Slashdot Mirror

swillden asks: "I need to package up some commercial Linux software for multiple distributions (Red Hat Enterprise 3 and 4, Fedora, Novell Desktop, SuSE Professional and Enterprise, Mandrake and Debian), and I'm wondering what tools others have found useful. The software is closed source and needs to be very easy to install. This has been an ongoing problem for commercial software on Linux for some time. Has there been any progress?" "So far, the options I'm looking into are:

1. Create distribution-specific packages using each distribution's tools. Nice in lots of ways, but a lot of work for ~11 different distributions.
2. Use a commercial cross-distro installer like InstallShield. This is what the previous developers chose.
3. Use one of the open source cross-distro installers, like autopackage or Loki.
4. Write a custom installer.

I really would like to provide distro-specific packages, to make use of the native dependency management solutions and to make the software fit nicely into each system, but implementing, testing and supporting all of those installers may be too costly. It may also exclude any other Linux distributions unnecessarily.

I don't like the current InstallShield installer for multiple reasons. First, it's written in Java which is fine except that it can only run if a JRE is present. Requiring users to install a JRE so they can run the installer to install a (non-Java) product is really annoying. Also, it doesn't really know how to do any proper dependency management, so the developers had to take the approach of installing everything that might be required, often duplicating tools that might already be on the system, and sometimes even creating conflicts. Obviously this approach doesn't integrate with the native package management at all.

The Loki installer has some of the same limitations as InstallShield, but it doesn't require Java and it's very scriptable, so I could probably write code to do the dependency checking and be smarter about what to install.

Autopackage looks very interesting, and I'm going to take all of the docs with me to read on a flight this afternoon. However, I'm concerned that it may be unstable, as it's just reached a 1.0 release.

Finally, I could always just write an installer from scratch, but that may be even more work than creating all the distro-specific packages."

Slashback is back, with a largish handful of updates and new information about previously run stories. Topics this go-round include Xbox sales in Australia, the Novell / MySQL connection, Adam Smith (no, not that Adam Smith)'s bizarre anti-GPL statement mentioned yesterday, and more. Read on for the details.

I thought Adam Smith was in favor of free markets and the exchange of ideas. mrjive writes "The plot thickens. In response to yesterday's story, it turns out that the attack on the free software movement was attached to the end of the letter in question by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash, who happens to have Microsoft as his biggest beneficiary. The original authors of the letter have sent an angry response for essentially twisting its original purpose. Read the full scoop here."

For the even-fuller scoop, see Roblimo's article on NewsForge.

Not bottling it up inside of himself. An anonymous reader writes "Richard M. Stallman has responded to comments made a week ago in response to his own Linux kernel mailing list post about the BitKeeper controversy. 'A technical issue or project sometimes raises ethical issues,' Stallman began. He did not stop there. More on the (newly cached and therefore a little bit Slashdot-immune) Linux and Main . Be gentle."

Free knowledge for sale for free, etc. OverCode@work writes "The complete LaTeX source to Loki Software's game programming book, Programming Linux Games, is now available on the author's site. This book was reviewed here a while back. Mad props to the publisher for letting this happen."

Everybody'sSQL haggar writes "MySQL (commercial license) will be shipped as standard with NetWare according to this announcement. I consider it a follow-up to the Slashdot story about the PostgreSQL port for NetWare. Apparently, the options for NetWare users are widening, thanks to open-source products!"

An iBook in every (lobster)pot! Call Me Black Cloud writes "Some time ago Maine awarded a contract to Apple for laptops for school kids. MacCentral has an interview with Maine governor Angus King where he discusses the success of the program. Despite the Maine state legislature's attempts to kill the program, it continues on. Why? Well, a $1M grant from the Gates Foundation certainly helped. Over the summer Apple delivered 18,000 iBooks and installed 239 wireless networks in 239 schools."

So long as they're not mandatory. Polo writes "I noticed that the Garmin Rino 110 and 120 are shipping. If you don't remember, these are FRS/GMRS Radios with integrated GPS. You can transmit your position to other units so they can hear you and see where you are. Pretty cool. This is a follow-up to an older story"

What the market will bear. His Nastiness writes "Just a follow-up that I ran across that indicates that Steve Ballmer may have just been blowing hot air on not selling the XBox in Austrailia anymore. See the previous thread here."

Al "Alkini" Koskelin writes: "Matt Matthews, with the help of the LinuxGames staff and some ex-employees of Loki, has put together a Loki timeline. The timeline is an attempt to document every major event in Loki's past, starting with the announcement of SDL and the Launch of the Loki Website through today, when Loki is officially ceasing operations." They're also looking for more information to make the timeline more complete.

nicku writes: "According to this email to retailers that was leaked, LokiGames is closing on January 31. I'm sad to see them go, I own 3 of their excellent ports..."

xwred1 writes: "Loki has announced a new port today, up to now known as "Secret Project Q": They are going Postal! Press release is here, and the game product page/overview is here. Seems to be a healthy sign of life from Loki, they are obviously still getting good things done despite the chapter 11."

xwred1 writes: "Loki has announced a new port today, up to now known as "Secret Project Q": They are going Postal! Press release is here, and the game product page/overview is here. Seems to be a healthy sign of life from Loki, they are obviously still getting good things done despite the chapter 11."

Long-suffering Slashdot reader WrinkledShirt contributes this review of John Hall's Programming Linux Games, and lays out the good and the bad in a book that's one of the few of its kind. More games are always good -- hopefully books like this one will spark some inspiration.

Programming Linux Games author John Hall pages 415 publisher No Starch Press rating 7.5 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 1-886411-49-2 summary Well-written guide to a wide range of game-writing tools for Linux, but not a definitive reference work for any single task.

