Parsec Demo For Linux Released

not exactly playable by McBeth · 2000-03-02 05:36 · Score: 3

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.

TI-994a version? by vitaflo · 2000-03-02 05:43 · Score: 3

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?

Mirrors by Nicodemus · 2000-03-02 05:54 · Score: 3

libglide required by Alex+Farber · 2000-03-02 05:55 · Score: 5

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

More Info by CentrX · 2000-03-02 06:05 · Score: 3

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

--

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson

Why closed? by / · 2000-03-02 06:06 · Score: 5

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.

--
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes

Re:Why closed? by Michel · 2000-03-02 07:18 · Score: 3

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? by cartographer · 2000-03-02 11:38 · Score: 3

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.

slashdot friendly html by xtype · 2000-03-02 06:17 · Score: 4

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Re:Daydreaming... by cpt+kangarooski · 2000-03-02 06:20 · Score: 3

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 ;)

--
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Gaming and Linux. by be-fan · 2000-03-02 06:38 · Score: 4

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 :)

--
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Re:Gaming and Linux. by captaineo · 2000-03-02 09:53 · Score: 3

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:Why such requirements? by Pope · 2000-03-02 07:21 · Score: 3

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

--
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.

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Parsec Demo For Linux Released

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