LINUXGAMES

Linux Game Publishing fired in the following announcement:

By popular demand, we have made X³: Reunion – Special Edition available to purchase immediately. The game is not complete, but so many people have asked how they can buy it right away, that we have decided to let you order now!Reseller or Gamer, simply place your order in the usual way, and you will be emailed with the game number or numbers you have been randomly allocated. When the game is complete, your order will be shipped to you!

X³: Reunion is a space combat simulator from Egosoft. X²: The Threat was previously ported to Linux by LGP and is available for ordering.

Valen Games has released Lunar Domination, a turn-based financial strategy game where two players compete over the lunar ore market:

The focus on strategy that revolves around finances, rather than military confrontation, creates a completely unique experience compared to other strategy games. The only weapon that is available in Lunar Domination is your mind.

Lunar Domination comes with six scenarios, each of which can be played at three difficulty levels against a computer opponent. An interactive tutorial helps you get into the game quickly, without having to spend a lot of time on learning how to play.

It costs $24.99 US from the developer’s website; there’s also a demo available.

Demo Download: [ valengames.com ]

Version 1.2.5 of Battle for Wesnoth, a GPL’ed fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game, has been announced by the developers. Changes:

• new ranged attack frames for the Naga Hunter
• fixed many wrong image references
• updated Elyssas anims to match the “mainline” mage units
• new and updated manual: Serbian
• updated translations: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish
• updated DejaVuSans font to version 2.17
• revised maps: Den of Onis, Hamlets, Meteor Lake, Sablestone Delta, Silverhead Crossing, Blue Water Province, Wilderlands
• ability to view a list of MP servers with the Join Game dialog
• corrected all wrong image references found via macroscope

The developers request that players with issues check this README and report any bugs you encounter.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ wesnoth.org ]

My Game Company has released Dirk Dashing v1.04 for Linux, which includes these improvements and bug fixes:

• Reduced texture swapping to improve game performance
• Fixed audio issues encountered by a few Linux users, particularly those with
• Ubuntu 7.04
• Fixed background clipping issues caused by round-off errors
• Fixed crash when loading a game that was saved while Dirk ran through a door
• Fixed so Dirk doesn’t fall through sloped floors when shooting grenade
• launcher
• Upgraded installer on Linux to fix uninstall issues on Ubuntu 7.04

Download: [ dirkdashing.com ]

The linuX-gamers.net team developed a gaming-focused LiveDVD based on ArchLinux for LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin recently:

To their surprise, the DVD came as a bombshell. The visitors of the biggest european Open Source exhibition were amazed about what is possible with a LiveDVD, yet and took along almost 100 DVDs in exchange for a little donation to the linuX-gamers.org foundation.

This 2.4 GB bootable medium contains both the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary Linux drivers and includes the following 3D games: BzFLag, Enemy Territory, Glest, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, Torcs, Tremulous, True Combat: Elite, Warsow, and World of Padman.

This is a development build on the way to the 1.0 release, but users are encouraged to test the live DVD and provide suggestions for the upcoming stable release. For more information please read the release announcement and visit the project’s website.

Download: [ linux-gamers.net ]

The independent game developer Irrgheist let us know they have released their first title: H-Craft Championship. It’s a 3D sci-fi racing game available for online ordering ($19.95 US); there’s also a demo containing 3 tracks.

Media: [ Screenshots | Trailers ] Demo Download: [ irrgheist.com ]

Wine version 0.9.39 is out; the requisite changelog for the open source Windows API follows:

• Many MSHTML improvements.
• Several improvements to the sound support.
• A number of Winsock fixes.
• Several new supported constructs in the IDL compiler.
• Many Direct3D threading fixes.
• Lots of bug fixes.

It’s been a while since I’ve tried it, so I’m curious: does Wine generally work on non-native games you wish to play?

Download: [ winehq.com ]

Version 0.99.7 of Secret Maryo Chronicles, an open source 2D platforming game, has been released. Changes include:

• Many new sounds
• New sprites
• New Turtle Shell sprites
• Many moving and falling platform updates
• New levels
• Collision detection updated
• Updated fonts
• Many level updates
• Manually loaded levels don’t enter the overworld now
• Many other fixes.

