LINUXGAMES

Brian Hook, formerly of3dfx (where he was the principle architect of Glide if I recall correctly),id Software, andVerant Interactive, whenasked about original gamesat Voodoo Extreme today, made this response:

Off the top of my head, the best example I can think of in terms of a creative, wacky and original title that doesn’t get much press is Mind Rover from CogniToy. People that have played this game just love it, but most people haven’t even heard of it:

http://www.mindrover.com

Click the above. I mean it, go there and download the demo. It rocks.

I mean, it got a Direct Hit from Daily Radar; 89% from PC Gamer (and they’re hardcore!); Highly Recommended from GamesDomain; 5 stars from AVault; and a 92% from Game Post. In other words, it’s pretty damn cool. But it’s so different that most publishers wouldn’t even think about touching it, so CogniToy pretty much had to self publish. And I wish them the very best because they’ve been doing things the hard way — believing in a concept so fervently that they chose to pursue that at a higher risk than going the safe route and writing another shooter.

People interested in cool new games should definitely check it out.

In case you weren’t aware, MindRoverwas ported to Linux byLoki Software, and you can order your copydirectly from them or from theirresellers.

Tim Gift of GarageGames wasinterviewedby Inside Mac Games recently; GarageGamesis the company offering a Tribes 2 engine(V12)license for $100 US. The interview is pretty general (at least initially) despite the Macfocus of the site.

Note: Also, their site was updated yesterday to mention that Sierra has approved their codebase as being free of Tribes 2 intellectual property, which means it should be made available fairly shortly.

• The Infiltrationsite was updated regarding the next release of their military-themedUnreal Tournament mod.A shotof a M249 SAW light machine gun model has also been posted, which should be includedin the mod’s arsenal eventually.

• The UT Strike Forcemod CO, Mike Hamlett, wasinterviewedby MGON about the genesis of their project.Questions are also asked of the team’s lead mapper and concept designer.

Over the weeked, Slashdot pointed outthis reviewof Intel’s 1.7GHz Pentium 4 CPU under Linux, where it’spitted against its predecessor and a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon.

Ryan “icculus” Gordonfired in news about hisBUILD Engine porting project:

…just dropping you and linuxgames.com a note to let you knowthe Build Engine CVS repository has moved.

To grab it now:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@icculus.org:/cvs/cvsroot cvs -z3 login
(password is “anonymous”, without the quotes.)
cvs -z3 co buildengine

(and also…)
cvs -z3 co buildutils

Anyone that wants write access (via cvs-over-ssh) should email me for anaccount.

Dan Chen sent in info abouta fix forNVIDIA Linuxdriver users withVIA Apollo Pro KT133 chipsets.The full text of Dan’s message can be found here:

http://www.linuxgames.com/articles/dchen-NVIDIA_Fix-20010716.txt

The Urban Terrormod team wasinterviewedby ELiTeD recently. The group’sQ3A tactical combat mod isdiscussed, as well as upcoming new features for their site brought by theirpartnership withTerrorStrike.

Michael Simmsof the online Linux game retailerTux Games sent in the following:

Tux Games is happy to announce the availability of Bunnies, thenew Linux arcade deathmatch game fromBlackHoleSun Software featuringcute cuddly bunnies killing each other in various brutal ways!

A demo of Bunnies can be found here.

Neverwinter Vault has been reprintingseveral recent posts fromBioWare developers fromtheir officialmessageboard concerningthe multiplayer AD&D RPGNeverwinter Nights, so be sure to checkthose out if you want additional insight on the game’s design.

Also, NW Vault has been continuing their NWN Scripting Function of the Day series,which can be found here.

Macslow let us know that he’s posted apossible solution forlockups using OpenGL applicationson machines usingNVIDIA’s version1.0-1251 Linux driver. Specifically,this should fix a double-buffering issue encountered after Macslow installed the latestdriver.

