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Are you typing from a cell phone or something?

Here's an english translation:
"If you don't have a Windows install, you can extract the data from your CDs with these tools:
http://icculus.org/~ravage/nwn/nwn_linux_installer .run http://members.cox.net/monteslu/nwn_data_installer .run
There may be issues since the stuff extracted from the CDs isn't patched up to 1.29, but I can't say for sure. Reply with info and/or tips if you have any."

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

Ever read "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clark?

yes

Instead of Big Brother we get gazillions of networked Little Brothers

The million little brothers have a lot of decentralized and unsearchable low quality videos that'll probably be deleted sooner than not. Facial recognition and similar tech will be of age around the same time it'll possible to fabricate the same quality video with 3D animation software for less expenditure in resources. Not to say that the two will balance out...

I made a tiny hack util to recover MS office files and RTFs from partial/full disk images I call recover-word, after seeing a lot of damaged floppies/zip disks. I might even make it more efficent one day. However, I did just add a hack to make it automate stripping partial images from a damaged drive, albeit it's not very smart. =)

recover-word

If you try it please send in comments and suggestions - I'm pondering making it usable for lay data recovery persons. I'm pondering adding my unreleased hacks for various other formats like JPEG or just making it use a RC file with a header dictionary and a simple lisp syantax for reading it. Then agian I worked on this maybe in 3 sit downs since I hated doing the recovery by hand over and over. =)

they have allready recreated helms deep

helm 1

helm 2

helm 3

helm 4

some more screenshots but i dont know where :)

they have allready recreated helms deep

helm 1

helm 2

helm 3

helm 4

some more screenshots but i dont know where :)

they have allready recreated helms deep

helm 1

helm 2

helm 3

helm 4

some more screenshots but i dont know where :)

they have allready recreated helms deep

helm 1

helm 2

helm 3

helm 4

some more screenshots but i dont know where :)

I think GNOME needs something like Sawfish -- something with useful features rather than just a Microsoft clone. If the GNOME people have gone off Sawfish, that's a shame, because there's nothing else like it.

I'm a long-time sawfish user, and have written several themes and small lisp modules for it. In my opinion, it's a very good thing to have a window manager that is extensible in a high-level language like lisp (rather than C or C++). However, in my opinion, it's also probably reasonable for this not to be the default WM.

In my experience Sawfish versions 1.2 and 2.0 are not even ready for beta testing. They crash readily and badly. Don't try them unless you're interested in development.

Stay away from anything labeled Sawfish-2.0 -- it's a prerelease of Sawfish 1.2 that RedHat made the mistake of releasing with RH8. I find Sawfish 1.2 quite usable, though it seems to have some problems with session-management. However,it seems to be in a bit of a transitional phase, as various features are moved out of the arena of graphically-configurable settings (in keeping with the Gnome 2 model of not including useless options) and purely into the realm of expert-user hack-the-sawfishrc-lisp-program-to-customize features. The documentation is trailing this development by quite a bit, unfortunately.

Metacity is good for Windows users. It's a better default than Sawfish was with that ugly Crux theme and the settings it came with in the old gnome defaults. But it's a shame that there's no longer a modern, sophisticated and efficient window manager in the project.

I used to hate Metacity with a passion, but lately, it's overcome its biggest flaws. Most Metacity themes adjust to fit the user's GTK theme flawlessly now, and you can also re-order the titlebar buttons in a way that is independent of the theme you're using. The only real flaw is that the MSW button order is still the default, so you have to change the button order using gconf-editor in order to get something sane (this is what HP has elsewhere derided as a 'fix-my-broken-app' preference). I'm even using Metacity right now, with RedHat's Bluecurve theme, just because my Sawfish setup needs some work before I can go back to it full-time. Mostly I don't even notice it except for some minor nits, and as far as I can tell, that's all Metacity is aiming for.

