LINUXGAMES

Saw on ShackNews that 3DRealms has announced the release of the source code to Rise Of The Triad. The source is available here and a README file with comments by Jim Dose, Tom Hall, and Scott Miller is here. The source code is being released under the GPL, however a legally purchased copy of the game is still required to obtain the game data.
Mirror: 3D Downloads

Ryan Freeman wrote in to point out that version 2.2 of the OpenGL billiards game FooBillard (screenshots: 1 | 2 | 3) has been released; changes include:

• non ANSI conform variable declaration fixed
• only printable characters are accepted in textfield
• removed hardcoded “CC=gcc” in Makefile.am

FooBillard 2.2 downloads: @ foobillard.sunsite.dk

Another release candiate of xmame has been released with the following changelog.

- Fixed problems in memory.c that could lead to crashes and default.cfg corruption. (smf)
- Fixed a bunch of ANSI/ISO warnings reported by Stefano Priore.
- Fixed a crash in the MESS Atari 800 driver.
- Aspect and mode switches are now available for the Xv driver even if DGA isn’t enabled.
- The hiscore_directory is now rooted in $HOME/.xmame by default.
- Snapshots should now save with the correct rotation.

Bill Kendrick of NBS wrote in to announce that version 0.9.2 of the child’s drawing program Tux Paint (screenshots) has been released; changes include:

• includes a Korean translation (requires a Korean font)
• “–keyboard” option, which allows you to use the arrow keys and spacebar to control the mouse pointer

Tux Paint 0.9.2 downloads: newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/download/

Tim Jung wrote in with a question that I was unable to answer:

I was wondering and doing some Googling and can’t seem to find any Triviagames that run on Linux. I am looking for games that are similar to “YouDon’t Know Jack” or “Jeopardy” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” thatare Open Source or licensed under the GPL and there doesn’t seem to beanything like that at all out there. Any ideas?

I realize that Linux games often don’t cover the full spectrum of thedifferent genres in gaming, but it suprises me to a certain extent nobody hasreleased any trivia games for Linux. It seems that it would be fairly easy towrite such a game and the hardest part would be to come up with all of thetrivia questions themselves. So, do any of you have any ideas? Are we overlookingany such projects? Please post your comments below.

Version 2.1 of the OpenGL billiards game FooBillard has been released. Changes and or fixes for this release include:

• vast performance improvements of rendered reflections
• human/ai player adjustible in menu
• better sdl friendliness (thx to Michael G. Martin)
• automatically save actual settings into .foobillardrc file on quit
• correct wraping (clamp to edge) of cubemaps
• cue-offset crosshair on ball

Download: foobillard-2.1.tar.gz

Great news follows our post yesterday concerning the future of the Neverwinter Nights Linux Client

We have just been informed by Rad Game Tools (http://www.radgametools.com) that they have Linux versions of both Bink and Miles. We will be getting our hands on these tools on Monday and we should have further information for you then.

This solves the two outstanding issues with the Linux Client, and I bet we will have even more good news for you in the coming week in terms of future Betas or Demos of the Linux Client. We here at BioWare are thrilled with this development.

We would like to apologise for the confusion arising from the Dec 13th update where it seem like we were blaming Rad for the delay. This is entirely untrue. We were stating that, to the best of our knowledge, we would have to find our own solutions for movie and sound playing in the Linux Client. This is no longer the case and we look forward to using the Linux Rad Game Tools just like we are in the Windows and upcoming Mac version.

Michael Simms of Tux Games sent in some statistics about how the company has been doing this year.

Some information on the performance of Tux Games this year.

We saw a vast increase of people visiting the website, up by 45% over last year. However sales did not rise proportionally. Sales were up by only 3% over last year, due to the lack of new releases following the demise of Loki.

The weakest month this year was november, which surprised us with the recent release of UT2K3.

Once again, the US lead the way in sales, bringing in 56% of all games bought from us.

Hopefully the releases of Majesty and the recently announced Disciples 2 will give Tux Games and other retailers a nice start for 2003.

LG’s own Dan Olson has posted a status update on his ports of Payback.

The remainder of the development time will be spent on polishing the ports and implementing even more exciting features, such as LAN play. Expect Payback to be available for Windows and Linux in early 2003!

Full update: http://www.apex-designs.net/payback_x86_report2.html

For people who are wishing to run Battlefield 1942 servers, a Battlefield 1942 server beta, is now available. This beta will expire in one month. Thanks to lillian for pointing this out.