Introduction

The potential for linux gaming has really exploded in the last couple of years. In many cases, the potential has been realized -- Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3000, Tribes 2, Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and many other successful Windows titles, have all been brought to Linux, with Loki leading the charge. Judging by the bottom line, there's a definite shortage of true cash-cow success stories in this enigmatic part of the industry, and hence, a shortage of good reference material for naive people hoping to produce that next cash cow.

However, we've reached such a point of critical mass of knowledge and technology that books had to start appearing sometime. So, despite the fact that there's no overwhelming market demand for Linux games and a high ratio of hobbyists to dedicated game developers for the OS, here we have a book aiming at taking amateur Linux game development to the next level.

However, much of the technology out there for game programming in Linux is still heavily in development, with many of the APIs and libraries still a long way away from a 1.0 release. Allegro and Clanlib are a couple of exceptions to this trend -- both are popular APIs that sadly don't get much more than a passing mention in the book. Their sexier counterpart, Sam Lantinga's SDL, gets a fair amount of treatment (no surprise there, considering John Hall was the lead author for a team based within Loki) -- but even this fairly feature-complete library, which Loki uses to port its games over from Windows, isn't explored in its entirety.

Instead, there are also crash courses in BSD sockets, package management, TCL, the framebuffer and various sound APIs, and what we end up with here is the consummate cookbook, a jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none tome that introduces us to a wide variety of Linux gaming topics while stopping short of being a definitive reference for any of them. Such is John Hall's work, an interesting, wide-ranging introduction to game programming for an operating system that few believed was capable of it not too long ago.

John Hall, an experienced game developer, participated in Loki's Civilization, Call to Power game hack, and is currently working for Treyarch developing that company's Spider-Man title for the PS2.

The Good

As far as cookbooks go, this is a good one, and there isn't much concerning Linux game API programming that isn't touched on. There's an ongoing case study (Penguin Warrior) that is developed over the course of the book. Each chapter introduces a fairly deep concept, gives a decent function reference related to the concept, then incorporates the knowledge into proof-of-concept code, and then uses the new-found knowledge to enrich the case study. The tone is straightforward and the execution is solid. The final game works well enough to give confidence that the reader could take the knowledge in this book and apply it to his or her own project, either to add new features or re-think old ones.

The book is also well-written -- the sample code is extremely well-commented and good error-handling is in place. He makes no assumptions about the knowledge of the reader, dealing with such introductory topics in Linux programming as vi vs Emacs, the FSH and make, although he never gets annoying or patronizing. *cough cough* LaMothe *cough*

Individual chapters stand out as being great introductory resources for material that doesn't have much in the way of documentation. The important aspects of SDL get good treatment in one complete and comprehensive unit. There's also a thorough chapter on audio programming, comparing and contrasting OpenAL, OSS, ALSA, Ogg Vorbis, and ESD (among others), and all this after showing off SDL's sound capabilities one chapter earlier. Many of the pitfalls associated with each of the different technologies, as well as the pitfalls of sound programming in general, are covered here. It's a great jumping-off point for those who don't know much about the audio end of things.

There's even a really neat chapter on incorporating TCL script interpretation within a program written in C. For anyone who's had trouble throwing together their own text parser for initialization scripts, or who's fed up with the constant recompiles needed when tweaking for the most arbitrary of changes of the game's AI, the information in this chapter is a godsend. In the Penguin Warrior case study, it's almost spooky how effective TCL turns out to be in making the computer ship chase and evade the human player.

Finally, I want to reiterate the effective use of the case study, Penguin Warrior. Having seen the way other game programming texts handle using samples to illustrate game programming concepts -- which is often a mish-mash, to say the least -- the way this book approached the issue is refreshing: there's one major project, and each chapter brings us closer to that project's completion. The code works as intended and goes a long way to convince the reader that the libraries and techniques explored in this book are near-commercial-level quality. (Networked games turned out to be choppy on my machine, but that was the only real black mark I could find in the program's execution.) If nothing else, John Hall deserves a good deal of thanks for proving that game development on Linux is a realistic and rewarding endeavor.

The Not So Good

At times, the generalist nature of the book left me wondering if Hall couldn't have gone just a little bit further in some of the topics. There's a decent enough synopsis about deployment using Loki's install tool, as well as packaging in general, although nothing related to the Penguin Warrior game itself, so we don't get to see the theory in practice as much as it could have been. Also, he teases us by early on by starting with the compiler, moving to the make utility, talking a bit about package management, and then mentions automake, but he stops short of really explaining how to bring that into an existing project. Considering all the fun little dependencies needed for multimedia programming in Linux, this would have been a valuable bit of information for anyone not used to deploying on the platform.

Another instance of this so-close-yet-so-far approach occurs when he talks about incorporating Mesa into an SDL program. He tantalizes us with a code sample illustrating how to use the SDL as a replacement for glut, but that's all -- the material doesn't really get deep enough to convince readers that a 3D neophyte really can abandon glut for the SDL, particularly when many OpenGL reference materials out there rely heavily on glut as a teaching aid for windowing and other utility functions. Loki primarily used SDL to handle its 3D utility programming, so at least we know it's possible, but given the exploding popularity of 3D games it's too bad this wasn't covered more.

It's sometimes hard to tell exactly who the book is intended for. The introductory chapters include discussions on topics such as the different gaming genres out there, despite the fact that game programming hopefuls who don't know that Quake is a first-person shooter must make up a really narrow audience. Also, it's almost enough to give one whiplash to see how quickly he dives into using ioctl() when only a couple of chapters earlier he was explaining the basics of using gcc. Next up soon after that? Strap yourself in, we'll be writing straight to /dev/fb0! It's almost comical to think about how much dangerous knowledge a newbie's been given over the course of the book. Still, like I said earlier, he never talks down to the reader, who because of this might feel compelled against better judgement to be whisked along into subject matter that really needs other support material to be of any real use.

