

Make sure you check out Unrealism for your latest Unreal News.

Mesa 3D Graphics Library developer Brian Paul has announced that he will be joining the team at Precision Insight to continue work on enhancing 3D hardware acceleration under Linux and XFree86:

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve accepted a position withPrecision Insight, Inc. effective October, 1999. I’ll beleaving Avid Technology in September.

I’ve been working on Mesa in my spare time for over five years. With Precision Insight I now have the opportunity to devote my full attention to advancing Mesa and OpenGL on Linux

While I’ll be focused on Linux, the X Window System, and hardware acceleration, my work will continue to be open sourced and available to any other programmers who may want to contribute to it, or use it for other projects or platforms

Thanks to C.J. for the news.

Jesse Booth wrote in to announce the launching of Vicarious Visions’, developers of the space combat sim Terminus, new site design. He also noted that Station Terminus has posted an update on the Linux client port:

Linux. Chuck finished his Linux sound mixer, adding support for streaming audio and stereo audio. It looks like there’s no support for full duplex audio in Linux at the moment. This causes problems for sending real time voice from a Linux client. For now, we’re only going to support receiving real time voice on the Linux side of things.

A bugfix release of the ClanLib game SDK, version 0.1.18, is now available. Changes:

-FBDev hw blitter fix (important fix)
-Fixed pitch error when using the empty surface provider

ClanLib 0.1.18 Source:
http://dark.x.dtu.dk/clansoft/clanlib/download/ClanLib-0.1.18.tar.gz

Artur Biesiadowski has made a new release of his FreeCiv Java client available. Changes:

– changed GlassTile to use fill3DRect – now city/settler overlays look a lot better
– changed all menu actions to AbstractActions and enable/disable action not menuitem
– added autosettler,autoattack,irriagte,mine,fortify and fortification commands

FreeCiv Java Client download site:
http://thenut.eti.pg.gda.pl/~abies/freeciv/

Loki Entertainment Software has added aHeavy Gear 2 newsgroup to the Loki news server and they have also changed the newsgroup for Railroad Tycoon 2 to loki.games.rt2. Our thanks goes out to Frank Ramsay for pointing this out to us.

Markus Hadwiger sent us some mail letting us know that they have added a few items the Parsec page. They have added yet another screenshot – this one displaying a new, but untitled, spacecraft as well as a new background nebula and planet. If you have a suggestion for a name for this spacecraft, drop them an email at parsec@parsec.org.

They have also added two additional sections to the news section – the events section includes screenshots of their booth at LinuxTag’99 in Germany and the work in progress section gives an overview of what they have been up to lately with the project. Currently they are working on the self-running demo which will hopefully be released in the next few weeks, however no date has been set yet.

The Freeciv project is looking to add sounds to their multiplayer strategy game, but they are in need of a large amount of freely distributable sounds. Joel Ray Holveck is asking for help with the sounds as he is unable to produce them on his own. For more information, take a look at www.freeciv.org and if you would like to help out with this fine project, email Joel.

id Software lead programmerJohn Carmack updated his plan with some code additions and changes to the Quake3: Arena test. Included among these are:

• spinning machinegun barrel
• reduced client to server bandwidth by 35%
• better ping calculation right after transitions
• changed q3data -origin option to -offset
• fixed 0 ping on last player killed before fraglimit
• sv_maxRate option to force all clients to play with a max rate
• fixed bad name vs name in tourney after first player left
• avoid sending usercmds during connection
• use nextSnap for player prediction when available

Version 2.2.6c of the Rouge-like game ZAngband has been released. ZAngband is a variant of Angband which is also a Rouge-like game that is loosly based on the works of Tolkien. Changes to this version mostly include bugfixes and small changes in the game’s behavior.

This was also spotted at Freshmeat.

Version 0.4.1 of the ALSA sound drivers have been released. This release is mainly a bugfix release although it also adds support for Diamond Technologies DT-0197H based cards. As usual be sure that you also get the ALSA library source and the utilities if you are installing ALSA for the first time.

I spotted this over at Freshmeat.

Version 0.90 of the WipeOut clone XRacer has been released. This version includes various autoconf patches relevant to sound and 3d graphics. There is also a patch available to patch 0.89 to 0.90.

Version 0.1.17 of the game SDK ClanLib has been released. Changes in this version include

• hardware acceleration for Matrox cards, when using fbdev
• more reference documentation
• much more stable network code
• new dynamic linking code
• simplified sound API
• faster GLX implementation
• bug fixes

netPong version 0.2, which now has a working Pong game, has been announced. There is no network support currently, but with time you will be able to play Pong across the internet. It does require SDL which is becoming more and more popular every day for game development.

netPong Source
ftp://addell.com/pub/netpong/netpong.0-2.tar.gz