LINUXGAMES

Michael Simms of the online Linuxgame retailer Tux Gamessent in the following:

From the information we now have, our Tribes 2 stock should at last be arriving later today. We will begin shipping outas soon as we get the stock. We have staff standing by just waiting for it to arrive now. People should start receivinggames as of tomorrow.

Great news! Keep in mind you can also order SMACwith Tribes 2 in abundle deal.

Kris Kerseylet us know thatLinuxHardware.org hasreviewed gigahertzprocessor offerings fromAMD and Intel. Benchmarksfor Linux Quake 3,kernel compilation, anddistributed.net are included.

Loki’s Sam Lantinga hasput together a HOWTOfor getting Voice Over IP support working with theTribes 2Linux port. In other news:

• There’s a guideto using the internal Tribes 2editor for creating new maps.

• Apilot’sguide is available which contains tips and tactics for T-grav crews and theiropposition (thanks Tribalwar).
• Gamespy hasinterviewed Tim Clarke,who composed the musical score for Tribes 2.

Voodoo Extreme contactedid Software’s John Carmack to askwhat he hopes to see in future 3D graphics chipsets:

My critical issue list has stayed constant for a while:

Higher precision color formats.Solving the temporary problem.Flexible dependent texture reads.Virtualized graphics address space.

I am confident that we will be getting 64 bit color formats in some cards next year.

It doesn’t seem like there is a wonderful solution to the temporary problem, but next gen cards are going to have enough temporaries that dropping back to full screen buffers (possibly with software tiling or striping) for the overflow cases may be reasonable.

The dependent texture reads are there in GF3 if you degenerate to simple rendering. I expect next generation hardware to have completely flexible implementations.

Virtualizing the graphics address space seems to be gated on Microsoft’s unwillingness to properly fix the AGP interface and management. I think they should go ahead and do it even if they can only use 66mhz PCI reads for it, but that is clearly suboptimal.

Carmack made a large .plan update a year ago in which he explains the rationale for 64 color bits in detail.

RPGamer has their ownpreview ofAnarchy Online, Funcom’s sci-fi MMORPG, up. 10 screenshots are included; it has been stated that the Linux port will be completed by Funcom after the Win32 version ships.

For those of you making Q3A mapswithGtkRadiant, there’s atutorial covering the use of the newQ3Map diagnostic utility in the 1.1 beta release.

Dynamix’s Mark “Got Milk?” Frohnmayer posted tothe Tribes 2 news systemthat he is leaving to eventually join his old comrades-in-arms atGarageGames, who will beoffering the Tribes 2engine (V12) license for one hundred US dollars.

Moreover, Rick Overman updated his.plan file last week with a SITREP forthe V12 release:

okay, I am back from my wedding and honeymoon and am ready to get working on wrapping up the V12 and getting it shipped. Looks like the GarageGames forums have been very active while I was in Kauai, there were over a thousand new posts when I got back. I skimmed through them but I am not even going to attempt to read them all. If there are any dangling technical V12 questions that you need answered just send me an e-mail with a link to the thread and I will get to them as quickly as possible.

My immediate V12 tasks will be integrating the recent Tribes2 patches to the V12 code base and making any necessary changes to get get the V12 up and compiling with VC++.

Linux support for the engine is listed as a feature, but it’s currently unknown as to how much, if any, of Loki’s porting work would be included (although GNU make was mentioned in a previous SITREP).

sanami wrote in to announce the new version of the multiplayer-oriented “remake of Microprose’s X-COM: UFO Defense” UFO2000. Changes in this release include:

• items destruction disabled

Side note: Data files from X-COM are required to play

Download: ufo2000-0.3.11.zip

Jeff Mrochuk wrote in to tell about his new Rune preview. Rune is a third-person 3D melee action game developed by HumanHead Studios and being ported to Linux by Loki; on a side note, the Linux version is still in beta. The article talks about weapons, graphics, multiplayer, and a few other key topics.