Screenshots: [View ] Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

4Front Technologies hasannounced thatthe Open Sound System versionhas beenreleased under the GPL:

Ok. We have made the decision to open source OSS and the announcement will bemade on June 14th 2007. The announcement was supposed to be kept secret but werealized that members of the open source communities may want to give somefeedback before the announcement. So the secret was leaked which proved to bethe right solution.

[...]

In addition we will announce our intention to move further development of OpenSound System to a community.

[...]

Why do we do this?

First of all we have recognized the benefits of open sourcing to the user andsoftware developer communities. We also believe that with the help of thedeveloper community we can make OSS better than it’s now.

Another reason is that our potential customers currently expect to have accessto the source code.

The source code, documentation, and discussion can be found at their developer site.

COR Entertainment has announced the release of Alien Arena 2007 6.05, its open source online deathmatch game featuring a retro sci-fi theme. Changes include new game media, tweaked gameplay, render improvements (weapon effects, dot3 bumpmapping, real time lighting, and shadered water reflections), the “Cattle Prod” game mode, and a class-based mutator.

It was also noted that there are now Alien Arena packages for Debian and Gentoo. A public SVN is also available @ svn://svn.icculus.org/alienarena/trunk.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ planetarena.org ]

The Blender Foundation hasannounced theApricotproject, which aims to create an open game with the 3D animation program andthe Crystal Spaceengine:

As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space communityare going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possiblethanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the “Nederlandse Game Dagen”,the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.

This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creatingprofessional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation andprotyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.

An announcement with more details is being worked on still. Full projectdetails will be presented and discussed during theCrystal Spaceconference,july 14-15th 2007.

Linux.com posted two articles recentlyconcerning games:

• Lunch Break Diversions looks at PONG!Multiplayer, a Firefox extension, and Lost Labyrinth, a graphics-basedroguelike.
• A review of Scorched 3D, whichwas inspired by ScorchedEarth.

A map pack has been released for Worldof Padman, a colorfully-themed multiplayer deathmatch shooter based on theioquake3 engine.Ente’s PadPack contains three maps: PadGallery, PadCastle and PadCrash:

Even though these maps are not lilliput style maps, they promise and deliverquantity construction and fantastic game action for that oh-so-good WoPfeeling. Beside normal FFA matches, the maps also work with the game types”Last Pad Standing” and “BigBalloon”, playing “Spray Your Color” is notpossible.

Download: [ myexp.de ]

Kinda off-topic, but Three Rings has a really neat office space. Three Rings developed Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy, and released game libaries under the LGPL. Three Rings also encourages hobbyist game development at GameGardens. Thanks to code_404 for the heads up.

Realms of Rivalry is an online graphical turn-based strategy/role-playing game where you can have short tactical skirmishes with 2-4 players in small randomly generated game worlds.

The game is free and can be played either as an applet or downloadable client.

Screenshots: [ View ] Play: [ realmsofrivalry.org ]

Jerome Glisse announcedon the X.Org mailing listthat they have reverse-engineered a driver for the ATI Radeon X1300 toX1600 series of graphics cards:

The current roadmap is:
- Find out missing bits for r520 and r580 hardware initialisation,
- RandR 1.2 support with a dumb memory allocator,
- Simple 2D acceleration (we will put more focus on 3D acceleration as now Xorg provides infrastructure to best utilise 3D drivers to display the desktop, thanks to the Glucose interface),
- 3D reverse engineering: We believe that this engine is very similar to the r300 3D engine which has already mostly been reverse engineered,
- TTM DRM driver for proper memory management,
- and likely port the driver to new DRM modesetting work.

Help is, obviously, welcome for any of these.

We are lacking people with time and interest for working onreverse-engineering r5xx. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that onlyrocket scientists can properly write a graphics driver: you mostly justneed to understand how a GPU works (not much more complex than a CPU’svector unit), and know how to code in C.

Of course here is the URL to grab source code:
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/avivo/xf86-video-avivo

Please note that this is intended only for people interested in workingon this and normal users should not try it yet as it actually needs you toadd your graphic card pci id in order for it to work.

[...]

I would like to take advantage of this announcement to stress thatAMD hurt its consumers by not providing specifications of theirhardware to the open source community which end up in providinga bad experience to them.

