LINUXGAMES

The developers @ TransGaming Technologiesupdated their site yesterday to announcethat they have released a patch for theWine CVS tree (as of Jan 29) which adds support forDirect3D Win32 applications. In case you missed them the first time wementioned TransGaming, you can findscreenshots of the recently-released 3D RTS Sacrifice running under Linux via this methodhere. With this patch, the “Demo for American McGee’s Alice now works almost 100% perfectly” under Wine. Your mileage may vary of course, but its a viable alternative for games that have not been ported to our platform.

According to Network Solutions’WHOIS database, id Software has registered a new domain name, presumably to promote their upcoming Doom sequel:

Registrant:
id Software (UACORP7-DOM)
3819 Towne Crossing Blvd #222
Mesquite, TX 75150 US

Domain Name: UA-CORP.COM

The domain name echoes a setting element from the original Doom game:

He and his body cast were shipped to Pearl Harbor, while you were transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation.

The UAC is a multi-planetary conglomerate with radioactive waste facilities on Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. With no action for fifty million miles, your day consisted of suckin’ dust and watchin’ restricted flicks in the rec room.

For the last four years the military, UAC’s biggest supplier, has used the remote facilities on Phobos and Deimos to conduct various secret projects, including research on inter-dimensional space travel.

There’s a placeholder site up at UA-Corp.com which indicates content will be added at some later date; by registering a domain name for what was previously a minor part of the backstory, it would seem that id is putting far more effort into creating a believable game environment this time around.

UPDATE: Further mention of Doom’s setting was made on the Quake3World forums: id level designer Paul Jaquays indicated in a thread on particle effects that the game will take place, at least in part, on Mars. This differs from the original game, which took place on the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos (and later, Hell). Thanks to 51|Buddha for the heads up.

Jeff “Judecca” Mrochuk let us know that he’s composed aneditorial @Linux.com in response to the resignationsfrom Loki. In the article, entitled “Come Join Us”,Jeff encourages Linux gamers to support the foremost champion of our cause, and remindsthe reader of what Loki has brought to the community over the past two years.

Loki’s Andrew “Prometheus” Henderson made a lengthypost to theZSNES developer message board today concerning the nuancesof porting the SNES emulator to various architectures and platforms:

Finally, a note to anyone interested in tackling this project: Good for you. I hope you learn a lot. It’s going to be frustrating and very hard. If this is your first programming project, I’d suggest sitting it out and picking a simpler project to hone your skills. One thing that I’ve noted is that there is always another project on the horizon that you can jump in on later. Those of you who have solid coding experience will find porting ZSNES a challenge at best. Best of Luck.

For those of you (including the original ZSNES folks!) that are seriously interested in more information on porting software, the amount of effort it takes, tools/libraries you should use, or anything else, please feel free to e-mail me. The more people that have the knowledge, the easier porting codebases will become. That’s part of the idea behind making source code open in the first place: Avoid wasted and duplicated effort.

Good luck to all, and I’m looking forward to checking out ZSNES when it goes open source!

ION Storm’s Warren Spector, who designed the sci-fi thrillerDeus Ex, participated in aninterviewwith Games Domain about how music can contributeto the atmosphere and player immersion factor of a PC game. Deus Ex’s audiodirector, Alex Brandon, also presented his opinions on the subject matter.

Andreas Henningsson fired in a release announcementfor Race version 0.4.0(shot). Changes:

• music: 12 Mb of punk rock in Ogg Vorbis format played by Sludgefeast
• track editor
• big graphical improvements
• optimized drawing of tracks
• vehicle selector
• “real” theme support with many configuration options
• possibility to add cars
• sound effects: engine and collision sounds
• the shop has been improved a lot
• Animated objects on tracks
• new map object types: bridge, ramp, water_object
• And a hecko’va lot of other stuff :)

Race 0.4.0 Download:
http://race.sourceforge.net/download.php3

BioWare’sPreston Watamaniuk was briefly interviewed@ Neverwinter Haven regardinghis work as technical designer for Neverwinter Nights,the multiplayer AD&D RPG being developed for Linux and other platforms.

The crew @ Daily Radar receivedword thatid Software founder John Carmack willbe inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and SciencesHall of Fame on March 22, 2001 for his achievements in programming 3D engines for electronic entertainmentover the years (Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, Quake, etc.).

Samuel Hart sent in the following:

Tux Typing (http://www.geekcomix.com/dm/tuxtype/), the educationaltyping tutor game starring Tux, is now having a feature survery(http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=60520)to see if certainfeatures previously announced are necessary or even desired. If interrested inhelping me decide where to take the project, please take a look at it.

