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I would contact this guy. I saw him give a talk at the IndieGamesCon and he seemed to be knowledge about the linux games porting scene. His resume drives it home.

Give Ryan "icculus" Gordon a call.. http://www.icculus.org/. He has worked on many ports over the years including America's Army, Medal of Honor, Postal 2, and plenty of others. He gained alot of experience working at Loki back in the day. I'm sure he wouldn't be opposed to helping you out.

I suggest everyone try using twm-gl, as created by brother Gary. twm-gl is a window manager based on twm, but improved by rendered in openGL context. Get it from the Icculus server, here! Hurry! Other Slashdot users are trying the same! Maybe you might see somthing before...

Mirrors can be found here and here .
A FreeBSD port can also be found here, made by the guy who helped with the FreeBSD XBOX port.

Mirrors can be found here and here.
A FreeBSD port can also be found here, made by the guy who helped with the FreeBSD XBOX port.

I was playing lineage II and they robbed me of all my clothing!

http://offload1.icculus.org/freyja/images/screensh ots/lineageII-support2.png

Unreal Tournament can already do that, as can anything that uses SDL (e.g. frozen bubble or I think wargus)

Didn't take him too long. Here's a screenshot from Ryan Gordon's ~/.plan.

These guys would probably do the job - and they have quite a bit of experience porting Linux applications. The guy who runs the site was the founder of Loki Software - the now defunct Linux software company.

I teach game development and do alot of 3D modelling. Alot of what you say above is false out of the box.

The state of 3D on Linux is far from sucking. Proprietary Nvidia drivers on Linux cannot be beaten, out-doing their Win32 counterparts alot of the time, even where frame rate (Q3a, Doom3, UT2004, AA) is concerned. Nvidia on Linux is an industry standard 3D animation platform in the feature film industry, for good reason. When teaching game development, if my students are sitting at machines running Nvidia binary drivers on a Linux OS, I'm having a very good day. Naturally, I'd love it if an open alternative could compete - you seem only aware of the open-source drivers, which are essentially blind to the rich talents of the Nvidia GPU. ATI's fglrx drivers are now (finally) on par with Win32 where pixel/vertex shaders (GLSL ) are concerned and close to a performance equal generally. The installation process is slightly more annoying, that is all. Many non-free distro's handle this for the user automagically (Mepis Linux comes to mind)

Secondly, binary compatibility is no more troublesome these days than it is between versions of Windows, eg running a game made for Win95 on XP - occassionally an issue. Installation of binaries can be done easily using a system like Autopackage if one doesn't want to find and or become an *.rpm/*.deb package maintainer.

Where devices are concerned, the trouble you speak of is many years in the past - udev works in userspace, and uses hotplug calls that the kernel signals whenever a device is added or removed from the kernel. Permissions, naming and control is all done in userspace.

Finally where sales of Linux games are concerned, I tend to agree that it is perhaps a little harder to market to Linux users, though from experience I am the first to buy a game that comes out for Linux. You will find though that due to existance of compatibility layers like Wine, publishers simply don't know how many Linux users are buying their games. I can account for around 14 windows games I've bought with the pure intention of playing them on Linux (for instance). Linux desktop market share is widely considered to be above or equal to that of the Apple OS. Whatever kind of market it is, it's growing.

Lastly, for the grandfather, Ryan, of Icculus is your best bet for a Linux port.

PS. Game development, as a culture, needs free software if a) small to medium sized developers are to survive and b) if micro-markets (like that of the indie-film industry) are to burgeon. Tools are increasingly expensive and publishers offset this cost with IP tradeoffs (buy outs). If I were you I'd ship the engine as free software (binary checksum for login, cheat protection and validation) and sell the data and/or subscription time. More on why here.

Try asking http://icculus.org/~icculus/. He used to work for the Linux game publisher Loki and currently works porting games to Linux/OS X. He has worked on some big time titles such as UT2k4, Postal 2 and ArmyOps. He should be able to help you or point you to someone who can.

Ryan C. Gordon would be the first person I'd contact to do a port of a Windows game to Linux. If he isn't able to do it (probably due to time restraints, rather than anything else), he will probably know someone who can.

