Parsec Demo For Linux Released

Jeff Hobbs writes about the " self-running demo of a new 3D, network, cross-platform space combat game called Parsec, that is being simultaneously developed for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Looks pretty *damn* cool so far...! "

Comments

Well I think my prayers have been answered

[slashdot-terminal]

Well at least in the figurative sense. Space games have always been favorites of mine from trek in the BSD games category to others I think this will be rather cool. Too bad my linux machine really can't take the strain, but I do have this little old useless NT machine here I can inflict with much punishment.

not exactly playable

[McBeth]

I camped out on their site almost all day waiting for this thing.

My take on it.

Like it says, self-playing demo....
pretty much it is three timedemos
and a "freeflying" mode, which means you fly around in space (nothing around you) to "get used to the controls"

Gorgeous graphics, since you can't really blow anything up yet, it is hard to tell how much fun this will be.

personally I wish the configure key bindings weren't disabled so I could pick something more descent-esque than the crazy ones in there now.

oh, and who ever recorded those demos sure knows how to fly

my machine gets pretty good frame rates considering it is slowly aging.

Like I said, I can't hardly wait til the real thing comes out.

Re:not exactly playable

[McBeth]

oh BTW, the music rocks.
I have already snapped up anything by this
stev guy I can find....

Very Cool

[msaulters]

Those are beautiful screenshots. Looking forward to the real thing. Does anyone else know of any good cross-platform games? Best one I can think of is Abuse.

Re:Very Cool

[Patrik Nordebo]

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is available on Windows, Linux and I think Mac. I'm not sure if it will interoperate between Windows and the others though, depends on whether it uses DirectPlay or not.
Railroad Tycoon 2 should interoperate between the Mac and Linux versions, at least once Loki and whoever did the Mac port get around to it.
Empire is available on just about any conceivable platform.
FreeCiv runs on Unix-likes, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, but doesn't seem to be available for Mac.
Unreal Tournament is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Those are the ones I can think of right now.

Re:Very Cool

[Azog]

Well, the obvious answer is Quake III, available for Linux, Win32, and Macintosh. I have seen it for sale in all three versions. It has pretty screenshots too. :-)

Oh yeah, and Quake II is cross platform as well. But not as pretty.

To the best of my knowlege, all three Q3 platforms are interoperable - you can play against a Mac user from your Linux box, etc.

Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

Looks good, but unstable

[eldamitri]

I downloaded it last night and played the first demo in the list. It was /very/ pretty and the music was pretty cool, too. About 8-10 min into it, it just stopped, my computer totally hung. No keyboard response, no mouse, nothing. I rebooted and tried again, this time selecting the free flight. My machine hung before I got a chance to even start flying.

Mandrake 7.0, Voodoo 2, latest drivers from 3dfx. Anyone have better luck or similar experiences?

-Scott

"there once was a big guy named lou

Parsec? Too little too late?

[DigitalGodBoy]

Granted, I haven't played it networked yet, but the free fly mode was pretty cool. The controls were slighty complex, using both hands for basic control. As for the graphics, it's seem like a 3D Escape Velocity/Overide. The lighting cannon seemed somewhat dated graphics wise, no transparency or anything. All the graphics feel somewhat dated. I do like the support of ANY acceleration (GL, Glide); max kudos there! Just my opinion, I've been known to ramble....

TI-994a version?

[vitaflo]

Since the site seems Slashdotted, is this game from the creators of the Parsec game I have for my TI-994a? If so, I'm all over this, as that was my very favorite game for that old thing. If not, what happened to that license, and is this an abuse of that license?

Unfortunately...

[cronio]

...the Linux version is glide2-only for now (opengl support will be out soon supposedly). Meaning you
a) have to have a 3dfx card, and
b) even if you have a 3dfx card, you can't play the demo if you're using the 3.9.18 DRI server, because that doesn't support glide2 (yet).
Oh well...I guess I'll just have to wait for a new demo, or for backwards compatibility to be implemented in glide3.

