Slashdot Mirror
Heroes of Might and Magic III Demo Released
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!
Oh, no. You think that GETTING the Amulet is your trial? Don't you recall your instructions?
That's right, chummer. You have to get the Amulet -and bring it back-. And the bearer of the Amulet, uhm, can't teleport. You gotta hoof it back up all fifty levels, with the Wizard of Yendor all over your ass and with no help from your god.
Not that you're done yet. Remember the rest? You gotta bring the Amulet -to your God-. So you'll need to take a short jaunt through the four Elemental Planes -- bring your pickaxe!
Heh. But I'm not done yet. Nothing's ever fair, is it? Welcome to the Astral Plane, home of the three High Altars of the Gods. And their attendants. And you know what? The other two Gods really AREN'T the least bit interested in your God gaining ascendancy over all things. Get ready to kick some Archon butt.
And who invited THOSE guys? For -no apparent reason-, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse want to kick your butt too, and you can't make those bastards stay dead. Fun fun fun.
And you thought -one- Wizard of Yendor was bad news...?
So fight your way back up through all fifty levels of the dungeon, traverse the Elemental Planes, and fight your way through that warzone they call the Astral, puzzle out which altar your God owns -- don't botch this one -- and offer the Amulet.
And THAT will be the last thing your character does -- except for the gloating. Lots of gloating.
Happy hacking...
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Well, I had a Mac for years and I couldn't ever understand it. I always said to people, "Yeah, it's a small market, but you know what? There's not as much COMPETITION for that market either."
How do you make your game stand out against 20,000 other win95 games? Lots of marketing. For linux, any new game is going to garner a good piece of that small market.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Oh yeah, have you found the Archon port to linux?!? It's somewhere, if you search the linux games archives. X-Archon, i believe it's called. Trying to remain true to the original.
make world, not war
I've set up a mirror at
ftp://templestowe.res.cmu.edu/pub/lokiga mes/
I notified Loki of this by email, and told them if they request me to take down the mirror, I will.
Till then, enjoy.
If it's open source, it doesn't matter who wrote it, anyone can copy it.
The people who could most benefit from this situation are the CD-ROM manufacturers, who could spend their idle time burning popular open source software and passing it to the local software merchants. If they had to compete, they could sell at a loss, as long as they didn't go below the losses they'd take from having idle factories.
The key objection to open source as a base for a profitable business is not that nobody would pay for the service of delivery, but that people who don't actually produce any software will have a competitive advantage over those who do. If hypothetical company Maroon Hat does everything Red Hat does, but doesn't spend money on any software developers, Maroon Hat has the same profitability with smaller expenses.
I think profitable open source development should be viewed as more of a busking model than any sort of traditional "give me your money, or you don't get what I'm selling" model. If it were convenient to do so (say, with a web-based micropayment system), I bet people would be more than happy to send out a few bucks here and there to the authors of their favorite free software.
Regards,
matt
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
As a programmer, when I moved from Windows to Linux a couple of years ago I increased my productivity 100-fold.
I doubled it by not having the system crash from under me, and I increased it by 50 times by not having any great games to distract me.
If this trend continues, I almost might as well move back to Windows; I mean what's the point of dealing with logging in every few weeks when I reboot for a measly double productivity gain?
I picked up this game as a XMas gift to myself. I have to say that it was worth every penny. Forget the 90-something meg download, and just go out and buy it. You'll want to buy it after you play, so why bother wasting the bandwidth?
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Oh, you kids today have it so good... I'll tell you one thing, young man, when I was young we didn't have all this fancy-schmancy games with, like, graphics and surround sound and all these silly effects. We had NETHACK, that's what we had, and I'll tell you one more thing, we LIKED it, and we didn't want anything more, that's for sure.
I mean, who decided that UNIX should have games, anywyay? Back in the old days, all a SysAdmin would ever want was a LART, rm, and the occasional luser and that's all we needed to have good, clean, wholesome fun.
*grumble*mumble*
oh...my back's killing me...
*mumble*
Maybe it's just me, but I think game designers are starting to ask a bit much. That's a hell of a long download time for people who are still largely on modem connections (and not very fast ones -- I haven't found anyone in my area who can get me better than a 28.8 speed, and I'm waiting until I move before I look at DSL).
Maybe it's just hitting me because last night I did a full install of Freespace 2 and had that top out at 1.2 GB of disk space -- and here I thought I'd be set for a long time when I got a 13 GB drive for my PC...
