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id Tech free multiplayer games:

id Tech 0 Freedoom
id Tech 1 Xonotic
id Tech 2 Warsow
id Tech 3 OpenArena
id Tech 4 ... nope
id Tech 5 ... sorry
id Tech 6 ... you must be joking

For those playing along at home, I believe he meant Warsow.

Sure OS developers can gain something from it, even if it's outdated. Just recently, Warow 1.0 was released. This project was built around the Quake 2 engine. It was modernized some to look quite nice. :)

Did you mean Warsow ?

Warsow, king of quake childs.

http://www.warsow.net/

http://www.warsow.net/media/0.5/1280px/06.jpg

THIS Warsaw?

No, it looks like somebody tried to rip-off Team Fortress 2 in the Unreal 1 engine. If your engine can't do curved surfaces properly, they could at least not make map designs that rely on them. (Look at the curved pipes, and the undoubtedly-supposed-to-be-round badge on the back wall.)

http://www.warsow.net/media/0.5/1280px/wdm19a.jpg

Look at this one, it's like Tron 2.0. What's that blocky white thing hovering in the air? Is that supposed to be a projectile of some sort?

5 years ago, these graphics might have looked awesome. Now the characters are ok (only because they are highly sylized, and because that style has been popularized by games like Crackdown, Team Fortress 2, etc), but the maps are pretty bad.

Here's what you're comparing it to, Unreal 2004. (The Unreal 2.0 engine. I'd like to remind you that the Unreal 2.0 engine has been superseded by Unreal 3.0 for, what, 3 years now?)

http://linux.softpedia.com/screenshots/Unreal-Tournament-2004_1.jpg

Look, the pipes are actually round!

http://www.warsow.net/media/0.5/1280px/06.jpg

THIS Warsaw?

No, it looks like somebody tried to rip-off Team Fortress 2 in the Unreal 1 engine. If your engine can't do curved surfaces properly, they could at least not make map designs that rely on them. (Look at the curved pipes, and the undoubtedly-supposed-to-be-round badge on the back wall.)

http://www.warsow.net/media/0.5/1280px/wdm19a.jpg

Look at this one, it's like Tron 2.0. What's that blocky white thing hovering in the air? Is that supposed to be a projectile of some sort?

5 years ago, these graphics might have looked awesome. Now the characters are ok (only because they are highly sylized, and because that style has been popularized by games like Crackdown, Team Fortress 2, etc), but the maps are pretty bad.

Here's what you're comparing it to, Unreal 2004. (The Unreal 2.0 engine. I'd like to remind you that the Unreal 2.0 engine has been superseded by Unreal 3.0 for, what, 3 years now?)

http://linux.softpedia.com/screenshots/Unreal-Tournament-2004_1.jpg

Look, the pipes are actually round!

On your last point: Asus, Acer, and Dell are pretty smart not to try to be a major player in the game console market. The market is crowded as hell (3 huge competitors with a several-year lead in install base and minimum 8/9 year lead in mindshare for Xbox, decade and a half for PlayStation, and decades for Nintendo), their competitors have a pretty big back library, and you're talking about hardware companies that don't generally develop software (and when they do, it tends to suck). Licensing an engine isn't cheap, and building a good game around it isn't any easier: there are a bunch of UE3 licensees that put out crap games, including Too Human, Stranglehold, Area 51, etc. The best these guys could do is to pay id to have Rage on their systems day-and-date, and then pick up on the scraps of gaming on Linux (and as a Linux fan, I know how scrap the games tend to be). Remember: game consoles aren't bought based on the hardware or OS inside them, they're bought on whether or not there is a big library good games for it.

TL;DR version: crowded, competitive market won't be overtaken by the likes of Frozen Bubble and Warsow.

Feel free to mod this post as flamebait, but I feel it's time to rant about the Open Source gaming community. It seems to me whenever there's a new Open Source FPS that comes out, it's just another pathetic Quake clone. Sure the trailer videos *look* cool, and sure the screenshots are rendered at high resolution, with all the bells and whistles enabled. All is good until it comes to the actual gameplay. It's disappointing when all the freetards (excuse my french) drool over another cheezy clone (merely because it's Open Source, but not of it's merits alone) that's no different from the previous hundred clones that came before it. Boring and unoriginal.