Hall's a humble enough guy, which is great insofar as writing style is concerned, but in one of the last chapters, he starts questioning some of the choices he made while coding Penguin Warrior throughout the book. Specifically, he says he probably should have used C++ instead of C, Scheme instead of TCL, and UDP instead of TCP for the networking, and this is cold comfort for people who would have hoped that the author would have picked the best plan of attack from the beginning. That said, C, TCL, and TCP are appropriate choices due to the simplicity of execution and the fact that they introduce useful techniques from a design point of view. Still, there's no point giving readers a sense of wistful "What if?" if you don't have to. It also highlights that this book is more a beginner's API reference than a game programming book per se.

To take that point further, there also really isn't much in the way of abstract game programming theory. This book could have really distinguished itself as special if some content related strictly to game development was here. There's a mention of Gamasutra here, a method of quick division there, the equation of a distance from a point to a line thrown into the mix, and that's pretty much all there is. Topics not really covered include optimization, pathfinding, and cracker-proofing your code, and what is talked about on the subjects of artificial intelligence design, collision detection, and physics is all rudimentary ... For coverage on these sorts of topics, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Finally, and this is really not the fault of the author or the book, but one wonders if the time was right for much of this material -- or, at the very least, its highly generalist approach. DRI is making its presence felt, the various audio APIs out there are improving all the time, and the LSB is coming along nicely, but until there's a proven and stable multimedia base to work from, no definitive guide can be written, and this sort of organized dogpile is really the best we can hope for with so much stuff to cover. The SDL is a top-notch library for graphics programming, and it's likely an entire book could have been spent strictly on graphics programming using it, and the depth that such a book could have attained far surpasses what we're given here. Plus, in a year from now, who knows where any of these sound APIs will be? Of course, these might prove to be just esoteric issues in the grand scheme of this book.

Conclusion

Despite the criticisms I have of this book, I really don't want the message that is conveyed here to be anything but positive. There's a lot working for this book -- the chapters on SDL, sound programming and incorporating TCL and C are excellent, and will be especially helpful for people who are novices in these areas. Considering the alternatives (hitting dryly-written online docs or constantly shaking your Google to see what falls out), this book is a very attractive option. Programming a fully-functional multiplayer game would probably require more effort than might be suggested by the brevity of the chapter on socket programming, but that chapter is a solid introduction as well. The book as a whole is well-written and succeeds for the most part in its endeavor to make the best of a chaotic situation. I'd recommend this book to anybody who appreciates the messy-kitchen style of learning, or to anyone with decent hacking skills who just needs to break the ice when it comes to the Linux game APIs. And even though it gets slightly schizophrenic in its attempt to be both an introductory text and a definitive reference, this is the sort of book that could kickstart a new movement in Linux game development.

Table of Contents (exploded version here)

1. The Anatomy of a Game
2. Linux Development Tools
3. Linux Gaming APIs
4. Mastering SDL
5. Linux Audio Programming
6. Game Scripting Under Linux
7. Networked Gaming with Linux
8. Gaming with the Linux Console
9. Finishing Penguin Warrior
10. To Every Man a Linux Distribution

• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography

Related Links

Sample Code
No Starch Press
Loki
SDL (List of SDL games)
OpenAL
DRI
Mesa
libsndfile
Gamasutra

You can purchase this book from Fatbrain.

Long-suffering Slashdot reader WrinkledShirt contributes this review of John Hall's Programming Linux Games, and lays out the good and the bad in a book that's one of the few of its kind. More games are always good -- hopefully books like this one will spark some inspiration.

Programming Linux Games author John Hall pages 415 publisher No Starch Press rating 7.5 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 1-886411-49-2 summary Well-written guide to a wide range of game-writing tools for Linux, but not a definitive reference work for any single task.

Introduction

The potential for linux gaming has really exploded in the last couple of years. In many cases, the potential has been realized -- Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3000, Tribes 2, Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and many other successful Windows titles, have all been brought to Linux, with Loki leading the charge. Judging by the bottom line, there's a definite shortage of true cash-cow success stories in this enigmatic part of the industry, and hence, a shortage of good reference material for naive people hoping to produce that next cash cow.

However, we've reached such a point of critical mass of knowledge and technology that books had to start appearing sometime. So, despite the fact that there's no overwhelming market demand for Linux games and a high ratio of hobbyists to dedicated game developers for the OS, here we have a book aiming at taking amateur Linux game development to the next level.

However, much of the technology out there for game programming in Linux is still heavily in development, with many of the APIs and libraries still a long way away from a 1.0 release. Allegro and Clanlib are a couple of exceptions to this trend -- both are popular APIs that sadly don't get much more than a passing mention in the book. Their sexier counterpart, Sam Lantinga's SDL, gets a fair amount of treatment (no surprise there, considering John Hall was the lead author for a team based within Loki) -- but even this fairly feature-complete library, which Loki uses to port its games over from Windows, isn't explored in its entirety.

Instead, there are also crash courses in BSD sockets, package management, TCL, the framebuffer and various sound APIs, and what we end up with here is the consummate cookbook, a jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none tome that introduces us to a wide variety of Linux gaming topics while stopping short of being a definitive reference for any of them. Such is John Hall's work, an interesting, wide-ranging introduction to game programming for an operating system that few believed was capable of it not too long ago.

John Hall, an experienced game developer, participated in Loki's Civilization, Call to Power game hack, and is currently working for Treyarch developing that company's Spider-Man title for the PS2.

