LINUXGAMES

Details for this year’s QuakeCon have emerged by way of press release:

MESQUITE, Texas – April 22, 2008 – As temperatures begin to rise it’s time to start planning the ultimate summer vacation to THE must-attend gaming event of the year – QuakeCon 2008. That’s right! The world’s greatest gaming festival and party will take place July 31 – August 3, 2008 in Dallas, TX at the Hilton Anatole Hotel. As always, this event is FREE to all attendees thanks to the support of the QuakeCon volunteer staff, id Software, the event sponsors and exhibitors.

QuakeCon will once again host North America’s largest BYOC (Bring-Your-Own-Computer) LAN party, as well as an expanded exhibit area with nearly 60 companies demonstrating their latest products. Of course, it wouldn’t be QuakeCon without highly competitive tournaments for serious cash and bragging rights, parties, contests, entertainment and announcements.

Registration for the BYOC area will kick off at 9 p.m. ET on April 30, 2008 at www.quakecon.org

The Hilton Anatole is now taking room reservations for QuakeCon 2008 through their custom QuakeCon reservation page or through their toll-free reservations number, 1-800-HILTONS.

To receive the specially negotiated room rate of $137 (single, double, triple or quad occupancy) and the special daily self-park rate of $5 (regularly $15 per day), you must request the group rate for “QuakeCon 2008″ or book through the link above when making your reservation. The hotel requires a $50 non-refundable deposit on group reservations, which will be credited to your final room bill upon check-out. Rooms at this special rate are limited.

A new version of OpenArena is out:

• New player models : Assassin and Space Marine.
• New player skin : Angelyss/Neko and Grism/Indigo.
• Ayumi/Neko, Angelyss/Sly have been atticed due to quality reasons.
• Text font (bigchars.tga) used by console and hud messages now doesn’t bleed anymore.
• Special characters added for text font (bigchars.tga) used by some mods.
• Lots of maps and changed maps; at least 8 new significant maps, includes the reworked oa_dm3 and oa_dm5.
• oa_ctf2 is more balanced, slightly retextured.
• Elimination and CTF elimination game types. No one respawns until the round is over.
• Double domination game type. Two teams must control two points on the map for 10 seconds to score.
• Last Man Standing game type. The name of the game is self-explanatory.
• Instant Gib option, gives everyone only a railgun that does kills instantly.
• All Rockets option, makes everyone only have a rocket launcher.
• Alt-tab working.
• Unlagged tracehits option, provides a more responsive feel for railguns, machineguns and shotguns.
• Classic Grism aren’t teamskins anymore. This means the ‘white’ skin will not show up during team games. In addition, the skins can be used for FFA again.
• Completely in SDL.
• BFG BFG BFG BFG

OpenArena is an open source first-person shooter which utilizes the ioquake3 source port of id Tech 3, effectively replacing the original Quake III: Arena’s copyrighted assets.

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

Oolite, developed as an homage to Elite, has a new stable release: version 1.65. Elite was an open-ended space trading/combat game; Oolite follows in Elite’s footsteps, but with OpenGL graphics, expansion packs (new ships and missions can be created with a text editor and free 3D design packages) and new equipment which wasn’t available in the original Elite (thanks Linux Game Tome). Changes:

• High resolution collision detection.
• More new equipment for players to add to their ships.
• External views of the player’s ship.
• Scooped escape pods now pay rewards and ransoms for their rescue.
• Many enhancements to the graphics, explosions and data screens.
• Improvements to the intelligence of AI opponents and expanded scripting.
• Many bugfixes and improvements to gameplay.

Download: [ berlios.de ]

A reader sent in notice that Farbs has released two games for Linux:

• Fishie Fishie (download) is “a kaliedscope of high speed sea food, featuring a challenging one button fish control system, lovingly hand illustrated fish, fish related poetry, and fish”
• Rom Check Fail (download), a really clever Video Game Name Generator Competition-winning mashup of classic games. If you’ve ever wanted to fight Space Invaders as Mario, this is your chance!

Both titles are powered by the TuxCap Games Framework.