• Version 1.7b5 ofJanis Legzdinsh’s Doom engine source port Vavoom has been released;changes include customizable menus, intermissions, and finales. (Source and Data Download)

• ZDoom author Randy Heitwas having difficulty last weekupdating his XFree86 install, which will push back the LinuxZDoom 1.23 release until it’s resolved.

Planet Neverwinter pointed outthat PC.IGN has fourscreenshots up fromBioWare’s AD&D RPG(which is being developed for Linuxinternally)Neverwinter Nights.

After a two week downtime, the Snes9x site has returned (http://www.snes9x.com/);a news post says that the downtime was caused by ahard server crash necessitated the acquisition of a replacement. Snes9x is a multi-platformSuper Nintendo Entertainment System emulator.

Version 1.1 of the Python-poweredQuakeWorld server QuakeWorldPython has been released; changes include:

• Removed C code relating to PAK files (now handled by Python)
• Reworked download code – now functions with the Python resource-loading code
• Tested against Debian 2.2, found and fixed problems that prevented a clean compile and running under Debian (and presumably other Linuxes)
• Changed Sys_Error() function so that it now does exit the game loop and raise a Python exception
• Cleaned up Python “pakfile” module
• Went over translated CTF, cleaned up code by hand

QuakeWorld Python 1.1 source: qwpython-1.1.tar.gz

Version 0.3.3 of SDL-based handball game ArenaBall has been released; changes sincev0.1.6 include:

• defence AI finished
• new logo
• new graphics
• keeping track of player statistics
• ability to switch from zone to man defence
• changes in player AI

ArenaBall 0.3.3 source: arenaball.tar.gz

Version 1.0.1 of the networked battleship game Batalla Naval (screenshots)has been released. We haven’t posted on this in a while, so if you’reinterested in what’s new, take a look at the changelog.

Batalla Naval 1.0.1 source: gbatnav-1.0.1.tar.gz

Games.Linux.com recently posted a reviewby their new writer Omar Ahmed. The review covers Loki‘s first port, Civilization: Call to Power -specifically game installation, features, gameplay, and graphics.

Loki Software’s site updated to link a newinterviewat ITWorld withScott Draeker, founder and president of the Linux game porting company.Draeker states:

The answer is really simple. This has been a tough time for the tech industry. It’s been a tough time for the Linux industry. It’s very difficult right now to get investment dollars. It’s very difficult to do a lot of the partnerships and get into a lot of business relationships that we’ve been pursuing because people are clamping down.

…

We had scaled up to a point, anticipating a certain level of growth, and anticipating a lot of new products coming out. The slowdown caught us by surprise. It caught other people by surprise, too. Now what we’ve done to address that is we’ve scaled down through attrition, we’ve hunkered down. Now we’re ready to start releasing products again.

Draeker also goes over the shortcomings of Linux as a desktop OS, and their recent releases ofAlpha Centauri andTribes 2 (which began shipping toresellers last week).

Taerom pointed out this news post atTux Games:

Unfortunately it looks like there will be a couple of days delay to the arrival of Tribes 2 stock. We are hoping to receive our stock shortly and we will begin shipping the moment the stock arrives.

We’ll update as soon as we receive word that Tux Games has begun shipping their stock.

Stephan Uhlmann wrote in to announce version 1.0beta2 Kmud. Changes and or fixes for this release include:

• added enable/disble all triggers/aliases via accelarator key
• various bugfixes (that’s what we want to concentrate during the beta phase) (e.g. in automapper, wordwrapping, colortriggers and ANSI handling (underline)

Download: http://www.kmud.de/index.html?file=download.html

Alex Burger also wrote in with some news about XQF, the server browser and launcher for Quake/QuakeWorld/Quake2/Quake3. The CVS source code has been updated to version 0.9.6g, and Tribes 2 support has been added. Alex notes on the webpage:

As I don’t even have the game yet I can’t test that it actually launches Tribes 2 correctly. I would appreciate it if someone could test this out when they get Tribes 2, or with the beta if you have it.

To find out how to get the CVS source code, visit the XQF website: http://www.linuxgames.com/xqf/