The Good

As far as cookbooks go, this is a good one, and there isn't much concerning Linux game API programming that isn't touched on. There's an ongoing case study (Penguin Warrior) that is developed over the course of the book. Each chapter introduces a fairly deep concept, gives a decent function reference related to the concept, then incorporates the knowledge into proof-of-concept code, and then uses the new-found knowledge to enrich the case study. The tone is straightforward and the execution is solid. The final game works well enough to give confidence that the reader could take the knowledge in this book and apply it to his or her own project, either to add new features or re-think old ones.

The book is also well-written -- the sample code is extremely well-commented and good error-handling is in place. He makes no assumptions about the knowledge of the reader, dealing with such introductory topics in Linux programming as vi vs Emacs, the FSH and make, although he never gets annoying or patronizing. *cough cough* LaMothe *cough*

Individual chapters stand out as being great introductory resources for material that doesn't have much in the way of documentation. The important aspects of SDL get good treatment in one complete and comprehensive unit. There's also a thorough chapter on audio programming, comparing and contrasting OpenAL, OSS, ALSA, Ogg Vorbis, and ESD (among others), and all this after showing off SDL's sound capabilities one chapter earlier. Many of the pitfalls associated with each of the different technologies, as well as the pitfalls of sound programming in general, are covered here. It's a great jumping-off point for those who don't know much about the audio end of things.

There's even a really neat chapter on incorporating TCL script interpretation within a program written in C. For anyone who's had trouble throwing together their own text parser for initialization scripts, or who's fed up with the constant recompiles needed when tweaking for the most arbitrary of changes of the game's AI, the information in this chapter is a godsend. In the Penguin Warrior case study, it's almost spooky how effective TCL turns out to be in making the computer ship chase and evade the human player.

Finally, I want to reiterate the effective use of the case study, Penguin Warrior. Having seen the way other game programming texts handle using samples to illustrate game programming concepts -- which is often a mish-mash, to say the least -- the way this book approached the issue is refreshing: there's one major project, and each chapter brings us closer to that project's completion. The code works as intended and goes a long way to convince the reader that the libraries and techniques explored in this book are near-commercial-level quality. (Networked games turned out to be choppy on my machine, but that was the only real black mark I could find in the program's execution.) If nothing else, John Hall deserves a good deal of thanks for proving that game development on Linux is a realistic and rewarding endeavor.

The Not So Good

At times, the generalist nature of the book left me wondering if Hall couldn't have gone just a little bit further in some of the topics. There's a decent enough synopsis about deployment using Loki's install tool, as well as packaging in general, although nothing related to the Penguin Warrior game itself, so we don't get to see the theory in practice as much as it could have been. Also, he teases us by early on by starting with the compiler, moving to the make utility, talking a bit about package management, and then mentions automake, but he stops short of really explaining how to bring that into an existing project. Considering all the fun little dependencies needed for multimedia programming in Linux, this would have been a valuable bit of information for anyone not used to deploying on the platform.

Another instance of this so-close-yet-so-far approach occurs when he talks about incorporating Mesa into an SDL program. He tantalizes us with a code sample illustrating how to use the SDL as a replacement for glut, but that's all -- the material doesn't really get deep enough to convince readers that a 3D neophyte really can abandon glut for the SDL, particularly when many OpenGL reference materials out there rely heavily on glut as a teaching aid for windowing and other utility functions. Loki primarily used SDL to handle its 3D utility programming, so at least we know it's possible, but given the exploding popularity of 3D games it's too bad this wasn't covered more.

It's sometimes hard to tell exactly who the book is intended for. The introductory chapters include discussions on topics such as the different gaming genres out there, despite the fact that game programming hopefuls who don't know that Quake is a first-person shooter must make up a really narrow audience. Also, it's almost enough to give one whiplash to see how quickly he dives into using ioctl() when only a couple of chapters earlier he was explaining the basics of using gcc. Next up soon after that? Strap yourself in, we'll be writing straight to /dev/fb0! It's almost comical to think about how much dangerous knowledge a newbie's been given over the course of the book. Still, like I said earlier, he never talks down to the reader, who because of this might feel compelled against better judgement to be whisked along into subject matter that really needs other support material to be of any real use.

Hall's a humble enough guy, which is great insofar as writing style is concerned, but in one of the last chapters, he starts questioning some of the choices he made while coding Penguin Warrior throughout the book. Specifically, he says he probably should have used C++ instead of C, Scheme instead of TCL, and UDP instead of TCP for the networking, and this is cold comfort for people who would have hoped that the author would have picked the best plan of attack from the beginning. That said, C, TCL, and TCP are appropriate choices due to the simplicity of execution and the fact that they introduce useful techniques from a design point of view. Still, there's no point giving readers a sense of wistful "What if?" if you don't have to. It also highlights that this book is more a beginner's API reference than a game programming book per se.

To take that point further, there also really isn't much in the way of abstract game programming theory. This book could have really distinguished itself as special if some content related strictly to game development was here. There's a mention of Gamasutra here, a method of quick division there, the equation of a distance from a point to a line thrown into the mix, and that's pretty much all there is. Topics not really covered include optimization, pathfinding, and cracker-proofing your code, and what is talked about on the subjects of artificial intelligence design, collision detection, and physics is all rudimentary ... For coverage on these sorts of topics, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Finally, and this is really not the fault of the author or the book, but one wonders if the time was right for much of this material -- or, at the very least, its highly generalist approach. DRI is making its presence felt, the various audio APIs out there are improving all the time, and the LSB is coming along nicely, but until there's a proven and stable multimedia base to work from, no definitive guide can be written, and this sort of organized dogpile is really the best we can hope for with so much stuff to cover. The SDL is a top-notch library for graphics programming, and it's likely an entire book could have been spent strictly on graphics programming using it, and the depth that such a book could have attained far surpasses what we're given here. Plus, in a year from now, who knows where any of these sound APIs will be? Of course, these might prove to be just esoteric issues in the grand scheme of this book.

