LINUXGAMES

Yet more Doom 3 news.

• HardOCP has posted “The Official Doom 3 [H]ardware Guide” in addition to their official Doom 3 benchmarks. Though the meat and potatoes of the “[H]ardware” guide seem to be yet more Windows benchmarks, it should give us Linux users a reasonable idea of about what we should be getting as far as image quality on our hardware.
• jvm (seen here in this file photo, hard at work on some quality curmudgeoning) has posted his “SysReqs for id Software’s post-Doom 3 Game”.

Epic Games has announced that future Unreal Tournament titles will now be published by Midway Games, rather than Atari.

Furthermore, Epic issued a press release today stating that new retail edition of Unreal Tournament 2004 is in the pipeline with added content:

New Maps for Onslaught Mode: Several new and never-before-seen environments for the new and mega-popular Onslaught mode, created by the masterminds at Epic Games, are being added. New maps will include never-before-seen areas as well as previously released maps created for Windows XP. Onslaught is an epic-in-scope team-based challenge that pits two teams in bitter warfare across massive terrain maps in a frag-filled battle to destroy, capture and hold key power nodes. Vehicles play a major role as war-hardened flying and driving machines transport combatants to the “front” and serve as mobile platforms to launch devastating attacks on the enemy.

New Vehicles: Three new vehicles are being added for Onslaught mode to help gamers tear up the countryside and bring their enemies to their knees. New battle machinery includes the Cicada, a two seat air vehicle; the Paladin, a deadly new tank that includes a player-oriented directional shield; and the Self Propelled Mobile Artillery (SPMA), a long-range artillery vehicle with a deployable hovering spotter camera.

New Characters: Six new characters crafted by Epic Games will join the bloodthirsty lineup of techno-gladiators for players to choose from and play as, including two MetalGuard mercenaries, two Mecha Skaarj and two Necris characters.

The Best Community-Made Game Modifications: Unreal Tournament 2004 boasts one of the most robust player communities in all of video games, and, with the tools included game, this community is able to alter gameplay and in some cases, completely change the way Unreal Tournament 2004 is played. Epic Games’ “Make Something Unreal” Contest has been challenging this community to bring their mods to a professional level and the community has answered the call. Epic has selected the best of the best, and those AAA community-made games will be included in Unreal Tournament 2004 – Editor’s Choice Edition. With several new and unique ways to play Unreal Tournament 2004 fans of the series both new and old are in for a huge variety of gameplay experiences.

Moreover, BeyondUnreal received this response from Epic’s Mark Rein:

All of the new content in the upcoming version of their multiplayer shooter will be released on the net for free for owners of the first version of UT 2004.

This Editor’s Choice edition will retail for $40 US, and will come in CD-ROM and DVD-ROM version. The Linux binaries shipped with the initial retail release, so it seems reasonable to assume they’ll be included on this one as well.

This news was sent in today, which sounds like a viable option for projects looking for sound assets:

Game sound effects creator indiesfx.co.uk have announced a new sound effects collection. The new collection, entitled Atmosphere, features over 70Mb of long looping ambient effects, from typical rain, wind and fire to indoor sounds such as factory noise. The high quality stereo files seamlessly loop without obvious repitition and are ideal for backgrounds in a wide variety of indoor and outdoor environments. Like any IndieSFX sound set, S011C-Atmosphere is available on CD-ROM or instant download for $24. Visit www.indiesfx.co.uk for further information.

Info on the licensing can be found here.

A reader pointed out that version 0.6.1 of ScummVM, a virtual machine for classic adventure games such as those from LucasArts, was released. It should be noted that 0.6.1b will be released shortly to fix a savegame path issue however. Changes include the requisite bug fixes :

• Glitches using an Ogg Vorbis talkie file in some games
• Crashes on 64-bit machines
• Crashes when saving to an invalid directory in Broken Sword 1
• Lots of sound glitches in Curse of Monkey Island, Full Throttle and The Dig
• Crashes in some international versions of Simon the Sorcerer

ScummVM 0.6.1 Download: [ scummvm.org ]

Update by Madeline Allbright:
I’ll leave it to the ScummVM developers to describe it:

Well, one of those “Small Yet Important” coding mistakes has cropped up in ScummVM 0.6.1. A copy-and-paste error in the ‘Edit Game’ screen may result in people not being able to save a game.

The mistake involves the new ‘Paths’ tab, which allows for easier editing of game paths. Unfortunately, the ‘Extra Path’ field on this screen is accidentally saved as directory to use for saved games, instead of correct field below it. This was noticed and fixed in the experimental CVS version, but the fix was mistakenly left out of the ScummVM 0.6.1 release.

