LINUXGAMES

The WorldForge project developers sent in the following announcement:

In November 1998, the Altima project was announced on slashdot with theintention of being the GPL equivalent of Ultima Online. About a year laterunder a new name and with the new goal of creating the first MMORPG engine asFree Software, the WorldForge project became more recognisable as it is today.

Seven years down the line the hard working members of the project havepersevered through trolls, skeptics, changes of leadership, slashdotting andworse to create over one million lines of code and nearly four gigabytes ofmedia. There have been over twenty thousand software package downloads from the sourceforge download site and there are often up to ten servers available forpublic access at peak times.

To mark the event we have released a new demo of our development game Mason.The eventual goal of Mason is to allow players to build complex structures likehouses, castles and ultimately mechanisms and machines from door locks to siegeengines. Mason 0.3 includes the latest versions of the two clients indevelopment, Ember and Sear, and the prototype server and AI engineCyphesis. The demo features a rendered 3D world with an advanced proceduralterrain engine, NPCs with novel artificial intelligence, resource gathering andsimple combat in a living, growing world.

To improve communications between developers and the community, the WorldForgeproject are proud to announce two new sites. The WorldForge Development blogwhere articles and announcements will be posted about the latest WorldForgedevelopment, and the WorldForge Development forums where members of thecommunity can meet and discuss topics such as online gaming, game design andworld building.

Client and Server software for Mason can be downloaded at the WorldForgesite, including full source code, binaries for Linux and Windows andcomplete media are all available under Free Software licenses.

id Software’s Timothee Besset has announced the release of a demo for Quake 4:

The GNU/Linux installer for the Quake 4 demo is on the ftp as well and on the BitTorrent tracker.

Note regarding multiplayer that windows clients are able to connect and play onthe Linux dedicated server, but Linux clients can only play on Linux servers. Read through the FAQ for details.

The demo includes the first two levels of the singleplayer campaign, and two multiplayer maps (large and small versions of “The Fragging Yard”).

Quake 4 Demo Download: [ 3D Downloads | ftp.id | BitTorrent | 3D Gamers | FileShack ]

Speaking of Phoronix, they’ve also posted a NVIDIA SLI Primer:

By now you’ve probably read numerous NVIDIA SLI guides for constructing a Windows gaming rig but for your viewing pleasure today we have our first Linux SLI primer, as the NVIDIA Rel80 drivers are on the heels of a public launch, which bring fourth initial SLI support. In this guide, we share some basic information for choosing graphics cards, power supplies, and motherboards that are NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface certified. In addition we share a few tidbits about the Linux software setup along with screenshots.

The maintainers of Phoronix let us know that they’ve received word from XGI Technology that they anticipate releasing driver source code for their Volari 8300 graphics card:

Unlike XGI’s earlier attempt at opening up their 2D FBDev source-code to the general public, which hadn’t gained much support due to the lack of 3D code, they have begun to take a new position on their software. As many OSS enthusiasts could have only dreamed about, by as early as next month XGI is targeting at possibly releasing their complete source-code for the Volari 8300 to the open-source community.

We received the following announcement for gUnrealTools 1.0 Beta (screenshots):

Good news for all the Linux UT2004 players out there, GUTS has been released. GUTS (gUnrealTools) is a single program which provides the following GUI tools for Unreal Tournament 2004 in Linux: a cache manager, a umod unpacker, a uz2 compressor/decompressor, and a dedicated server setup.

gUnrealTools 1.0 Beta Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

A reader pointed out that at BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights 2 forum, a moderator (Vulcano) has requested that users interested in a Linux port of the game post at the publisher’s forum:

If you desire a Linux/Mac Port of NWN2 and you haven’t already, please post so in the following thread:

click here

NWN2 will ship supporting DX9.0c only. There are currently no plans for anything else, and only Atari can make the decision for an OpenGL version of the graphics engine. Asking for one here doesn’t improve the chances of a port; if you want something, you have to ask the right people (see link above).

Will NWN2 run under cedega? Nobody knows (the game had not been release yet), and as cedega is 3rd party software, the developers and publisher of NWN2 can make no such guarantee.

Further requests for OS ports will be considered off-topic and locked/moved. Thank you for your cooperation.

The Atari thread for Linux users is currently at 11 pages.

Version 1.9.2 of Lost Labyrinth, a Rogue-like game (screenshots), has been released. Changes in this release include:

• New Graphic for the Body Skeleton.
• The traders get saved now for all levels. So players in different levels do not share the same trader anymore
• Creatures only see other creatures and players when they are in the same level now

Download: [ Lost Labyrinth 1.9.2 ]

Ophiuchus, a game based on Master of Orion, has been updated to release 0.3.2.1. Changes:

• When multiple players arrive at the same uncolonised system at the same time, none of them can colonise the planet. Previously, the player with the lowest ID got the planet, leading to an advantage to players with lower IDs. This was a problem especially in single player, where it gave a great advantage to the player over the computer.
• Attack commands now always give feedback.

