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Nope. What I described was a collaboration between artists and programmers as a game development team - the team produces the game, and then the programmers make the source libre for the good of the game itself. And there's more than art out there - level design, for instance, or level scripting are all places where the programmers can help in the assembly of the game files themselves. The engine should be open source, and the part that makes it the specific game that it is, the artistic components, stay the part that makes the money.

Hmm, it occurs to me that they had better tested against XFree86 4.0 since that's a big step towards hardware acceleration support. For the right graphics boards the Linux numbers should have been a lot more like the W98 numbers (extrapolating from Q3A) as can be seen here though it seems the Voodoo fares better under 3.3.6 for now but the latter article also hints at how much can still be done for Voodoo support under linux.

What amazes me most in the article is how BeOS compares very well against windows. I'm really looking forward to a Q3A comparison of BeOS, Linux/XFree86 4.0 and W98 in a few months (best by some neutral agency) when Q3A is there for BeOS, more graphic cards are supported and XFree86 4.X has shed some bugs.

Although I agree that BeOS has a screaming advantage over Windows or Linux, it's the Windows/Linux difference that disturbs me.
Seeing as they used Corel Linux, they probably did not bother getting any real hardware state-of-the-art Linux drivers. The reason for this is not just Linux-trolling!
The Linux Games article compared Linux and Windows performance, and got much better results for Windows vs. Linux.

Actually.... there is the distinct possibility that a Microsoft space sim will be ported:

http://www.linuxgames.com/followup/23 08.shtml

Work on a Linux port for the old Sierra games (actually, the SCI interpreter that drives them) is in progress. Check out The FreeSCI Project (of which I am a proud member :-)

In my case, I'm working on a novel to tie in with an open source game being developed named Adonthell. When completed, the work will be available for free in plain text format at the Adonthell site. So I'll have immediate contact with the people I most want to read my book.

But this doesn't prevent a Dead Tree version being published, and in fact enjoying an audience. Simply put, the DT edition should have some sort of value independent of the online text version. I have settled on having interior illustrations and a bonus short story, but other writers may have other ideas. Unusual formats, added bonuses (say, a sheet of stickers or something) and other little extras not only make a book interesting and draw welcome attention, but they also help distinguish it from the free online version, and thus everyone's happy.

[...]3dfx's drivers proved to be very fast even without direct hardware access.

That's wrong, in a recent review on linuxgames , 3DFX scored last against Matrox, Nvidia and others in the speed comparison between the windows drivers and the linux drivers.

---
guillaume

I would like to point out to the vindictive moderators and flamers that the article specifically talks about how it uses WINDOWS 98. Not NT. Not Win2k.

Many thanks to those who noticed this, and pointed out the details of the way windows works with DOS.

Thanks also to those who actually READ THE ARTICLE.

Supposedly free- loads of rumors to that effect.
One box handles Windows, MacOS, and Linux- it'll be guaranteed to be on the store shelves everywhere if they get the right channels selling it.
It was developed under all OSes simultaneously.

It's got a LOT of potential- and I've been eagerly awaiting it for several months now. Now I know what to hint at for Father's Day or my Birthday now... :-)

Oh, you might want to hit Linux Games on a periodic basis- they track this sort of thing.

Unfortunately, I think this author is not very experienced in this field. First of all, last year's E3 was MUCH more promising on the Linux front. Many new titles announced, and a lot of enthusiasm on the part of the companys towards linux. (see my review of last years show at http://linuxgames.com/e3expo.shtml). Second, Blender has been around for a long time. It is a great application with a large user base. Thier new stab at game developers with Blender 2.0 (aka Gameblender) is just a try at some more professional marketshare. Best luck to you Ian! Another interesting thing of note at the show was the Halo 3d engine from Bungie. There is a chance that it may be crossplatformable and that would be great. I was BLOWN AWAY by their demo.

