LINUXGAMES

Vicarious Visions developer Dave Calvin updated the Station Terminus Developer Journal with an update regarding their upcoming space combat sim Terminus. Dave gives some details on the mission testing that has been going on recently, as well as ship hull balancing and audio tweaking.

Our fellow Telenation site Poisonville updated with an e-mail from Xatrix’s Ryan Feltrin concerning the release of the Linux Kingpin 1.21 patch and SDK:

Unfortunately my Linux box is unavailable at this time, so the Linux port will be somewhat delayed.

id Linux guru and CTF developer David “Zoid” Kirsch popped into Clan Elite Strike’s IRC channel yesterday to gauge community reaction to the revelation that Q3CTF will not have a grapple.The full log can be read here; Zoid’s rationale for removing the grapple from CTF is based upon reaction to the heavy-dependence on the grapple in Q2CTF for flag runs. Thanks to Blue for the news.

3dfx Gamers has released Glide 2.60-9 and the XFree86 3.3.5 server for the Voodoo 3 chipset. Changes in Glide:

The previous release, Glide_V3-2.60-7.i386-7.glibc20.rpm, had an unnecessary dependency on libNoVersion. This release removes that dependency and simplifies the installation process. However, there are no functional changes in this release, so if you were able to install the previous revision you have no need to upgrade.

3dfx Voodoo 3 Linux Driver Distribution Site:
http://www.3dfxgamers.com/view.asp?IOID=31

Hans de Goede has released X-Mame version 0.36b5.1. Changes:

– Everything from msdos 0.36b4 & b5
– After a lott of discussion on the mailinglist about which frameskipping method is the best, selectable frameskippingmethods have been added. Use -frameskipper # or the frameskipperkeyword in xmamerc to configure this. The frameskipmethod can also be changed runtime with left-control + key combinations.
Currently available frameskippers are:
0 lctrl+insert Dos frameskipping code
1 lctrl+home Improved frameskipping code thanks toWilliam A. Barath
– added toggleable idle sleeping “-[no]sleepidle” which can make xmame run smoothly on a loaded machine as well as freeing the CPU so we can do more than just play games… :) Thanks to William A. Barath.
– added upper-bound for autoframeskip “-maxautoframeskip<#>” which assures a playable framerate even if the emulation can’t keepup with real time, this is currently only used by frameskipper 1 Thanks to William A. Barath.
– Made -geometry work for fx and gl versions, it can be used to specify the windowsize / resolution now. Thanks to Nguyen TheToan
– Fixed XIL (again) Thanks to Taso N. Devetzis
– Fixed screenshots for 16bpp games. Thanks to Mathis Rosenhauerfor the hint where the problem was.
– It turn out that xmame compilation breaks when usingegcs-1.1.x or gcc-2.95, added note to use -fno-strict-aliasing to fix it. gcc-2.95.1 does work with -fstrict-aliasing, and gives a nice speed increase.
– Quieted make output. Thanks to David R. Hampton
– Fixed making of obj/cpu/m68000/m68kops.o to not use implicitrules this was needed for the quieting to work. This should also make our openstep users very happy.
– Preliminary SDL display target. Thanks to: Tadeusz Szczyrba

X-Mame 0.36b5.1 Source:
http://xmame.retrogames.com/download/xmame-0.36b5-290999.tgz

Markus Hadwiger wrote in with the following Parsec announcements:

* There are two entirely new pages:
- the GALLERY features all five currently available Parsec spacecraft along with descriptions.
- the FAQ section answers the fourty most common questions about the Parsec project people have e-mailed us.
* The fifth (then unnamed) Parsec spacecraft which we were asking people to mail in suggestions for a proper name, got… a name! It is now called “The Claymore”.
* We have put up the screenshot for September 1999, which shows an unfortunate pilot’s ship being blasted to pieces from several directions at once.
* We have optimized the loading time and revamped the navigator.
* We have updated the WORK IN PROGRESS section at the bottom of the NEWS page. It contains some details about what we have been working on over the past couple of weeks.

Couple o’ .plan updates from the developers at id Software today:
John Carmack updated regarding the use of display lists in OpenGL code to achieve a near fourfold increase in rendering throughput. Furthermore, Graeme Devine fired off a response to Redwood’s revelation that Q3ACTF will not utilize the grapple, as well as briefly stating that bot-master Mr. Elusive is aiding John Cash with AI issues.

Loki’s Stephane Peter has announced the release of Myth 2: Soulblighter version 1.3b. Here’s the announcement from the Loki Myth 2 newsgroup:

The second patch for Myth II: Soulblighter has been released.This is mostly a bugfix release, so if you don’t have any problemswith the 1.3a version of the game, you don’t necesarily have toupgrade to 1.3b.

New in this version:
– Bugfixes for setuid-root executable
– Workaround for the SBLive drivers bug. Enable this by setting the SDL_SBLIVE_HACK environment variable to 1.
– Fear bugfixes

You can grab it right now from ftp.lokigames.com or from the Myth II page at http://www.lokigames.com/products/myth2/updates.php3

Loki has released a 1.1 beta patch for those of you running Civilization: Call to Power on an Alpha Linux system. If you find any bugs in this release, be sure to report it to Fenris, the Loki bug tracking system.

