LINUXGAMES

Some more Enemy Territory: Quake Wars miscellany:

• Pigmod is a competition mod that enforces the game rule variations that online leagues have implemented, such as limited deployables for games with smaller player counts (6v6 and below).
• Sevenfats provides detailed statistics generated from the Official Stats Site’s XML feeds; as a reminder, this data is only collected on ranked servers (i.e., the ones with a little ribbon in the server browser).

CHARGE is a 3D first-person perspective variant on Pong with powerups.

Download: [ charge-game.webs.com ]

bravas let us know in the forums that he’s written an article on utilizing steering peripherals in Linux, especially with force feedback functionality. The Logitech MOMO wheel is tested on several native and emulated (Wine) titles.

The secret ingredient is… LOVE?!? The Legendary Orthogonal Virtual Environment is an open source 2D game engine which utilizes Lua; there’s an online reference manual and a tutorial, but currently LOVE only supports things such as audio, fonts, imaging, input, and timing.

Download: [ love.sourceforge.net ]

ezQuake is a QuakeWorld (Quake 1) client focused on enhanced graphics and extremely fast gameplay; the full feature list can be found here. The changelog for version 1.8.3 is:

• Fixes model checking
• Security module is now not necessary to perform f_modified check (security module for this version might not ever be available)

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

Wine version 0.9.54 has been released to the general public. This free implementation of Windows on Unix has the following new items in this release:

• Photoshop CS/CS2 should now work, please help us testing it. See http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobePhotoshop for details.
• A number of RPC fixes.
• Various improvements to the debugger support.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Download: [ Wine 0.9.54 ]

Although I’ve been playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars rather avidly, it’s been difficult finding organized play, as most online leagues seem to require third-party Windows-based anti-cheat programs. Consequently, I was excited to find the Starter’s Tournament being run by Project Malice:

The Starter’s Tournament is comprised of teams that want to make a mark, but are just starting out with the competition aspect of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. This tournament provides something that others have not been able to provide, all teams being on or around the same skill level, so every team has a chance to win. The tournament is limited to North American teams only.

Registration will be closed for teams February 2nd at 12 AM EST; registration for players will be closed February 4th at 12 AM EST. If interested, you can read how to sign up for the tournament here.

A new build of the Sega Saturn emulator Yabause was announced with bug fixes and user interface enhancements.

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

There’s a brief preview of Introversion’s next game, Multiwinia, at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

One of the immediate reactions to Darwinia was that it might make an entertaining multiplayer game. Introversion, stretched for time and resources, had expressed their intention to create a multiplayer aspect, but needed to get the game finished. With continued interest in the multiplayer concept they concluded that rather than simply making a multiplayer add on for the original game, a totally new game was required. Hence: Multiwinia.

Darwinia, and all of Introversion’s previous titles, was released for Linux (demo).

There’s a new stable release for the Linux kernel available; Linux Kernel Newbies has the rundown:

2.6.24 includes CPU “group scheduling”, memory fragmentation avoidance, tickless support for x86-64/ppc and other architectures, many new wireless drivers and a new wireless configuration interface, SPI/SDIO MMC support, USB authorization, per-device dirty memory thresholds, support for PID and network namespaces, support for static probe markers, read-only bind mounts, SELinux performance improvements, SATA link power management and port multiplier support, Large Receive Offload in network devices, memory hot-remove support, a new framework for controlling the idle processor power management, CIFS ACLs support, many new drivers and many other features and fixes.

Out of curiosity, how many of you compile from the stock kernel source these days? If not, do you use distribution-supplied/modified kernel source, pre-compiled kernels, etc.?

Download: [ kernel.org ]

Mtp Target is a game newly ported to Linux where players compete online by rolling down a ramp and receiving points for their landings. Testing feedback has also been requested by the developers.

Screenshots [ View ] Download: [ mtp-target.org ]

Here’s a roguelike we’ve yet to mention: POWDER (the origin of the name is a mystery!) is a role-playing game in a tradition that includes NetHack, but it has graphics-based tiles and is biased towards fast play:

Descend into the depths of the dungeon until you reach the foul daemon known as “He who the author cannot spell consistently”, or, Baezl’bub. When you have slain Baezl’bub in heroic combat, or, if Baezl’bub dies in any way, retrieve his black heart and bring it to the surface world.

The design was shaped primarily by these precepts (as well as the requirements of its original platform, the Game Boy Advance):

• Tactical play. The unit of action is based on the individual adventurer. The game is not twitch oriented (like Quake, rewarding reflexes & well trained actions) nor is it strategy oriented (like Civilizations or Warcraft, requiring working on the large picture)
• Based in Hack and Slash. A roguelike isn’t primarily about plot development or telling a story. It is about killing things and acquiring treasure.
• Random games. A roguelike is a dungeon crawler where no two games are the same. The maps are different, the items are different, there are no guaranteed win paths.
• Permadeath. You die, that is it. No restoring a savegame. Good roguelikes delete your save game after loading them. This is compensated by the re-playability of the game.
• Complex interactions of properties. While the commands for a roguelike are simple, the potential interactions are not. My favorite example is equipping a silver ring as a weapon in order to damage a creature vulnerable to silver, but not one’s other weapons.
• Steam rolling monsters. If a critter is in your way, and weak, you shouldn’t even notice it is there.

