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

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

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.

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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 :)