Jay (=
Sorry to the 6 people on right now, i've gotta restart the ftpserver to raise the limit from 10 to 150 users....
Nope, Loki games isn't opensourcing the games so far as I know, they're just porting them over. They have, however, open-sourced the library they used to port the games over. It's SDL, and it works on many different platforms (though I, personally, have only used it for Linux and Windows).
-Denor
I have a fast mirror. My link tops out about 900 kbytes/s. Check the realtime monitor for current conditions.
http://www.ryans.dhs.org/heroes.html
Realtime server status
Ryan Salsbury
How about that, wu-ftpd maintained the connections through the '/etc/init.d/wu-ftpd restart'.
That's awesome!
Go, wu-ftpd!
The AI bug as well as many other game-related bugs have been fixed in the forthcoming 1.3 patch for Heroes that should be released in a few days (it's almost ready internally, now in QA).
:-)
Hang on
Stéphane Peter
Stéphane Peter
Codehost, Inc.
Loki has released several Open Source projects:
- SMPEG
- Setup
- SMJPEG
- Fenris
In addition, they are quite supportive of SDL (no surprise -- Sam Latinga co-founded Loki)This
Ah crap. I forgot to replace that partial dl. Everything should work now.
RYan Salsbury
I really don't understand the gaming programmers reluctance to move to Linux. w/the popularity of the Quake series, etc, etc, don't they see the market expanding?
I say forget about Office and other MS products, we need more serious games to be ported. Do you really think that people bought the Commodore64 so that they could write papers w/the GEOS word processor?
It's funny. I SHOULDN'T like this game. No 3d graphics. Cardboard cutout figures in the fight scenes. Yet this game had something that other games lack. It's weird but every game I play is like a story that tells itself. Even on the same map. It also has a bewildering variety of creatures and random events which really add to it.
The music is also fantastic. The tower and desert land music is the best. Also the amount of detail they put into regular sounds is also quite good.
For me it was totally the atmosphere of the game which put the hook in me. Castlevania3 is only game which can compare in terms of excellent atmosphere.
That being said I've heard that the music was better for HOMM2. Also I have the AB expansion pack, the Conflux (elemental) race is a mediocre addition (at least they didn't include the "forge" race *shudders*), but the new campaigns and creatures made it worth recommending for HOMM3 fans.
Anyway don't take my word for it. Download the demo and find out for yourself.
I picked up the commercial version of this about a month ago, and have spent far too many hours locked in its entrancing spell.
Technically, this is a solid achievement. I haven't had a single crash. It looks and sounds as good as in Windows.
And gameplay is superb. It isn't dramatically different than HOMM2, really - but that's not much of a complaint. This is, no doubt, one of the premiere strategy games on the market, regardless of platform.
Another nice note - if you do the full install (which is, I grant, huge), you don't need the CD to play. You could probably play it remotely over X, if you want to. It put an icon in KDE under games, which I thought it should do. I installed it as root, and can play as myself - which is better than some things, like Star Office.
Kudos for Loki for an exceptional port of an unusually addicting game. I'm becoming decreasingly interested in even keeping a windows box around for any reason.
-- Kate
This post interested me because it speaks to my interest in pricing models ...
...)
drig suggested buying the game, not downloading it (and at 90 megs, it is a huge download!). If you ever hear Free / free software impugned with the increasingly silly rhetorical question "But how can that stuff stick around? How can anyone make money off it?" you've got one more data point to fling. Even on a fattish pipe, most people are not interested in downloading 90 megs at a time, but pop in a disc and 90 megs is no sweat.
(Of course, this could go either way -- in 3 years, will you be on a DSL2* line with no metered charges and 90MB is three minutes whistling? Or will you be on a clogged cable modem loop with by-the-K download charges and a meter outside the house? I certainly hope the first trend is winning
CD-burners may not be DVD-RAM, but they certainly constitute a great way to pass around big files, and for a well-done manual, brand assurance and support, I think Loki is offering great deals for Linux games.
Whee!
timothy
*Strictly hypothetical. Not real. Restrictions apply. See local dealers for details. Not availabile in all areas, terms and conditions apply and are subject to change without notice or obligation.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
That means he must have used
*gasp*
Windows!