What I'm actually looking forward to with a bit of anticipation is Openbox 3. It's a total rewrite of OpenBox, and is/will be a fast, lightweight, ICCCM and EWMH compliant window manager with embedded Python scripting. Python is a good language for this kind of thing, and it's widespread in the GNOME development community in a way that lisp isn't. If it turns out as nicely as it promises to, Openbox 3 might make an excellent replacement for sawfish as the advanced, programmable WM for GNOME.

http://www.bluesnews.com/
http://www.shacknews.com/
http://www.slashdot.org/
http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.icculus.org/
http://www.flipcode.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.gouranga.com/
http://curmudgeon.linuxgames.com/
http://icculus.org/fingerdigest.html
http://kerneltrap.org/

No doubt this will be buried into the mass of similar posts before long, but it is a decent format for listing where people generally go...

http://www.bluesnews.com/
http://www.shacknews.com/
http://www.slashdot.org/
http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.icculus.org/
http://www.flipcode.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.gouranga.com/
http://curmudgeon.linuxgames.com/
http://icculus.org/fingerdigest.html
http://kerneltrap.org/

No doubt this will be buried into the mass of similar posts before long, but it is a decent format for listing where people generally go...

Don't you mean http://www.icculus.org/bitstream/ ?

You know how many people are developing games for linux for free? This is a positive motion from LGP. Maybe if they had loads of money they could pay the developers, but either way its a step in a positive direction. I've been working on a game in my part time for the past while, mostly to learn and keep my skills in use. No incentives other than that existed, until maybe now.

Maybe you should encourage them... I've read way to many negative posts on this story.

Quake?
Why is that the only game ever mentioned? I don't even like quake.

Here's a couple hunred of which at least 100 work fine through winex. And many others that are playable but not perfect.

Here's 251 native linux commercial quality games, 250 of which are not quake.

And there are countless others at sites like happypenguin that are free(beer and speech) that could be conisdered not "real" games I guess.

Go spread your FUD somewhere else. Oh nevermind this is slashdot, carry on. lol

A bit like TTYQuake, but being new & up-to-date

http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/aaut

Gary (-;

What's your point?

Return To Castle Wolfenstein is one of the highest selling games of the year and it is just the Quake3 engine with new+more detailed pictures, more complex maps, and a little slower gameplay.

Quake3 is the #1 game because there are many fun game modifications and expansions that use it and are freely available. Quake2 is the same way; ID makes verry scalable games. You would think Quake1 would be long-forgotten, but then you go see the fun at Tenebrae and Dark Places and now you want to run over to EBGames/Babbages/Fry's/Target/{K|Wal}Mart/Yahoo_Au ctions/eBay to buy a new or used Quake1 CDROM.

Quake3 deserves the recognition as #1, but I think the next Good Thing(TM) will be from http://icculus.org

Well, the Build Engine on which Duke Nukem 3D is based is (to some degree) open source, and has been ported to Windows and Linux, but apparently it isn't in a great shape...

Here's list of commercial qaulity linux games, some free some not.

This List is somewhat outdated as there's only 249 on it, but a good source of info.

BTW, nice first post of that troll. Too bad, all the other guys aren't marked as redundant yet.

Um facts to support this? go to www.icculus.org. read the last few news headlines.

next year, instead of that new powerbook, i want THAT!!

What about this image, then - does it imply that we've got Solaris 9 running under Linux?

Right.

I don't say that it's 100% certain that they haven't got the game Americas Army running under Linux, but what about actually getting someone to comment this as well? Some news source or something?

The women working the show are your average marketing department types.

Certainly not the type to read Slashdot... Oops.
Sorry about my lack of spandex at Xiph's booth, but I prefer my black jeans and tee.
There were some cute women out there, and most of the ones I took the time to talk to actually had something intelligent to say. Perhaps you should have hung out at the icculus booth and watched the chicks playing pyDDR. If you don't find bouncing female breasts attractive (and many of the girls I saw even had cute faces to match), then it's quite possible there is no hope for you.

To icculus.org (booth #9): What is it like to be a small organization at a big convention with people like HP, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc? Do people give you any credit for what you are doing?

What about text mode Unreal Tournament? http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/aaut/

In case you didnt hear, Ryan Gordon has a public beta of Serious Sam for Linux up at http://icculus.org/betas/ssam/

You'll be pleased to know that a Linux port is underway.

Here's a sound engine.

Here's a movie player.

I want my client now, please!