I also believe they are no sensible technical informations in thisspecifications as proven by others graphics manufacturer who giveout specifications: XGI; or good driver source code well documentedalmost as good as specifications: Intel.

So, AMD, please be respectful of the community and at least give adetailed motivations and reasons for not providing your graphicshardware specifications. I look forward to the day when theopen source community will be able to work with AMD for providingto AMD’s consumers the best experiences with their hardware onany open source operating systems.

Danger from the Deep, an open source World War II German U-boat simulator that strives for technical and historical accuracy, is now at version 0.3. Changes include:

• OpenGL 2.0 and GLSL 1.1 support.
• 4 new U-boat types (IIA, IIB, IIC, and IID).
• Tribal-class destroyer.
• Almost all models are now set for in-game transformations (rotating turrents, elevating guns).
• Multi-threaded code.
• A new sound system.

Screenshots [ View ] Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

NVIDIA has released a new build of their Linux display driver for x86 and AMD64 architectures. Changes include:

• Adds support for new GPUs:
• GeForce 8600 GTS
• GeForce 8600 GT
• GeForce 8600M GT
• GeForce 8600M GS
• GeForce 8500 GT
• GeForce 8400 GS
• GeForce 8400M GT
• GeForce 8400M GS
• GeForce 8400M G
• GeForce 8300 GS
• Quadro FX 1600M
• Quadro FX 570M
• Quadro FX 360M
• Quadro NVS 320M
• Quadro NVS 140M
• Quadro NVS 135M
• Quadro NVS 130M
• Adds support for Quadro FX 4600 G-Sync and Quadro FX 5600 G-Sync boards.
• Improved notebook GPU support.
• Improved RenderAccel support for subpixel antialiased fonts.
• Added XV brightness and contrast controls for GeForce 8 GPUs.
• Improved interaction with newer Linux kernels.
• Fixed a locale-interaction issue in the nvidia-settings configuration file parser.

Additional info can be found in the README.If you have questions or issues, NVIDIA directs you to check their Linux discussion forum, or e-mail linux-bugs@nvidia.com.

Download: [ nvidia.com ]

id Software updated their websiteyesterday to note that John Carmack demonstrated their latest enginetechnology at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

The ground breaking technology unveiled today will power id’s new internallydeveloped game and will be available for licensing to third parties. The newid rendering technology practically eliminates the texture memory constraintstypically placed on artists and designers and allows for the uniquecustomization of the entire game world at the pixel level, deliveringvirtually unlimited visual fidelity. Combined with a powerful new suite oftools designed to specifically facilitate and accelerate this content creationprocess, id Tech 5™ will power games that contain vast outdoor landscapes thatare completely unique to the horizon, yet have indoor environments withunprecedented artistic detail.

While shown for the very first time running in real time on a Mac, id Tech 5additionally supports the Xbox 360 and Playstation3 console platforms as wellas the PC, and will be available for licensing to developers and publishersinterested in working with a truly next generation rendering and gamedevelopment solution.

Given id’s history of every previous title being available for Linuxandthe cross-platform nature of the engine (PC/PS3 in particular), I think it’ssafe to assume there’ll be a Linux port. You can watch the presentation videoat Apple.com(streaming QuickTime; mplayer can handle it though – the id tech sectionbegins around 11 minutes in) or GameTrailers.com(multiple formats). There are also pictures at Engadget.

The OpenGL news page mentioned that version 2.x of the graphics API will drop next month, followed afterwards by a major revision:

The first version due in July 2007 is Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x). This is a major clean-up of the code after almost a decade and a half. Approximately three months after that we will see the release of Mount Evans (OpenGL 3.0) which will run specifically on hardware born after November 8th, 2006. We are talking about DirectX 10-class hardware, bringing all the features of unified 3D architecture to the world of OpenGL. Mount Evans is compatible with Longs Peak, but you will require OpenGL 3.0 class hardware to run everything.

OpenGL 3.0 will offer features such as instanced rendering, stream out of vertex data to a buffer, texture buffer objects, numerous new texture formats and so on. Most importantly the KhronosGroup is linking OpenGL and OpenGL ES, a mobile 3D graphics API via COLLADA and glFX, so what is supported in OpenGL 3.0 will see the light of the day in the ES version as well.