Which brings me to my point: WHAT ABOUT WARSOW?! This game has been out for years, it's free, the source code is GPL'd, runs on windows/linux/mac, and above all the gameplay takes the Quake shooters to a whole new level. In all of my 15+ years of gaming, warsow is by far the most complex and elegant FPS to date. Imagine playing quake2/quake3, now imagine that on crack. That is warsow. It's not another lame re-skinned quake clone like it's predecessors. A quick search on slashdot shows only one post referencing it... ONE POST!!

The community is small and has been diminishing over the past couple of years. Which is quite surprising for a game with such immense potential. My only guess is this: the game is too hard. Yes I will admit that the learning curve is steep, but that's half the fun right there! You would think a community of opensource folks (who love to tinker with their own systems, to learn and read and gain a better knowledge of the inner-workings of their respective systems) would be chomping at the bit to take on a game that requires some sort of learning. If you're willing to spend 5+ hours trying to decipher an archaic perl regex, you shouldn't break a sweat trying to learn how to rocket jump over the period of a half an hour or so.

You would think a community that looks down on proprietary cookie-cutter products would embrace originality and innovation in their games, but it's starting to look like the Open Source gamers are painfully similar to their proprietary counter-parts. Same cookie-cutter crap as before, only difference being the price of their engine. </rant>

Or WarSow. It's free software and has been an official e-sports gave ever since it's aplha release. It's that good. The developpers have chosen to lay the focus on gameplay and the game has therefore has non-heavy graphics. http://www.warsow.net/

Don't forget Warsow! http://www.warsow.net/

0.5 just released! Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtJKrIngTIs&fmt=22

It's better than OpenArena or Nexuiz imo, and adds much more original effects and gameplay is just so much better than in any quake-engine game.

It sucks for me, though, I hate FPS games. For my Linux gaming I've always used emulators. Install ePSXe, Mednafen and dgen, then eat your heart out on old games console titles.

When it comes to fun, and skills, there's mainly free addons built by the community for the community...

For Quake3 you can find CPM, or you can find the best fps of all, Warsow, which is full open-source, cross platform and is faster than everything you know.

If you're searching fun, and gameplay, warsow is definitely the game... (checkout the tricks tutorials, and all the movements ) .
Finally don't miss warsow movies
 

When it comes to fun, and skills, there's mainly free addons built by the community for the community...

For Quake3 you can find CPM, or you can find the best fps of all, Warsow, which is full open-source, cross platform and is faster than everything you know.

If you're searching fun, and gameplay, warsow is definitely the game... (checkout the tricks tutorials, and all the movements ) .
Finally don't miss warsow movies
 

What about warsow? You get a very innovative "wall-jumping" ability, and strong/weak ammo to prevent spamming (where you start with strong ammo, and when you use it up you get weak ammo).

What about her? http://www.warsow.net/

First, I suggest you try Warsow. Someone already mentioned it so there's not much to say.

Now on Quake Live. The beta is going extremely well, although, very slow. Their website is actually better than most, if not all, current games' GUI systems. The matchmaking thing is also working like a charm. I'd say Quake Live is going to rock when the public beta kicks off.
The ads fit extremely well as Quake 3 had big video screens from 1999.

It's basically Quake 3 gameplay with some tweaks the so called "casual gamers" may or may not notice at all.

The only "problem" I see with QL is that it may not be as easy to play at work as one might suspect. At least not for everyone. At work, I am only able to log into the site but not install (and then play) it. The installer tries to put files in Documents and settings folder which as well as in system/32.

Open arena is kind of lame. Try Warsow instead

http://warsow.net/

Open Arena would not be my pick of Quake 3 fork. For one this is going to kids and the game even tells you on the homepage that it is more of an adults only game. Warsow on the other hand is not very gory and uses some very nice graphics. I think its a bit more intensive than Open Arena but it wont illicit unwanted legal attention.