Conclusion

Despite the criticisms I have of this book, I really don't want the message that is conveyed here to be anything but positive. There's a lot working for this book -- the chapters on SDL, sound programming and incorporating TCL and C are excellent, and will be especially helpful for people who are novices in these areas. Considering the alternatives (hitting dryly-written online docs or constantly shaking your Google to see what falls out), this book is a very attractive option. Programming a fully-functional multiplayer game would probably require more effort than might be suggested by the brevity of the chapter on socket programming, but that chapter is a solid introduction as well. The book as a whole is well-written and succeeds for the most part in its endeavor to make the best of a chaotic situation. I'd recommend this book to anybody who appreciates the messy-kitchen style of learning, or to anyone with decent hacking skills who just needs to break the ice when it comes to the Linux game APIs. And even though it gets slightly schizophrenic in its attempt to be both an introductory text and a definitive reference, this is the sort of book that could kickstart a new movement in Linux game development.

Table of Contents (exploded version here)

1. The Anatomy of a Game
2. Linux Development Tools
3. Linux Gaming APIs
4. Mastering SDL
5. Linux Audio Programming
6. Game Scripting Under Linux
7. Networked Gaming with Linux
8. Gaming with the Linux Console
9. Finishing Penguin Warrior
10. To Every Man a Linux Distribution

• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography

Related Links

Sample Code
No Starch Press
Loki
SDL (List of SDL games)
OpenAL
DRI
Mesa
libsndfile
Gamasutra

You can purchase this book from Fatbrain.

kdgarris writes: "Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, a real-time strategy game is now available for Linux from Loki. The announcement is not yet on their website, however. A demo was made available earlier this month."

kdgarris writes: "Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, a real-time strategy game is now available for Linux from Loki. The announcement is not yet on their website, however. A demo was made available earlier this month."

yamla writes: "Loki is dead!" and points to a Linux Review article which says the gaming company has filed for protection from creditors under bankruptcy laws. Yamla continues: "Read about it here. This is terrible news! I have paid for some of their games and they were always at least as good as the Windows versions. I hope Loki can pull out of bankruptcy and keep going but if not, it will be our loss." There is also a story at LinuxToday (pointed out by reader Beee) which draws from the Linux Review report. Meanwhile, the Loki site appears business-as-usual. Filing for bankruptcy protection is not the same as being "out of business," but it's uncomfortably close.

JigSaw writes: "SDL, the open source answer to DirectX, is a well-known cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. Sam Lantiga, the maintainer and SDL project leader, announced today on the SDL mailing list, that he ported the library to Playstation2 and it will allow to write and run SDL games (open source or commercial, as SDL is LGPL) on the Linux port for the PS2. Great to see Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality), easily recompiled for the PS2 and run them without having to spend $49 USD for each game. This release will be even more significant in the near future, as SONY is planning to release the broadband adapter add-on, which will enable small developers (and even companies) to release free or shareware games, downloadable in binary or source format (most SDL games are known to have small sizes) from the web, and hop, to your TV!"

JigSaw writes: "SDL, the open source answer to DirectX, is a well-known cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. Sam Lantiga, the maintainer and SDL project leader, announced today on the SDL mailing list, that he ported the library to Playstation2 and it will allow to write and run SDL games (open source or commercial, as SDL is LGPL) on the Linux port for the PS2. Great to see Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality), easily recompiled for the PS2 and run them without having to spend $49 USD for each game. This release will be even more significant in the near future, as SONY is planning to release the broadband adapter add-on, which will enable small developers (and even companies) to release free or shareware games, downloadable in binary or source format (most SDL games are known to have small sizes) from the web, and hop, to your TV!"

An anonymous reader sent in this tidbit - Loki Software has recently released Programming Linux Games, a book about Linux game development. It covers SDL, several audio APIs, and the Linux framebuffer console. The publisher has more info. (If someone wants to review this, email Hemos.)

barrettlight50 writes "Nokia released news that they plan to distribute Linux games from Loki Software with their up and coming Media Terminal due out this fall." I'm hearing rumblings from people who have their hands on this box, but am still waiting for more meat. What remains to be seen is if Nokia will embrace the Open Source model, and let us hack the hell out of their box. Here's hopin'

Time Doctor writes: "Wow, Tribes 2 and Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri are actually shipping from Loki next week :-) Faith has brought Linux Gamers two new games, and if sales are good, more will come. Sure we had some sad news today about the Indrema, but, keep hope alive! (thanks to Linux Games for the tip)."

Time Doctor writes: "Wow, Tribes 2 and Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri are actually shipping from Loki next week :-) Faith has brought Linux Gamers two new games, and if sales are good, more will come. Sure we had some sad news today about the Indrema, but, keep hope alive! (thanks to Linux Games for the tip)."

Time Doctor writes: "Wow, Tribes 2 and Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri are actually shipping from Loki next week :-) Faith has brought Linux Gamers two new games, and if sales are good, more will come. Sure we had some sad news today about the Indrema, but, keep hope alive! (thanks to Linux Games for the tip)."

Mark Cappel writes "Here's a holiday guide to games for Linux, published by Linuxworld.com. Share and enjoy." The only game on there that I know some people have been playing is Tetrinet. I've been playing with SC3U quite a bit lately - I highly recommend it.

crazney writes "Linux.com has an article up by Ryan Gorden of Loki on porting from Windows to Linux, in particular the troubles faced with Microsofts MFC API and the extensions implemented by Microsofts Visual C++ on the C++ language." Talks about porting, the gaming industry, and gives suggestions for portability from someone who should know.