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon

I hear he recently lost much of his nerve, was kicked out of his parents' house in New Jersey because they thought his "Linux porting venture" was just another bad move. He dropped out of High School, doesn't have any education outside of reading Bill Ball novice Linux "technical" manuals. He got his first Linux porting job at Loki Entertainment Inc, situated at Tustin in California. Worked next to Sam Lantinga the maintainer and founder of Simple Directmedia Layer. After Loki went under bankruptcy protection, Ryan fell apart. He was living in his office for awhile, and that is when he incurred much butt sex. Sam Lantinga went on to better things, and now works at Blizzard Entertainment Inc for only God-knows-what in World of Warcraft. Ryan returned to his parents' backyard, porting some U.S. Army propoganda software as well as Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and FriedChickletts MUD. He's pretty much unimpressive, and generally unavailable for porting jobs. I suppose that's why Linux Game Publishing was not willing to hire him to port Candy Crunchers. I also hear Ryan has taken a liking to homosexual lifestyle, (NOTE: goatse balls, men, and Lenin poster) which explains why his choice of books is rather questionable in the "gender-confusion" sort of way.

I think you're wasting your time asking for burned-out hashish-eaters, like Ryan. You should contact the Alpha Troll in Linuxgames.com forums for all your porting needs.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: ridIcculus

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon

I hear he recently lost much of his nerve, was kicked out of his parents' house in New Jersey because they thought his "Linux porting venture" was just another bad move. He dropped out of High School, doesn't have any education outside of reading Bill Ball novice Linux "technical" manuals. He got his first Linux porting job at Loki Entertainment Inc, situated at Tustin in California. Worked next to Sam Lantinga the maintainer and founder of Simple Directmedia Layer. After Loki went under bankruptcy protection, Ryan fell apart. He was living in his office for awhile, and that is when he incurred much butt sex. Sam Lantinga went on to better things, and now works at Blizzard Entertainment Inc for only God-knows-what in World of Warcraft. Ryan returned to his parents' backyard, porting some U.S. Army propoganda software as well as Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and FriedChickletts MUD. He's pretty much unimpressive, and generally unavailable for porting jobs. I suppose that's why Linux Game Publishing was not willing to hire him to port Candy Crunchers. I also hear Ryan has taken a liking to homosexual lifestyle, (NOTE: goatse balls, men, and Lenin poster) which explains why his choice of books is rather questionable in the "gender-confusion" sort of way.

I think you're wasting your time asking for burned-out hashish-eaters, like Ryan. You should contact the Alpha Troll in Linuxgames.com forums for all your porting needs.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: ridIcculus

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon

I hear he recently lost much of his nerve, was kicked out of his parents' house in New Jersey because they thought his "Linux porting venture" was just another bad move. He dropped out of High School, doesn't have any education outside of reading Bill Ball novice Linux "technical" manuals. He got his first Linux porting job at Loki Entertainment Inc, situated at Tustin in California. Worked next to Sam Lantinga the maintainer and founder of Simple Directmedia Layer. After Loki went under bankruptcy protection, Ryan fell apart. He was living in his office for awhile, and that is when he incurred much butt sex. Sam Lantinga went on to better things, and now works at Blizzard Entertainment Inc for only God-knows-what in World of Warcraft. Ryan returned to his parents' backyard, porting some U.S. Army propoganda software as well as Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and FriedChickletts MUD. He's pretty much unimpressive, and generally unavailable for porting jobs. I suppose that's why Linux Game Publishing was not willing to hire him to port Candy Crunchers. I also hear Ryan has taken a liking to homosexual lifestyle, (NOTE: goatse balls, men, and Lenin poster) which explains why his choice of books is rather questionable in the "gender-confusion" sort of way.