Mirrors - kill /. effect early

[sethdelackner]

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Windows
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Mirrors

[Nicodemus]

Here's a list of mirrors, straight from the site since it looks like they're going to get slashdotted pretty soon.

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

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

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

Re:Daydreaming...

[JatTDB]

Parsec was also a 2D side-scrolling space shooter game for the TI-99/4A home computer...a computer that holds a special place in my heart as it was the first I ever owned. Nothing spectacular in the graphics department, but insanely fun and addicting. And, if you had the speech synthesizer attatched to the TI, it even talked to you: "ENEMY SHIPS APPROACHING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!"

libglide required

[Alex Farber]

Don't bother d/l if you run Linux,
but don't have a Voodoo-card:

PC/Win32 (95/98/NT/2K)
----------------------

Voodoo Graphics
Voodoo 2 (8MB, 12MB)
Voodoo 3
Matrox G400
NVIDIA TNT
NVIDIA TNT2
NVIDIA TNT2 ULTRA
NVIDIA GeForce (SDR, DDR)

PC/Linux (x86)
--------------

Voodoo Graphics
Voodoo 2 (8MB, 12MB)
Voodoo 3

Mac (MacOS 8.5 or later)
------------------------

Voodoo Graphics
Voodoo 2 (8MB, 12MB)
Voodoo 3
ATI Rage 128

/Alex

Re:libglide required

[spinkham]

It will do the samewhen it's done, it just isn't done yet ;-)

More Info

[CentrX]

Here's more info for all of you who cannot visit the site:

The major part of this demo is a movie of in-game action rendered with the Parsec game engine. The demo is composed out of several actual network game sessions that was recorded using Parsec's in-game recording feature. It is 11:40 minutes long and features nice background music.

There is also a "free flight mode" where people can select their ship and navigate outer-space, collecting power-ups and such. However, there are no opponents, since the demo does not contain any networking code. Still, pilots can steer their spacecraft and fly around.

There is also a TIMEDEMO feature that is available.

The minimum recommended CPU is a Pentium 200 although a Pentium 300 is recommended. The minimum memory requirement is 64MB although 128MB or more is recommended. 65MB of hard disk space is also required. It is required that you have a Voodoo card (Glide), as GLX is not yet there. Kernel 2.2, glibc 2.1, and X (or svgalib) is also required.

The source is not available.

Chris Hagar

Why closed?

[/]

From the faq:

30. Why are you offering it for free?

Basically, Parsec has always been planned to be a project for fun and educational purposes. So the decision to release it as freeware was actually quite an easy one. As soon as it became apparent that we didn't compare all that badly to commercial releases (at least in most respects, we certainly won't be able to compete with the breadth of the big releases, there being no missions and real story, for instance), we coined the term "commercial-quality freeware" to describe a freeware game that rivals commercial releases in quality. Since then, we're working on living up to this premise.

33. Will Parsec be open-source?

No. We're strong believers in a coordinated development effort for computer games which we don't think works with a large number of people involved. There are already plenty of really great open-source projects out there (have a look at Crystal Space and WorldForge for instance), so there isn't really anything missing. What we want to do is to create a game, for which art and music is also very important; we don't think you can create a consistent look-and-feel of a game in a hugely distributed approach. We are going to release some of the game source, though, to facilitate the creation of user extensions like mods, maybe even total conversions. We will decide on the license for this at a later time.

Sure, there's no need to opensource the artwork, but why keep the engine closed if it's all being done for educational reasons and for fun? Those two tend to be synonymous with open source. And the points about distributed development are both silly and inapplicable, since they don't actually have to accept any modifications that people would make. They could even release it under some silly "you get the source, but you can't distribute modified copies" sort of liscense that would encourage bugfixes but no forks. At least the second paragraph implies that this is all subject to change.

Let's just hope they don't screw up security-wise the way Quake 1 did. If they're writing the game from scratch, I hope they get it right instead of learning the hard way after the fact.

Re:Why closed?