Andreas Umbach has released version 0.45 of his multiplayer 3D racer glTron. Changes from the release announcement:

• Sound – There is now a soundtrack for gltron. It’s calledRevenge of Catsby Peter Hajba.
• Load and save your settings. If you press F5, gltron will createa file .gltronrc in your home directory and store the current settingsthere. Start it with ‘gltron -wtfb1′, press F5, quit and restart ->tadaa! If you somehow mess it up, just delete ~/.gltronrc and it willuse the defaults again.
• Code change. I split the gltron code over several files now, tomake development for other people easier and provide a client serverframework for an internet version. This is not finished yet, gltron.ccontains still most of the code. And, I messed the header files andthe Makefile a bit up. Expect this to be cleaner in the next version.
• I need to generate some hits (i.e. announce onfreshmeat & happypenguin.org) so people come and answer the poll. One reasonis the following:I have received a lightcycle model. Poly count ranges between 190-800.That’s ok for all you hardware guys I guess. My time is very limitedcurrently -> if everyone uses hardware rendering anyway, I don’t haveto optimise very much for software and I’ll just release the thing. Onthe other hand, if everyone uses software rendering, I have to come upwith some clever LOD’ing for the thing to work nicely. If it’s 50-50,I’ll be lazy and make it an option I guess (and add the LOD stuff ina later release).

Andreas is also requesting help in writing a new INSTALL file with explanations for implementing support for various libraries.

glTron 0.45 Source (Sound):
http://www.ards.net/Andreas/gltron/glTron-0.45.sound.tar.gz

Saw this at the Game Tome.

Version of 0.7b10 of the Free Standard Game Server has been released. FSGS, which forked from the BNetd project, supports most Blizzard multiplayer titles and the recently released Tiberian Sun.

FSGS 0.7b6: http://www.fsgs.com/files/fsgs07b6lx.tgz
FSGS 0.7b6 to 0.7b10 Upgrade: http://www.fsgs.com/files/fsgs07b10lx.tgz

Thanks to Freshmeat for the news.

Version 0.1.0 of Freetrek has been released. Free Trek has gathered many features over the past few months, and the long push towards having good configuration, working torpedoes, and broad graphics support is nearly finished. Changes in this version include:

• Contains all the parts for 3ds file reader
• contains rudimentary sgi texture reader for *.rgb, *.bw files
• A new TCL configuration program (ship_load_config.tcl) is in /trek/src/tcl/config – it creates a file is used to determine which ships need to be loaded
• All ship definitions are now stored in the directory trek/src/tcl/ships
• A main menu for all the configuration programs is in tcl/menu.tcl
• bug fixes

id Software might have missed their projected middle month release but that did not stop John Carmack from updating his .plan with a worklog and a mention that they have not worked out the single player game yet. Check out his update on the 3dFinger.

Ok I feel like a broken record but here is some info on how to run the UT Linux Server as a nonroot user taken from Brandon’s .plan

It is not necessary to run the Linux dedicated server as root and you should not do this. If you have difficulty starting remote web administration, edit the UnrealTournament.ini and change the UT Web Server’s ServerPort to something other than 80. For example you might change it to ServerPort=8080 and then connect in Netscape using this URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/ServerAdmin/

For the daring Linux users, Brandon updated his .plan with a possible way to upgrade your server to glibc. Use this at your own risk and I personally recommend against this. There is a mention of the Linux Client Status at the bottom also.

If you are running Slackware 4 or another libc 5 based Linux distribution, the Linux dedicated server will generate a segmentation fault in libpthread.so. This is because the dedicated server was built using glibc 2.

Its very frustrating that Linux distributions can vary so much in such a fundamental way.

Here is a link to the glibc HOWTO: http://www.imaxx.net/~thrytis/glibc/Glibc2-HOWTO.html

The HOWTO discusses methods of upgrading from libc 5 to glibc 2. I really don’t know how practical upgrading is. I do know that I don’t have the time to install a libc 5 system and maintain two linux distributions for the purposes of supporting both configurations. From reading the document, it appears that it would not be difficult to upgrade, however I am not a Linux guru and cannot give sound advice on the matter. I wouldn’t want anyone to screw up their system.

On to the good news. I just played with the Linux client for a long time and all the crash bugs seem to be gone. Its now just a matter of working on ways of improving performance.

ReV of SkinDepth pointed out a .plan update by Brandon “GreenMarine” Reinhart concerning an issue when running a linux server:

If you run the Linux server and get an immidiate segmentation fault, it probably means your machine is using libc5. The Linux server requires glibc. I have no plans to make a libc5 version. Upgrade!

UT Linux Dedicated Server mirror:
ftp://ftp.linuxgames.com/utdemo

Jason Allred wrote in with word that 4Front Technologies updated www.opensound.com to state that drivers for the A3D Vortex 2 sound cards are in development:

Development on Vortex2 drivers has started! – Please be patient on the Vortex2 support – it’s coming!

Epic’s Brandon Reinhart .plan to announce the release of the Unreal Tournament Linux dedicated server, to be followed by a client release at some point in the near future:

Okay, the UT full demo linux server will start showing up on various sites for you
to download now. I’m spreading it to some various sites for distribution and I’m
sure it’ll find its way around the net.

In the morning we’ll release the UT full demo.

Note: The full demo is not network compatible with previous versions. You _must_
upgrade. ngWorldStats will go online and only accept stats from updated servers.
There will be a 7 meg patch available for people with the 3dfx demo.

Here are the notes for the linux dedicated server. This doesn’t include any UT
338 release notes. I’ll see if we can get those on unreal.epicgames.com soon.

This doesn’t include the linux client which will be released later.

The server README can be read in the full .plan here.

Lee Anderson has written a detailed article for Ext2 concerning the open source Lemmings clone Pingus. Anderson, whose first linux gaming experience was with Pingus, describes basic gameplay, planned features, and installation tips. There are several screenshots also included, so be sure to give it a read if you haven’t yet tried this quality OSS game.

There was an update on the Unreal Tournament page concerning the release of the Linux Server. We are looking at a server-only demo tonight and the demo for the Win32 users in the morning. Hopefully we will see the client version soon now that the server will be out shortly. As usual, check out Unrealism for your latest Unreal News.