The weekly update to the Neverwinter Nights Linux Client has occured with some rather bad but unexpected news at this point in time.

[Dec 13 2002] There have been many questions as to why the Linux client is taking so long. The two big issues are sound and movies due to the fact that BINK and Miles are only available for Windows and Mac. BINK is the in-game movie player and Miles is the sound engine for Neverwinter Nights. We are having to find our own solution for Linux sound in Neverwinter Nights, and we are exploring possible movie options. Due to these factors, we are revising the estimated release date from Fall 2002 to Winter 2002 (Dec 22 2002 to March 21 2003), with January 2003 being the earliest date it could be out.
Progress has been made on sound this week, and to re-iterate, the graphical side of the Linux client is looking excellent and is almost complete.

And LGP wrote in with another announcement:

After mich delay, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Mindrover: The EuropaProject and its downloadable updatefor owners of the old Loki version of Mindrover.

The downloadable update is available at a mich-reduced price.

LGP wrote in (finally) to announce their next port:

Linux Game Publishing is proud to announce we have signed an agreement withStrategy First to port their new Turn Based Strategy title Disciples 2:Dark Prophecy.

Andy Mecham from NVIDIA wrote in toannounce that three new display drivershave been released for three new Linux platforms:

• 1.0-4191 for the IA32 (x86)
• 1.0-4050 for the IA64
• 1.0-4180 for the AMD64 (Hammer)

Each of them includes support for GLX 1.3, OpenGL 1.4, and CineFX. The IA32 driver includes support for AGP 8x and nForce2 IGP, separate X screens on nView enabled GPUs, and index overlays on Quadro4 to support legacy applications.

Version 2.0 of the OpenGL billiards game FooBillard (screenshots: 1 | 2 | 3) has been released; changes include:

• fallback for systems without sound
• automatically exclude bumpref for non NVIDIA cards at compiletime
• additional configure parameter for enabling/disabling bumpref

FooBillard 2.0 downloads: @ foobillard.sunsite.dk

Version 0.0.6E7 of the graphical Nethack variant Slash’EM (screenshots: 1 | 2) has been released; changes include:

• treacherous pets
• Cthulhu revivification
• monsters use of potions of amnesia & wands of cancellation
• reflecting golems
• implemented gtkhack
• support for multiple routes through the dungeon
• switched to buffered I/O to remove packet length limitations

Note that this is consdiered a development release and is not considered playable.

Slash’EM 0.0.6E7 downloads: @ sf.net

Version 0.3.0b of the LucasArts’s SCUMM interpreter implementation ScummVM (screenshots) has been released; changes since version 0.2.0 include:

• fixed major race condition
• new in-game GUI
• launcher dialog
• code seperation of various engine parts into several libraries
• bugfixes

ScummVM 0.3.0b downloads: @ sf.net

Version 1.7g0 of the multiplayer 3D tank game BZFlag (screenshots) has been released; changes include:

• world file caching
• team killers die
• tank labels on roaming
• new GUI options

BZFlag 1.7g0 downloads: bzflag.org/download

Version 0.6.0 of the Arcade Volleyball remake GPL Arcade Volleyball (screenshots) has been released; changes include:

• now it is possible to redefine keys
• theme support
• multiplayer, max. 4 players

GAV 0.6.0 downloads: gav.sf.net/download.php

A new release candidate of version 0.62.1 of xmame has hit the street looking for the usual testing/feedback. Changes include the following items:

All path and directory options in fileio.c now support expansion of environment variables such as $HOME.
Re-added the commands reported missing from fileio.c by Shadow Walker: record, playback, stdout-file, stderr-file, and log.
Set cfg_directory, nvram_directory, memcard_directory, input_directory, and state_directory to have a default root at $HOME/.xmame, as suggested by Shadow Walker.
Fixed a typo in xmamerc.dist and added a line for diff_directory, as suggested by Frank Cox.
Fixed a C++-style comment in drivers/vendetta.c. (Caleb Shay)
Fixed a warning about snprintf when building for Mac OS X.
Fixed the XInput handling so that spinners no longer show an inertial effect. (David Mitchell)
Applied the latest Xv cleanup patch. (Alastair Robinson)
Made a change to the OpenGL code that *might* fix the crash that occurs when rotation is enabled.