[Michel]

There are already plenty of really great open-source projects out there (have a look at Crystal Space and WorldForge for instance), so there isn't really anything missing.

*Twitch*

Isn't that kind of like saying "We don't need (Free|Open|Net)BSD to be open source because linux is already out there and there isn't really anything missing"?

Re:Why closed?

[cartographer]

I'd love to see a game done like this, w/ a totally client-server based protocol underneath and an open specification for the client. It would be cool to run the 'big asskicker 3D rendered client' or the curses-based text-mode client-- whichever I felt like at the time. Also, being client-server would open the door wide for
implementing robots-- very cool.

Your prayers are/will be answered ;). Take a look at Worldforge (www.worldforge.org). The protocol you are wishing for is called Atlas and is a library you can plug into a client or server today. I could go on and on about the cool stuff that has been developed or will be, but there's a whole website for that. Stop on by.

BTW, all the art, text and code are Open Source. And the security it through not trusting the clients. We know they will be hacked...in fact, we encourage it.

TI 99/4A Emulators?

[weston]

I feel the nostalgia welling in me as well. But there is no TI 99/4A in my closet (wait... no, actually there is, but the darn TV adaptor is missing). Perhaps there is an emulator out there that I could use? Maybe even dumps of my favorite games? (Parsec being cheifest among them, but I also spend hours glued to knockoffs such as Munchman and TI-Invaders).

Re:TI 99/4A Emulators?

[technos]

If I remember, it had a RCA jack that connected to the back of the TI, a switch, a coax connector for the antenna and a bit of two conductor ladder line to the TV? Go out to the local Radio Shack with the busted unit in hand and ask them for another one like that. If they don't have one in stock they will order one for $3.19. They're a common thing! There is no reason to have such a fine bit of computational hardware just lying there when you could be playing Wumpus!!

slashdot friendly html

[xtype]

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How about a 3D Escape Velocity

[Zemrec]

When Escape Velocity came out, I thought I was in love. Here was a game *I* would have made, if I were a programmer. But there was something missing....3D texture mapped graphics!!! Now that I think about...anyone remember Starglider 2 for the Amiga? THAT game kicked ass!! I'd just like to be able to use these 3D accelerator cards for something other than mindless killing sprees. I'm sick of those games. My head feels numb for hours after playing them! Just imagine being able to explore a 3D galaxy, visit planets, and be able to engage in lucrative commerce, join a starfleet, or be a rogue pirate swooping down on unexpecting merchant fleets... Gotta get those credits for that whiz bang particle accelerator cannon somehow! 8^) Something of a cross between Escape Velocity and Star Control but with 3D would be my ultimate game....only wish I knew how to do it myself.

Re:How about a 3D Escape Velocity

[Esperandi]

Basically you want to live another life inside a computer game... well, that is being done. They're called MUDs. Probably caused more divorces and flunked students than anything else in the world...

You have to have an imagination though, it won't draw all the pretty pictures for you.

Esperandi

Re:Daydreaming...

[cpt kangarooski]

Many moons ago, there were a whole bunch of interesting computers that had absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel.

Texas Instruments (they make a lot of chips and calculators) had a few personal computers in the 70's and 80's and one of the more popular was the TI-99/4a (which was not as popular as the stuff from Apple or Commodore... or Tandy... really, but was hardly unknown either)

It was also designed really weirdly (a 16bit chip with no registers to speak of and most ram only accessible through the video processor) and could be slow (the basic for the machine was slow 'cos it was interpreted twice)

Anywho, Parsec was one of those side-scrolling games where you fly a little ship and shoot at the aliens.

Personally, my favorite computer game of all time (aside from Lightspeed, a flight simulator that ran on an SGI Onyx) was Bolo for the Apple II. God help you if you tried to play on level 5 or above. You could at least have fun on level 9/density 9 by attempting to run away from the enemies. For about 15 seconds ;)

Why such requirements?