I work in this industry and can shed some light on whats happening here. First of all, some of the PC game industry has been put aside for a little while to make room for Playstation 2. This is what contributed to a poor show this year. As you walk into the PC hall of the show, a gigantic 40'x40' screen greets you as it shows games that EA will be releasing on PS2. Most of the PC hall was this way as well. The biggest attraction this year in the PC hall was by far, the trailer that was played in the Konami booth ever hour on the hour for Metal Gear Solid 2 on Playstation 2. The is indicative of the state of the PC game industry. Right now, the PC's just arent as fast as the PS2 and everything is going to be released for it in the near future. This is not a bad thing at all, but it does explain why there was less enthusiasm towards linux PC games.

Problem 2: The show was disorganized. I blame this on the show producers (IDG I think). There were too many Console related titles being show in the PC hall and a couple of PC exhibits that didnt belong in the console hall. It made things confusing and disorienting.

I have to say that even the developers of these games need to be more aware of the linux situation. I am involved with the Sony PS2 developer support team. I was saddened to hear that after a large push by Sony to thrust Linux at developers (their dev kit uses linux tools they created), it has been not well received. The developers for the most part, especially in Europe, did not accept linux as thier new development environment. That is to say, most of them have opted to develop on their windows machines and then use a frontend that was written to the dev kit to send compile commands to their Linux box and thus to the dev kit. Sony's lack of linux experience didnt make it any easier for the developers to make the transition, but it is still a disappointing situation.

As far as PC games go, I think we are going to have to rely mostly on Loki to keep dishing out the quality ports for now. Users need to keep loki afloat by buying their games. Better 3d sound, hardware, and input device support for linux would also help stir some development. What we really need is the developers that like to use Linux to get out and promote it to their collegues. Not everyone is a John Carmack or Tim Sweeny.

BTW, I will be posting a ton of pictures from E3 at my website in the next day or two. Check back for the URL.

http://www.linuxgames.com/articles /linux3dcards/

These new drivers from NVIDIA are really quite remarkable. While the stability is still not perfect (as noted by crashes of Q3A after changing resolution or graphics settings, as well as other glitches), the performance is fantastic. At first glance, these drivers seems to be nearly as fast (if not faster) than the Windows drivers on comparable hardware. (We'll be taking the time to get some results to see if this is indeed true later this week, so stay tuned.)

But, and as a Linux user I must mention this, the drivers are not open source as with the drivers for 3dfx, ATI, and Matrox cards. Further, they don't use the DRI as developed by Precision Insight and incorporated into XFree86 4.0. Among other things, this means that when XFree86 changes slightly or when a bug is discovered, users of these drivers may be left waiting for NVIDIA to release a fix. While that's not a show-stopping limitation, it is worth noting. Further, the only drivers I've seen so far are for Linux running on Intel/AMD hardware. This leaves out several other groups out that might otherwise be included with open source drivers. Those include users of any of the BSD variants, users of Linux on PowerPC, and users of Linux on Alpha hardware. In theory, all of these can be supported with open source drivers, but for now will be dependent on NVIDIA if they ever want drivers in the first place. Also, from a philosophical point of view, many Linux users may want the drivers to be open source. I know I'd like to see NVIDIA embrace the open source movement, but from a practical point of view I can't deny that, at least with these initial drivers, they're doing well without being open.

These new drivers from NVIDIA are really quite remarkable. While the stability is still not perfect (as noted by crashes of Q3A after changing resolution or graphics settings, as well as other glitches), the performance is fantastic. At first glance, these drivers seems to be nearly as fast (if not faster) than the Windows drivers on comparable hardware. (We'll be taking the time to get some results to see if this is indeed true later this week, so stay tuned.)