I don't care so much if a game isn't free software (although having as many libre low level libraries as possible, as Loki's games and Unreal Tournament do, is a huge plus) because I don't depend on a game. If a game maker goes out of business next year, I don't care that their game will never again see another upgrade. If I'm feeling security conscious, I think it's crucial that my daemons running as root are open source, but I'm not so concerned about games running as a user account. And if a game crashes every so often, it doesn't worry me much as long as the save game files aren't corrupted.
Besides, games are (or should be) about *content*. Graphics, level designs, sounds and music, story line, character development, interactivity... these things are often aided by improved software engines, but they primarily aren't part of the software. In fact, I can't think of a game besides half-life that took an existing software engine and made it heavily better. Some games license an engine and use it to run new content, some games have an engine written from scratch, but how many games are subject to the steady, incremental improval process which free software so benefits?
And starting with Quake (to my knowledge; I'm probably wrong), a heavy component of game development has been driven by almost-open source: the code-level mods that the user community puts out so enthusiastically is made possible by the release of a significant chunk of source code for the base game.
For an operating system, on the other hand, having it crash every month, much less every week, is not acceptable. Security issues for OS and daemon software are critical, and ongoing, steady development on top of the same code base should be as fast as possible without compromising stability.
Has anyone seen any oddities when running the demo under sawmill?
;)
The X server zaps to 800x600 and then the title bar with a solid black window covers the actual game. I can kill sawmill and run without a wm and I dont have this issue. I spose I should report it to loki or maybe the sawmill team? I havent tried wit hany of the other windowmanagers yet because once I got the game in a playable state I am now realizing it's 2 am and I have to be up in 4 hours
Needless to say if anyone can point me to who would be a better person to get notice of this tiny problem, I'll document for them straightaway. I know a few of the loki guys peruse slashdot on more than a regular basis.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
This is probably my favorite game in recent memory. It ranks up there with the best of the mid 80s Commodore 64 games: Archon, M.U.L.E. (anybody remember that one?), Pool of Radiance, Temple of Apshai, and Ultima IV. PC games suck, except for id, Origin, and New World Computing.
:)
Heroes of Might & Magic is one of the best series of games I've ever seen. And I've been playing computer games longer than some Slashdotters have been alive.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where Ultima 8 is a 1 and NetHack is a 10, I would give HOMM3 an 8.5 (9 with the additional scenarios).
The Heroes of Might and Magic series has been great, and I'm eagerly awaiting HMM3 for Linux. However, at 93MB for the demo, I'll have to give it a miss, and just wait for the full game. Even with my ISDN, it's just too big to be practical. Until BT get off their fscking backsides and sort out ASDL, those of us in the UK are stuck with comparatively slow net access :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yes, a newbie can definitely play this game. It has an excellent tutorial that explains everything in detail. Really, the rules are quite easy to understand. Getting a good strategy might take a little longer, though. The manual has many hints and tips on gameplay.
You'll definitely want to bump up the difficulty level once you start winning scenarios. It defaults to "easy mode", despite what they call it ("normal" or something).
I've won scenarios at "impossible" difficulty, and it surely is not impossible (though the first week or two is very, very difficult).
I've seen a lot of posts here that say "see, everyone should port to linux!", but I'd like to point out that mere days ago the Soldier of Fortune demo was released. It weighed in at over 95 megs, and it still had something ridicioulous like 500,000 downloads. All 5 mirrors were clogged. Now I know that it's a different game genre, perhaps a more popular one. But if we want companies to port games to linux, we have to support them when they put out demos like this. I know 90 megs is large, but from what I've been hearing, it looks like a great game. Let's see if we can clog a few pipes with this one.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
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I recieved a copy of Heroes 3 for Christmas.
Soon after my wife and daughter got a chance to play it, they demanded accounts on my Linux box.
After playing Quake III Arena, she wants Linux on HER box!
A seriously adicting game. I would enjoy it more if they fixed the AI player bug involving regenerating armies... But even then, it is still a hell of a lot of fun to play and worth the money. (Loki did a fantastic job on the port.)
I can't wait to see what they do with Alpha Centari.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
As of Monday, Tux Games will be offering a CD with all of the Loki demos on it. This will be sold at break-even price (about $7 shipped anywhere in the world). If you are from a country that charges you for local calls, it would probably pay you to hold off on the download and pick up the CD on monday.
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
I installed a SBlive a couple of days ago, just in time to use it for this demo. Didn't have a problem at all. I'm using the latest (As of a couple of days ago) code off opensource.creative.com and the 2.3.40 kernel.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?