[ForceOfWill]

I don't get why all the new games have such high system requirements. I know they want to have spiffy graphics, but at the expense of availability? There should be settings to allow for crummy graphics, but fast play. X-wing and TIE Fighter only needed a 486, and I still consider them to have pretty good graphics. Heck, Wing Commander III had excellent graphics, and it just barely ran on a 486-50 (but for some reason it refuses to work with my newer computer). Now I see all games having anything to do with 3d needing an accelerator, and if not, an absurd amount of memory (no single program should consume 128MB!).

Now that I'm done ranting about requirements, I just wanted to say that this looks to be a great game.

Re:Why such requirements?

[Pope]

Well, I have a 3.5 year-old Mac clone with a VooDoo 1 card, and it ran pretty damn well!
Of course, I automatically bumped all the graphics to LOW and sound to LOW. Still, it's pretty, and runs rather well on this ol' Mac.
hell, Unreal Tournament runs *way* better than Quack 3 does. If a brand new game can run on 2-3 year old technology, then what's the big deal?
I often rant against the True Hardcore Gamer(tm) upgrading every 6 months for negligible benefits, but I am a casual gamer so I don't really care all that much whether I can squeeze an extra FPS by reducing the usable life of my components, ie overclocking. I buy a machine to last a couple of years.
I bet you were complaining about the cost of that 486 back when it was brand new! :)

Pope

Re:Why such requirements?

[be-fan]

Actually, programming a 3D engine with software support greatly reduces the things you can do with the hardware accelerated version. Graphics that are not superfical are hard to bring down. Many 3D rpgs also use textures and such for important information and losing those essentially changes the game. The problem is mainly that when making comprimises for fast software rendering, a lot of features have to be left out, even in accelerated modes. Plus most serious game players have PII and PIIIs so availibilty is franky not a problem. Even with the new MRM (basically tessalation) technologies coming out, it is more usefull on fast computers to deliver more consistant frame rate than to squeeze the game into a smaller computer.

Re:Why such requirements?

[be-fan]

A) The graphics in todays games are leap years beyond 486 graphics. MYST may look cool, but it isn't real time and isn't interactive. Sure Quake3 still doesn't have as good graphics (in terms of photorealistich) as some of the 2D sprite games, but it is much more interactive.
B) #D is the name of the game. 3D takes space, it take computing power. To draw even the most complex 2D sprite, all that is required is a blit of a 160K image, but to draw the same picture with 3D, it will take a few thousand polygons with a thousand verticies and a few matrix multiplies for each vertex plus color, shading and texture calculations. Not to mention that current games use something like 30 meg of textures, which shows there need of huge memory. Its not sloppy coding. The executable themselves aren't significantly larger, and the coding is probably even tighter. But when you have 3D scenes with a few million polygons per level and a total of a hundred megs of textures, memory gets hit. The Quake 3 executable is 830 kilobyes, but the .paq file, is 430 megabytes. Sure the executable loads a few DLLs, but the quake 3 installation is 464 meg, and 458 meg is tied up in levels and 3 meg in online services. That leave less than 3 meg of executable files.

That was disapointing

[slashdot-terminal]

Well I ran the demo on an NT machine (upper end pentium PII 400 and it just crawled in just the menu I never even got past the opening screen. And even the turning logo was slow not to mention the lighting effects. What exactly did I do wrong here?

Gaming and Linux.

[be-fan]