But, and as a Linux user I must mention this, the drivers are not open source as with the drivers for 3dfx, ATI, and Matrox cards. Further, they don't use the DRI as developed by Precision Insight and incorporated into XFree86 4.0. Among other things, this means that when XFree86 changes slightly or when a bug is discovered, users of these drivers may be left waiting for NVIDIA to release a fix. While that's not a show-stopping limitation, it is worth noting. Further, the only drivers I've seen so far are for Linux running on Intel/AMD hardware. This leaves out several other groups out that might otherwise be included with open source drivers. Those include users of any of the BSD variants, users of Linux on PowerPC, and users of Linux on Alpha hardware. In theory, all of these can be supported with open source drivers, but for now will be dependent on NVIDIA if they ever want drivers in the first place. Also, from a philosophical point of view, many Linux users may want the drivers to be open source. I know I'd like to see NVIDIA embrace the open source movement, but from a practical point of view I can't deny that, at least with these initial drivers, they're doing well without being open.

I have the installation FAQ in front of me, and it's a long and careful list of things to do. From a quick scan, it looks like people of a nervous disposition should think twice before going down this list - making a quick backup of your current Xfree installation might not be a bad idea, or at least keep the old Xfree86 rpms at hand in case of crisis. Beyond that, it looks like it may conflict a bit with Mesa, so those modules need to be deleted or renamed as well (all in the FAQ).

For a speed comparison under the new drivers, Linux Games has a First Look up which gives me hope that I'll finally see some speed on my TNT2 card!

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

here
--

Station Terminus, the main fansite for the game. Read the latest news post here on how to actually get the limited edition, it's not enought to just pre-order it from the store! (you need to send in an email).

a bunch of screenshots at LinuxGames.

ATFW's Terminus databank entry, lots of info. There's some *really* good MP3 tracks from the game there as well.

I pre-ordered my copy last week and I'm already on the first 100 list, can't wait to play it!

Also, what isn't mentioned in the writeup or in the (rather old) preview that was linked to is that this game will ship with binaries for Windows, Linux (x86) and Macintosh in the box.

Some of the main features are a newtonian physics engine, lots of ship customization features, a half dynamic, half scripted campaign mode that can be played in both single and multiplayer; three different careers to choose from,...

Check out this benchmarking of something more important to us, done by a linux site.

Cheers!

JimD

I think starting with the closed team worked well, because it got it off the ground and released in a very organized and clean fashion. Then when the source was opened, a huge number of requested features started getting put in there. There's a BeOS port (it's slow, though), and some people are supposedly working on a Linux port. There's also an OpenGL driver somewhere around there.

The major caveat I found when working with it was that it's (IMO) poorly documented. Some people are working on docs, but I really haven't seen anything but stuff generated from symbols (which I could easily look in the headers for). I got too frustrated trying to figure out initialization order for the components. Like working with DirectX without the help reference. =p

I love their editor, though. Very nice, and a huge improvement over the one they had for Genesis. I'm still figuring out Crystal Space's MazeD.

Look at Crystal Space. It's an LGPL'd 3D engine, which means you can use it in any software as long as you release all the changes you've made to Crystal Space under the LGPL. It's also very much cross platform, supporting Linux, general Unix, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, BeOS, NextStep, OpenStep, MacOS/X Server, DOS, and Macintosh, using OpenGL, Direct3D, or software rendering.

Jeez, people are tripping over themselves to give the things away. You wouldn't want be relying on this to pay the rent, would you?

Obligatory Crystal Space link.

Commentary on all this vs LithTech (USD250,000 I understand), UnrealEngine (USD Loads), and Quake 3 engine (I dread to think how much) would be appreciated.

Oh! And another. So many engines, so little time.

Dave :)

BTW, this got rejected - is Cyrix's website still broken?

If they were following how large games were, they would of ported Diablo, Baldurs Gate, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament.

Actually, UT has already been ported, it's loads of fun to play, and plays better on my Linux box at home than my NT box at work. (Interestingly, you can even play most of the Unreal levels using UT under Linux.)

The rest are Blizzard games, as already noted, and Blizzard has been quite reluctant to allow ports of their games until the sales results of other games justify it.

Nope. The TNT drivers that compile with XFree86 are under the XFree86 license, the Mesa component is GPL'd.