I think you're wasting your time asking for burned-out hashish-eaters, like Ryan. You should contact the Alpha Troll in Linuxgames.com forums for all your porting needs.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: ridIcculus

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon

I hear he recently lost much of his nerve, was kicked out of his parents' house in New Jersey because they thought his "Linux porting venture" was just another bad move. He dropped out of High School, doesn't have any education outside of reading Bill Ball novice Linux "technical" manuals. He got his first Linux porting job at Loki Entertainment Inc, situated at Tustin in California. Worked next to Sam Lantinga the maintainer and founder of Simple Directmedia Layer. After Loki went under bankruptcy protection, Ryan fell apart. He was living in his office for awhile, and that is when he incurred much butt sex. Sam Lantinga went on to better things, and now works at Blizzard Entertainment Inc for only God-knows-what in World of Warcraft. Ryan returned to his parents' backyard, porting some U.S. Army propoganda software as well as Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and FriedChickletts MUD. He's pretty much unimpressive, and generally unavailable for porting jobs. I suppose that's why Linux Game Publishing was not willing to hire him to port Candy Crunchers. I also hear Ryan has taken a liking to homosexual lifestyle, (NOTE: goatse balls, men, and Lenin poster) which explains why his choice of books is rather questionable in the "gender-confusion" sort of way.

I think you're wasting your time asking for burned-out hashish-eaters, like Ryan. You should contact the Alpha Troll in Linuxgames.com forums for all your porting needs.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: ridIcculus

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon

I hear he recently lost much of his nerve, was kicked out of his parents' house in New Jersey because they thought his "Linux porting venture" was just another bad move. He dropped out of High School, doesn't have any education outside of reading Bill Ball novice Linux "technical" manuals. He got his first Linux porting job at Loki Entertainment Inc, situated at Tustin in California. Worked next to Sam Lantinga the maintainer and founder of Simple Directmedia Layer. After Loki went under bankruptcy protection, Ryan fell apart. He was living in his office for awhile, and that is when he incurred much butt sex. Sam Lantinga went on to better things, and now works at Blizzard Entertainment Inc for only God-knows-what in World of Warcraft. Ryan returned to his parents' backyard, porting some U.S. Army propoganda software as well as Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and FriedChickletts MUD. He's pretty much unimpressive, and generally unavailable for porting jobs. I suppose that's why Linux Game Publishing was not willing to hire him to port Candy Crunchers. I also hear Ryan has taken a liking to homosexual lifestyle, (NOTE: goatse balls, men, and Lenin poster) which explains why his choice of books is rather questionable in the "gender-confusion" sort of way.

I think you're wasting your time asking for burned-out hashish-eaters, like Ryan. You should contact the Alpha Troll in Linuxgames.com forums for all your porting needs.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: ridIcculus

Judging from the FAQ and either known defunct or no longer available websites, the only porting house still in business is LGP. At least it is the only one I am aware of. While not a programmer myself, I do try to keep on top of the Linux Gaming News.

I just want to say thanks to LGP as well.

You'd think he would check with them since this has happened before.

Ask Icculus.

Ryan C Gordon is the one to thank for the Unreal ports, and a Linux game porter community surely exists at his site.

Check out http://icculus.org/

You don't even need to go that far. Just encourage game developers (Id, Epic, Blizzard, etc.) that choose to program in OpenGL, or utilize other open standards, and the games port nearly flawlessly to Linux. Just have a look at UT2004, America's Army, and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Get these engines into the hands of talented people like Ryan Gordon at http://icculus.org/ http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/477/, and you can see that it looks very promising. BTW, WoW works amazingly well using Wine alone.

1. better Cedega Support - http://www.transgaming.com/
2. native installers - http://liflg.org/
3. Greater development in the SDL world
4. Push for support of
      http://www.happypenguin.org/
      http://www.linux-gamers.net/
      http://www.icculus.org/

Why not try,

Somewhere around 1999 or so I worked with relnev, (Steven Fuller http://icculus.org/~relnev/) to make a homebrew demo of the Hamster dance on the Gameboy Color. I re-drew the tiles and we converted the sound clip into a format that could be played on the Gameboy Color. And on the faithful day we saw the fruits of our efforts......I still can't bring myself to use a Gameboy.

None of: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, are compilable (except for mods). Modern patches exist for all of these games, and they are all runnable, gentoo even has ebuilds for each one. Yes binary compatability is a huge problem, it is just that the things you've pointed out here aren't. For what little help people need with them, there is excellent documentation in the form of the Linux Gamers' FAQ.

