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http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/binary.html This is a 1993 clone of Asteroids for the Mac, but was ported to Windows and other operating systems. Still fun to play, with funny sound effects.

I feel guilty for bringing this invasive technology into this guy's life.

Maelstrom is a supremely addictive game, and it's now released under the GPL so ports to pretty much everything are now available.

You can probably run splitvt under screen.

What, you're not satisfied with fortune and nethack? ;)
Really, I suppose it's true that one of the few things left in the world that Windows is needed for (by some people) is games. Software like OpenOffice, GNOME, etc. would only take getting used to in a transition, but games are unique in that they are designed to entertain, not to perform a task.
Or you could try to distance yourself from modern-ish computer games. I play prboom and Maelstrom sometimes. Other times I use my operating systems as games.

It's Maelstrom.

--sex

I'm surprised noone mentioned splitvt at all. I use this in combination with screen when I want to group logical windows on one screen(the program) screen.

You can check it out here.

It only has three keybindings and includes a ^O for command mode that allows you to resize the windows.

• FreeCiv - free Civ 1/2 clone
  
• Tux Racer - downhill racing game
  
• Tux Typing - typing tutor
  
• IceBreaker - Jezzball clone
  
• Maelstrom - networkable, cool Asteroids clone
  
• Angband - best dungeon crawl ever!
  
• Chromium BSU - neat-o OpenGL 2D shooter
  

Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.

Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.

Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.

Lets consider some others:

zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...

Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.

Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:

Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.

Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.

Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.

There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)

Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.

While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.

There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)

Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.

There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.

Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.

Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...

These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.

Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot :-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.

Maelstom is classic Mac game, now ported using SDL to many platforms and released under the GPL.

I agree with everything that's already been said about knowing the value of pipe's and the standard tools.

In addition to screen which has already been mentioned the two things that I've noticed impressing other people recently are, splitvt, and Emacs

Emacs is impressive because in the hands of an expert you can do almost anything - and splitvt is a stunning program which will turn one shell into two - I highly recommend you check it out.

Sorry if I took offense rather too quickly. It was more the thread I was replying to, not your post in particular.

OK. No problem.

The games are Windows only for the moment (Hence the domain name), but a tinyworkbenchgames site is in the works for Amiga fans. There are currently no plans to develop on Linux, although if anyone wants to give it a shot, be my guest ;)

I don't have much of free time right now, but I could take a look at the source of a simple game and see if I could port it. I don't know how your games are written but if it's standard C or C++ and if you have some internal frame buffer, than it shouldn't be hard to output that buffer to SDL window. Even if it had to be converted to different format with every frame, the overhead shouln't be high with small screen.

Actually, you may want to take a look at the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. Using SDL, you could write portable games working under Windows, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, QNX, OSF/True64. Here's a short summary from SDL website:

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD. SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, ML, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

I really recomend SDL. It's developed mostly by Sam Lantinga, who worked in Loki porting Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Tribes 2, Heavy Gear II, Heretic II, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Railroad Tycoon II, Civilization: Call To Power and few other titles, and is now working in Blizzard on the World of Warcraft - in other words, he knows how to code games, and it shows with the SDL. Check out the games, demos and other applications which use SDL.

For the portable sound code you can use SDL_mixer and for more advanced effects I recommend the OpenAL which takes care for you about the 3-D sound effects in a similar fashion as OpenGL with graphics.

What language and libraries do you use anyway?

Don't forget Maelstrom, which believe it or not is still around and available for Linux.

Are we going to be able to program games/demos/etc. How much codeability are we going to be able to get out of the thing?

Actually, it will be just like any other Linux machine. You'll have GCC, libs, driver support (well, I think the GPU is limitted). As a matter of fact, SDL has already been ported to it, and you can already find
Open Source games for it.

But I personally think the biggest use of this will be for third parties to create internet ready apps for the PS2 (such as web-browsers, e-mail clients, etc.) For example, AOL is already using it as their base for the new PS2 AOL accessory.

Maelstrom is now a GPL released game built on the SDL library. it runs on linux, windows, mac, and be. the original company, ambrosia software made some cool little games.

i played the heck out of maelstrom on the mac when i was in school. good
little sound effects. 'yahoo! all right!'

-sam

One of the cross-platform multimedia libraries that has already been ported to the PS2 is SDL. f you have the PS2 Linux Dev kit (hard to get) then you can just download PS2 SDL from here.

I have no idea how well the support is... or the speed... but it works well enough that there is a port of Maelstrom for it. I have heard that you may also be able to use the SDL OpenGL wrappers to make 3D PS2 apps.