YuppieScum writes "Voodoo Extreme has word that Loki have released a playable demo (x86 anyway) of Sim City 3000. It's a hefty beast at 175Mb for only 10 years play, but worth the download all the same." The word from Loki is that the actual game will roll off the presses sometime last week, and start shipping around then.

YuppieScum writes "Voodoo Extreme has word that Loki have released a playable demo (x86 anyway) of Sim City 3000. It's a hefty beast at 175Mb for only 10 years play, but worth the download all the same." The word from Loki is that the actual game will roll off the presses sometime last week, and start shipping around then.

Omnifarious writes "James Hills of gamespy.com has an article that has some interesting and positive things to say about Linux gaming, and Linux on the desktop in general. He has comments about both Loki and Indrema." My copy of Descent 3 for Linux finally arrived, so it might be time to do some extensive research on the subject myself *grin*.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "Loki has released a Linux demo of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It allows for 100 turns and weighs 25 MB." Yet another game I watched others play under Windows and wished I could participate in.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "Loki has released a Linux demo of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It allows for 100 turns and weighs 25 MB." Yet another game I watched others play under Windows and wished I could participate in.

Dustin Reyes writes "Loki Entertainment Software has released a demo of Descent 3, the 3D action game developed by Outrage Entertainment (who were also responsible for the initial Linux porting work). Featuring 3 levels (one single-player and two multiplayer), the demo weighs in at 42MB (the README is available here, which includes command line options and known issues). Mirrors: Loki, 3D Downloads" My copy should ship any day: descent is probably the one game that I probably should take dramamine to play.

Dustin Reyes writes "Loki Entertainment Software has released a demo of Descent 3, the 3D action game developed by Outrage Entertainment (who were also responsible for the initial Linux porting work). Featuring 3 levels (one single-player and two multiplayer), the demo weighs in at 42MB (the README is available here, which includes command line options and known issues). Mirrors: Loki, 3D Downloads" My copy should ship any day: descent is probably the one game that I probably should take dramamine to play.

Dustin Reyes writes "Loki Entertainment Software has released a demo of Descent 3, the 3D action game developed by Outrage Entertainment (who were also responsible for the initial Linux porting work). Featuring 3 levels (one single-player and two multiplayer), the demo weighs in at 42MB (the README is available here, which includes command line options and known issues). Mirrors: Loki, 3D Downloads" My copy should ship any day: descent is probably the one game that I probably should take dramamine to play.

Dustin Reyes writes "Loki Entertainment Software has released a demo of Descent 3, the 3D action game developed by Outrage Entertainment (who were also responsible for the initial Linux porting work). Featuring 3 levels (one single-player and two multiplayer), the demo weighs in at 42MB (the README is available here, which includes command line options and known issues). Mirrors: Loki, 3D Downloads" My copy should ship any day: descent is probably the one game that I probably should take dramamine to play.

GehRehmee writes: "Heresay's been floating about for some time now, but Loki has officially announced its intent to release the Linux version of Descent 3 "By July 2000". Quotables: "We're excited to see the Linux market growing and we're very happy to be a part of it," said Matt Toschlog, president of Outrage. Jeff Slutter, who programmed the Linux version for Outrage, said, "We originally released a dedicated server version of Descent 3 for Linux and are very pleased that Loki will now bring to market the full client version." "

GehRehmee writes: "Heresay's been floating about for some time now, but Loki has officially announced its intent to release the Linux version of Descent 3 "By July 2000". Quotables: "We're excited to see the Linux market growing and we're very happy to be a part of it," said Matt Toschlog, president of Outrage. Jeff Slutter, who programmed the Linux version for Outrage, said, "We originally released a dedicated server version of Descent 3 for Linux and are very pleased that Loki will now bring to market the full client version." "

A number of folks, including LokiSoft, have pointed out that Loki has released a beta version of the tools needed to develop Q3A mods and levels under Linux. You can get the SDK here, as well as get more news and such from their Q3A page.

A number of folks, including LokiSoft, have pointed out that Loki has released a beta version of the tools needed to develop Q3A mods and levels under Linux. You can get the SDK here, as well as get more news and such from their Q3A page.

A number of folks, including LokiSoft, have pointed out that Loki has released a beta version of the tools needed to develop Q3A mods and levels under Linux. You can get the SDK here, as well as get more news and such from their Q3A page.

Okay, don't tell anyone you heard it from me, but Loki's porting Descent 3 to Linux. Just thought I'd let you know about it because you're my favorite Slashdot reader. Don't get me in trouble!

jvmatthe writes, "I've gotten confirmation from Loki that their latest game, Heavy Gear II has gone gold and will be in retail stores soon. You can read our preview of it here at LinuxGames. "

jvmatthe writes, "I've gotten confirmation from Loki that their latest game, Heavy Gear II has gone gold and will be in retail stores soon. You can read our preview of it here at LinuxGames. "

Noctavis writes "If you are heavily into Legos, then you should take a look at a new TC that'll be released soon. It's called Leggo II: Arena. (Gotta love the name ;-)It's the sequel to Leggo My Myth, which was released awhile ago. The best part? You penguin-heads out there can get Myth II for Linux, and both Mac and Wintel users can grab the Myth Codex (Myth, Myth II and a slew of third-party stuff) for only $15-20 now. " LokiSoft did the porting effort of MythII to Linux - it's a heckuva lotta fun to play. And this just looks cool beyond belief.

John Carmack of id wrote Quake III, but Loki distributed the Linux version. Loki Entertainment Software has been described by happy puppy as "...the most visible Linux gaming company," so who better to turn to than Loki President Scott Draeker for word about game development and porting for Linux? Scott's an extra-cool guy, so we expect extra-cool answers from him. We'll post them sometime within the next week, so please keep an eye out.

