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911survivor http://www.selectparks.net/911survivor/ which I've never actually been able to get hold of but looked reasonably intelligent. This too looks reasonably intelligent, but perhaps not as well done... Is it too soon? Well personally I think it's too soon for the hoards of crappy unintelligent World War 2 murder simulators we have. Yea, it's sensationalist and it's trying to shock, but there might just be a point in there somewhere, even if it simply shows how shocking we find games about tragic events... better that than exploiting the deaths of millions in world war 2 for profit.

The best brawler ever is Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.

Well I wish it was a real game anyway.

...then what are these guys making...?

We host and or link to about 120 game-based artworks many of which are built on/for Quake3.

Over the years several artists wanting to sell work to museums and/or have work shown in museums/galleries have hit a legal 'glass ceiling' due to the issue of IP. This has resulted in game-based artworks that rely on proprietary third-party engines having less-than equal opportunity where other mediums are concerned.

This is welcomed greatly in the art world. True to form as always, thanks John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not as long as you think, 911 Survivor anybody?

Here are some screenshots

What is next, a race from the top of the World Trade Center Towers?

Too late, somebody's already doing it: 911 Survivor

ugh.