The games that are exibiting dynamic lighting are modified releases of the Quake 1 source from ID software! There are about 5 different quake 1 projects that are in active development, but I am only able to post two: ex-Loki employee Ryan Gordon is hosting Dark Places on his www.icculus.org website. Also of note, Ryan Gordon is currently porting games as Battlefield:1942 to Linux and has since finished porting Serious Same:First Encounter to Linux. I recommend visiting the beginning of www.icculus.org for a good list of fun and hardware-strenuous 3d ganes that as well run on linux. But back to dynamic lighting, the only other project I can remember from my immediate L1 memmory is Tenebrae. Tenebrae builds on linux just fine, says someone I can't remember on the tenebrae sourceforge.net help forums. I recommend Dark Places because it is more stable than tenebrae, in my 64bit Alpha platform gaming experience. Still, check Dark Places' screenshots page tenebrae's screenshot page and drool as I did over the pictures. Currently requires graphics hardware with Vertex and Pixel shader technology. Meaning, if you don't have an AGP interface on your motherboard, your only option(albeit a verry good one) is to buy a Radeon 9000 PCI on eBay which is made only by PowerColor

The games that are exibiting dynamic lighting are modified releases of the Quake 1 source from ID software! There are about 5 different quake 1 projects that are in active development, but I am only able to post two: ex-Loki employee Ryan Gordon is hosting Dark Places on his www.icculus.org website. Also of note, Ryan Gordon is currently porting games as Battlefield:1942 to Linux and has since finished porting Serious Same:First Encounter to Linux. I recommend visiting the beginning of www.icculus.org for a good list of fun and hardware-strenuous 3d ganes that as well run on linux. But back to dynamic lighting, the only other project I can remember from my immediate L1 memmory is Tenebrae. Tenebrae builds on linux just fine, says someone I can't remember on the tenebrae sourceforge.net help forums. I recommend Dark Places because it is more stable than tenebrae, in my 64bit Alpha platform gaming experience. Still, check Dark Places' screenshots page tenebrae's screenshot page and drool as I did over the pictures. Currently requires graphics hardware with Vertex and Pixel shader technology. Meaning, if you don't have an AGP interface on your motherboard, your only option(albeit a verry good one) is to buy a Radeon 9000 PCI on eBay which is made only by PowerColor

In other gaming news, I just read over at Linuxgames that there is now a Linux version public beta of Serious Sam the First Encounter. It will even install the game from the cd for you. I tried it, and it runs with no hitches on my AthlonXP 1800+ with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200.

Openbox has font anti-aliasing (with XFree86 4.1+), opaque window moving, and it runs like a champ on a P75 laptop of mine. You can get alpha blending using psuedo-transparent terminal emulators like aterm.

Then you also have drop shadows for window text, multiple workspaces (seems to be standard with every wm nowadays), window snapping and/or edge resistance (which I STILL wish Windows would include by default), and it only consumes a few hundred kbytes of RAM, leaving almost all of a system's resources available to applications.

Ask and ye shall receive. Linux versions of both are imminent from the immensely prolific Ryan C. Gordon. The man's a genius, and deserves your support...

I port video games to Linux for a living, so I am probably qualified to comment on this.

Do NOT optimize for Wine. You probably can't anyhow, since both Win32 (at least, DirectX) and Winelib are moving targets to varying degrees, what works and works well in one version of Wine will not necessarily do so in another.

I think Wine is an excellent piece of work, but I'd imagine even the Wine developers would rather have native Linux applications than emulated win32 apps (and if they don't, they should).

This is doubly true for game development, where you need every CPU cycle you can reasonably get.

Wine, Winelib, and WineX are really meant to be bridges to make Linux more feasible in the short term by letting Win32 programs run in some form, even if they just limp along. They are afterthought solutions to running software that we have no real ability to use, but think we can't do without.

The ideal solution is to write portable code in the first place. Be mindful of what you write, and follow some basic principles:

1) Don't tie yourself to a compiler. If you build on Visual C, take time to build on a different compiler (specifically, GCC) every now and then. Getting code to compile on various platforms is half the battle.

2) Don't tie yourself to a platform's API. Use cross-platform libraries and toolkits where you can, use abstraction layers in your own code where you can't. If you do this right, a good chunk of the porting work is just filling in stubs for a new platform. For game development, you should be looking at Simple Directmedia Layer for most of your needs. Other libraries like my own PhysicsFS can abstract file handling for you. OpenAL can give you 3D positional audio if SDL's stereo output is insufficient, and OpenGL gives you 3D accelerated graphics if SDL's 2D linear framebuffer is insufficient.

3) If PowerPC (MacOS, specifically) is of interest to you, be conscious of byte ordering. Always be conscious of structure packing regardless of platform. If 64-bit platforms (Alpha, Itanium, Hammer) are of interest to you in the future, don't do silly things like cast pointers to ints and such.