I suggest a couple multiplayer shooters. Warsow http://www.warsow.net/ and Urban Terror http://www.urbanterror.net/ They're both free and based on the open sourced Quake engine (2 and 3). The Intel cards in those Dells should be enough for them. Plus they both have Linux and Windows clients.

People tend to avoid free games so here are some links: http://wz2100.net/ excelent RTS. http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/ Quake like FPS with fancy graphics. http://www.warsow.net/?page=home Fps with emphesis on acrobatics. Freespace 2 open http://fs2source.warpcore.org/install.html . http://www.wesnoth.org/ a very highly rated turn based stratagey game.

First, I've never pirated cliffski's games, or even heard of them. So kudos I guess for figuring out how to get free marketing.

But really, I think games have a lot to compete against. The local Community College is responding to overwhelming demand for video game creation classes. In an industry full of underpaid, overworked slaves, people are still willing to work for free. Think about how many games Valve had a hand in: Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and probably more since I stopped caring. There's also Battlefield 2, which was based on a mod to Battlefield 1 called "Desert Combat". There's a history of unpaid labor here. Expecting to make a profit requires some clever thinking and is probably as likely to happen as becoming rich writing poetry. Enough people have figured this out that a few of them have given up on that dream, but decided to make an awesome game anyways.

Console games, for all their high price and lack of freedom, seem to be a better deal than the average PC game. It takes a very low price (read: free) to convince me to bother with it. There are, however games I would pay for. They're games that I like enough to keep, even though I could resell them. Yes, this basically means I don't buy PC games, since they equate selling the media with piracy. The sale and purchase of used games is a concept so central to me; I'm not buying a license to play the game, I bought a game. And I shall sell it, should it be made of suck.

I guess this means I'm on the fence about download only games; Fret Nice looked interesting, but it's sad to see it's gone to WiiWare / XBLA / PSN, and other end runs around first-sale. I might be willing to pay 50 dollars for a game that I can sell for 10 or 20 later (or perhaps even 50, in rare cases). But take that away, and suddenly I'm paying for something I don't think I need to.

All that said, I have an alternative strategy. cliffski says he'll make demos, though probably not make them longer than he already does. I say, don't give away demos and sell games. Give away games and sell endings. It's a bit mercenary, but I think many people would have bought the portal ending. Hell, make it so you can sell the final level and "cheats" / plot skips. It's not a strictly new idea -- I recall a recent game promoting a "DVD chapter" style level progression as a feature, where if you get stuck you can skip to the next "chapter".

But it doesn't run on linux and on windows only in firefox 2 (and of course ie{6,8}). So... back to warsow.

The 'non-free ' is one of the things which makes the majority of linux users non-gamers I think. A lot of them still think in black & white. Open = good, closed = bad, which is just plain stupid in my opinion.

You have 2 parts in the 'free' problem, the first is the accelerated drivers, the other is the game itself. Don't even dream of an open accelerated OpenGL driver which outperforms nVidia's propriatry version. ATI/AMD released the specs/source of the drivers for their cards - but do you honestly believe that's gonna 'improve' anything for 'a gamer' - or even performance-wise?

nVidia drivers started to improve the moment they were making money with their Quadro line on Linux workstations. They have steadily improved (for the user) and I have absolutely no problem with them at this moment. They work brilliantly and run games just fine. Even 'worse' (from your point of view) - I would recommend anyone an nVidia card to run Linux - and yes - with the 'propriatry closed' drivers.

Other part is the game, I heard some fanatic say 'they should open the sourcecode of ' - and then I really wonder what planet he is living on, they simply have no clue what they're talking about. I'm member of the warsow devteam (currently inactive though due to lack of time), and while it's an opensource game, the development process is not open (read: we only release sourcecode for each release) - for some very good reasons. Our development isn't even commercial, we don't have to take into account that we use licensed technology/libraries/... over which we don't have control since we're limited to GPL things. I'm not even touching the anti-cheat stuff here, which can - sadly - only work through obscurity and binary-only dynamic libs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against warsow being 'opensource', but it does make the development process a lot harder. Sure, the community sometimes submits patches - but that's rare. The ones submitting multiple patches usually become a devteam-member anyway.