Download: [ Ophiuchus 0.3.2.1 ]

NVIDIA has released version 1.0-0310 of their Linux driver for nForce motherboards. Changes:

• Adds support for nForce 430/410 motherboards
• Adds support for 8-bit audio playback
• Compatibility fixes

Linux nForce Driver 1.0-0310 Download: [ x86 | AMD64 ]

Version 0.9.2 of the Windows API implementation Wine has been released. Changes:

• Winelib Explorer app (just a wrapper around winefile for now).
• Debugger cleanups and improvements.
• Many wininet fixes.
• Better autogenerated API manpages.
• A bunch of Koreantranslations.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Information on a given application’s compatibility with Wine can be found inthe App DB.

There’s also a blurb in the most recent edition of Wine Weekly News concerning Direct3D support work.

Wine 0.9.2 Download: [ winehq.com ]

We received the following release announcement for Tux Paint version 0.9.15:

After over a year of development, a new version of Tux Paint has been released — along with updates to Tux Paint Config (the graphical config. editor) and the Tux Paint Stamps collection.

New magic tools have been added: Smudge, Darken, Tint, Grass, Bricks and Cartoon. The Stamp and Text tool UIs were improved, along with the color palette. Many bugs were fixed, speed and memory usage were improved, and updates were made to help in porting and packaging Tux Paint. New animal, vehicle and seasonal stamps were added, and the entire stamp collection was reorganized.

Tux Paint 0.9.15 Download: [ newbreedsoftware.com ]

Here’s a reminder post to point out the GtkRadiant project, which is a leveleditor for several id Software enginegames. As Timothee Besset noted,there is currently no native editor for Quake 4 in Linux, but GtkRadiant does alreadysupport DOOM III. If you’re interested in working on the project, there’s aWiki,mailinglist, and Subversionrepository.

Version 4.0.0 of SDL.NET, a setof .NET bindings for SDL, has beenreleased (examplescreenshots). There’s a Linuxinstallation guide and tutorials.

If you plan on utilizing this, you may also be interested inthe Tao project, which containsthe lower-level .NET bindings to SDL.

SDL.NET 4.0.0 Download: [ sourceforge.net]

zakk let me know that icculus.org/quake3 nowsupports OpenAL, and that they are lookingfor testers to join the project. You can join the mailing list (archive) and/or hitthe IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #icculus.org/quake3). icculus.org/quake3 isan effort to build a cross-platform codebase for Quake 3: Arena (source) with variousadditional features; build instructions can be found here.

The latest release of xmame and xmess (0.102) has been released. Changes since 0.101 include:

• Everything from MAME 0.102 and MESS 0.102 .
• Fixed a bug that could afflict MESS console emulations by preventing the keyboard from working.
• The default ALSA buffer size is now 50000ms instead of 250000ms, which reduces lag.
• Advancing frame-by-frame using shift-P works again. Bugzilla bug 787.
• Added more GCC -march settings for x86 CPUs to the makefile.
• When the setup menu is closed, the keyboard state is cleared. This prevents the key press that closes the menu from affecting the emulation. This replaces the fix from 0.97, which wasn’t working anymore and caused the frame-by-frame advancing to break besides.

Download: [ xmame/xmess 0.102 ]

Phoronix has posted additional benchmarks for Quake 4, as version 1.0.5 was released; since the patch’s changelog was largely concerned with server browser fixes, there are no major variances to speak of compared to the initial version.

Version 0.9.9 of FlightGear, an open-source flight simulator, is now available (screenshots). The rather lengthy changelog mentions the addition of new volumetric clouds, carrier takeoffs/landings, high G redout/blackout effects, and several new aircraft.

FlightGear 0.9.9 Download: [ flightgear.org ]

We’ve been notified that a new scenario has just started at Battletech: The Frontier Lands (screenshots), which includes a new map. Other changes:

• New real-time map/objective overlay page.
• Clickable unit listing.
• Kill stats.
• Improvements to AI target/sensor selections.
• Glancing blows have been implemented.
• Misc. Battlesuit fixes.
• Added support for XL, Compact, and Hardened Gyros.

Battletech: The Frontier Lands is a text-based, real-time version of the popular Battletech board game by FASA which utilizes the Xpertmud MUD client. Instructions for getting started can be found here.

A reader let us know that the Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives site has moved to http://www.nerogame.org; NERO is an award-winning real-time strategy game which involves training robotic AI-driven soldiers before deploying them in combat. There’s also a news update on the Linux version:

The Linux release is still having bugs ironed out of it and we’re praying that it will come out soon as well.

A reader pointed out this forum post by 2K Games’ 2K Sam concerning the Linux port of Serious Sam 2:

Linux client, deathmatch and the editor. Hooboy. Ok. Yes, they are in the works. No, I dont know when they will be available. I’m supposed to find out in the next couple of weeks. When I do, we’ll probably announce the details through the usual PR channels, but I’m going to push to let you guys know first. No promises on that one. I have people that need to approve what I do too.

Serious Sam 2 (screenshots) is a FPS developed by Croteam; there was a beta client created for the previous game in the series.