Loki And BSDi Team Up For BSD Games

I just got word from the fine folks at LokiSoft announcing that they are partnering with BSDi to produce games for BSD. Very cool -- my hat is off to all involved. Here's the press release.

Loki and BSDI Partner for FreeBSD Games
Loki to Certify Games for Use with Linux Compatibility Features

San Jose, California -- August 15, 2000 -- Loki Software, Inc., the leading publisher of best-selling games for the Linux operating system, today announces a strategic alliance with Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI), the foremost supporter of the FreeBSD Project.

Loki introduced fully-supported, shrink-wrapped commercial games to the Linux community in 1999. While Loki has released Alpha and PPC versions of their games whenever technically feasible, FreeBSD users had been left to their own devices to make the games function on their open-source operating system of choice.

Through this new partnership, Loki and BSDI will work together to ensure Loki's gaming titles are compatible with FreeBSD using the Linux-compatibility features. Certified games on this configuration will be fully-supported by Loki.

"Many people do not take games seriously, and this is a mistake," said Jordan Hubbard, Vice President, Open Source Solutions. "Availability of Loki's industry leading line up of Linux games is a huge win for us, as we realize full well that games drive a large part of the overall acceptance of any operating system, even a serious operating system like BSD."

"We are excited to be announcing our official support of FreeBSD's Linux compatibility libraries," said Scott Draeker, president of Loki Software. "FreeBSD users have been enjoying their Open Source operating system for years, and many of them have been playing our games."

Loki is now preparing several A-one titles for certification, including the highly-anticipated SimCity 3000 Unlimited and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri with the Alien Crossfire expansion pack. Other popular programs to be certified soon include Quake III Arena, Soldier of Fortune, and Descent3.

Specially-marked certified games will be available from The FreeBSD Mall in addition to Loki's Web site store.

Comments

Great!

[tealover]

I assume that they'll be released under the BSD license, so that means I can repackage and resell.

Just what I needed to start my own gaming company! Thanks BSD!

Linux games w/ emulation?

[Mr.Phil]

Can BSDi use the Linux binary emulation wizardry and play existing Linux games from Loki?

Re:Linux games w/ emulation?

[Fervent]

Or you could have just inserted the CD in Windows 2000 and had it install in seconds.

Food for thought. :)

Re:Linux games w/ emulation?

[AntiBasic]

If you're referring to BSDi as in BSD/OS 4.1 then probably. LAP (Linux Application Platform) enables a BSD/OS system to execute many dynamically linked Linux ELF binaries (both libc5 and glibc) with no significant loss of performance. This release has been tested with the following Linux applications: Adobe Acrobat, ApplixWare, Informix and Word Perfect. It works about as well as well as BSD/OS's SCO shell (sco sh).

LAP works by inserting an interface library in between the Linux application and the Linux libraries, and the BSD/OS kernel. This library interface translates Linux data structures and other system call parameters to and from BSD/OS equivalents. For example, the library replaces the Linux stat(2) call with a translation function that calls the BSD/OS stat(2)call and converts the BSD/OS stat buffer into a Linux stat buffer. No special preparation is required to run Linux programs with LAP; there is no seperately invoked emulation program (with SCO/iBCS2 you run sco sh). LAP should be roughly as efficient as the native Linux glibc library.

How about 3d support, though?

[Masker]

Now, with games like Quake III Arena being produced for Linux, we have pretty decent 3d acceleration support from 3dfx and (shudder) nVidia. But what about the *BSDs? I don't think that I've seen anyone (including utah-glx, which is what I use) claim to support *BSD. I wonder who will step forward first to add 3d acceleration support (I'm imagining that the hardware vendors will have to at least help out a bit...).

Anyone know (or care to guess)?

Daemon?

[Signal 11]

Call me cynical, but why is it that the first game they ported has pictures of daemons chasing linus torvalds and his evil team of ninja penguins?

I have to admit, however, the "Code Dungeon" looks kinda cool... fight flaming perl zealots and FUD-wielding slashdotters. Can't wait for the playable demo!

Everybody should chip in and help them out.

[efuseekay]

Hear Hear. I love Lokisoft. I think they have their hearts in the right place, with a lot of brains too. I used to keep a WinDoz partition to play games, but now I've deleted that away.

Loki is a big reason for that, and everybody to chip in and buy their stuff. Because they deserve our support.