4) Don't use assembly code. Ever. If you _must_ use it, you better have a C fallback. Be smart and use NASM on win32 and Linux, so you don't have to deal with the massive differences in inline syntax between Visual Studio and GCC.

If you are more than one developer, the easiest way to do this is to have a devcrew made up of at least one person for each targeted platform. This makes it easy to make sure that things aren't silently breaking on MacOS while you write code for Win32, since that developer will catch it in his next code sync (you _are_ using source revision tools, right?).

Good luck to you.

--ryan.

I port video games to Linux for a living, so I am probably qualified to comment on this.

Do NOT optimize for Wine. You probably can't anyhow, since both Win32 (at least, DirectX) and Winelib are moving targets to varying degrees, what works and works well in one version of Wine will not necessarily do so in another.

I think Wine is an excellent piece of work, but I'd imagine even the Wine developers would rather have native Linux applications than emulated win32 apps (and if they don't, they should).

This is doubly true for game development, where you need every CPU cycle you can reasonably get.

Wine, Winelib, and WineX are really meant to be bridges to make Linux more feasible in the short term by letting Win32 programs run in some form, even if they just limp along. They are afterthought solutions to running software that we have no real ability to use, but think we can't do without.

The ideal solution is to write portable code in the first place. Be mindful of what you write, and follow some basic principles:

1) Don't tie yourself to a compiler. If you build on Visual C, take time to build on a different compiler (specifically, GCC) every now and then. Getting code to compile on various platforms is half the battle.

2) Don't tie yourself to a platform's API. Use cross-platform libraries and toolkits where you can, use abstraction layers in your own code where you can't. If you do this right, a good chunk of the porting work is just filling in stubs for a new platform. For game development, you should be looking at Simple Directmedia Layer for most of your needs. Other libraries like my own PhysicsFS can abstract file handling for you. OpenAL can give you 3D positional audio if SDL's stereo output is insufficient, and OpenGL gives you 3D accelerated graphics if SDL's 2D linear framebuffer is insufficient.

3) If PowerPC (MacOS, specifically) is of interest to you, be conscious of byte ordering. Always be conscious of structure packing regardless of platform. If 64-bit platforms (Alpha, Itanium, Hammer) are of interest to you in the future, don't do silly things like cast pointers to ints and such.

4) Don't use assembly code. Ever. If you _must_ use it, you better have a C fallback. Be smart and use NASM on win32 and Linux, so you don't have to deal with the massive differences in inline syntax between Visual Studio and GCC.

If you are more than one developer, the easiest way to do this is to have a devcrew made up of at least one person for each targeted platform. This makes it easy to make sure that things aren't silently breaking on MacOS while you write code for Win32, since that developer will catch it in his next code sync (you _are_ using source revision tools, right?).

Good luck to you.

--ryan.

UnrealEd has not been ported to linux, and as of now there is no plan to do so. There was some discussion on the mailing list of a community developed port of the Editor, however this was more or less ruled out. Basically they are concerned about releasing documentation on the engine libraries, which change often and would "open up a ton of cheats we couldn't detect" (Ryan C Gordon).

Icculus Quake2
Quake2Forge

Both work with slight tinkering.

Well, if they want to play games other than UT2003, Neverwinter Nights, Doom3, or .. Tuxracer, there's plenty of other free and commericial games available for Linux.

Desktops, web stuff, multimedia and offices suites are already there for Linux. Games hit a little slump when loki went under, but it looks like linux gaming is picking up again.

Any games that require 3D just hang or fail with different errors. (Freespace II complains that you cannot launch it directly and when trying a start with the game's autorun launcher nothing happens)

Umm... You do know that there's an open-source Linux port of Freespace II, right?

You know, you can run Unreal and Hexen II (click on Home Page->Downloads) natively under Linux.

I found the following games work very well:

o Half-Life (Single Player)
o Warcraft II BNE
o Fallout / Fallout2
o Unreal Gold (some hacking required)
o SimEarth
o Hexen II

Installing is often a problem. Sometimes you need to boot to windows, intstall, then copy the whole tree over to linux. Often it is useful to start X in 640x480 mode as well.

My experiences are with vanilla CVS Wine. TransGaming won't accept my debit card, so I haven't subscribed (would like to though).

If only Serious Sam I and II would get supported, my life would be complete! Or maybe
icculus will finish his port someday.