If you encounter this glitch, the recommended work around is to set the Extra Path to the saved game directory. ScummVM 0.6.1b will be released soon to correct this issue.

After a huge amount of effort by the community on bug reporting, a new release of mapacman has been released.This 1.0 has the fix to the GUI that many people pointed out and also the issue concerning timeouts during multiplayer.

Download: [ mapacman 1.00 ]

New review notice:

‘Spout’ is a small fast-playing port of an LCD-based game. It’s a great little game to play while sitting on hold on the phone, waiting for lunch to arrive, to blow off steam after that stressful meeting.

Full review, with screenshots, is available on Plant Geek.

A reader wrote in to point out the following project:

JZuul is a text adventure and interactive fiction framework written in Java. The JZuul Project consists of two major parts: the JZuul Engine and the JZuul Game Editor. The Engine is an abstract base for games, providing features such as a dialog system, iteractive objects and non-player characters, multiplayer capabilities, saving and loading, and maps. The Game Editor is a SWT based GUI for easily creating XML Gamefiles running on the Engine. Those two components together form the base for easy game creation and lots of hours of gaming.

JZuul Download (Updated daily): [ jzuul.org ]

Michael Simms of Tux Games and Linux Game Publishing will be appearing with Ryan “icculus” Gordon (of icculus.org fame and fortune), at Linux World Conference & Expo. Also appearing will be the unlikely Chris DiBona. The threesome will be discussing the Linux Games Industry, at 1 PM PDT on the fourth of August.

Neopop-SDL, a NeoGeo Pocket emulator using SDL, has released version 0.2. The changelog for this release includes:

• major speed improvements
• load ROMs from zip archives
• YUV overlay (hardware scaling)
• config file (~/.neopop/neopoprc)
• joystick support
• HQ2x/HQ3x smoothing scalers
• sound and throttling improvements
• configurable key and joystick bindings
• pause
• 10 state save slots
• on-screen display

Download: [ Neopop-SDL-0.2 ]

According to a forum post by Epic’s DrSiN, the Unreal Tournament 2004 Master Server is down due to a switch failure. It should be back up post-haste thanks to an emergency response team.

Update by Margaret Thatcher
The server is back up now according to page 2 of that thread, GO ERT GO!

id Software made a few post-gold updates to their websites:

• idsoftware.com pointed out that the DOOM Collector’s Edition, containing the WAD files for Ultimate DOOM, DOOM II, and Final DOOM, is available. There’s a plethora of DOOM engine source ports to Linux (DOOM’s source code was GPL’ed many years ago) that you could use to play this collection.
• The DOOM III website now has more content, including a clip of the theme song by tweaker (there’s a Billboard article concerning the music here). The site also prominently displays the August 3rd ship date for North America.
• The Union Aerospace Corporation site (the sinister company behind the ill-fated teleportation experiments in the DOOM storylines) is now displaying a countdown to the demonic invasion and end of life on this plane of existe– I mean the ship date.

GameSpy spoke with id programmer Robert Duffy about DOOM III’s multiplayer networking scheme; Duffy had this to say regarding the Linux dedicated server (the client was not mentioned):

RD: The Win32 dedicated server works out of the box and the dedicated Linux version should be available around when the game hits store shelves. That does not mean it will be available but it should be.

G4TechTV ran several interviews with id personnel over the past week: Pulse spoke with id employees about DOOM III in general and showed new footage of the game, while Icons devoted an entire show to the history of the DOOM series. Both of these segments have been posted online and can be downloaded from 3D Gamers’ DOOM III section.

Shacknews also pointed out another brief interview on G4TechTV in which id’s Todd Hollenshead stated that Return to Castle Wolfenstein II is in development at another studio; no further details have been made available at present.