On further investigation, you may be correct that the glx.o may be provided with the other material. Hard to tell, because there's not much direction provided with it (and it looks like it needs to be untarr'd over an existing XF86 install).

However, the current indications are that the future for nVidia is closed driver stuff -- read the report at LinuxGames or check out the interview with Scott Draeker (or this response and the subsequent thread).

Please prove that wrong. I'd like to think better of them, but my experience to date has been pretty doggone negative. Sad, too, because the card performs very well and looks very nice under NT.

From what I can tell from talking to Michael Vance, the standard is as neutral as, say, OpenGL. That is to say, we're not in a position to say that OpenGL is geared more towards NVIDIA cards than towards 3dfx or ATI cards. OpenAL has been designed in the same spirit and should favor no hardware over another, in principle.

Now, if one company has hardware support for more features than another, it may seem as though the API is geared more towards the former hardware than the latter, but that's not the fault of the API.

matt
Writer, Linux Games

Linux is getting closer as far as software support (such as StarOffice/KOffice, etc.) but it has a ways to go as far as making drivers easy to handle for people. Even my parents and siblings can handle the most basic driver work in Windows such as installing or uninstalling drives or a scanner or printer, etc. - but even engine gods like Carmack can have troubles with Linux drivers.

THE Carmack and Bernd Kreimeier (of Loki software, the guys with the mad porting skillz) talked about this on the Utah-GLX driver list. They have a copy of the exchange on LinuxGames for Sunday the fifth.

If only there were more big games for Linux and then I'd have no reason to have a hard drive with Windows on it. Yeah, we have Quake and all the sequals (or their all coming soon), and we have a few more. But, frankly, I don't like Quake. I'm just not a action-shooter person. (I play them every once in a while, but not much).

Thankfuly, theres the linuxgames.com project. If it weren't for them, I don't think there would be any hope ;).

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Linux
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MacOS
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Windows
Mirror list on www.3dfiles.com
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Here's a list of mirrors, straight from the site since it looks like they're going to get slashdotted pretty soon.

Windows
File size: 18MB
README
Local server (Vienna/Austria)
Mirror list on www.3dfiles.com
Mirror provided by www.atfw.net
Mirror provided by www.gxp.de
Mirror provided by www.newsbytez.com

MacOS
File size: 17.8MB
README
Local server (Vienna/Austria)
Mirror provided by www.insidemacgames.com
Mirror provided by www.macupdate.com
Mirror provided by www.gxp.de
Mirror provided by www.newsbytez.com
Mirror provided by www.atfw.net

Linux (x86)
File size: 16.9MB
README
Local server (Vienna/Austria)
Mirrorprovided by www.atfw.net
Mirror provided by www.linuxgames.com
Mirror provided by www.gxp.de
Mirrorwww.newsbytez.com

Linux
Mirror provided by www.atfw.net
Mirror provided by www.linuxgames.com
Mirror provided by www.gxp.de
Mirror provided by www.newsbytez.com
MacOS
Mirror provided by www.insidemacgames.com
Mirror provided by www.macupdate.com
Mirror provided by www.gxp.de
Mirror provided by www.newsbytez.com
Mirror provided by www.atfw.net
Windows
Mirror list on www.3dfiles.com
Mirror provided by www.atfw.net
Mirror provided by www.gxp.de
Mirror provided by www.newsbytez.com

Hey if anyone is interested in Rumors like this my message-board for the Loki Portal page a has a Rumor Section. So check it out! Go to the Loki Portal Page!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of

According to this interview (and lots of news at LinuxGames (search for Tribes)), Tribes 2 is being ported to Linux by the development team.

In case anyone is interested, back in June 99, I visited E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in LA on behalf of Linuxgames.com. E3 is where the next year of gaming and beyond is revealed by most game companies. I went and interviewed as many vendors as I could and hounded them about Linux. There is a VERY detailed write-up of my findings at http://linuxgames.com/e3expo.shtml. Makes for very good reading, and even though it is 6 months old, it gives a very thorough overview of Linux Gaming.