Also, you can now play Hexen II using Anvil of Thyrion which is a native linux client.

Often the free software development model is criticized for simply rebuilding what has been done already. And I feel that the release of the Quake engines and DooM engines have exemplified this very inadequacy.

I had hoped that we would see some really brilliant things come out of the GPL releases of these codebases, and, in reality some very good, cleaned-up clients have been developed. I certainly enjoy the mouselook, higher resolutions, and enhanced levels that have been developed from the DooM engine (see DooMWorld to see the kind of stuff that's out there). The improved QuakeWorld client I'm aware of is pretty nice. And Q^2 has a good Quake 2 client.

But these are just the obvious extensions of what was already done. The community now has (for the most part) all the source and tools that went into making Half-Life, the most successful game to come out of all of these codebases. Yet, to my knowledge, no project has arisen from the community to mold the next such game. How about another story-driven game that people would compare to Deus Ex? Or an all-out action game in the same vein as Soldier of Fortune? Or how about a freaking free software teamplay game that we compare to Counterstrike so that Linux users can play a team-oriented online FPS using free software only and not rely on WINE or WINEX? Or meld two free software projects and connect a Z-machine interpreter with the Quake engine and make a text-command driven story with a 3D view of the action?

These are things that would demonstrate just how momentous and visionary the release of the Quake source under the GPL was. Yet, all the community has managed to come up with is Quake++.

People slam my posts for being negative lately. That I'm ripping on people that have done good work. That's fine, I've got the skin for it. (Try USENET...) I admit that some really find refactoring and coding has gone into redoing the Linux Quake clients. But really, I hear plenty of bitching about how Linux (and other free OS) don't have good games and don't get the attention of the big game companies. Yet, when empowered to do new and exciting things and to make your own games, the group is content to simply recompile Quake for the Zaurus and call it a day. That's good work, for sure, but it's not the kind of work that's going to move free software forward and make it the kind of interesting world that non-free software people take a real interest in.

Again, I'm not making a judgment about the quality of the work that has been done. It's great. But now that you have the best raw materials from John Carmack, can we see real creativity out of the free software gaming world? (FWIW, I think CrystalSpace has done a good job of attracting some interesting new development.)

No need to walk. Just become a Toll Booth Ninja.

What we want to do is learn how a 3D core works, and get some exposure.

The reality is I want to work for NVidia or ATI, and what better way to learn the ropes than to try it yourself.

Its not for mass consumption. So far we have a working board which can plug a monitor into it and render triangles. Further along than I thought I may ever get.

Then again maybe some already large company would like to expand their scope, and bring in what will one day be a complete core.

The reality is, its a learning experience.

Jeff Mrochuk
Manticore

While I'm sure this is an admirable project, I'd much rather see icculus rescue me, and remove the only reason I still have a Windows filesystem: Serious Sam. It'd be nice to get AvP, too, but Serious Sam is the one that counts for me. Yeah, I know it's a volunteer effort, but I'd love to see it deliver anyway.

While I'm sure this is an admirable project, I'd much rather see icculus rescue me, and remove the only reason I still have a Windows filesystem: Serious Sam. It'd be nice to get AvP, too, but Serious Sam is the one that counts for me. Yeah, I know it's a volunteer effort, but I'd love to see it deliver anyway.

As the source of Quake2 has been released, there is now a proper GLX version of Quake2: http://www.icculus.org/quake2/

This guy seems to think that TransGaming is lying:

http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=t heoddone33

It's probably worth saying that just about any story falls into a few of Joseph Campbell's archetypes. Some fit more, some fit less, but no story I'm aware of fits them all. Indeed, some of the archetypes are contradictory.

The notion that Luke Skywalker is a Campbellian hero apparently wasn't talked about until years after A New Hope was made. Still, that doesn't mean there aren't Campbellian elements...Anakin fits this, too. After he becomes Vader and his son overthrows him, it's likely that episodes 7, 8, and 9 would detail Luke's fall to the Dark Side, and another Jedi rising up to defeat him. It's cyclical, but that's part of the myth.

Some of these elements overlap with Spider-Man. Then again, maybe it's just a coming-of-age story with web-slingers. I dunno.

Here's my brief dissertation on the literary value of Spider-Man...hopefully I'll get less flames than Jon Katz. :)

--ryan.

It'd be really nice if games were ported/developed for linux.

Except they are.

Sure, lately fewer are available, but still some are being released.