A reader pointed out an article at Phoronix discussing the continued unexplained absence of the Unreal Tournament 3 Linux port, which points out that Epic Games is dissuading inquiries or forum discussion on the topic:

Lastly, this administrator then locked this Linux thread to prevent any further communication, even though that FAQ thread didn’t answer my original question of providing an updated status.

Freshmeat mentioned two interactive fiction projects this week:

• Glulx, a virtual machine for IF that uses 32-bit data.
• The Z-Machine Preservation Project is an implementation of the Z-machine in Java.

There’s also a lengthy article at Waxy.org about an unreleased sequel to the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, which you can sort of play (it was never completed) via ZMPP at their site.

Edit: If you’re looking for more recent IF games, Anchorhead, Varicella, and Galatea are three standouts. There’s also the annual Interactive Fiction Competition.

Version 1.0.9.6 of Risk, a Java-based implementation of the classic board game, has been released with various bugfixes.

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

Wired has an article up describing the author’s experience playing Passage, a short game developed for the gamma 256 event, which was created to encourage experimental gameplay (you can also read the creator’s statement after playing):

Wait: Did I call Passage a game? I actually meant to say poem. Because while Passage behaves like a game, it’s psychically and aesthetically closer to a superb and tightly crafted sonnet. More than any game I’ve ever played, it illustrates how a game can be a fantastically expressive, artistic vehicle for exploring the human condition.

The TuxCap Games Framework, an implementation of the PopCap Games Framework for Linux, is at version 1.3.09:

• Support was added for bundling the Python library within the game distribution.
• The drawLine and isKeyDown functions were added to the Python bindings.
• A separate Joint class was added to the physics.
• The software graphics renderer was improved.
• Functionality was added to the common part.

Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

Frictional Games has released a Linux demo for their adventure horror game Penumbra: Black Plague:

…the demo includes the four first levels of the game, giving gamers an opportunity to get familiar with the unique physical interaction and the horrifying atmosphere, hopefully without completely stripping players of their sanity…

There’s also an updated demo for the previous game in the series, Penumbra: Overture, which has a few bugfixes. The full version of Penumbra: Black Plague should be available to purchase online soon.

Demo Download: [ atomicgamer.com ]

Laminar Research has announced the release of X-Plane version 9 for Linux, which comes with world-wide global scenery. Current features:

• 867 instruments
• 25,737 airports
• 25,866 navaids
• 88,367 fixes
• 18,008 scenery files (each file is one degree of latitude and longitude)

News regarding add-on packages and plugins is posted at X-Plane.org; additional discussion can be found in their official Linux support forum; the FAA-certified flight simulator from can be ordered online for $79 US.

The German distributor Application Systems Heidelberg (focused on Mac software) removed the Linux version this time for the translated X-Plane 9, unfortunately.
Edit: This was first planned according to Bernd Hentig from ixsoft but then ASH changed their mind and included it nevertheless in the last minute.

Demo Download: [ x-plane.com ]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an article discussing the just-announced sequel to Majesty, which was ported to Linux some time ago by Linux Game Publishing. In it, they mention what made the original game unique:

In terms of Majesty’s merits, it was interesting in that while it looked like a traditional game – though with a lot more humour than was usual – it played with a more indirect route. Rather than ordering the units, you managed the system to do what you’d like to do, gathering heroes and similar. Hence, the Fantasy Kingdom Sim rather than WAR OF DEATH or whatever else. Add in a splash of random generation and you had a sizeable cult hit…

If you haven’t had a chance to try it yet, there’s a demo available. I missed it the first time around too, so I went ahead and ordered it from TuxGames yesterday.

As for the sequel, there’s no word on Linux support yet, but we’ll keep our eyes open.

The Wheels of War site has an update showcasing new models and textures for the vehicular combat-themed Enemy Territory: Quake Wars modification (thanks PlanetQuake), including some examples of the undead menace I’m guessing you’ll have to run down.

New releases!

• Endgame: Singularity 0.27, a rogue AI sim from Evil Mr. Henry, who has ported a lot of shooters to Linux also.
• Chocolate Doom 1.1.1, a no-frills DOOM engine source port.
• Phoronix Test Suite 0.3.1, a set of benchmarking utilities.
• cave9 0.2, a SF Cave-inspired cave-exploration game.
• Stella 2.5.1, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator.

