LINUXGAMES

The official GtkRadiant pagewas updated with this note on the Linux version of the Q3A/RTCW level editor’s latest iteration:

The Linux version is not available yet. Time for us to finish some setup scritps work, and to deal with linux specific issues. Check back in a few days.

Kristopher Kersey sent in a nice little blurb, read below:

LinuxHardware.org has just published their results in the Pentium 4 verses Athlon XP war. In this review, the new Pentium 4 “Northwood” 2.2GHz is pitted against the Athlon XP 2000+. To level the playing field, both platforms use DDR memory which make for some interesting results. The usual benchmarks are included: Distributed.net, POVBench, Kernel Compile, Audio Encoding (Ogg Vorbis), Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament.

You can read the full article here

Version 20020122 of Wine has been released to the masses. The changes and or fixes for this release include:

• Lots of improvements to asynchronous I/O.
• Beginnings of unit testing infrastructure.
• Inter-process DDE should work now.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Download: Wine-20020122.tar.gz

Jacek Fedorynski sent in word that he has made it so you can play Quake II with red & blue 3d glasses. Dosen’t seem to hard to setup, the requirments and setup instructions are on his page. Check it out at: http://www.jfedor.org/red-blue-quake2/.

Anandtech has a nice next gen benchmark up, involving a recent build of the Unreal Engine. This benchmark is to show how cards will fare up to the future of gaming. Instead of using older games to benchmark newer technologies. You can read the article here.

There is an interesting history of DRI that was posted to the dri-devel mailing list. It goes very in depth to the roots of DRI and where it is today. You can read it here, thanks to Andreas Ehliar for the heads up on this one.

Former Loki Software President Scott Draeker wasinterviewedby Newsforge about the end of the Linux game porting company.Among Draeker’s statements is an expression of hope for the future:

NewsForge: How do you feel about the future of Linux gaming? Do you think there’s enough of a market for a company to port Windows games to Linux?

Draeker: It’s problematic. After three years I know it can be done. The market is there. But it’s also very challenging. We did it out of conviction, which is why we lasted as long as we did.

Draeker also discusses the problem of bringing new, original titles to the Linux platform.

On a similar note, Ryan “icculus” Gordon and his merry band of Linuxgaming enthusiasts haveannounced that they will be hosting CVS treesfor Loki’s various open source projects, suchas OpenAL. Included in the announcement is Ryan’s commentaryon the end of Loki, as well as his recommendations to the community for moving on.

Johan Karlsson from Illwinter wrote in with the following announcement regarding Conquest of Elysium II:

Illwinter Game Design has released a new version of their old but still supported fantasy game Conquest of Elysium II.

New features in this release (version 2002) are:

• New computer player, the archmage
• Improved switches (use –help to see them)
• Cost for Druid summoning is displayed properly
• New Druid ability, Call the counsil of beasts
• Two new monsters

The full version of CoE can be purchased for $17US.

Conquest of Elysium II demo download: www.illwinter.com/coe_downloads.html

Several readers sent in a link, which I won’t post here as it contains contact phone numbers, that quoted a purported e-mail from Loki Software President Scott Draeker to retailers:

After 3 wonderful years, Loki will be indefinitely suspending operations onJanuary 31.

We understand that many of you have come to rely, at least in part, onreselling Loki products. In order to protect your ongoing business, we aregranting you the first opportunity to purchase our existing inventory.

All orders are subject to the following:

-Effective immediately, Loki will no longer offer end user technicalsupport for any of its products
-All purchases must be paid in full at the time of shipping
-All sales are final
-All shipping costs will be paid by the purchaser

Remember that after January 31 these products will no longer be availableanywhere.

…

Thank you all for your support and for three great years!

Loki requested Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last summer; if true, this news is a saddening conclusion to the life of Loki Software, the company that did more than any other company to bring quality gaming to the Linux operating system.

Update by Matt: At the time of Loki’s Chapter 11 filing, we composed a retrospective covering the achievements of Loki as well as their contributions to Linux and the free software community. Although that article doesn’t cover the latest releases from Loki, it does give a solid overview of their place in the Linux games scene.

QERadiant.com, the home ofthe cross-platform Q3A engine level editor GtkRadiant, was updatedthis past Sunday with an ETA for the RTCW game pack which will allow GtkRadiant to create levels forReturn to Castle Wolfenstein:

We are going to delay the release of the Wolf game pack to early next week. There is a number of things left to be done, among themproviding some documentation and doing more testing .. stay tuned ..

Thanks to several readers for pointing out that version 4.2.0 ofXFree86 was released; the changelogcan be found here inthe release notes. As always,you can download it in pre-compiled binary format or as source code (full or patch):

XFree86 4.2.0 Download:
ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.2.0/

The online Linux game retailer Tux Games fired in the following:

Tux Games has completed its installer for Return to CastleWolfenstein and we are starting to ship all of the preorderstoday.

This is the Win32 retail box bundled with a Linux installer CD.

TribalWar received an updatefrom Sierra’s Alex Rodberg concerningthe development of futureTribes 2 patches:

The developer is lined up and is ready to do it. Sierra is ready to proceed. All that’s left is about 7 lbs. of contracts and legal proceedings to finish processing.

It isspeculatedthat the unnamed developer is Garage Games, which has several formerDynamix (the original developer of T2) coders and offers T2engine licenses (Torque) for $100 US.