In the end it's plain simple, a typical gamer (95%+) wants an icon on his desktop which he clicks and the game launches. No fuzz, no 'oh no is my driver up-to-date', and certainly no 'warning your driver is not driver opensource/free/...'. They simply do not care, and why would they? I don't care anymore either. It's just pointless, if nVidia produces bad drivers, it hurts their business. They can develop and test drivers for hardware that's still in development and can only be simulated on huge clusters. I buy the lastest nVidia card and I can pretty much run any game I like. Right now, no waiting for 6 years for a decently optimized accelerated OpenGL driver - which simply doesn't exist in the Opensource world, Mesa is NOT optimized at all.

So that leaves maybe 5% of gamers which could actually care about something more than an icon on a desktop - and then we're not even talking about 'choice of OS' - since most of them got Vista or XP preinstalled anyway, why not use it. That leaves a very minor niche-market for the linux audience. Of the ones actually running linux (like myself), a lot of them end up with 2 pc's, one for gaming, one for 'linux stuff' (or dual boot - which I hate).

So why are so few gamers using linux? Convenience.

I'll eventually have to use Vista for gaming purposes,

Thanks for telling me about that. Warsow in Gutsy is only 0.31 for some reason.

That's really the most annoying thing with package systems like Ubuntu's. If you only update versions every time a new version of the OS is released, then for certain things (like games), it becomes impossible to play online simply by doing things the easy way.

This game really is crap compared to http://warsow.net/

Here's a good 3 part article on Linux gaming:

http://kahvipapu.com/blog/2007/06/16/linux-gaming- part-one-first-person-shooters/

It focuses on Open Source games but it also lists many of the other titles that are available for Linux.

Most of these games, if not all, are also available on Windows, of course. The first game listed, Warsow is an excellent Open Source FPS, whether you're on Linux or Windows. No Mac client, though I'm sure an interested Mac developer could rectify that.

• bzflag http://www.bzflag.org/
• armagetronad http://www.armagetronad.net/
• warsow http://www.warsow.net/
• alien arena http://red.planetarena.org/
• xmoto http://xmoto.sourceforge.net/
• tumiki fighters http://tumiki.sourceforge.net/ this is a port of a win game tho
• frozen bubble http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
• sturmbahnfuhrer http://www.sturmbahnfahrer.com/
• globulation 2 http://globulation2.org/wiki/Main_Page/

http://warsow.net/

Tremulous is excellent and really rather addictive, i used to be a big fan of onslaught in UT2k4 but i tend to find Tremulous more interesting.

Not sure that i'd agree with the comparison of Alien Arena 2006 to CUBE, Alien arena is quite nice to look at and a fast paced deathmatcher based on Quake(2 or 3, i forget), for some reason there aren't any good screenshots of it on the homepage so http://www.ratiatum.com/img/logiciel/502/502.jpg will give you a better idea. CUBE is mildly entertaining but Sauerbraten with coopedit is more fun.

Nexuiz does a good job with a heavily modified version of the original Quake engine as its codebase, again surprisingly attractive for such an old fashioned engine http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/

Warsow is fast paced Deathmatch with a twist, and quite nicely done in a cellshaded style http://www.warsow.net/

Most of those are free software, if not they're at least linux compatible. http://www.happypenguin.org/ despite looking a little dated, is still a good place to find new games.

And the rest : http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. We're not sick of our old games because they fare much better than the games that are out today. Do you really expect us to play Quake 4 and Doom 3 just because it has a bigger number beside it? They have to bring something good to the table, and I don't mean good graphics. They have to play well too. As more recent games have been very dissapointing in terms of longevity, competativeness and fun, we will stick with our 'old' games. So, to add to my comrade's response . . .

No

- Doom 2 player

P.S. Our requests are not unreasonable. Warsow is a great example of a modern game that brings something new to the table, and has the potential competativeness, longevity and fun to be a nice substitute for the inadequate pile of garbage that was Quake 4.

A few more for FPS lovers: Warsow Cube and its successor: Sauerbraten Of the three, Warsow is my favorite.