If you are using the PS2 Linux dev kit, you can use the GCC (I think) as well as autoconf|automake.

> the #1 feature preventing Linux from going mainstream: DirectX support.

As, a game developer, I agree. Allthough Loki did a good start with SDL.

People seem to be mentioning the obvious targets: Knuth, BSD etc. but I notice nobody has mentioned Dan Bernstein's projects, notably qmail. This guy basically didn't trust the standard C library routines for security and wrote his own string handling, file processing etc. based on a few system calls. He also splits up his programs into separate binaries as much as possible and is very, very minimalist in other ways too. The code seems quite impenetrable at first, I'm not sure beautiful is the right word, but it's certainly an education.

Also worth a read is Sam Latinga's C++ port of the classic Mac game Maelstrom. The actual code of the game is surprisingly small and very well-written.

Oh, and while I think about it, the InfoZip sources are a real surprise too-- I mean this code is one of the most portable pieces of code you'll ever see; they're a very good example of the sort of lengths you'll need to go to in order to achieve this kind of portability, and it's still elegant in my opinion.

• full sound, threads and timer capability
• Linux, BSD, Windows, BeoS and Mac support
• X, Framebuffer, svgalib, win32 DirectX and a whole lot more
• support for OpenGL contexts (accelerated if your card is)
• real-world tested by most of Loki's commercial ports
• large suite of informative examples

As a gaming API, it's currently unmatched IMHO...

IMO Games are one area where the GNU/Open Source Model is unlikely to work.

Wrong.

Game engines


http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/

3D graphics


http://crystal.linuxgames.com/

http://www.mesa3d.org

etc are now a mature software area, and
with today's hardware we're almost at the point where brute forcing it will be a "good enough" programming strategy.

Wrong. Copying graphics to the screen one pixel at a time will _always_ suck.

And artists are, for the most part, a greedy and opportunistic breed....

... suddenly, i feel as though i'm being trolled.

well, reading it again, he wasn't saying that OSS can't produce the code to do the low level stuff, but, since i bothered to paste those links, i'm leaving them in. :P

--
blue

While vaguely related, this isn't really for GUI, more for graphics in general...

If you're doing multimedia development, I'd recommend SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), a wrapper for X, DGA, OPenGL, DirectX and various other lower level APIs. It's available somewhere on www.devolution.com.

If you doing 3D stuff, try GLUT. This one acts as a simple windowing toolkit for various operating systems, including Windoze, X, Mac OS et al.

I think this is the answer to your question. Many of the wonderful new Linux gaming APIs/libraries, for example SDL, are LGPL:ed so that they also can be used with closed-source games.

How to pick this up in a positive way? Develop a highlevel, crossplatform gaming API that does not force game developers to reinvent the wheel. Apparently such a library is lacking on both the mac and linux.

I believe this is what SDL is trying to do. It was successfully employed in the linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."

Sure it does! We use it for most of the libraries on Linux, for gosh sake! It's because we explicitly want people to be able to create proprietary applications on their Linux systems.

Was anybody arguing with that?

Nope. Although there was a time that I would have argued against that.

What made me change my mind was a little company called Loki Games. Their products (a) make Linux more fun to play games on, and (b) increase the adoption rate of Linux among end-users. This in and of itself is a boon to the open source movement.

Now, what enamored me with the LGPL was something related, the Simple Directmedia Layer ( SDL ), by Sam Latinga, who just so happens to be the lead programmer at Loki Games.

But what I'm suggesting in the earlier post is to use the LGPL not as a Library GPL, but as a Lesser GPL, and in fact release actual non-library programs under its terms. It seems to me to be the ideal compromise between BSD-style licenses and a full GNU copyleft.

I mean, it is about freedom, isn't it?

DIVE seems to be an API for standardised access to Video Drivers. DirectX is a collection of APIs for standardised lowish level access to various pieces of hardware.

DirectX includes
DirectDraw - 2D graphics
DirectInput - Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick, etc.
DirectPlay - Networking
Direct3D - 3D graphics
DirectSound and DirectMusic - Guess

DIVE is I suspect equivalent only to DirectDraw. Other important/difficult pieces from a programmer's point of view are the sound, and input.

Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer for Loki Entertainment Software has created Simple DirectMedia Layer which is an open source project to develop DirectX style functionality. This is currently available for Linux, Win32, and BeOS, with unofficial/in progress ports to Solaris, IRIX, OpenBSD, and MacOS. So it might be possible to get this extended to OS/2 WARP as well.

http://www.devolution.com/~slouken /SDL/Xmingw32/ http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu /~khan/software/gnu-win32/ I use xmingw32, emacs, gdb, and cygwin as a pretty much comprehensive development platform for the game I'm working on, Reel Deal Slots ( A slot machine casino.... I know, not exactly a product targeted for geeks, but heh, I thought if I had to work on something like that, I might as well get some fun out of it! Close in the running to becoming the first hybrid Linux/Win32 game on same cd too.... www.phantomefx.com for details... ) SDL is pretty cool for us cross-platform people too.. Check it out: http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/ Also, I'm working on getting a cross-debugger for Win32 ( Debug a windows hosted program from a remote Linux station ), anyone else out there got something like this going? Jeremy Peterson.

http://www.devolution.com/~slouken /SDL/Xmingw32/ http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu /~khan/software/gnu-win32/ I use xmingw32, emacs, gdb, and cygwin as a pretty much comprehensive development platform for the game I'm working on, Reel Deal Slots ( A slot machine casino.... I know, not exactly a product targeted for geeks, but heh, I thought if I had to work on something like that, I might as well get some fun out of it! Close in the running to becoming the first hybrid Linux/Win32 game on same cd too.... www.phantomefx.com for details... ) SDL is pretty cool for us cross-platform people too.. Check it out: http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/ Also, I'm working on getting a cross-debugger for Win32 ( Debug a windows hosted program from a remote Linux station ), anyone else out there got something like this going? Jeremy Peterson.

There are also cross-platform GUI environments like WxWindows, V, etc. See the MinGW FAQ for more information as well!

JimD

OpenGL is an API for standardised 3D graphics work. DirectX is a collection of APIs for standardised lowish level access to various pieces of hardware.

DirectX includes
DirectDraw - 2D graphics
DirectInput - Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick, etc.
DirectPlay - Networking
Direct3D - 3D graphics
DirectSound and DirectMusic - Guess

OpenGL is equivalent only to Direct3D. The most important/difficult pieces from a programmer's point of view are the sound, input and 2d. In fact a lot of games until recently (DirectX 6/7) used some pieces of DirectX but did not use Direct3D. Instead writing their own 3D code (GLIDE or OpenGL). A number still do their own networking rather than use DirectPlay.

Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer for Loki Entertainment Software has created Simple DirectMedia Layer which is an open source project to develop DirectX style functionality.

Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer for Loki Entertainment Software has created a toolkit called the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL). This is open source (available under GNU LGPL) and provides an increasing amount of the functionality for DirectX style work.

As well as Linux it is currently on BeOS and Win32, with the potential for MacOS, IRIX, Solarix and FreeBSD (unofficial or in progress).

SDL is the open source API developed by Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer for Loki Entertainment Software. There is information about it Here.

In order to write a game there is a need for a lot more than a 3D rendering lanuage (and most of it is more important). Direct3D is a very small part of DirectX and with your own 3D engine you could do without it and use DirectDraw instead.

Other important functionality includes 2D drawing (DirectDraw), Sound (DirectSound and DirectMusic), User Input (DirectInput), and Networking (DirectPlay). It is the ability to do all these in a consistant manner that makes it easier now to develop games on Windows.

So while it is nice to have OpenGL and it does make things easier a lot more is required to provide a full game API. However as I said before SDL (the API that Loki uses) is available open source.

There is an open source API called the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) that has been developed by Sam Lantinga (lead programmer at Loki). Currently available under GNU LGPL license.

According to the site it is currently running on Linux, Win32, and BeOS. Unofficial ports are reported to be in progress for Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, and MacOS.

So if people use it then this could greatly increase the number of games on the Linux and related platforms.

Check out the Simple DirectMedia Layer, which Loki uses in the vast majority of their ports.

Thinking back to the only DirectX proggy I've seen the source to, SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) does an awful lot of this, and cross-platform too. I think there's definite stress on the "simple", but that suits me fine...

It's here now and it's name is SDL. Linux. Windows. Mac. BeOS. 2D and OpenGL graphics. Sound. Input. DirectX on Windows. Fast. Lean. LGPL.

The first developer was Sam Latinga, who currently uses SDL to bring games to Linux with the other folks at Loki Software...

Maelstrom has been on Linux longer than I have
over a year.
They open sourced it and the latest version 3.0
is available for most platforms except Mac.
Kind of funny, but that one's coming along.
Wanna hear the best part?
It's now networked.
Oh yeah, the url is Here
---CONFLICT!!---

Loki has released several Open Source projects:

• SMPEG
• Setup
• SMJPEG
• Fenris

Nope, Loki games isn't opensourcing the games so far as I know, they're just porting them over. They have, however, open-sourced the library they used to port the games over. It's SDL, and it works on many different platforms (though I, personally, have only used it for Linux and Windows).

