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This is a quote from the leading online gaming source, Blue's News.

There are scary implications here. When you cannot trust software made by one of the world's largest software companies, what do you do when if[sic] comes to all the little homebrew progams that are available?

This is exactly the mentality that keeps open-source from advancing. As strange as it may seem, the corporate world does not see open-source software go through the same sort of rigorous QA that (they assume) corporate products go through. An event such as this is only going to serve to make people doubt more software in general and that has a negative effect on open-source software which already has to face the FUD about its quality.

No, this isn't Heaven's Gift, it's Satan's Blessing. Too many people see Microsoft as the sort of God of software and when your God fails you, where do you turn? Certainly not to the meek.

Greame Devine of id software posted his opinions on last nights X-Files episode. check it out at blue's finger

but just in case, here is the text:

Name: Graeme Devine
Email: zaphod@idsoftware.com

X-Files. I like X-Files. I didn't like the episode last night -- in fact it was awful.
Mr. Gibson, if you want to come down to id and hang out and see how a real developer makes games you are most welcome. Heck, you can even help out on id's next game thereby staying here long enough to get our culture.

flip - out

Most people get finger info through a Web-based interface like this instead of through a command-line utility (since there isn't one in Win9x-- thanks Bill! :P)

If the link doesn't work (planetquake tends to puke under load), here's a few others:

3dshack finger server

bluesnews finger server

You could always just finger johnc@idsoftware.com, but I really don't recommend it.... I don't think the id server can take the load.

The offending page is here: http://w ww.quakelives.com/main/ql.cgi?section=dlagreement& file=qwcl-win32/


--

They are not clueless - shut up my account quickly when I tried to run some daemon. I had to remove it :-( the dedicated server is yet too expensive for me

I run Pref News there - a russian-speaking e-zine devoted to Perl, Python, Java and PHP-programming. 8 people post interesting links and code snippets almost daily. We are looking for more enthusiasts.

/Alex

If you would have bothered to read the frickin article, you would know the answer to that.

Hint: look in the second yellow paragraph.

The Linux-specific parts of Unreal Tournament will be open sourced. (Credit to Blue's News where I saw this - I thought it would be relevant here.)

From Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart's .plan:


I have permission from Tim to open source certain parts of the engine for the purposes of improving Linux support. What I would like to do is make available the code I have written for Glide, Mesa, input, and audio. I would appreciate Linux programmers taking the time to submit improvements to me at brandon@epicgames.com. I will look into putting up a webpage for this and perhaps a discussion forum. Please email me your input or ideas.

I'm leaving to go home for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so I may not be able to start on this until I get back on Friday. Right now I'm working on the Mesa renderer, because I would like to release that soon, if possible.

The code that I open source will not allow you to really dig very deep into the engine, but it will let you do a lot of stuff to the renderer and X windows interface.

Since my time is split between non-Linux related projects, the Linux port could no doubt be improved if it gets some attention from experienced Linux programmers.



This is excellent - it might also help other people porting games to Linux. An obvious question is, what open source license? The released code will have to be linked against the proprietary game engine. So I guess the GPL wouldn't work, right?

Azog

According to BluesNews for a while, it has not gone gold...the story actually keeps changing.

http://www.bluesnews.com

-Davidu

A few posts have been made on Blue's News in an attempt to clear up some confusion over this. Activision has stated that they will make a formal press release when Q3 officially goes gold, but Todd Hollenshead from ID says they're done with everything on their end. Check out Blue's for more details.

As seen on BluesNews : Contrary to expectations, the Linux Unreal Tournament executable will not be included in the retail Unreal Tournament box, but will rather be made available for download when the game is available for purchase:

Earlier I said that Linux UT would be available out of the box. GT decided that they didn't want to support a Linux version and didn't want it in the box. We decided not to argue the issue, so the Linux UT libraries and executables will not be available in the box.

So if you thought about buying Unreal Tournament, think again, it might be better to buy another copy of Quake3Arena instead just to show your interest in Linux...

• FilePlanet
  
• id Software
  
• MnGamers.com
  
• Meccaworld
  
• 3D ActionGamers
  
• Gaminggroup.com
  
• Blue's News
  
• Queensland Gamers League in Australia (QGL)
  
• Avault
  
• German Mirror at GXP.de
  
• Stomped FTP2

www.quake3arena.com (hosed)
fileplanet.com (hosed)
mngamers.com (some speed)
Blues News (some speed)
Post more as you find them...

Epic's Brandon Reinhart's latest .plan says they need to get the Linux client out to mirrors first before it is available, otherwise it's ready to go. He also mentioned in a previous .plan entry that the Linux client will be included on the retail CD and is using Loki's recent installer.

Epic's Brandon Reinhart's latest .plan says they need to get the Linux client out to mirrors first before it is available, otherwise it's ready to go. He also mentioned in a previous .plan entry that the Linux client will be included on the retail CD and is using Loki's recent installer.

The correct URL is
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=25 4&time=19990716050110.

blue of bluesnews has talked about this some time ago. he said it was better then dew/jolt. their jingle is sureal... i can't beleve they got it played on the radio.