Regards,

matt

Regards,

matt

You like 6502? Check this out. 6502 to x86 JIT compiler.

I saw this first on the linuxgames.com website: pre-order s for a Loki port of Heavy Gear 2. Finally, some killer action games! (I like strategy games, and I know they were the easiest to port, but I was waiting for some action. [sorry, I just don't dig the quake-style FPS games, although I know those are 'action' too...])

yeah, its called www.linuxgames.com

I don't visit it too much but it seems pretty cool


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Well we have known about Heavy Gear2 and SOF but these new one's sound great! Guess Im gunna have to add them to my site. Anyone interested in helping me make webpages for these game check my site out and email me!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of

At crystal.linuxgames.com there is a very good open-source 3D gaming engine. It is quite far along. Looks like this discussion ended a long time ago, though.

Can someone please post either here or on the Loki Portal Page message-board under drivers/gl? Im eager to get a GeForce!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of

www.linuxgames.com

oh but have a look at if u didnt do that already and check out that old article about the plan to persuade Westwood into Open-Sourcing Command & Conquer1. Now THAT would be something cool to see happen.

Definately worth a look (and maybe even an e-mail)

few aspiring programmers can take all of that code and begin development on some true Virtual Reality software

Try Crystal Space

FWIW, the Genesis3D SDK is in violation of the Open Source definition. While it does indeed make its source code available, the licensing terms are fairly restrictive, so it is not free software.
A much cooler project is Crystal Space, the LGPL'd cross-platform multi-API 3D game engine. It's nowhere nearly as complete as Genesis, but shows a lot of promise. I suspect today's announcement will be a boon to CS, since any of the code in Quake can now go into CS.

I think FastGL does just that. Mabey you should read linuxgames.com more often. :-)

=======================
== Section 11. ==
== MESSAGE OF THE DAY==
=======================

When Quake 3 Arena starts a map up, it sends the GL_RENDERER string to the Message Of The Day server at id. This responds back with a message of the day to the client. If you wish to switch this option off, set CL_MOTD to 0 (+set CL_MOTD 0 from the command line).

I hope this allows the paranoid to play Q3 safely again... :)

i did read somewhere, Linux Games dot com i think thatt he euro version was made with linux binaries, they mentioned gtvalue.com ill try track down the exact story and post it here..

Hey guys I run http://loki.linuxgames.comand I think that this could give all of a chance to prove that there is a market for Linux. Now that DiabloII is delayed maybe there is a chance to get Loki in the picture to start porting the game. That way we will have a Linux Version on Shelf at the same time as the Windows version. I'm willing to put up a page to sign a petition to port Diablo II to Linux. If anyone can help me out here...please email me! I need someone to help out on the news section and the Petition! Natas natas@linuxgames.com

A solid, stable, pretty, glitzy GUI is needed first.
As many have mentioned before, see KDE or WindowMaker or Enlightenment w/ Gnome

The OS needs to be usable to a new user - on the same level as Windows.
Again, see above comment, and Corel Linux
Linux needs to be easy to install, easy to uninstall, able to sense hardware without the user needing to open the PC to read numbers off of chips.
Yet again, see Corel Linux
Linux needs to support the latest and greatest hardware, like USB (USB2), firewire, parallel port scanners, WinModems...
Again, see.... er.. wait. Damn, we don't have these. Linux needs to have GAMES!
See Linux Game Tome and Linux Games and Loki Games
End see

Definitely agreed. Linux (or rather, the open source development model in general), can have a profound and beneficial effect on the quality and innovativeness of games. Games on Linux are great and welcome, but if we're still not able to mold and shape them into new forms, we're losing out on a lot of potential.

So in addition to supporting GUI development, web development, driver development, et al., don't forget about FreeCiv, WorldForge, CrystalSpace, and the like. :-)