LINUXGAMES

An indie developer let us know that their game, Escape from Quaoar, is coming to Linux in the near future. It’s a platforming physics-based title; here’s a gameplay preview:

The developers of Alien Arena have posted a progress update over at ModDB about the next release of the open-source first-person shooter. Videos of a new map and ODE-based ragdoll physics are featured, and it is mentioned that they’re planning to release Alien Arena 2011 later this fall.

Some unfortunate news by way of the Hothead Games forums (thanks nod51), where the developers of Penny Arcade Adventures mention that their most recent title, Deathspank, won’t be coming to Linux after all:

Hi Nod, there are no plans at this time to bring DeathSpank to Linux. Sorry we can’t support Linux like we did with the Penny Arcade games!

Linux support had been part of the project plan when the game was first announced 2 years ago.

Thanks to liam from Gaming On Linux for pointing out that the second episode of Caster, the third person indie shooter from Elecorn, is due to drop soon for Linux:

The plan’s to get something out by end of this month unless we have another 3D driver caused issue we have to work around.

Unigine, developers of their eponymous cross-platform 3D engine, have update the site for their next game, Oil Rush, with new screenshots, and mention the minimum GPU requirements: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or ATI Radeon 2600. I’m completely out of the loop on graphics card/driver performance in Linux these days; what are you using and how well does it run?

games.on.net interviewed id Software’s Tim Willits and Jason Kim (creative director and senior producer respectively) about the venerable first-person shooter developer’s next title, RAGE:

At its core it’s definitely a first person shooter, but we basically came up with the idea for Rage when John was developing the technology and he was working on some prototypes and experiments, and we saw the potential of being able to create much larger areas than in the past with a very unique texture landscape.

Many of the questions center around PC (Windows) vs. Console focus and development; the problems and arguments mirror those that surround Linux gaming: it’s difficult to exclusively support a smaller audience in today’s market. Fortunately, just as many indie developers support Linux, id still supports the PC:

With that said, there isn’t anything that we’re not doing on the PC, that we’re doing on the console – and vice versa. The content is exactly the same across all platforms. We’ll have not just content but technology parity across everything. The PC, the only difference is that you’ll be at your desk, more than likely, and you’ll have a keyboard and mouse.

Regarding RAGE itself and Linux specifically, id’s Timothee Besset commented about it last year at his blog; short version, while there’s no firm commitment (which is normal!), a port will likely happen as it has in the past.

Eurogamer has posted a retrospective review of Uplink, the black hat hacker-themed game from Introversion first published in 2001.

I had forgotten this, but Uplink was set in the year 2010:

This is a time when gateway computers would be able to handle as many as eight CPUs. Which is, um, pretty accurate. What’s slightly less accurate is Introversion’s optimism that by now they’d be running at 200GHz. I’d like me one of those 200Gig Octo-cores very much. I’m also not entirely clear what a Gq is, and therefore can’t figure out if 32Gq of RAM is good.

The article skillfully examines what made the gameplay compelling, and ultimately concludes that the game is still “properly great”. I need to revisit it myself, as I’ve played it off and on over the years without ever nearing the endgame.

Thanks to readers who pointed out that Frictional Games has posted an analysis of Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s sales after one month:

Gathering an exact percentage of sales for Linux turned out to be a bit complicated. Purchases made in our store gets all three platforms, which is the only place to get the Linux version. The total amount of sold units in our own store is about 5000. Since we can connect some of these sales with steam activations and similar, we can make a conservative estimate of 2500 Windows users, leaving 2500 left for Mac and Linux. And since this this is the only store for Linux users, we assume 70% of these are Linux. This means 1750 sold Linux units, or 5% of the total sales.

There’s additional discussion about overall sales with respect to their expectations, and implications for future projects. Speaking for myself, I think it’s commendable that with all the risks and uncertainties that are inherent to independent game development and publishing, Frictional Games, and all others who support Linux, spent the human-hours to port the code, test the builds, and release the game for our platform.