The website includes a beastiary and spell tome. There’s a review of an older release @ GameSetWatch.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download : [ zincland.com ]

Hedgewars: an open source turn-based strategy game like Worms, but with hedgehogs. The list of stuff that is new to you and I:

• registration of net game in web
• weapons sets support
• added teleportation and hedgehogs switching tools
• decreased network bandwidth usage
• added clans support
• full saves support

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

Loemu, a general emulator front end (support for xmame, sdlmame, snes9x and zsnes), has added the following:

• Customization of columns in the games list view.
• Game states are shown with image colors.
• New game lists by played and favorite games.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ pegueroles.com ]

Phoronix has a new article up looking at the state of Linux support for AMD’s latest ATI Radeon HD graphics cards:

With the first of the DisplayPort-capable graphics cards now on the market, it raises the issue of Linux support for DisplayPort. Starting with the ATI fglrx driver, Catalyst 8.01 for Linux does start to (not so noticeably) contain some DisplayPort work, but in the coming driver releases it should become apparent.

[...]

AMD’s open-source Linux representative, John Bridgman, had today commented on the Phoronix Forums that the open-source support for these new graphics cards will be a two-stage process. Initially these graphics cards will be supported by the RadeonHD driver using the conventional DVI and HDMI interfaces, while later the DisplayPort capabilities will be introduced.

Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine (and that’s still the longest project name I’ve ever seen) has a new released, dubbed Voxhumana, with new features and bugfixes delineated at length here (thanks Linux Game Tome).

OHRRPGCE is a free utility that you can use to create your own RPG game in a style similar to the classic Final Fantasy games. The project Wiki has documentation for using it.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ hamsterrepublic.com ]

Linux Journal has posted their annual Reader’s Choice Survey; among the myriad categories is “What is your favorite Linux game?”:

• Doom (I’m assuming they mean the original, although it could also mean Doom 3)
• Frozen Bubble
• Tux Racer (Planet Penguin Racer/Extreme Tux Racer)
• Super Tux
• Battle for Wesnoth
• Freeciv
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• Maelstrom
• Nexuiz

There’s also a write-in vote option.

A reader, A08, pointed out the statistics for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at splatterladder.com:

Often enough companies are claiming, that the amount of people considering Linux for gaming is rather low. If you check the splatterladder for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars you will see in the live statistics, that the number of Linux players is just as high or higher as the number of Windows players. In this very moment the percentage of Linux players is 54%!

I don’t know how splatterladder derives their client OS data, but as of this writing the breakdown is still split in favor of Linux (57% to 43% Windows). This is rather surprising, as, if memory serves, id Software games usually have around 5% of players using the Linux clients. I wonder if this is an artifact of the server breakdown, which is a more understandable 60% Linux to 40% Windows.

At any rate, there certainly are many Linux ET:QW players, which is gratifying to see. Besides splatterladder and the official stats site, there’s the ET:QW Stat Reader, which will generate a table of performance data from your player name.

Edit: Thanks to Timbo for providing additional data that makes this look very unlikely: the open source first-person shooter Tremulous, which is included in some Linux distributions, has Linux clients making up around 16% of their total playerbase.

Edit #2: Thanks to r00b for pointing out this comment by Splash Damage’s Gordon Biggans which explains the stats:

It’s players on linux servers.

Leo Wandersleb wrote in to the Globulation 2 mailing list with a job announcement:

Subject: [glob2-devel] doubling all bids to gain a full time programmer

[...]

As mentioned at http://cofundos.org/project.php?id=49 i will double the next 900€ offered to this project. That is 15 people spending 10€ per month for 6 months. Remember WoW is 13€/month ;)

I count on you. Where else would you get a full time programmer that proofed his capabilities at 400€/month? Become entrepreneur now ;)

The Cofundos listing mentions that the programmer would be working on, among other things, online-play, the map editor/generators, pre-game alliances, and improved campaigns. Globulation 2 is an open source real-time strategy game project with unit-level AI for mission execution; there’s also a scripting language.

Thanks to Plouj for pointing this out to us.

Vitetris is a terminal-based Tetris clone that’s growing rather rapidly (part-Spaarti):

• Fixed pause bug.
• American spelling used when locale is en_US.
• Tetromino colours can be changed.
• Build-system is more portable.
• Beaten highscores at end of list are now removed internally, so no 11th entry will show up after entering a new score.

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