Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviewed the developers of Pioneer about the project’s efforts to recreate the classic space sim Frontier, and the virtues of free software:
RPS: So what relevance does Frontier/Pioneer still have in a world with games like X, Eve, Freelancer… ?
Brian Ronald: I used to work on the X games! Pioneer is free. Its license allows it to be improved, shared, ported to other systems. I’m a big proponent of free software. Pioneer will never become abandonware as long as there is any interest, because there will always be the freedom to pick it up and continue its development.
Kimmo Kotajärvi: The free-ness is indeed remarkable. And even when compared to commercial efforts, you’d be hard pressed to find a single player experience with this mix of simplicity and gigantic scope. Except Frontier.
Nicholas Vining, all around awesome guy, sent in the following rad news:
Dungeons of Dredmor is now available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, as part of the Desura closed Linux beta. As soon as the client officially launches, the game is yours.
This week only, Dredmor is 10% off on Desura. Buy now and save!
For those users with Linux machines who have bought Dredmor on Steam, the Steam build now contains some Linux binaries as well. You can extract them using WINE.
So, I’m glad these guys in Frozen Synapse don’t have names, because they’re going to be dying a lot.
I like the cyberpunk setting, but it’s nice that the game was designed with the knowledge that the single-player plot should take a backseat to the mechanics. Eager to try multiplayer.
Note that a tech demo is also available on the IndieDB page of the game, and that a real demo (with exclusive levels) will come soon!
The pitch:
“When indie game developers Alexey and Markus are in trouble, their only hope comes from their creation.
You are the Tetrobot: a tiny robot that can drill blocks of matter one by one, collect them, and recycle them into new pieces of 4 blocks. You also have the possibility to destroy lines of 8+ blocks in a very «retro russian» game style. Sand, wood, stone, obsidian, iron, diamond: each matter has its specific behaviour you’ll have to use wisely and take advantage of them. So get ready to use your brain and combine your platforming and puzzle-solving skills in this incredible mashup!”
Key features
- A unique gameplay experience mixing puzzle and platform that will challenge your brain
- 40 levels to play in Adventure Mode
- 20 bonus levels to unlock and more free content to come
- Collect every 40 “Blocks That Matter” and rediscover videogames made of blocks that made or will make History
- Create and share your own puzzles using an easy-to-use level editor. Already dozens of creations available!
- DRM Free, purchase for one platform, get the game for all the supported platforms!
Launch trailer
Blocks That Matter is available right now on Linux, through Indievania, for $4.99 US.
This version of the game runs on Windows, Mac and Linux alike using a single installer. To install, make sure you have Adobe AIR (it’s free and available online). Once you have AIR installed, you can get the latest build of the game and install it.
This new version features a ton of improvements to the game–so many that I can’t get into them all here–but here are a few:
The Crypt of the Poet King is now finished, and boy is it ever a nasty one.
Your character can now use drugs and (depending on your luck) get addicted, suffering prolonged withdrawal effects if he goes too long without a hit. (Don’t do drugs, kids!)
You can now swap out orbs between battles.
There’s new music in the game that plays during the battle preparation screen.
There are a ton of bug fixes.
The game engine now officially supports voiced dialog.
The game is due to be completed around the end of the year. In the meantime, pre-orderers get a 20% discount off the price of the finished game.
Another QuakeCon has come and gone. It sounds like this year’s paid pre-registration experiment was a success, and the Quake Live tournaments (which had live streaming coverage) were competitive and exciting, with SK Gaming’s rapha winning the dueling crown. Anyone seen any demos posted yet?
John Carmack’s annual keynote has been posted in its entirety (another first I think – there are also other videos at the QCon YouTube channel):
During the speech, Carmack mentioned that as with previous id Software engines, id Tech 4, which powered Doom 3, will be open-sourced after the release of RAGE. Unfortunately, Carmack also mentioned that while there is a desire to do a Linux port of RAGE, it’s not currently scheduled or a priority. Also of note is that Quake Live was not a business success due to the failures of in-game advertising companies.
Additionally, the engine powering Hammerfight has been open-sourced with Ryan “icculus” Gordon’s assistance, which he has delineated in this post at the Wolfire Blog:
On top of all the other goodness, the thing I love most about the Humble Bundles is how they tend to leave a trail of open source software in their wake.
[...]
It’s not enough to just bring games to Linux. Games will come and go. A game may take years of devotion to build, and then maybe it will live on a best-seller list for a few weeks and be forgotten. Ultimately, any given product is just another bullet point: does this run on Linux? Great, but what have you done for me lately? Porting a game isn’t nearly as rewarding as releasing the source code to something you built to help port that game. To that end, today I’m announcing the availability of hge-unix.
Desura’s Keith Poole sent along the following note (thanks Keith!):
If you haven’t heard of Desura before, now may be the time. We’re getting pretty close to releasing a Linux client and games, so I’m reaching out to as many fellow Linux gamers as possible to let them know the news and get any final feedback.
I’m doing blog posts of the ongoing development, and the most recent can be found at this link, which also links to the previous two blog posts and to numerous ways to contact me with feedback.
There was also two interviews lately that some of you may be interested in, with myself here and Dave our main editor here.
It’s not strictly speaking a game, and it’s been a while since we’ve even mentioned it, but this story about goings-on in Second Life is so strange I have to point it out (and it reminds me of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, so bonus!):
Meeroos, SL’s extremely popular species of virtual, breedable animals created by Malevay Studios, are currently starving. Yesterday, reports Malevay’s Catherine Farspire, unidentified griefers using variations of the avatar name “Meeroos Resident” (the company’s official account) were found selling unauthorized Meeroos food in the region of Twas. (The miscreants, says Ms. Farspire, “built their own [store] in the sky selling fraudulent food”.)