A new maintenance of Wine is now available. This new version has various bug fixes and translation updates.

Download: [ Wine 1.2.1]

PipeWalker version 0.9.1 has been released. The latest edition of this open sourced logic game updated with new themes support.

Download: [ 0.9.1 ]

Me:

• Minecraft
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent

…haven’t had a lot of gaming time lately :\

FreeCol, a turn-based strategy game based on Colonization, has been updated to version 0.9.5. This is a maintenance release to fix memory leaks and other bugs.

Download: [ freecol.org ]

Sillysoft have released their next generation strategy wargame – Castle Vox (thanks Thunor!). Castle Vox is a simultaneous-turns strategy game with a variety of historically-inspired war maps.

Features:

• Fast world domination.
• Plan attacks simultaneously.
• Collaborate with teammates.
• Maps from many eras and mythologies.
• Giant maps with many players.
• Map editor included.
• Hard AI will push your brain in single-player matches.
• Online multi-player modes: relaxed and speed variants.
• Easy to learn, hard to master.

Linux demo available here.

The Goblin and the Butterfly (TGatB) has released version 1.0.0.17 of the 2D MMORPG. Changes:

• This includes new monsters, maps, quests.
• The client has now an URL catcher (F2 key), which starts the last seen URL with the configured browser.
• A TAB map was implemented, which shows an overview of the current map and allows you (limited) walking of longer distances by clicking on it.
• The website has now a highscore list, which lists players according to their skill levels.
• A few new items were implemented, buyable from a shop or/and rare monster drops.
• Further there is now a new item spawn, which spawns one item every hour.

Download: [ the-green-leaf.de ]

Revenge Of The Cats: Ethernet is a fast-paced, moddable, freeware, multiplayer first-person shooter:

Players start out in Etherform and need to find a zone owned by their team in order to manifest as a CAT. As CAT, players take zones for their team simply by being inside the zone while no enemy CAT is also present in the zone. The zone then turns red or blue, depending on which team captured it. If CATs of both teams are present, the zone remains white.

Here’s some footage a reader (thanks Vann) pointed out:

Media: [ View ] Download: [ wasted.ch ]

Who wants to play HoN? The always Linux-friendly S2 Games has provided trial keys for Heroes of Newerth, the DoTA-inspired strategy game.

To receive a key, comment below (be sure your user account has a working e-mail address first!). Each trial key allows for 10 free games; there is no time limit on the life of the key, it just expires when you’re done playing 10 games.

A reader pointed out (many moons ago – sorry!) Crystal Architect, an IDE for creating Linux games:

CrystalArchitect is a software that helps you create your 3D worlds in a fluent and cooperative way.

It provides all the tools to manage your assets, build scenes, make use of entity systems, add logic, live program your world, etc. Of course, you can also do this in a cooperative way : CrystalArchitect supports networked editing, which is a blessing for teamwork.

On top of that, CrystalArchitect supports as many 3d engines as you want, with currently an emphasis on Crystal Space and CEL.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ kyanite-studios.org ]

Many thanks to Nemoder for letting us know that Frictional Games’ latest adventure/horror game has been updated to fix a few crashes and many level design bugs.

Here is the full changelog and download link.

On a related note the infamous Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has posted his hilarious Zero Punctuation review of the game.

SlickMcRunfast wrote in about this, uh, I don’t know when (or I’m too embarrassed to check):

There is a post on OpenGL.org about a new game engine called Pixel Light that runs on Linux. The Pixel Light source also seems to be open source. There are also a few demos to download on the site and they run pretty well on my nvidia 8800GTS.

Bitfighter 013, a team-based multiplayer arcade shooter, has been released.

The game features customizable ships, multiple game types, full-featured level editor, Lua scripting, and solid network play.

This version features many improvements in gameplay, enhanced robot players, an overhauled level editor, and even a few bug fixes.

Downloads/Linux build instructions and full change log at our downloads page.