LINUXGAMES

Linux Orbit has posted a WineX review testing various games. Its looks at how well each of the following games run.

Diablo 2

Starcraft

LinksLS 1998 (Golf Simulation)

Dungeon Keeper 2

Populous the Beginning

Black and White

Fallout 2

Might and Magic 6

Missed this one a few weeks ago. Version 25026 of Tribes 2 was released, bringing it up to speed with the Win32 client. This is Sam Lantinga’s port of the new updates to the client.

Download: http://www.libsdl.org/projects/tribes2/release/

Michael Simms sent in an announcement regarding Doom 3 at Tux Games:

You can now pre-order Doom 3 at TuxGames. As always, Tux Games will report each copy sold back to id as aLinux sale instead of a Windows sale.

Sam Hart sent in an announcement for Tux Typing 1.0.3.

This release follows so closely on the heels of 1.0.2 because in the 2-3weeks since then, we’ve had some awesome patches applied and it warrantsanother release. Here’s the changes:

Smoothscroll patch applied (for those who don’t know, this drastically cuts down on memory usage in game, as well as minorly boosts performance)

rand() bugfix (thx to Jesse Andrews)

wordfile bugfix (now it’s 200 words /per/ file, instead of 200 words total. If you haven’t tried this in CVS yet, download this release, because there are words in these word files you’ve never seen before! ;-)

Homepage: http://www.tux4kids.org/dm/tuxtype/
Download: http://www.tux4kids.org/dm/tuxtype/downloads.shtml

The Civil team sent in an announcement with a new version of their turn based strategy game Civil. The full change log is available on the Civil homepage.

It’s a pleasure to announce that Civil [http://civil.sf.net], aturn-based network strategy game written using Python and Pygame (thesuperb SDL wrapper for Python — http://www.pygame.org) has now reachedversion 0.80.

This release is the culmination of several month’s hard work and theresult is a faster, leaner, more playable Civil.

Homepage: http://civil.sf.net
Download: http://civil.sf.net/download.html

John Wu sent in an announcement for gLuV, his PHP Quake 3 server monitor. Here’s a sample page generated by gLuV.

Some features:

Customizeable to each web page’s look(uses Cascading Style Sheets)

Displays all information a Q3 server query will return in an easilyreadable web page.

Shows the levelshot of the current map being played.

Works for normal Q3 servers, and OSP servers(more to come).

Parses fun names and OSP fun names and displays both foreground ANDbackground colors!

Highlights the current row the mouse is over, for easy reading.

Shows team divisions, team scores, and # of players on each team in OSP

Homepage and Download: http://www.digitaltorque.com/gluv/

In a recent IRC chat with Epic’s Mark Rein, Rein states that a Linux client port of Unreal Tournament 2003, the sequel to Unreal Tournament (long playable natively on Linux), is in development:

[21:13] <[LEGION]Cypress> MarkRein[Epic]–> I am sure you heard this 100x.. but have you heard anything about Playing UT2003 on Linux??

[21:14] <MarkRein[Epic]> [LEGION]Cypress–> It is in the works

Previously, Epic had indicated they would be open to producing a client port, but the server port had been the initial priority.

As some of you may already know, Linux Game Publishing, which ports entertainment software titles, and Tux Games, which sells Linux games online, are both headed by Michael Simms. I had the opportunity this week to interview Mr. Simms about both ventures; questions include queries about the market in general and specific upcoming LGP titles.

Interview

Version 0.4a of the OpenGL-based shooter Glaxium has been released. This release fixes some issues for Linux users that had problems with the last release. Changes and fixes for this release include:

• EXT_texture_env_dot3 and EXT_texture_env_combine extension to draw the floor Great improvement for radeon owners with very new DRI driver.
• Real font (no more glBitMap which slowed down everything)
• Benchmark added
• Menu options (texture filtering, shadow)
• Display bug fix (tanks, ‘game over’ with Geforce 2) + enhancement (explosion)
• to fire and for the super fire (this is more usual).
• A smarter autofire
• Fixed the link problem on some Not-Nvidia Linux config.
• ./configure now really works (sound problem solved !)

Download: glaxium_0.4a.tgz

Apologies for not posting this sooner, but a Tech Demo has been released of the upcoming Epiar. The upcoming Epiar 0.2.0 named “The Battle at Junonia” has a completly reworked engine and pits you as any of three fighters in the sector as an illegal cargo ship attempts to fly in, and the local sector police come in and stop them.