Wine, the free implementation of Windows on Unix, has been updated to release 0.9.60. The new items and features in this release include the following:

• Better support for Windows IMEs.
• Option for Windows-style window decorations.
• Improved system tray behavior.
• Window management fixes.
• Improved quartz audio support.
• Better support for launching apps from Unix file managers.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Download: [ Wine 0.9.60 ]

Another snapshot release from the Java Classic RPG project was announced at the project’s blog:

New animals as bear and spider were added. Humanoid groups were introduced with the humans and their basic economy. Basic populations and houses added for human groups. New sounds for animals and humans along with environmental effects depending on nearby beings and climate. Party Behavior and Pre-encounter input screens were introduced. On screen display extended with the ‘Entity-O-Meter’ which shows nearby groups’ icons. New portraits and models by Archenemy.

The update also mentions that they’re looking for 3d model animators.

Screenshots [ View ] Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

A new stable release for the Linux kernel was announced by Linus Torvalds:

The full changelog from 2.6.24 is 7.5M, with a 12MB compressed patch. Tons and tons has changed, but if you’ve been following the -rc releases, you’ll already know about the big things. The changes from the last rc (-rc9) are fairly small and mostly pretty trivial, and the shortlog is appended.

So it’s mostly one-liners, with some updates to drivers (net and usb) and to networking that are a bit larger (although a number of the driver updates are things like just new ID’s etc).

Linux Kernel Newbies has a rundown:

2.6.25 includes support of a new architecture (MN10300/AM33) and the widely used Orion SoCs, a new interface for more accurate measurement of process memory usage, a ‘memory resource controller’ for controlling the memory usage of groups of processes, realtime group scheduling, a tool for measuring high latencies called latencytop, ACPI thermal regulation, timer event notifications through file descriptors, an alternative MAC security framework called SMACK, a ext4 update, BRK and PIE-executable address space randomization, RCU preemption support, FIFO spinlocks in x86, EFI support in x86-64, a new network protocol called CAN, initial ATI r500 DRI/DRM support, improved device support and many other small improvements.

Nothing earth-shattering to my untrained eye, but even incremental improvements are always welcome.

Download: [ kernel.org ]

Creative Labs has released a 32-bit Linux driver for their X-Fi series of sound cards:

This download is a beta driver providing Linux® 32-bit / 64-bit OS support for Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi ™ series audio devices. For more details, read the rest of this web release note.

Take note of the following:

• THIS IS AN UNSUPPORTED BETA DRIVER. There is no technical support for this driver.
• This beta driver has only been tested on the following 32-bit / 64-bit Linux distributions: Ubuntu® 7.10, openSUSE® 10.3 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.1 (64-bit only).
• We recommend that only experienced users install this driver. Do not install this driver on a system used to perform critical tasks.
• Your feedback is a valuable part of our development process. To submit feedback on this driver, visit the Sound Blaster X-Fi Linux Beta Driver Feedback Program.

This download is intended for the following audio devices only:

• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty®
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic

Current release features:

• ALSA PCM Playback
• ALSA Record
• ALSA Mixer

Added Features or Enhancements:

• Supports GCC version 4
• Supports Linux 64-bit and 32-bit OS

Known issues:

• S/PDIF passthrough is not supported in this driver release.
• External I/O modules are not supported in this driver release.
• Applications from the original Sound Blaster X-Fi Installation CD will not work with this driver.

Requirements:

• Linux x86 / x86_64 OS
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi audio devices listed above

Notes:

• To install the driver, do the following:
  1. Download the XFiDrv_Linux_US-1.18.tar.gz package onto your local hard disk.
  2. Double-click the downloaded package to unpack its contents.
  3. Read the README file and follow the instructions.

Download: [ creativelabs.com ]

Deliantra, a cooperative multiplayer RPG and adventure game, has a new server build with bugfixes and currency changes.

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

Version 1.4.3 of Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion, a cross-platform source port of Hexen II, was released earlier this month (thanks Game Tome). This build adds bugfixes and an experimental svgalib port; additional detail can be found in the release notes.

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