Slashdot Mirror
RTCW Single Player Demo & Linux Binaries
Ant was fastest on the mouse to report that Id Software has a single-player demo and a set of linux binaries available for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Blue's News has some more information and a mirror.
However... is this sort of release really going to be downloaded and used a lot (outside of Slashdot)?
/. and other geeks downloading it just to see how it works, but this is as a novelty, IMO. You download it, get it working, say "this is cool I am gaming on Linux" and get back to work never to touch it again.
If it was used only by the people on slashdot that'd still be a pretty large audience. This site has a big base of regulars, posters, and lurkers. Why do you think that within minutes of a small to mid-size site link being posted here the server ends up going down?
I can see people from
People who would do that weren't really that interested in playing it in the first place. It's the same thing as people who download the PC demo, try it for five minutes, and move on. I'm guessing there's a large segment of Linux users who do a lot of gaming on their Windows machines, but would rather be doing it on their Linux box (I know I fall into this category). For them, it's a godsend. And in terms of appeal, I'm sure the percentage of Linux users who will stick with it is probably proportional to the amount of PC users who will.
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
I live in a Windows-free world, so I guess I'm a Linux gamer.
The downside is that there's not much in the way of games. The upside is that those that are there are pretty good.
My "game machine" is a P1-233 with a PCI GF-MX200 in it. Plays Q3 just fine. And I've been making my way through the Loki ouvre and having a ball with it.
I'm almost finished SOF, and then there's Descent 3 waiting in the wings.
Am I typical of the bleeding-edge, overclocked, 3000 FPS gamer that Windows seems to attract? Hell no. But I AM using Linux as my gaming OS, and I AM having fun with it, and I'm using a machine that's over 5 years old.
Which is pretty cool, as far as I'm concerned.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Despite poor sales of their Quake3 linux port, the release of a demo for linux shows the future of commercial gaming on linux platforms is still possible...
I have a couple of friends in the computer game industry and Linux games, as commercial ventures, are usually nightmarish. Providing support is difficult and expensive while compatability issues abound due to the number of distributions and versions of Linux out there. While many in the Slashdot community claim that Linux users are the technical elite, many Linux users are just kids with no understanding of programming or even how to get around in a Unix shell.
Then you get the dark side of the open source mentality -- "I've never written a line of code in my life but I want to download gigabytes of software for free." If half of the people that decry the lack of quality commercial Linux games actually bought bought the games that were offered for sale, there would be a booming market. As it is, companies, bouyed up by e-mail campaigns requesting that they release their game for Linux, actually do release the game and it sits on store shelves gathering dust.
I watched Quake III, in the tin-box for Linux, sit on the shelves of Microcenter for months. It was eventually marked down to $9.99 and had a sticker slapped on it saying that you could download what you need to play it on Windows!
Linux is a viable, thriving market for computer games. Yeah. Right.