HomeLAN Fed spoke with the author of an upcoming book that follows the development of DOOM III.

id also supplied [H]ard|OCP with benchmarks for DOOM III on higher-end video cards. The results won’t translate to the Linux build due to OS and driver differences, but it should give a rough idea how NVIDIA 6800-class and 5950 Ultra cards would perform on your machine. There were also these comments from John Carmack:

It should be noted that all of the modern cards play the game very well, and benchmark scores should not be the be-all-end-all decision maker. Scores will probably improve somewhat with future driver releases, and other factors like dual slots or dual power connectors can weigh against some of the high end cards.[...]A note on overclocking: it is very likely that overclocked configurations that “play everything else perfectly” will start to show problems on D3 due to new usage patterns. Everyone is of course free to do whatever they want with their own hardware, but don’t complain to us…

Finally, id made the rounds at several gaming websites last Friday and answered various questions :

• IGN
• GameSpot
• GameSpy

Among the interesting things mentioned:

• It will ship on 3 CD’s
• A demo is being worked on
• Environmental sounds were used in lieu of the traditional id score/soundtrack
• Multiplayer is client/server-based for 4 players due to concerns over bandwidth bottlenecks. Game modes are all deathmatch variations: FFA, team dm, tournament, and last man standing
• id’s next project will be a new property, not a sequel to an existing franchise
• Raven Software is still working on the Quake 2-sequel Quake 4, which uses the DOOM III engine

Update by zakk
In addition to the above, id’s Robert Duffy has updated his .plan with a huge post regarding Doom 3 system requirements. Covering what amount of VRAM you’ll need for certain across-the-board video quality levels in the game, in addition to mentioning that Doom 3 is using Ogg Vorbis and a variety of other snippets of detail on RAM usage and such.

A fair amount of Linux gamers use this distribution, so I think it’s prudent to mention this release: version 2004.2 of Gentoo Linux is now available (thanks Slashdot). Release notes for your architecture can be found here; of note is the switch from XFree86 to X.Org’s X11 server. You can update an existing Gentoo distribution in the usual manner via portage, or download 2004.2 here.

An update to S.C.O.U.R.G.E., an rogue-like game that is sporting a new graphical interface, has occured. This release includes the following:

• projectile weapons
• working mission objectives
• visible character stat modifiers
• levelling up
• 3ds object shading
• improved map movement
• more monsters and items

Download: [ S.C.O.U.R.G.E. 0.5]

The O’Reilly Linux Dev Center has posted an overview of Stratagus, the open-source RTS engine project. The engine’s features and other game projects (such as Magnant and Invasion – Battle of Survival) which utilize it are covered.

A reader fired in the following question for discussion:

Not news so much as a question that I hope the Linuxgames.com community can answer: Where do you buy the (few) retail Linux games that are available? I have tried to do business with Tux Games, but so far both of the orders I have placed with them have turned into total nightmares. The first one (UT2K4) arrived 6 weeks late, and the second (MOHAA) is six weeks late now, and has yet to arrive. Needless to say, I am wary of doing any more business with them…

Release 0.4.3 of Crimson Fields, a tactical war game that follows the style of Battle Isle, has come to our attention. A small set of changes in this release include a new map, a Polish translation and better support forISO-8859-2 locales.

Download: [ Crimson Fields 0.4.3 ]

Mark “Line72″ Dillavou fired in this notice:

Digital Extremes is using the Unreal 2004 Engine to create a game called Pariah. According to Meridith Braun from Digital Extremes regarding a Linux port “If there’s enough demand for it we may do it but probably not until the other platforms are out first.”

So head to the thread at

http://www.pariahgame.com/vb3_forum/showthread.php?p=1035#post1035

and make sure they know there is demand for it!

aspifox sent in the following:

Human Head seem to now be re-publishing the Linux version of Rune themselves.

http://www.humanhead.com/headstore.htm#headgames

This is Rune Gold, which includes the Halls Of Valhalla expansion pack and is available at the pretty good price of $17.

• Ryan “icculus” Gordon released abeta Linux patch(download) a while back forUnreal Tournament 2003.This fixes an exploit in the UT2003 network codebase among other changes.
• There’s been several UT2004 mod releases and updates over the past fewweeks; a largelistis being maintained at the official UT2004forums. Some of note:
  • Air Buccaneers 4.1,which features pirate combat (swordplay, cannons) in hot-air balloons
  • Red Orchestra 2.1.1,a WWII (Eastern Front) mod
  • SAS 1.1, a tactical squad combatmod

  If you’ve found a neat UT2004 mod I haven’t been mentioning (I haven’t hadtime to try them all unfortunately), feel free to mention it in the commentsbelow.

Slashdot is running a story linking to The Houston Chronicle’s Computing column which has Doom 3 minimum system requirements. Here’s the most important info:

“Todd Hollenshead, id’s chief executive, said Doom 3 will require:

• A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500.
• 384 megabytes of memory.
• Two gigabytes of hard drive space.
• An nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.”

The article then goes into detail about how one might upgrade a system to meet the requirements, covering video cards, memory, processors, and hard drives.