The way I see it, with all the games being ported to Linux and all, that Linux will become significantly less choatic than it is now. Linux reminds me of DOS/Win 3.1 in many ways, at least in terms of applications. The gaming environment back then was complex. I remember that Kings Quest 6 actually had you drop into the command line to install it! There were hacks and workarounds all over the place, proriotory APIs were being used, and there wasn't really a unified installation method. With
mainstreamness (TM... My new word)comes unity, and I forsee Linux one day becoming better than Windows in this respect. (Whoa, put down the pitch-forks and hear me out!) Look at windows gaming today. The OS may be a piece of shit, but look at the infrastructure that MS has put in. There is a unified game API (DirectX) sure most good developers these days use OpenGL, but 3D is just a small (design, not code -wise) part of DirectX. Even an OpenGL developer would be a fool not to take advantage of everything from DirectInput and its ultra-flexible device handling, to DirectSound and its accelerated sound support, and DirectDraw and its accelerated everything support. I forsee Linux oneday having an API just like this, except instead of the hard-to-program closed API that is DirectX, it will be an open (source or not, I don't care) API that will be easily portable to different POSIX (and non POSIX) systems. I also see a standardized installation method. Variants of RPMS or DEBs except with much less complexity. And the LSB finally getting its act together so we will never have to harken back to the DOS days and hack the system just to get a game to work. The nifty thing about this is that there is no force required to develop this infrastructure. If it is built and built well, developers will come. There are about 0 serious developers that don't use autoplay or DirectX on windows. They could use something else, but why bother the user with it? And the cool thing will be that it won't be tied to one closed OS. (ie. It will be portable to BeOS :)

Re:Gaming and Linux.

[captaineo]

Even an OpenGL developer would be a fool not to take advantage of everything from DirectInput and its ultra-flexible device handling, to DirectSound and its accelerated sound support, and DirectDraw and its accelerated everything support. I forsee Linux oneday having an API just like this, except instead of the hard-to-program closed API that is DirectX, it will be an open (source or not, I don't care) API that will be easily portable to different POSIX (and non POSIX) systems.

It's here now and it's name is SDL. Linux. Windows. Mac. BeOS. 2D and OpenGL graphics. Sound. Input. DirectX on Windows. Fast. Lean. LGPL.

The first developer was Sam Latinga, who currently uses SDL to bring games to Linux with the other folks at Loki Software...

Re:Gaming and Linux.

[be-fan]

Again, I've said this before, the problem with SDL is that it is directx style on the outside, but is missing the whole point of directX. DirectX is meant to be a library that directly abstracts the hardware, pushes the rest of the OS out of the way and provides accelerated everything. SDL is nice, but it is still software based. The only time it give the power of DirectX is under windows, and at that point you might as well use windows.

Re:Daydreaming...

[Esperandi]

Hey, was Parsec the game where if you fired your guns too fast your ship overheated and got destroyed (or maybe you just couldn't fire any more for awhile,I forget)... my neighbor had a TI, and I think I remember this game ;) Of course I only had a Vic-20 at my house, but I learned to code while he dropped out of school ;)

Esperandi

even more obscure

[Pope]

My friend Wayne had an Exidy "Sorcerer" machine.
The carts like for BASIC, etc, came in 8-Track shells!

Exidy being, of course, primarily an arcade game manufacturer.

Pope

Re:Daydreaming...

[Esperandi]

Damn, can't believe I remembered that game, I was YOUNG... like no older than 8...

Esperandi
But it looks like I'll be trying out this new one, that game was damn fun.

Debian

[Sendy]

I've run it with Debian Gnu/Linux Potato. Just install the Debian glide packages (there is a mesag3_glide deb), and add a symlink from /usr/lib/libglide2x_V3.so to /usr/lib/libglide.so.2.
Don't forget to run ldconfig after it.

I did try it, but i didn't like it like this.

another space game for linux: BFRIS

[synk]

This looks neat, but have you seen BFRIS? It's been out for over a year now and has linux and windows demos. It even runs well on low-end 3dfx cards and 28.8 modems.

Glide wrappers?

[Sloppy]

Whatever happened to the Glide wrappers that used to all be in the news a years or two ago? Any available for Linux/BSD yet?

---

Re:Which is why I don't run Linux...

[six809]

Thinking back to the only DirectX proggy I've seen the source to, SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) does an awful lot of this, and cross-platform too. I think there's definite stress on the "simple", but that suits me fine...

Re:DirectX has been ported to Linux

[be-fan]

The main problem with DirectX through winlib is that you miss the point of DirectX. The library is nothing special, its the fact that it is a direct abstraction of hardware. Presumably, winlib directX just makes calls to the OSS soundsystem to emulate DirecSound or whatnot.