Download: @sourceforge.net

Bill Kendrick of NBS wrote in to announce the a new release of Tux Paint. Changes and fixes for this release include:

• Italian translation
• Dutch translation
• Updated German translation
• Support for SDL’s upcoming “WMCLASS” support (so it’ll play nice under WindowMaker)
• Renamed US Coin stamps’ filenames, so that they sort in order of value. (Penny, Nickel, etc.)
• Made a few of the flower stamps ‘tintable,’ to show off the feature.
• Better looking cursor in ‘Open’ dialog.
• ‘Candy-cane’ style progress bar displayed when first starting up, and while preparing to show thumbnails of saved images.
• Added details on “*PREFIX” Makefile variables in “INSTALL.txt” docs. (Spanish translation of this file needs updating!)
• And, last but not least, the number one requested feature: Support for loading older, BMP-format ‘saved’ images!

Download: http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/

Bill also sent in this note for help:

I’m interested in translating Tux Paint to as many languages as possible. I’d especially like help in the non-Latin-character languages like Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc… I’ll need (open source compatible) TTF fonts, and help getting the code to work with them.

Catonga sent in word that Imagination Technologies has released new Kyro Linux drivers.

The Imagination Technologies Linux Driver kit provides 2D and 3Dacceleration for PowerVR KYRO family of graphics chips running in 16 and 32 bpp depths. The drivers are based on the standard DRI mechanism shipped with XFree86 > 4.0.

Download: http://www.powervr.com/Downloads.asp
Readme: http://www.powervr.com/Drivers/Linux/README

zakk of timedoctor.org has released a new version of his Orbital Sniper (Screenshots) port.

New version of OES, 1.27 brings these changes:

Screenshots. Press s.

Pause. Press p.

Boss key, Ctrl+z. This pauses as well

Thanks to jwr for the above!

Double buffering, can’t remember who asked for this, but it’s in.

Yet another new logoscreen!

You can download Orbital Eunuchs Sniper 1.27 here.

As promised, here’s the interview I conducted with id Software’s Timothee Besset while at QuakeCon this past weekend. Questions include how he got started at id, his evaluation of Linux gaming today, and there’s even a brief discussion concerning DOOM III. I still have more content to put up when I get a chance; mostly notes from the id presentations, Carmack’s keynote, and impressions of the RTCW expansion pack, Enemy Territory.

The emulator Atari800 has been updated to version 1.2.4.

Atari800 is an Atari 8-bit computer (400, 800, and XL and XE series) and Atari 5200game system emulator for DOS, Windows, Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, andLinux/UNIX.

Homepage: http://atari800.sourceforge.net/

Daniel Vogel sent in word of a fix for the Unreal Tournament version 436 server.

Sorry, it took a little longer than expected! Ryan informs me this patch is good to go, and we’ve had some server administrators testing it for a few days. We suggest all server admins running on Linux install this patch.

Homepage: http://unreal.epicgames.com/
Download: http://unreal.epicgames.com/files/IpDrv-436-Linux-08-20-02.zip

Bill Kendrick sent in news of a new version of Entombed, a clone of a simple Atari 2600 maze game.

Changes:

Tweaked the firey “number of players” effect on the title screen

Some sound effect changes

Less cartoony-looking Zombie

Alpha blended gradient

Players can die (touch zombie, or hit the top of the screen)

Game can end (one of the players loses last life)

Lives displayed at the top

Number of “make-or-break” potions displayed at the bottom

Make-or-break potions in the maze!

Homepage: http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/entombed/

Daniel Horn sent in the following, about a new version of Vega Strike.

This version adds over the previous many items.
It has many many rendered bases for players to explore in the day, night, oreven sunset (should the player land at that time of the day with respect tothe sun’s position). Likewise, it has added news events that actually affect how the game play goeson… if there’s news about a spy in a sector perhaps his escape is still inprogress! If there’s something funny happening in a sector maybe it’s a newalien race.

And if you’re near a blackhole… then you may get… well yanked around!

Homepage: http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/

The NES emulator FCE Ultra has updated to version 0.81. From the site:

FCE Ultra 0.81 is out. This is a major release, despite the small increment in the version number; besides the changes listed in the end-user documentation, many internal changes have been made, so some things may have been broken.

Homepage: http://fceultra.sourceforge.net/
Download: http://fceultra.sourceforge.net/downloads/

Version 1.11 of the WineX Game Installer has been released.

WineX Game Installer is a graphical interface to installing Windows games in Transgamingscreen WineX and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Homepage: http://www.franksworld.net/wine/wgi/