Gamespot has posted areviewof Introversion’s futuristic “hacking” gameUplink. The review concludes with:

Yet even with these shortcomings, Uplink is frequently enjoyable. When you’re sweating out the last seconds, trying to get the job done before your victim completes a trace, the design miscues don’t seem to matter. This is a game where you can get lost in the moment very easily.

The Uplink news page was updated this month describing an upcomingbeta patch that will add IRC functionality.

Finally, there’s an interview with Introversion’sChris Delay up at UnknownPlayer.com.

Gentoo Linux’s site posted a warning forowners of recent AMD CPUs (Athlon/Duron): there’s anextended paging memory corruption bug encountered when AGP is in use:

And, this problem hits us because Linux 2.4 kernels compiled with a Pentium-Classic or higher Processor family kernel configuration setting will automatically take advantage of extended paging (for kernel hackers out there, this is the X86_FEATURE_PSE constant defined in include/asm-i386/cpufeature.h.) Fortunately, there is a quick and easy fix for this problem. If you have been experiencing lockups on your Athlon, Duron or Athlon MP system when using AGP video, try passing the mem=nopentium option to your kernel (using GRUB or LILO) at boot-time. This tells Linux to go back to using 4K pages, avoiding this CPU bug. In addition, it should also be possible to avoid this problem by not using AGP on affected systems.

Needless to say, this is a problem that affects many Linux gamers. The update also states that Alan Cox will be adding detection code in the kernel to avoid this issue altogether.

Version 1.1b of Return to Castle Wolfenstein has been released by id Software’s Timothee “TTimo” Besset.

Changes:

• General stuff:
  • made the installers and binaries more BSD friendly
  • Alt+Enter shortcut toggles between windowed and fullscreen
• Single Player:
  • initial public release
• Multiplayer:
  • fixed a giant memory leak

As noted in the changelog, this release includes binaries for the single-player game, so you can take on Himmler’s occult war machine under Linux now :).

Moreover, a demo for the single-player game is now available. TTimo also states that when the Macintosh version is released, it will have a Linux-friendly file tree (as of right now you need to utilize Wine to install RTCW from the Win32 CD). The Linux installer will then likely be updated to support installation from the Mac CD for users without Wine.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein 1.1b Download:
id Software FTP
3DDownloads (Mirror) – Note: Use Texas server.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein SP Demo:
id Software FTP

Return to Castle Wolfenstein SP Demo – No Media (if you already have the SP demo pakfiles from the Win32 demo):
id Software FTP

A few people pointed outthis story atThe Register which claims thatSGI, the initial developers ofOpenGL, has transferred”much of its 3D graphics patents” to Microsoft. I asked Brian Paul ofthe Mesa project, an open sourceimplementation of the OpenGL API, how it could affect his efforts:

Well, it’s disappointing to hear that SGI is selling off stillmore of its assets, especially to Microsoft. It strikes me asshort-sighted thinking by SGI.

The consequences of Microsoft holding these patents is hard topredict. I don’t know how many patents are involved nor thenature of them, though I’d guess that they’re hardware-centric.That could be a big problem for the various hardware vendors ifMicrosoft decides to take an offensive position with the patents.

I don’t think I have anything to worry about with Mesa (at leastfor now). Most of the algorithms used in Mesa are very widely usedand have been around for a long time. What would Microsoft haveto gain by going after me/Mesa? Certainly not money. The ill-willthey’d generate would only further tarnish their image.

As Mesa adopts newer graphics techniques (like vertex and frament-level programming) I have to be mindful of stepping on other’sintellectual property, but that hasn’t been a big deal so far.NVIDIA, for example, was very agreeable when I asked for permissionto include their NV_vertex_program extension in Mesa.

Don’t take my comments as gospel though. I don’t know what Microsoft’sup to and I’m not especially knowledgeable of patent issues.

Mark Riddell, of Sunspire Studios, wrote in to let us know that they have put up a brand new Tux Racer website. In addition, they’re taking pre-orders for Tux Racer, and have also added an updated FAQ, new screenshots, and a new forum.

For those not familiar with Tux Racer, Mark included this:

In Tux Racer, players race as one of four arctic characters (including thepopular Linux® Mascot, Tux the Penguin) through eighteen thrilling downhillcourses, while collecting herring and performing tricks along the way. Entercups and compete to win the title! Tux Racer includes a variety of optionsfor gameplay, including the ability to race courses for time, againstcomputer opponents and even your friends in fog, snow, and high winds.

Your journey starts as you compete on beginner courses designed to let youlearn the basics of Tux Racer’s controls. Win and you will unlock othercourses and cups that will lead you to more exciting and challenging races.Only the quickest, smartest, and luckiest will win!

Tux Racer will be available for Windows and Linux.

sjbrown wrote in to announce that he has started a project called Metagame-Sector (screenshots). It is a Python framework for making sector-based games (Chess, WarCraft, Civ, etc.). The project is currently at version 0.2.

Metagame-Sector source: metagame-sector-0.2.tar.gz

Version 0.1.5 of the turn-based strategy game FreeLords has been released; changes include:

• implemented menubar
• implemented razing cities
• bugfixes with city occupation

FreeLords 0.1.5 source: freelords-0.1.5.tar.gz