LINUXGAMES

We’ve finished our latest article on 3D game performance, and this time we’re doing something a little different. We’ve tested a Matrox G400Max, an NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR, and a 3dfx Voodoo3-3000 under Linux and Windows. Now, with these results we have a clearer picture of where Linux stands relative to Windows, especially for playing the very latest in 3D games.

There are some interesting results, and even a few surprises, in our tests, so click here to start reading.

The Linux Game Modification Center has made compiled game source shared libraries available based on the Q3A 1.17 SDK release. The .so’s should provide a framerate boost when compared to the interpreted .qvm’s, but keep in mind that they are only loaded by the Q3A client when the server has sv_pure set to 0. Furthermore, the compiled .so’s initially load teamscores incorrectly when a map is first launched; however, reloading the map appears to rectify team-related behavior on the server.

Quake 3 1.17 Compiled .so Download:
http://www.planetquake.com/dl/dl.asp?lgmc/q3alib117.tar.gz

Blake Friesen has announced the launch of the Foundation project, an effort to develop a real-time multiplayer space strategy game in OpenGL. Current features include:

• Move ships
• Build units, buildings, ships
• Mine planets
• Colonize planets
• Rotate the starmap and select planets

Foundation 20000514 Snapshot:
http://foundation.sourceforge.net/foundation-snapshot.tar.gz

Daniel Leonard has released a new snapshot of his Java-based BZFlag map editor bzworld. Changes include:

• Teleporters can now be added to maps

bzworld 20000520 Snapshot Source:
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~leonard/bzflag/bzworld/bzworld-2000-May-20th.zip

The ever-prolific Bill Kendrick fired in a trio of release announcements this week:

• Bug Squish 0.0.2 – Changelog – Source
• Circus Linux! 0.0.5 – Changelog – Source
• Mad Bomber 0.1.6 – Changelog – Source

Zocks’ Gerhard Schroeder sent in news that the German Linux gaming site has posted an article examining the install process for various Loki titles: Civilization: Call To Power, Myth 2: Soulblighter, and Railroad Tycoon 2: Gold Edition. The article was written in German, so you may need to utilize a babelfish to grok it.

NaTaS of the Loki Portal Page wrote in with word that he’s posted a screenshot from the beta version of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, which is being ported by Loki Entertainment Software. SMAC was originally developed by Firaxis Games, which was in turn founded by the creator of Civilization I/II. NaTaS also notes that first impressions of the game will be posted shortly as well.

Version 0.3.9 of the Arianne RPG has been released. Changes include:

• A new interface
• Some bugs removed
• A new main image

Also note that the official URL for Arianne is now www.arianne.cx and they have a SourceForge project page at sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1111

Arianne source: Arianne_RPG-0_3_9.tar.gz

Development version 000520 of the simple Lightcycle game Armagetron has been released. This version includes higher stability, scoring functions, and bugfixes. This should be the last development release before version 0.1.3

Armagetron source: at_src_000520.tar.gz
other downloads: pluto.spaceports.com/~zman/armagetron/download_linux.html

Version 0.4 of the game dev library TileLib has been released. This version incorporates support for smooth scrolling.

TileLib downloads:
source: tilelib-0.4.src.tar.gz
binary: tilelib-0.4.bin.tar.gz

Version 1.1 of the SDL-based Missile Command clone Penguin Command has been released. Changes include:

• Works with SuSE 6.2 now
• Faster menu
• Better playable at high stages
• Other bug fixes

Penguin Command source: penguin-command-1.1.tar.gz

Version 1.23 of the TurboGrafx-16 emulator HuGo! has been released. Changes include:

• adds support for another kind of synchronisation of subtitles, i.e. now subtitles can be synchronized with background music instead of game only, as previously.
• install script
• skin background changed
• added the optional blocking of zip scanning inside archives in the file selector
• new key under the file selector to refresh the directory content forcing zip scanning

HuGo! downloads:
source: hugo123s.tgz
binary: hugo123b.tgz

Versions 2.21 and 2.30 of the OpenGUI graphics library have been released. 2.21 is a continuation of the stable 2.2x series and changes include:

• textto utility now reports a counts of all parsed lines
• fixed drawto_line() bug
• added moveto(int x, int y);
• fixed bug with redundant ‘gpm’ restarts – please add ‘-R’ switch to startup GPM script in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S??gpm to the line with ‘gpm’ but this action destroys X-windows mouse pointer
• fixed some bugs for VESA FBDEV, because video mode change is unavailable

2.30 is a new version beginning the 2.3x development series. Changes include everything in the 2.21 series and:

• new base object – class FGShape as parent of all graph primitives
• added support for custom resolutions (e.g. 1152×864) via -geometry switch
• added MTRR support for LINUX: 10%-15% speedup on K6-II processors
• the variable ‘mmx’ has been renamed to ‘__fgl_mmx’
• improvements to better FBDEV mode handling

The gltron Homepage has been updated with some development news and an announcement that a couple mailing lists for the light-cycle racing game project have been created. On the page, Andreas Umbach states:

I heavily modified the current game engine to be suitable for networking. Demo recording is now working, which is a good sign (think of network game as a demo that’s recorded on the server and played back on your computer at the same time). I’m now working on the networking code and hope to have a test version and a server up for testing by end of next week.

The two new mailing lists are gltron-devel and gltron-announce. If you need a description of each of them visit gltron.org.

Version 2K0511 of the PowerPak Game SDK has been released. Changes include:

• The Makefiles now use libGL and libGLU instead of libMesaGL and libMesaGLU to be compatible with all OpenGL implementations
• The functions PD_ScaleSurface(), PD_ScaleSurfaceBy(), PD_ScaleSurfacePart(), PD_ScaleSurfacePartBy(), PD_DrawSpriteScaled() and PD_DrawSpriteScaledBy() were added
• There is now joystick support for all supported platforms, thanks to joystick support in SDL.
• added the new joystick function, PI_SetJoystickHighValue(), to set the maximum value of a joystick’s axes
• Apparently taking powerdraw.h from mpeg.h only worked on BeOS so it has been re-added

PowerPak source: PowerPak.tar.gz
PowerPak downloads: www.angelfire.com/va/powerpakgsdk/download.html

linuxnewbie.org has published a brief articled called Introduction to Linux Games. The article covers some problems with the current ports and finding them in brick-n-mortar stores as well as some GPL games like Freeciv.

Version 0.3 of the floating space arena soccer-type game SpaceCup has been released. Changes:

• Add Jet team (red, blue, white)
• Add blue team goal
• Print score
• Select team
• First AI
• Demo in menu

SpaceCup source: SpaceCup-0.3.tar.gz

Version 1.0.4 of the AI bot combat game RealTimeBattle has been released. Changes include:

• It is now possible to create an arc (part of circle ring) in thearena. With it comes two new arena commands, arc and poly_curve. Thelatter has been added to make it possible to create a series of arcs andlines. A arena-command angle_unit has been added to make it possible touse degrees instead of radians. Read the documentation for more info.
• Two new arenas: Flower.arena and Pool.arena
• Improved drawing of inner_circles.
• New translation: Galician by Jesús Bravo Álvarez.

RealTimeBattle sources:
bzipped: RealTimeBattle-1.0.4.tar.bz2
gzipped: RealTimeBattle-1.0.4.tar.gz

Version 0.4.1 of the KDE-integrated mud client Kmud has been released. This version includes a bugfix for a bug that made it impossible to delete triggers and aliases in the recently released 0.4.0 version.

Also worth noting is that the Kmud Web page now supports both the English and German languages if you have cookies enabled.

Kmud downloads:
source: kmud-0.4.1.tar.gz
binary RPM: kmud-0.4.1-1.i386.rpm

Version 0.37b2.2 of the multi-arcade/console machine emulator xmame has been released. Changes:

• much cleaned up and rewritten keyboard support for svgalib, ggi, xgl, xfx, svgafx
• Made the unicode support for X11 actually work (shift and altgr are now honered)
• Corrected a small type in makefile.obj-xmess
• Fixed the creation of tape images in xmess
• Updated the romalizer script in contrib to v0.6

xmame source: xmame-0.37b2.2.tgz
patch: 0.37b2.1-0.37b2.2.diff.bz2