Does anyone reading play/venture into Second Life? What’s it like these days?
You know the drill - NVIDIA made a new display driver for graphics cards utilizing their chipsets last week:
Added support for the following GPUs:
GeForce GTX 570M
GeForce GTX 580M
Fixed a GLX bug that could cause the X server to crash when rendering a display list using GLX indirect rendering.
Fixed a GLX bug that could cause a hang in applications that use X server grabs.
Fixed an X driver bug that caused 16×8 stipple patterns to be rendered incorrectly.
Fixed a GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap bug that caused corruption when texturing from sufficiently small pixmaps and, in particular, corruption in the GNOME Shell Message Tray.
Added unofficial GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the following OpenGL extension:
GL_EXT_vertex_attrib_64bit
Added GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the following OpenGL extensions:
I’m not making it to QuakeCon for the second year in a row, so it’s a little depressing to listen to this new Bethesda Podcast where several people from id Software discuss the event and the company’s history:
Take a trip down memory lane with members of id Software, as they discuss the company’s early years, the magic of QuakeCon, and what fans can expect out of RAGE at this year’s event. Podcast features John Carmack, Tim Willits, Matt Hooper, Marty Stratton, Jonathan Wright, and “id Mom” Donna Jackson.
If you’ve been curious about the multitude of Minecraft mods out there, but haven’t had the opportunity to sort through them all, an enterprising team has compiled a package+installer dubbed Yogbox. The biggest change is what Millénaire brings: NPC villages you can interact with (which are really bizarre to first encounter given the single player game’s usual mindless denizens).
Notch also posted a preview screenshot of a creepy mob coming to the game (seriously, it looks like a Slenderman).
Unigine’s naval real-time strategy game OilRush had a delay announced last month:
The release is planned for autumn 2011. We can’t state the exact date right now because it also depends on our distibution partners: we are working on placing the game into the most popular digital distribution channels to make the delivery comfortable for you.
Why?
We know that it is not the first delay of Oil Rush, but we are putting extra efforts to deliver a polished, well-made game instead of a rushed-out-the-door title. Each day it becomes better as we invest more time, money and striving in the project.
In the meantime, a new gameplayer trailer was created, showing a single player mission walkthrough:
Gaslamp Games has released their roguelike game Dungeons of Dredmor for Windows and Mac OSX, and posted this update about the Linux version on their blog:
Linux guys: those of you who have emailed us have hopefully received a note from me. We are still very committed to getting you a Linux version of Dredmor, please be patient, we have not forgotten about you!
And in the comments:
Guys, have you considered distributing the Linux version through Gameolith (the new Linux games store)? I’d love to play Dredmor on my Linux box, please don’t delay it for too long!
There are quite a few options out there for Linux. Our current hope is that a more direct purchasing solution could support Linux users *and* people who would just like to buy the game using a different method than Steam. Nothing is certain just yet, but that’s the dream.
[...]
Can Linux users that bought your game through Steam dream to get a Linux client without having to buy the game again ?[...]
Planning on doing this. We just have to finish the darned Linux port.
It’s been a while since Valve Software has said anything official about their games and Linux, at least as far as clients are concerned. Recently, Podcast 17 conducted an interview with Gabe Newell, in which he addressed the difficulties of supporting our platform:
GABE @ 02:13: I don’t think that our motivation is to delay the next Half-Life game. I think one of the things that’s useful for people to, at least understand is: Whenever you are trying to figure out what we are doing, it’s useful to know we have way too many things to do than people to do them. So we’re always sorta measuring things in terms of trade-offs; so we look at how much time something will take versus how many of our customers it’ll benefit. So for example on Linux, we obviously would like to have a Linux client and we’d like to have our games running on Linux, a lot of our— I mean our servers run on Linux, so we’ve been supporting Linux since ‘98 in terms of having server support, but whenever we look at that we have to compare that with “Okay, well we can spend that time making the Mac version better, or the Windows version better, or the 360″. Recently we started supporting the PS3, and for us that decision was mainly motivated by Sony’s willingness to be more open than the console companies have traditionally been around being an internet client. And to us that seemed like something we should really get behind, that sorta tipped us over in terms of doing a PS3 version. But that’s the thing that we’re always faced with. It’s not “What would we like to do?” it’s “What five things would we give up in order to do the one thing we are able to do?”. And that is the constant frustration we have is, there are only so many hours in the day, and we’d love to be doing all those things simultaneously.
There’s been a lot of noise over the years about Valve potentially supporting Linux, and while Newell doesn’t rule a port out, I think until something concrete appears the community’s energy is best spent elsewhere.
Internet – June 3, 2011 – The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by 29 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.
Due to the size of the 0.5.0 ndata, downloads shall from now on be hosted at Sourceforge instead of Google Code due to the latter’s arbitrary size limits.The rest of the project infrastructure will remain unchanged.
In the future a shorter release cycle will be used with focus on the remaining features left before content can be the main focus which include asteroids, dynamic economy and fleet AI among others.
Some statistics of the release to give an idea of the magnitude:
961 files changed, 91734 insertions(+), 25431 deletions(-)
List of changes since 0.4.2:
* Better visuals
* Much larger systems and galaxy
* Mouse interactivity
* New GUI
* New tutorial
* Weapon sets
* Heat replaces accuracy
* Loads Oodles of new content