IGN’s RPG Vault hasinterviewed the developersfrom TimeGate Studios about their fantasy RTSKohan. Three screenshots are included.

The other day I took a snapshot of the Glide project’s copy of Device3Dfx. This works for 2.4.0 and 2.4.1 (where the prior linux.3dfx.com releases have not). It should keep working in future versions of the kernel and work well in 2.2.18 (although I have not tested 2.2.18). This package is totally unsupported by LinuxGames, 3Dfx, and the Glide project; feel free to use the comments, or e-mail me if you need help. This is non binary, you will need to compile it using make && make install (as root), also only for X 3.3.x

Download – Device3Dfx-CVS-20010129.tar.gz

Starbuck Zero pointed out that theZSNES site has added a developermessage board to facilitate the upcomingsource release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator.

id level designer/OpenBSD-admin Xian Antkow updated his.plan file last nightto announce that he’s created a network connectionpoll at theShugashack:

I’ve created a poll on The Shugashack to gauge personal curiosity as tohow wired gamers are out there. While I realize this is hardly accurate, itshould give a good “rough idea”.

The gist of it is, I’m trying to see, roughly, how many gamers out therehave a permanent connection to the internet, despite the fact that whichevergame you are playing, doesn’t need a connection to the net.

If you have a moment to spare, please take all of 13.2 seconds to participatein this poll.

Thank you.

Gaming + Net Connection Poll

Given the events of this past week, I figured it would beprudent to commenton the state of our gaming industry niche.

It’s been approximately four months since the last Loki Software productshipped, andsix months since Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauriwent gold without shipping.Loki does not release figures or comment on sales, but John Carmack hasstatedseveral times over the past year that the sales figures forQuake 3 werelow (of course, how indicative thisis of other Linux game sales is unknown, since it’s only a single data point). Also,we have the aforementioned departure of three programmers over the course of a few weeks, althoughreasons for the resignations have yet to be given.

Unfortunately, available evidence would seem to indicate that there is now, or has been, someform of financial trouble at Loki. How serious the problems are, how long they will last (or ifthey’re now in the past), or if Loki will survive is all unknown at this time.Loki’s success is dependent on several factors largely out of their control, which includesthe status of Linux in the consumer desktop market, where we have yet to make serious inroads.Indeed, Linus Torvalds himself hassaid thatit may be “perhaps five or 10 years” before Linux is a formidable option for home users. To their credit,Loki has taken some considerable steps to ensure this occurs (besides creating a gaming libraryso that new users will have additional incentive to use our platform) by creating or contributing toa myriad of open source developmentprojects, such asMesa, SDL,OpenAL, and Setup.It would be tragic if, by laying the groundwork for future Linux game developers and players before the marketcould sustain them, Loki became a martyr.

Loki is a bold experiment not yet concluded, but regardless of the final outcome, we at LinuxGames would like to express our gratitude totheir past, present, and future employees for their work and sacrifice. Good luck, and thanks.

Version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel stable series has been released; the changes since2.4.1pre8 can be found here.

Kernel Mirror List – http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/

Linux 2.4.1 Source:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.1.tar.gz
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Linux 2.4.1 Patch:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/patch-2.4.1.gz

Linux Emu‘s Tima let me know he has written an article on the state of Linux Emulation. Said article covers what emulators we have for Linux, and where we are lacking.

Version 1.0.1 of Julian Bradfield‘sMah-Jong game has been releasedto fix a crash issue with the 1.0 release. Screenshots can be foundhere.

Mah-Jong 1.0.1 Source:
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jcb/stevens-bradfield/MahJong/Downloads/mj-1.0.1-src.tar.gz

AnandTech has posted areview of thePogo Linux Alturasystem, which utilizes an AMD 1 GHzThunderbird CPU and comes with a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and Red Hat 7.0pre-installed.

zez.org has posteda tutorial entitled”Building 3D worlds with OpenGL”, which includes examplesource code using theQT-widget library.

Version 0.20A of the Game Boy emulator cingb is available; changesinclude:

• inserted #define’s for MIT_SHM
• it seems XFlush is not needed after X(Shm)PutImage, I think it could mean: more performance (?)
• update for non-XShm-systems
• replaced locate-commands with test -r commands for finding header/lib-files

cingb 0.20A Source:
http://download.sourceforge.net/cingb/cingb-0.20A.tar.gz