I’ve been out of the loop a few months, but some things haven’t changed:
-More Humble Bundles, yay!
-Updates to awesome projects like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, etc. are still being released.
-Phoronix still swears up and down that, like the Great Pumpkin, Source and Steam are coming, no really this time.
Anyhow, this April I aim to play a Linux game and write about it EVERY DAY. That’s every 24 hours. So. Hrm.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.4
is now available.
This release represents 20 months of development effort and over
16,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new DIB
graphics engine, a redesigned audio stack, and full support for
bidirectional text and character shaping.
It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as
support for many new applications, notably Microsoft Office 2010. See
the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.
This release is dedicated to the memory of Gé (Greg) van Geldorp, who
passed away in May 2011. Greg single-handedly designed, built, and
maintained the Wine Testbot, which has become a cornerstone of our
development process. The high quality of this release owes a lot to
his work. He is greatly missed by us all.
We are getting close with yet another release candidate of Wine having been announced. This 1.4 release candidate 5 has only bug fixes which is the standard with all release candidates for Wine.
A new release candidate of Wine has been announced. This 1.4 release candidate 4 has only bug fixes which is the standard with all release candidates for Wine.
After almost a year of work a new version of Dwarf Fortress has been released. Changes include tombs, dungeons, vampires and werewolves for adventure mode and many bugfixes and improvements for fortress mode.
Linux build is available for download (thanks Nemoder!).
The multiplayer-focused DOOM variant Skulltag has, after many years of resistance, become an open source project, as announced on the project forum recently:
Behold! What has been discussed and requested countless of times in the past, finally happens: Skulltag is open source now! And this not only covers the current version of the code, but includes the full history from our SVN repository. In particular, the full source of all public and all official beta builds made since I took over the Skulltag development five years ago is included.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has posted a review of Oil Rush, the naval-themed real-time strategy game recently released for Linux by Unigine that praises the game’s mechanics and originality:
In these suprisingly roleplaying-heavy times, something as laser-focused strategic as this is entirely welcome. It’s a proper, honest-to-god RTS – but, delightfully uncommonly, it doesn’t bow slavishly to the C&C or Total War thrones. Were my thumbs not too bust helping to type these very words, I would certainly hold at least one of them aloft.
It’s fair to say that we’ve neglected our linux fans for a little while now, but I’m hoping to change that. I have just finished uploading:
- Nixinstaller
- 32 and 64 bit RPM
- 32 and 64 bit Deb
Packages for DEFCON and Multiwinia.
If you are linux fan, please let us know how you get on with them.
As you may have heard by now, gaming luminary Tim Schafer’s development studio Double Fine has raised over ONE POINT FIVE MILLION DOLLARS through a Kickstarter-hosted fundraiser.
What’s even better is that both the Kickstarter FAQ and the Double Fine games page mention Linux as a possibility for this adventure game project:
Q: What about Android or Linux?
A: Those are possible too! It all depends on how much money we can raise.
In a month long event, we will release an avatar for one of the Horsemen every Tuesday throughout February. Each will be priced as a standard premium avatar and includes new voices, animations, and models plus they will each include their symbols for the first three days they are available. The Horsemen are NOT limited edition and will be available from this point on.
Winner of Roguelike of the Year for both 2010 and 2011, Tales of Maj’Eyal is an open-source, single-player, tactical role-playing roguelike and action game.
Why play this one? LEMME TELL YOU (courtesy of the SA Forums):
For one a lack of consumable hoarding. The Tome philosophy is that hoarding potions and scrolls until the end of the game is neither fun nor particularly easy to balance. Things generally handled by consumables like healing and teleportation are handled through runes and infusions instead, which are basically swappable talents. Likewise Tome dungeons do not respawn. Once an area is cleared it’s generally cleared for good. The game’s leveling and xp system is balanced around these concepts so the player should never feel the need to grind to advance.
Tome also comes with a full tile set, has sound and music, as well as an integrated chat system so you can ask advice of other players without leaving the game (hence the thread title). It also supports ASCII and has an options menu so almost any feature you don’t enjoy you can turn off.
There’s more, the game’s pretty innovative and it would be hard for me to cover everything. But briefly, a friendly interface that supports both keyboard and mouse based play along with fully functional auto-explore, a fairly unique combat system, a polished UI (which will be customizable next beta), a very active developer (the game’s seen 37 beta releases in the last two years), and a growing player base.