Can anybody comment(guess) on how much it adds to dev time to do a port/do 2 OSes on avg?

I am using SDL for a few game projects right now. It simply rocks, let me tell you!
SDL contains routines that interface to graphics framebuffers, audio devices, CD-ROMS, etc as well as routines for handling events and thread management. It is supposedly cross-platform, running under Win32/Linux/BeOS and others (I've had problems using it under FreeBSD, but apparently others have to according to the FAQ).
SDL is under constant development, and though I've only subscribed to the mailing list for a short time, the maintainer Sam Lantinga seems very open to new ideas, routines, etc, though I haven't contributed any code to the library myself yet. But, yes it is very much worth the effort. For being a low level library, I believe it has a very clean, consistant and easy to use interface. Also, the source code is pretty clean and well-written, making it easy to browse through to see what's going on.

If anyone is interested in checking it out, here's the address where you can find it:
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/

It supports Win32 (either through Visual C or Cygnus's cross-compiler), Linux, Beos and the Mac (although the latter two need some more work). There's lots and lots of goodies in its API: threads, tracked music playback, MIDI playback, CD playback, MPEG music and video libraries, multiplayer net code, threads, hooks to OpenGL (it's possible to write an SDL program which is hardware accelerated under X f.e), hooks to GTK+, and fast access to X framebuffers through a linear surface which can be converted to any colour depth.

In short , if you're looking to write a game or any multimedia kind of app, SDL is the way to go. It is possible by changing a single switch at autoconf time to have your app recompiled for Windows 9x + DirectX 5 or better.

Another great thing is that this lib is being used for Loki's commercial games so it's real-world and any improvements made there go straight back into the source. Likewise all the testing and feedback makes it possible for all those games to be ported to Linux :) I know you have it already but anyone who wants to have a look can find it here

They use the SDL library for most (if not all) of their game ports. The freeBSD port is in progress.

Once it is finished it should be trivial to port the games under FreeBSD.

Note that there is also a linux port of maelstrom, its one of my favorite svgalib games. There is also a debian pacakge of it in the non-free section.

wouldn't a contestant need some time to look over the code before finding something to 'fix' or being able to add new features?

The Simple DirectMedia Layer is used for CivCTP, you can check out the source.

Too bad I'm more into Perl :)

wouldn't a contestant need some time to look over the code before finding something to 'fix' or being able to add new features?

The Simple DirectMedia Layer is used for CivCTP, you can check out the source.

Too bad I'm more into Perl :)

Geez, some of you need to lighten up! Not every PR stunt is a manipulative scheme devised by marketting flacks. Ambrosia has actually made some pretty cool games for the Mac, and even allowed one of their most popular to be ported to Linux.

Speaking of marketting flacks, I once heard both music and sound effects from the game Apeiron on a commercial for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I only saw it once, and no one believed me. I couldn't have been the only one, will someone confirm this? It may have been made by the local station, channel 46 in Atlanta.

I doubt they got permission. It would be ironic, considering how uptight Paramount has been about copyright infringment by overzelous fans.

They are thin, wrapper libraries that allow "cross-platform" development. They both appear to be relatively easy to use and offer differing feature sets (Different percieved needs for games development...). Give them a look-see and maybe you'll find what you're looking for.

URLs:

SDL - http://www.devolution.com/ ~slouken/projects/SDL/index.html
ClanLib - http://www.clanlib.org/

Keep in mind that these aren't your only options, there are others in varying levels of usefulness but these are the current front-runners that appear to be sticking out of the crowd (Cross-ELF/JUGL is one of the other libraries, allowing a unique ability- one main binary set for DOS, Windows, and X11 with a batch file to execute the loader engine for each platform. The main drawback to it is that it's poorly documented and fairly primitive.)

I had a similar problem when working on a fairly large-scale game for a software engineering class. I turned up, in my monumental search for the Perfect API, something called SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer. I can't attest to its flexibility or ease of use, since I didn't end up using it, but it boasts "portable low level access to a video framebuffer, audio output, mouse, and keyboard." It is LGPL'ed and impressively platform independent. But what I, or even its website, have to say is probably not so gleaming; Probably a more solid endorsement is the fact that Civ:CTP was written using it.

Hope this helps,
Dan