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE

How is this BS? They used a standard benchmark (SPECint, SPECfp) designed to test _different_ CPUs with the same benchmark.

If you run ZiffDavis benchmarks on a Sparc, it's gonna say that an Intel chip is faster, because the ZiffDavis benchmarks are written for Intel chips.

I seem to also remember that a month or so ago when QuakeIII came out, somehow TomsHardware had benchmarks for it, even though the 'timedemo' and 'timerefresh' commands were _broken_.

Here's the story on Blue's.

You sure you still want those benchmarks from Tom?

Carmack dicussed the problems in detail a while back. You can read about it here.

Oh dear, you've gotten me started. As an occasional game author myself, I have some perspective on this (with lots of lessons learned the hard way from both sides), and it just happens that I've been thinking about this issue lately. Here are some things I believe Linux needs to improve its appeal to gamers and game developers.

Transparent Access to Full Screen Display Modes
SVGAlib has been an excellent tool for a long time, but it's starting to show its age, and it supports considerably fewer cards than the current release of XFree86. Further, it's silly to have to write a driver for the same card two or more times (once inside XFree86, once inside SVGAlib, etc.). I've read the work of The GGI Project, and I suggest interested techies do, too. There are no glaring flaws in the design (though it has odd warts here and there), and with work it could become an excellent foundation for high-performance graphics device control and configuration. SVGAlib and XFree86 could both be built on top of this structure. Thus, drivers would need to be written only once. I've love to see this move forward.

Unlike Windoze display modes (which all come out of a fixed table), Linux should be able to generate any resolution and scan rate the card can physically generate. Multi-monitor support would also be nice, but this is much harder (trust me on this one). Also, you should be able to launch a full-screen app from inside XFree86, and neither XFree nor the app should care (being able to switch back and forth would be nice, too). Ambitious souls may care to emulate BeOS's "Workspaces", where each virtual desktop can be a different resolution, scan rate, and pixel depth.

There also needs to be work done on supporting VESA DDC (Display Data Channel) which allows the system to identify the attached monitor and determine its scanning limits (thus alleviating the need for the dreaded mode table in XFree86config; just ask the monitor what it can do). We may also need to beat up on VESA to make its standards more readily available.

Expansion of OpenGL Efforts
OpenGL is the future of 3D gaming (just ask John Carmack). While Mesa is an excellent first step (and very complete), its performance is poor compared to OpenGL ICDs available for Windoze. Basically, we need to get the triangle counts up. Part of this can be done by optimizing Mesa. However, a significant portion of the rest has to be done by or in cooperation with the 3D card manufacturers.

A standard interface needs to be established between Mesa (or whatever OpenGL implementation ends up dominating) and the graphics cards. This will allow for Mesa and the hardware drivers to be evolved and optimized independently of each other. It also allows users to plug in any compliant card and expect it to work. This GL/hardware interface can be established at the driver level; the GGI people probably have suggestions on this.

Finally, everyone reading this article needs to beat up on the 3D card vendors to support Linux. Roughly half of all Quake servers are running on Linux. 3D card vendors live or die based on their Quake frame rates. Why should a server operator have to crash back into Windoze just to test out the latest RA/TF/CTF/LMCTF release? This alone is compelling enough reason for the 3D vendors to formally support Linux.

New Sound Architecture
OSS is functional (it works well for Quake and MikMod), but modern gaming requires much more. Sound has always been my weak point, so I don't have a lot of concrete ideas here. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) looks interesting, but I lack the knowledge to evaluate it properly.

Basically, the goals of the sound API need to include extremely low latency and low overhead. The system shouldn't be eaten alive just mixing and playing back sounds. Also, for applications that do buffer sounds ahead of time, there should be an event system built in such that the application can be informed when a particular sample or sample segment has started playing. This allows the client to synchonize other events (explosion visuals?) with the audio.

Networking
In my view, very little needs to be done here. Linux's socket API is one of the most reliable and complete implementations anywhere. There's no reason a game can't directly use network sockets.

Input Devices
Again, the keynote here is low latency and high sample rate. Most PS/2 mice will run at higher baud rates (if you're running Windoze at the moment, grab a copy of PS/2 Mouse Rate and see for yourself), so the mouse drivers should have the ability to tweak this.

I'm not as convinced that USB is important, but in order to get that to work, you better start beating up on Intel for the specs now. Intel's documentation department can be slow to respond (I'd use the term "glacial," but that conveys an unwarranted sense of haste). USB is a non-trivial beast. Getting all the device types, hubs, and hot-plugging issues down is going to take time.

Anyway, that's pretty much what's on my laundry list. I also have specific ideas on how some of this might get implemented. If I wasn't so darned employed, I'd probably be working on some aspect of this stuff.

Thanks for reading.

Schwab

The source for the Heretic engine was released under the same terms as the Doom source the other day (i.e. you can do anything you want with it, EXCEPT sell it), so no-one will be selling versions in a hurry.

Of course, one needs to buy the Windows version for the full .wad files, as these have not been released.

Still, AFAIK it's a turnaround of less than a week, which is deeply impressive.

I got the story about the release of source off Blues News .