Michael Simms writes "According to an article in the Loki Requests newsgroup, Sam Lantinga, lead programmer for Loki Games states that 'We are going to try to do Starcraft and Diablo II as soon as we sell enough units to make it interesting to Blizzard' One way to help to persuade Blizzard that they should work with Loki on this is to sign the Games Petitions Page run by Tux Games. "

mackman writes "Head on over to Loki Games' Web site to waste a few hours with the latest hit (but let me finish downloading it first!). " Warning: It's 93 megs. But there are several mirrors up on the site. I've played this game before - it's a huge blast to play. Have fun!

kato writes "Loki has just announced that it will be porting the following games to linux: Alpha Centauri, SimCity 3000, Soldier of Fortune, Interstate '82, and Heavy Gear II. Pre-ordering should begin soon at the standard places: Loki, Handeye, etc. No word on exactly when they'll be released, though. "

Every year I pick a new years resolution and ever year it doesn't come true. This year I've opted to set my sights low so I can greatly increase the chance of suceeding for once. This year my resolution is to continue converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Read on to learn what resolutions RMS, ESR, Jon Katz, CowboyNeal, Mandrake and others have for the year 2000.

Jason Haas from LinuxPPC has the following resolutions: "248x768 @ 85 Hz, Merge my world domination plans with Linus's tree, Kawasaka W650:It will be mine (a Virago would be ok), Restart akido, and mv competition to /dev/null

Jon Katz , Slashdot's favorite gasbag says " I wish for Walt Disney to thaw himself out, climb out of his Cryogenimatronic Vault, show up at Walt Disney World and wreak havoc on the corporate weenies who desecrated EPCOT, his model city of tomorrow. Maybe join with the Seattle protesters and touch off a war against corporatist weenies everywhere. "

Emmett Plant is the latest editorial addition to the Slashdot Authors roster. His resolution is "to start a company called 'EmmettLinux,' which will be responsible for creating no product whatsoever. We will employ a highly-paid staff of fifty people who will show up every day and start throwing money into a furnace. I hope to IPO by March and use the cash to hire 2,000 more moneyburners and open an office in Hong Kong. I will leave soon after, selling all of my stock and retiring to the Bahamas."

Chris J. DiBona , Linux Community Evangelist for VA Linux Systems, President of SVLUG, and Grant Chair for LI, has resolved the following: ".Sleep is high on my list, but I really just like to have more time to read, this year has been pretty hard-core. I'd also like to spend more time learning power supply electronics, dc-dc transformers and such. I'm already pretty good with the digital side of things, but this is a big gap in my knowledge. Can I give more than two? I'd also like a puppy. A puppy with an X10 Cam mounted on its collar so I can put a "puppy cam" online."

Rusty Russell , kernel hacker and mad genius wishes to Learn to cook. Or trade kernel code for food. Or buy a fire extinguisher.

Eric S. Raymond is perhaps better known simply as esr... and if you don't know who he is, well, ouch. He resolves to " Catch up with my email and cut down on my traveling. It's nice to be needed, but 50% time on the road is getting ridiculous..."

Raster aka "That Enlightenment Guy" who is the only living person with more typos than me resolves simply to use procmail to allow more sleep time.

Mandrake resolves "I really need to start taking better care of my body. I haven't really worked out in about a year - and I eat too much garbage (junk food / fast food), and I REALLY need to stop drinking coke. I go through 2liters like most people drink cans of coke. I don't think it'll happen any time soon - but hopefully I'll at least be a little healthier by the end of the year."

Trae McCombs , aka X, aka MC, aka 'That Linux.com guy' resolves to "Learn to eat more foods, Incorporate working out into my lifestyle, Work less than 14hrs a day, Be kinder to others, Listen more, Talk less, Learn to code, Read more, Keep true to my ideals..."

Scott Draeker , the President of Loki Entertainment Software resolves to release a first tier Linux game which is not available for windows. Hard to argue with that one.

Kurt DeMaagd , aka The Pope, aka Rob's Roommate and the BSI number cruncher has the following:

1. Combat bimetallism and establish the gold standard for currency.
2. Negotiate the DeMaagd-Hay-Pauncefote treaty, allowing the U.S. to unilaterally construct an isthmian canal.
3. Establish an American protectorate in Cuba.
4. Suppress the Boxer uprising.

Mind you if you look closely at Kurt's resolutions, you might notice that they look strikingly similiar to President William McKinley's adminstration's high points. I'm going to have to up kurts medication.

Illiad , creator of the ever popular User Friendly comic strip says "I resolve to only take responsibility for those choices that I have control over. That means I have to give up on the idea of educating the technically-resistant, the doublespeak-inclined, and the village idiot."

Richard M. Stallman , founder of the Free Software Founding and the GNU Project gave us suggested resolutions for Slashdot readers: They are 1. Do not install any non-free software your computers and 2. Do not buy from Amazon until they stop using software patents for aggression.

CowboyNeal , the man, the myth, the legend. The guy who responds when users can't figure out how to login. The guy who maintains the slashboxes. And the guy who inhabitants the living room in the Geek Compound, resolves that he shall "Shower Every Week, whether I needs it or not." All of the co-workers in this office who have orafactory functionality thank him. It doesn't matter to me much either way.

Jim Jagielski , aka jimjag or jim@apache.org or jim@jaguNET.com, resolves to call sleep(28800) a lot more often.

