AnandTech has posted an article examining the state of running modern Windows-native games in Linux via Wine and its derivatives:
What’s the answer to the initial question, “Is Linux ready for gaming?” As you probably expected, the answer is both yes and no. If you’re looking for an out-of-box solution for running older games, Linux is a decent alternative to Windows. The longer a game has been around, and the more popular the game, the better the odds that someone has already taken the time to get it working properly under one of the Wine projects.
Why do you thing we are not seeing a lot more applications/games crossover from the android side? Do you think it is the difficulty factor. It is just not android too, you also see those table top arcade units that have linux cores. Where are these games?
Is the market just that small that it would not make sense to try create regular linux clients for their apps/games?
Just wondering.
Not owning an Android-based phone, I’ve been wondering lately myself what game titles were available, how they were licensed, and so on. Anyone care to comment?
Version 0.4.4 of Odamex, a free software multiplayer DOOM engine source port, is now available. Changes include client/server sector desyncs improvements, dehacked support, weapon sorting issue fixes, and a coop reimplementation of spynext.
Versions 7.6.1 and 7.7 of the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, an open-source implementation of the OpenGL spec, are available; 7.6.1 is the stable bugfix release. while 7.7 is the new development build.
The Speed Dreams team has announced that its first release 1.4.0 is out:
Speed Dreams is an open source motorsport simulator. It was forked in late 2008 from the famous open racing car simulator TORCS, in order to implement exciting
new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents, to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.
Features:
visually reworked menus by Brian Gavin, Andrew Sumner and Jean-Philippe Meuret
3 amazing fine tuned and balanced new car sets by Andrew Sumner and Haruna Say : Super Cars, 36 GP and LS-GT1
an updated TRB1 car set (well balanced, more realistic behaviour)
3 exciting new tracks and many visually improved ones
smashing liveries for all these cars, by Eckhard M. Jager and Haruna Say
2 new TRB first-class robot for the Supercars, 36 GP and TRB1 car sets: USR by Andrew Sumner and Simplix by Wolf-Dieter Beelitz (at last real AI opponents !)
animated driver by Andrew Sumner on 36GP cars, 3D wheels for all cars by Eric Espie
2 new leader-board modes by Gabor Kmetyko, smoke on spinning tires by Andrew Sumner
brand new gauges by Eckhard M. Jager, and many many other small visual improvements
experimental Simu V3 physics engine by Christos Dimitrakakis
many menu improvements (support for grid shifting, optimized track select load time, category filter when selecting driver, more infos in results and standings boards)
Cronk, a title previously made available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, has been released for Linux by Mobile 1Up.
Cronk is a cave man who is trying to save his tribal villages from destruction.
In order to help him you must throw boulders to the oncoming train of rocks, matching three or more of the same color before they crush Cronk’s village.
Along the way you will encounter special boulder types that will aid in your quest. Identify and learn patterns during the game play to work to your advantage!
Enjoy classic or timed modes with three levels of difficulty!
NVIDIA has released a new Linux display driver build, version 190.53, for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 Linux systems that utilize their graphics hardware. Changes:
Modified the installation location and names of internal VDPAU libraries to conform to conventions and Debian packaging guidelines. New versions of libvdpau expect this layout. Compatibility with old versions of libvdpau is maintained with symlinks.
Fixed a bug that could cause errors in graphical applications run after a previous application using VDPAU and OpenGL. This behaviour was observed when running Gwenole Beauchesne’s hwdecode-demos application.
Modified vdpau.h to increment VDPAU_VERSION, to reflect the fact that new features have been added in the past. Also, add the new define VDPAU_INTERFACE_VERSION.
Fixed a periodic temporary hang in the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue.
Fixed a problem that caused resolution limitations or corruption on certain DisplayPort devices such as the Apple 24″ Cinema display or some DisplayPort to VGA adapters.
Disabled the UseEvents option for GeForce 8 series and higher GPUs due to a problem that causes occasional short hangs. It will be re-enabled when that bug has been tracked down and fixed.
VDPAU now allows multiple streams to be decoded at once, without the need to set any environment variables.
Version 0.65 of Gnurobbo, a open source version of of Janusz Pelc’s Robbo from the Atari XE era, has been released. This release has 3 major new features which includes the following items:
For the more ambitious, what’s your Linux game of the decade?
Mine:
2009: I didn’t really play enough games to make a good call here unfortunately :( – I played Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup more than anything.
Decade: Return to Castle Wolfenstein! I spent more time with this game than anything else in all likelihood, single player and multiplayer, even to the point of having an organized clan in online ladder play.
Ho, ho, ho! The holidays are upon us, and Santa has brought each of you a special present! For two weeks enjoy “Silent Night”, a holiday-themed remake of the popular arena “Distant Screams” from Team Arena. During this time Santa himself along with his festive helper Vixen, will be playable character models across all game types.
Nemoder pointed out this blog post at Thoughts on Technology which examines TransGaming’s recent lack of work on Cedega, the Wine-derived solution for playing Windows games on Linux.
While nothing official has been posted by the company itself, I feel it is pretty obvious Transgaming is letting Cedega die a slow death. November 13th 2009 marked the one year date since we last saw an update in Cedega’s news page – The Den. While we did see a small update to the software in August – this did not add any new functionality to Cedega, it simply resolved an issue a World of Warcraft update had introduced.
What are you using to play games without native ports? Wine? CrossOver? A virtual machine? Dual-booting?
A reader let us know about the release of Trichromic 1.2, a turn-based strategy game similar to Advance Wars (which also has an open source Java clone, Custom Wars).
Frictional Games, developers of the Penumbra survival horror series (all of which are available for Linux), announced last month that their next game would be entitled Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Moreover, the developers were interviewed at Linux Gaming News about Penumbra’s sales (Linux: 12%), the hardships of independent game development, Amensia’s evolution from Penumbra, and word that the Linux version of Amnesia should ship simultaneously with the other supported platforms.
Frictional’s development blog also has an entry about video editing under Linux that may be of interest.
The open-source first person shooter World of Padman has a holiday package for you!
The mod changes several things in World of Padman to a Christmas themed version adding several Christmas hats, item models, music, some skins, spraylogos, menu changes and a freezetag gamemode.
Tremulous, an open-source first-person shooter and real-time strategy game hybrid, has a beta build for its upcoming version 1.2 release. Gameplay changes can be read in this forum thread.