Doomworldpointed outthis brief mention of the camera system from the next Doom game inan interview@ Achtung Wolfenstein!with Gray Matter’s Greg Goodrich:

One of the most recent additions to Wolfenstein has been the incorporation of the new camera technology id is creating for the next installment of Doom. It’s simply amazing. It has allowed us to tell our story in the manner we always dreamed of telling it. When we started, we knew we had a compelling story, rich with character and full of depth. And throughout the development process it has continued to grow. One of the biggest ‘unknowns’ in the production schedule was to figure out how to actually tell the story. The new camera system is allowing us to create the in-game cinematics quickly and effectively using assets from the specific locations where the story unfolds. If you had a chance to view the E3 trailer you saw some of this new technology in place. With the ability to track, dolly, pull-focus, etc. it’s like having our own director of photography and camera crew on staff (without having to pay the exorbitant union fees!)

BarrysWorld Admin Modversion1.04, a server administration tool forTribes 2 has been released;changes include:

• Random teams in FFA
• Option to reset a voted time limit back to the default when the map changes
• Two new options for Match Mode

bwadmin 1.04 Download:
http://bwadmin.barrysworld.com/bwadmin_t2_v1.04.zip

Sgt. Scrub pointed out thisreviewat GamePC ofAMD’sAthlon MPunder Linux. The results of several tests are presented, as well as an explanationof AMD multiprocessing architecture.

Andreas wrote in to announce the releaseof Toppler 0.52, a “reimplementation of the old game known as Tower Toppler or Nebulous”(shot).

Toppler 0.52 Source:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/toppler/toppler_src-0.52.tar.gz

Steve Baker has released new versions of two of his games:

• TuxKart 0.0.5: source
• TuxAQFH 1.0.12: source

These new versions include no major changes but include support for the latest version of PLIB. They also includefixes for bugs related to newer versions of the Linux kernel, OpenGL and GCC.

Curtis L. Olson sent out announcements for these two FlightGear-related new releases:

• Version 0.7.8 of the main FlightGear project: [source | base package | changes]FlightGear is a free, open-source flight simulator project.
• Version 0.0.16 of SimGear: [source |changes]SimGear is a set of LGPL’d open-source libraries designed to be usedas building blocks for assembling 3d simulations, games, andvisualization applications

Version 0.0.6 of the space combat sim Vega Strike has been released; changes include:

• Added Weapons that you can fire with spacebar
• Fly around and zoom out with the ’1′ key
• Added halos around your engines
• AI, Halos, and Weapons are almost done!

Vega Strike 0.0.6 source: vegastrike071101.tgz

Cohort pointed out that version 1.6d13of the Quesa 3D graphics library,an open source implementation ofApple’sQuickDraw 3D API, has been released. The changelog can be foundhere @Gamasutra.

Quesa 1.6d13 Source:
http://www.quesa.org/info/files/quesa_1.6d13.tar.gz

Well as announced yesterday, Beta 2 of the counter-terrorism mod for Unreal Tournament has been released. There is a bunch of new maps, weapons, and features for the new release. You can read some important instructions on the Tac Ops Forums.

Download: http://www.tactical-ops.net/

Version 2.2 of Quake 3: Arena tactical combat mod Urban Terror has been released. This is a bug fix release for some of the problems caused in 2.1. Changes and or fixes include:

• Invisible player bug
• Spawning without knife bug
• Team DM spawns further apart now
• cg_sfxVisibleItems no longer hides your own laser or silencer or medkits
• Fixed bug that would cause pressing reload to not work sometimes
• Shooting cancels out your respawn protection so make your first shot count
• cg_autoRadio now functions as originally designed
• Extra ammo now gives 3 more shells to the hk69
• Safety measure added to ensure kills, deaths, and times are cleared after a survivor map change
• sv_fps now properly capped to prevent crashes at startup

There was a special note on the website:

Listen and read closely, this is where the details come in for the updated files for Urban Terror . We are releasing two different patches, the first file is for those who are already running Beta 2.1 and is 450kb. The other file will be for those who have NEVER downloaded 2.1. The new Beta 2.2 patch is only approximately 5.3MBs.

Download:
Beta 2.2 from 2.1
Beta 2.2 from 2.0