Mostly you don't need help until you want to install a mod or something. I should also note that Quake 3 will at some point in the future have the entire source code released, as soon as id stops licening it out to companies who are paying for it. I'd guess it might be as early as Quake Con or Christmas this year. I'm just guessing though, I do not know for sure when, I do know it will come out eventually.

However, the main thrust of your argument seems to be that even games with source released won't run? I don't understand that, Quake 2 for instance compiles and runs fine, and even better than the last id-released version since you don't need zinx's hack in Linux to make the mouse smooth.

Why don't you, and this guy start talking about when the Linux userbase will be large enough for games to be directly ported.

It's not "pie-in-the-sky dreaming", and no it's not a gamer's paradise either, but for now, I have more games for native Linux than I have time to play, and more are being ported all the time.

The Cubs have not won the World Series and Duke Nukem 3D hasn't been released.

The screenshots are amazing! It looks like Unreal Tournament. It certainly looks promising.

For those interested, here's the Dark Places engine.

My favorite FPS so far is ETF. It's a mod for Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory(free as in beer).
Cube is not bad either.

Yup. And they've been under active development ever since in projects like Quakeforge, Darkplaces and Twilight.

There's other OSS engines out there, too, such as Crystal Space.

Yup. And they've been under active development ever since in projects like Quakeforge, Darkplaces and Twilight.

There's other OSS engines out there, too, such as Crystal Space.

Or even worse, orbital sniping:

Orbital Eunuchs Sniper (very fun game, btw, and runs on Linux)

apparently. http://icculus.org/openbox/

fluxbox and openbox are much better than blackbox anyways!

Think of it this way... How many programs have you seen written for the 3DFX glide API? So, if you are one of the people who still has a glide card, but it was designed so that it couldn't do OpenGL becuase it used completely different technology, how useful would it be to you?

Glide was a great API. Software writtent to use Glide was often much more impressive with stunning visuals that could only be access by directly using the Glide API. As well, Glide was used to accelerate the openGL API which is the way software drivers were meant to be in the first place; an open hardware-specific API for everyone else to adapt their popular API. This solves the disorder of graphics developers from sitting the long route to stable drivers for openGL and Direct3D; someone, like Microsoft or Mesa3D (to voodoo2 Glide API) would just pick up the API from a vendor and run the trials of translating an construment to use it. Of'course, this could lead to practical design limitations, but it would allow some sort of API to appear from a graphics developer

Woops, did I forgot to remove the "sarcasm" tag all this time? Ok... [/sarcasm]

Go take a look at Manticore design on the icculus.org server and just see how near this articles subjective FPGA design is in likeness.

Or even better, Icculus' list of actual commercial games that run natively on Linux.

There already is such a game. It is called Neverball

Also included is a mini-golf game using the same graphics and engine : neverputt
Find them there : http://icculus.org/neverball/#download Note you will need a DLL if running winXP without service pack, but i cant recall the name (easy to find via google)

Maybe a billard game such as foobillard would be suitable ? Of course, this means you'll lack a bit of the "advanced" features such as ball spin, etc., but it could just be fine.
find it here : http://foobillard.sunsite.dk/

Maybe you would be interrested, if you type with Dasher, or any other quick typing method, to try out some roleplaying forums (fora?)

Good luck, don't hesitate to send message if you want me to inform you when i find more suitable games.

Try neverball. You tilt a map and try to get a ball into a hole, and it comes with an extension, Neverputt, which is a mini-putting game. It's great fun. I can even play it with a touchpad (I play it while travelling):
Neverball!

regardless of zany SFX, i reckon it's about time gnome does something about it's icons.

there's always been something 'smoked' or 'damp' about them.. themes should be called "Journey to the Mushroom Planet" or "Camping in the Rain". the 'My Computer'(ish) desktop icon is a metaphor so tired it yawns on it's own. this said, the http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/screenshots/gorilla .jpgGorilla theme however is getting somewhere, i don't know why the gnome-devs don't make that the default theme.

is it a case of lagging sentamentalism? gnome itself has evolved into something extremely useable. why are the icons still lost in a pipe-dream?

think i'll just stick with X.org and http://icculus.org/openbox/

Why stop at the commercial only ones (besides that's what he did ask for) when there are many very good free games available
Full Icculus Game List

Here ya go

And there's also pydance . So that's 2 good DDR-like games freely available for windows and linux.

well, Medal of Honor IS coming to linux. just, slowly.

http://www.icculus.org/ - Porting MOHAA for EA. I know it's not pacific assault but still...