Nitrozac is the creator of After Y2k... which as best as I can tell means she's about to work herself out of a job. But regardless she says "If civilization manages to hold on to its tenuous existence, I'd like to find a cure for Agalmatophilia, and have others join me to rid the world of this illness that causes so much needless suffering. If civilization crumbles, my Post-Apocalypse Resolution is to learn how to do 16-bead graphics on my abacus, so I can continue the comic. ;-)"

And finally (thank god because my wrists are tired) is Jeff "Hemos" Bates , a man who needs no introduction (but he does need a solid smack to the head).He says "With the coming of El Ano Neuvo, I resolve that I'm going to continue my battle against the dread forces of The Krull Invasion. I think that I might also try to learn some grammar. Per'aps. And maybe I'll learn how to spell a few more words as well".

Matt writes "Saw over at Ars Technica that Loki Games has announced that Quake 3 Arena for Linux is hitting stores like EB and Fry's today! I will certainly have to run by EB after work to see if this is true. Man, screw the egg-nog action - I'm gonna need some fraggin' if I'm going to survive a day with the in-laws."

Everyone in the known universe has been submitting the news that Loki Software will be publishing and distributing Quake III Arena for Linux. The game will be published Dec. 27. The box will be a limited-edition collector's tin box and will include SuSE Linux 6.3. Asking price is 50$.

Everyone in the known universe has been submitting the news that Loki Software will be publishing and distributing Quake III Arena for Linux. The game will be published Dec. 27. The box will be a limited-edition collector's tin box and will include SuSE Linux 6.3. Asking price is 50$.

Mat Kovach is trying to organize a LUG Adventure to Ceder Point next september. For those who don't know, its an awesome roller coaster/ride park in the midwest. I wouldn't mind going actually. overcode noted that the patches to Civilization: Call To Power for Linux from Loki Hack now available. Nuke Lawyer causes is a wonder that causes all lawyers to explode as a nuclear bomb. Great stuff. otterboy found an auction that has old printings of Neal Stephenson books with The Big U weighing in at $400. For a book! (Note:I Finally finished Diamond Age. Wow) Mo B. Dick pointed us to a 486 overclocked to 247 mhz combining freezers and booze. El Clip sent us an awesome mrtg parody of a geeks life. escher sent us Microsith which is definitely among the most amusing MS parodies that I've seen. dustpuppy2000 pointed us to Homepage's at Superiosity which is a promising looking new comic strip.

anonymous porcupine writes "The kind folks at Loki Entertainment have finally released the Loki Hack '99 patches. Share and enjoy. And keep in mind that the hacks aren't listed in any particular order. :) " I actually had the privilege to judge the event at ALS - everyone did an amazing job (See the feature we did on it) - and now you can download the fruits of their labor.

anonymous porcupine writes "The kind folks at Loki Entertainment have finally released the Loki Hack '99 patches. Share and enjoy. And keep in mind that the hacks aren't listed in any particular order. :) " I actually had the privilege to judge the event at ALS - everyone did an amazing job (See the feature we did on it) - and now you can download the fruits of their labor.

Kurt The Pope, most notable for his recent reviews of CodeWarrior and Code Fusion has taken time to play in a slightly different IDE ^[?] - Railroad Tycoon II Gold, by Loki. Click below for the skinny.

Rating 10/10
Buy from Lokisoft.

When I survey my life and contemplate which computer games have sucked my time away from being an otherwise productive citizen, Railroad Tycoon stands out high on the list. I spent many a summer afternoon with my friend Nate and his 286 building railroad empires while our peers were out living healthy and energetic lives. Now, Loki has released a new version of Railroad Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon Gold Edition 2, for Linux. RT2 is very similar to its predecessor, but has improved graphics, more scenarios, campaigns, multi-player support, a terrain editor and an improved and more complex financial model.

At the game's core, as the name implies, you build railroads. You ship passengers, mail, and a wide variety of other raw materials, goods and products from one location to another. If you send raw materials to a city with the appropriate industry, it will create a finished product for you to ship to another city. You have the option to select how difficult of an industrial model you wish to use. If you chose the basic, option, you can ship anything to any city and they will buy it. This obviously makes it much easier to find a buyer for your goods. Think it will be fun to ship every carload of coal in the United States to Alpena, MI? That's fine, because they'll happily pay for it. For those looking for a little more challenge or a more realistic game, you can choose an advanced model which only pays a fraction of the price for goods not demanded, or the expert level where you basically get nothing for undemanded goods.

But if you are only playing to build a railroad, you are missing the real fun of the game. If you play your cards right, it will be no time before you are making money faster than you can spend it. It is time to become a true robber baron and create monopolies that would make Microsoft drool. If you have a couple hundred thousand spare dollars, you can begin to buy up all of the industries around your railroad-though you have to be playing the most difficult industrial model to do this. While you do need to be careful to buy and hold only profitable industries, this is an easy way to earn a little money.

The real monopoly building fun, and frankly the most fun part of the game, is playing a ruthless corporate raider. RT2 has added features such as buying or selling on the margin give you that extra edge when playing the market. Thanks to the designer's decision to separate corporate funds from company funds, you can now first personally buy up a bunch of a competitors stock and thereby guarantee some votes when your company attempts to merge (or more accurately, take over) the company.

While the game concept and design are excellent, there are a couple of minor issues with the game. First, the scrolling is very slow which makes is a little bit difficult to get around the map. Second, if you choose to start a new game on a large map, it can take a little while for the computer to create the game. Both of these items, while they can be corrected with a getting a faster machine, the performance was somewhat slow for a fairly well loaded Pentium II.

Overall, this is wonderfully addictive game. There are a wide variety of difficulty levels, depending on how complex of an economy you want to play. If you are they type who would rather control the world's economy than run around through caverns shooting thiings, this game is a must buy.

Note: Railroad Tycoon II Gold, which this game is, is different from Railroad Tycoon II. As Gold implies, it comes equipped with more scenarios, and more playability.