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Three Axis Promises Nanosaur For Linux
lvillalt writes: "Three Axis Interactive is porting Nanosaur (a 3D Mac game) to Linux, using the Quesa 3D graphics library." Nanosaur seems like one of the best reasons to buy a Macintosh -- smooth action, good controls, nice textures, and action suitable even for small kids. But if you can put Nanosaur and a close-enough-to-Aqua theme on a Linux box, the premium for The Real Thing suddenly looks a little steeper. However, no release date yet.
pangeasoft has their priorities WAY, WAY out of line. what they REALLY ought to be porting is "gerbils".. NOT nanosaur. :)
:)
of course let's keep in mind this is why Quickdraw 3d was originally created; so that people could _do_ things like porting a 3d app crossplatform ("crossplatform" at the time meaning "windows and mac os", of course) without massive rewrites (although i never saw anyone do this except for the makers of the game "Havoc"). Of course, then OpenGL came along and made QD3D irrelivant, but we didn't _know_ that was going to happen when QD3D first came out.. at the time, sitting there staring for hours at pangeasoft's gerbils demo, and to a lesser extent their (still very cool) 3DTicTacToe and Wormhole 3D demos.. oh man. it just seemed like the coolest thing in the world. Esp. right after we were recovering from Quicktime VR.. we may never find a use for quicktime VR, but damn, it was nifty.
Oh well. Maybe someone could get hold of the gerbils source or something-- i dunno. i can't even find a place to download the binaries anymore, nor can i find a 3dtictactoe or wormhole 3d, or for that matter any of those small yet at the time mind-blowingly cool (3DCalc!!!) original Quickdraw 3D apps.. they used to all be linked from apple's website but now that's all gone. What happened to all this stuff?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The king of all simple, addictive games:
TETRIS!!!
Heck, a friend of mine back in school even programmed a version of it for the old TI-81 caculator after seeing the version I had on my HP-48. I still can't believe he made a fully functional (if simple-looking,) version of Tetris in just 2400 bytes of memory, in a programming language that makes BASIC look as powerful as C++.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It's apparent that Nanosaur was an experiment in 3D game programming that focused on the tech, not the game (and, relevantly, the tech was mostly QuickDraw 3D based). It's very impressive that one person did this in his spare time, but it isn't something you'll want to ever spend more than an hour or two with. Remember, this game was given away free for the Macintosh, because the author knew it wasn't enough for a commercial product. A port to Linux would be an interesting comparison of the state of Linux 3D vs. Macintosh 3D.
Both games seem intended for fairly young children; neither kept my attention for very long. However, it is interesting to at least one game company doing something other than car racing, one-on-one fighting or shoot-em-ups with modern 3D hardware.
> I'm just sick of never having anything of our own that is
> so great that Win/Mac users can't wait for a port so they can get in on the action.
Well, the reason that's not likely is because all our best innovations come from Open Source. And when you're open source, there's no waiting for a port. Furthermore, look at the two biggest APIs in use for Linux gaming right now, SDL and OpenGL. Both of these libraries make ports to other platforms TRIVIAL, a matter of a few hours worth of bug chasing and recompiling. Yay-rah, I say, I'm personally liking the games that are 'simultaneously developed' for different platforms, like Parsec for instance. (BTW, if you haven't checked out that demo yet, it's well worth the download time.)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Nanosaur seems like one of the best reasons to buy a Macintosh -- smooth action, good controls, nice textures, and action suitable even for small kids. But if you can put Nanosaur and a close-enough-to-Aqua theme on a Linux box, the premium for The Real Thing suddenly looks a little steeper.
Dude, I totally just slapped a Porsche sticker on my 98 Eclipse and now noone can tell the difference. Thanks for the advice.
Set your browse level to 2. That's where mine is and you filter out about 98% of the /. crap. Of course, you won't be able to see your own posts, but that's a small price to pay.
Of course, all that childishness would probably discourage visiting emissaries. Perhaps the default browse level should be 2 unless you explicitly change it. If you don't want to have a cookie, we don't really care what you think anyway, right?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
5 of the most addictive games I've ever encounterd in no particular order:
1) Any roguelike. Angband seems to be my favorite.
2) Ogre. There was an implementation of this for SCO about a decade ago.
3) Mille Bourne. This was another one I was introduced to on SCO. You can get it for Linux or the Palm Pilot, too.
4) Ski. This was an incredibly silly character mode game for DG/UX a while back. It was so simple you could play it on a paper teletype.
5) Robots. This is an old classic and has been implemented on nearly as many platforms as Emacs has. Hmm. I should write an implementation in E-Lisp...
Lets not forget Solitaire, either. For a while my favorite quote was: "Windows: The best game of solitaire $90 can buy!"
So for all you people who ask why it's important that a cheesy mac demo game gets ported, maybe there's an answer in there somewhere. Maybe not, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One thing mentioned on the Quesa maillist is that this may allow for more resources to bear in the completion of the library. Progress on Quesa hasn't been too bad (although you wouldn't guess it from the rather infrequent releases-- there are just a small cadre of developers working on it), but a few hard snags still remain before the current goal of QD3D 1.6 compatibility (e.g. NURBS equations, according to Joe Strout)
By the way, for anyone not familiar with Quesa, check it out. It's an incredibly well-designed 3D scene graph API, roughly the equivalent of Inventor. (Or is it Performer? I keep getting those two mixed up). Apple dropped support for it in OS X (they went OpenGL-only), so right now the API is in that same eerie twilight zone as the old OPENSTEP API, where you have this very clean, well-architectured standard basically abandoned by its parent company. (The cool thing being, of course, that future development of such a standard falls into the hands of "the community," a la GNUStep)
I've heard wonders of the elegance of this API. Definitely superior to Inventor. (or Performer). And the nice thing about Quesa is that the implementation is sweet-- the structure, even the commenting is beautifully done. Quesa is going to be one hell of a graphics library when it is finished. I'm hoping it will become the cross-platform standard 3D scene graph layer, much as OpenGL already has for low-level 3D. I'd be hard-pressed to name anything better.
iSKUNK!
I am very dissapointed to see the lack of support that most have shown so far in the discussion of this forum. Most of the posts have either been useless trolls or simply stupid. Do you think what you are doing is at all helpful. Did you even follow the links. Looking at this it is probably not the type of game that I would play now as I am more into the first person shooter genre. It is however something that I would have loved when I was younger and anything that broadens the scope of linux is a good thing so rather than criticizing stop and think what you are doing. So far their have been very few worthwhile posts. Slashdot is going downhill and only the people that are causing the problems can fix this.
When you are hitting the submit button pause and think for a second. Is what you are doing in any way helpful. Is it even going to help you or are you behaving the way you are simply to be cute or because you want attention?
On another note people that actually read the article would have noticed that this is a good thing not only because linux will get more software but because the developers are embracing a concept called "charity ware" in which people who like the software give money to a charity instead of paying the developers.
Aaron
Aaron Bryden
Aaron Bryden
abrydenREMOVETHIS@gmail.com
This is just another example of the endless stream of hand-me-downs the Linux community has been given. It's great that companies are giving us anything, and I certainly don't blame them. I'm just sick of never having anything of our own that is so great that Win/Mac users can't wait for a port so they can get in on the action.
Isn't it about time we did something monumental instead of just porting and cloning apps from other OSes?
I'm grateful for what we've been given so far, but it's time to innovate.