If only one ICQ client was worth using to you, how would you feel if that one client wasn't available because it wasn't "the standard Linux ICQ client"?

And ICQ has been pretty dead for pretty long. When did you last try Linux?

Oh, and, uh, cough, cough, SDL. Simple Dynamic Library. Does everything DirectX does, uses OpenGL as a background.

If you want to write a book for DirectLinux, which teaches people to use SDL, go ahead. But it'd be better to call it something like "SDL for Dummies".

Linux has games. UT, UT2003, UT2004, Doom 1, 2, and 3, Neverwinter Nights, Quake 1, 2, and 3, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D... Go read this and come back when you've got enough info to justify such a long rant.

Linux distros aren't all that different to the application developer. I run Gentoo Linux as my distro. About 5 apps were developed specifically for it, and most of them were easily ported from other, more popular distros like Fedora and Debian. It takes about 5 minutes to port an app to another distro, 15 at most.

And I wouldn't want a "Standard Linux". Competition is healthy, and I'd rather be able to choose Gentoo Linux than be forced into, say, "Standard Linux" running on a Win2k kernel. But hey, you're free to create a new one, or go check out the free desktop project. Or maybe you should go "****" yourself.

Your best bet is trying out D2X. The audio problem is due to being very DOS specific even the Win32 with mouse support version used audio through DOS.

The sources to Descent 1 & 2 were released several years ago. The Descent 2 code is being worked on in a project called d2x. http://www.icculus.org/d2x/ I'm trying to find a copy of Descent 2 so I can use the data files with it. Does anyone know if it's still available? I've googled for the shareware version, but couldn't find much. (I found it at descent2.com but i couldn't get the download to finish.)

Gee whiz folks, we've got UT2004 with a NATIVE PORT, we've got Doom 3 with a NATIVE PORT (excellent port thank you ID), HL2 plays under Cedega (you need a brute of a CPU tho.) Lots of games with nice installers: Check out http://liflg.org/ for installers for the best games.

People cry that it's too hard to get your video to work; I'm really sorry you were too cheap to get the GeForce Go 5200 and got the Intel "Extreme" integrated graphics and now your pixel shader games look crappy. Nevertheless, UT2004 and the UT2004 DEMO play under linux with the DRI drivers.

Stop complaining, Loki is gone, but http://icculus.org/ is still around, and several of those guys WORKED for loki. If you want it EASY, you want GAMES then either USE WINDOWS or buy an X-Box. If you prefer Linux and are willing to expend the time and energy (and reap the rewards of what you learn) then USE LINUX and play the games that work well, there are a bloody AWFUL lot of games that work, work well and aren't that difficult to set up.

Take a little time, subscribe to http://www.transgaming.com/, make a little donation to http://liflg.org/, buy products from http://www.nvidia.com/ and shut up & enjoy the games!

FPS games tend to get ported because developers/publishers see the value of having user-run Linux servers, and it's easier (although by no means guaranteed) to get a client port from a dev team that's already porting the server code.

Just something I'd like to note: Most FPSes these days aren't being ported to linux/mac by their dev team. this guy does it for them.

Tried to check out a screenshot
.

> look
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> find link
You stumble around trying to find http://icculus.org/projects/twmgl/screenshot1.jpg, but your hands grasp nothing except dirt and rock. You eventually touch something solid, and lift it up. As you bring it to your eyes, you squint to find that it is an electronic root kit of high-jump.

> quit
Your score is 25 out of a possible 375. This gives you the rank of hoser.
Are you sure you want to give up [y/N]? : y

I heartily recommend twm-gl for your desktop.

1. You forgot a link to the project.
2. twm-gl is binary-only, no source (that I could find, anyway.).
   I am reluctant to trust binary-only code from someone that I don't know.
3. The lack of any reasonable documentation on the website (three bullet points, one of which claims that the writer was on LSD when he/she wrote it), plus the broken screenshot pics, do not give me great confidence in the project.