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.
Um, an AI where the enemies don't wander around aimlessly? The ability to jump? The ability to walk under and over corridors? The ability to play on teams? I'm sure this is flame bait, but I'm bored.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I think its a good game. I like the atmosphere of the SP game. It isn't new or groundbreaking, but it has kept my interest since I got it for x-mas. (flame-throwing a room full of nazis and hearing their screams of agony... well, *I* like it!)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
For those like me who have had problems with RTCW 1.0 you can get the Patch Here
http://www.kubuntu.org/
For those of us about to ROCK...
Where's the Mac version?
Try DOD. Seriously. Play as an Allies, with a big gun and go after those nazi bastards. Play with a sniper rifle, go into a building that's been ripped up with holes in it, and get the feeling from the movie "enemy at the gates". Seriously, I get so much more out of DOD than RTCW.
The levels, alone, make all the difference...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
While not yet posted on their website as of 15:07 Eastern Time, www.tuxgames.com will sell RTCW with a linux-based installer.
:)
This is for those folks who want to show their allegience to Linux gaming by purchasing from a company dedicated to bringing it mainstream and properly tallying Linux sales.
I have no affiliation, just a friendly notice.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I have played both DOD and I now own RTCW and I much prefer RTCW. RTCW is not living off the name alone and in reality has very little to do with the original game (iD's original that is). The multiplayer aspect is only half the game experience as the single player game is very good and will draw you in and make you stay up later than normal playing it. As for the multiplayer... it rocks! Its very different from DOD and should be looked upon as such. It offers some serious team based play and a few different game modes that make each map play a little different. Its much faster paced than DOD but doesnt lose its strategy elements and in fact makes things feel more harried (sp?). It runs very well on my system and now that the single player binaries are out I can stop booting into Windows to play that part of it.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
I have been playing the full multiplayer version on RH 7.2 for some time and it runs like a breeze. .10 kernel that ships with RH. Only "problem" I have is that I'd like to run a lower resolution(1024x768) in the game than on my desktop(1280x1024), but when you choose full-screen and a lower resolution than the desktop, the games sits in the lower left corner of the screen and the rest is garbage. But that goes for all the games I have tried, like Tux Racer.
Once you get the proper display drivers installed for OpenGL. I realized that I was lucky that NVIDIA provide Linux drivers that enables me to take proper advantage of the card. Note that the default install of RH won't utilize the Geforce chip properly so that you can play games on it.
I have a "old" Geforce 1 and have been looking at the ATI 8500DV. But I have just switched from Windooze to Linux this week so I was checking ATI's site for Linux drivers and it quickly shows that it is not a choice if you want to play games. Their site says that they do not support Linux and then direct you to some sourceforge pages. Pheew good thing I checked that out. Now I am going for a Geforce 3 istead.
Anyway RCTW works great with the
A final hurdle is that you cannot make a Linux install from the CD, which gave me a lot of problems. You have to copy the data files from a INSTALLED version on a windooze setup which was impossibe for me since I had deleted the Windooze. I had a second drive in my PC with a FAT32 partition with my old data. So I had to install windooze again just to get the files.
Please, PLEASE, make a Linux program that can extract the data from the Windooze installer. I don't need no fancy GUI, just a command line tool that will let you extract the files from the CD that you need.
Yes, but Evenbalance is now supporting Punkbuster for RTCW, and not Half-Life/Conterstrike. All the cheaters made multiplayer Half-Life a waste of time. Also, RTCW multiplayer is better by virtue of its populatrity. With online games, it is often the cluster of people around the game, rather than the game itself that is most important. (Of course, if the game sucked, you'd never good sized group of people in the first place.)
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.
Yes, I think an Old West game where I could play a rogue Indian brave wasting cowboys would kick ass!
I'm a white American male and I suspect most of my kind would feel the same. That it would kick ass! Heheheh. I love typing that.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Well one reason could be that Linux performs better on P4/2.2GHz than WinXP does. If more games would perform better. the more people would play on Linux ;)
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
What we need is people to log in to ID's ftp and download the 8mb file that is required to play the buy version on Linux since the CD does not contain Linux binaires. Will the next game be available on Linux if there is no one getting the binaries needed? hmm I don't know.
How else is Linux Gaming going to get popular, then? I too am someone who only uses Windows for the games, and would definitely like to see Linux with a stronger video game selection. However, the only way this will ever happen is through support, and part of that support comes from downloading demos, giving feedback to the developers, and passing it on. It will only remain a noveltly as long as people let it.
The MP has been out a while and the SP ran fin under wine, transgamings, winex, and plain vainlla CVS , all except sound lag on SP under wine.
:)
What IMPORTANT is they DID it, they said the would and did is also imortant this is the kind of cross plattform movability you get with OpenGL.
RTCW is a ton of fun, I hadnt bought a game in over 10 years, Im not really the Gaming Type, BUT Me, and my two sons are Hooked on this, since we have Linux workstations at home, It RUNS FAR more stable on Linux than it does on My wifes W2k box, much nicer all the way around.
Just in case any of you wonder my handle is
"Major Dick"
See you at the Happy Penguin Server tonight
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
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
i have no idea why sales were so poor? maybe the fact that you can't find it on the shelves anywhere! i look for linux games every time i'm in best buy, and never see anything. just last week, i saw quake 3 and some railroad tycoon. these were 10$ each. i don't know how long quake 3 for linux has been out, but for 10$.. that's chump change. the game installed easily and is well worth the money. my point is, they'll sell more boxes if they put them on the shelves!
Different classes in multiplayer. Grenades. Interactive turrets you can use. Ladders. Water effects. Walls and buildings that can explode, break, etc. The flame thrower (already being talked about as revolutionary).
:) CW is quite simply one of the best single-player (according to reviews, community) FPS games in awhile. Couple this with the fact that the Lords of FPS (ID software) helped them with development and gave it their blessing, and you have a game that may not be mindshattering, but is supposedly top-rate entertainment for FPS fans.
Of course its still point and shoot! It's an FPS, sheesh! What exactly are you looking for? The smug feeling of knowing CW won't change our most basic perceptions of the world we live in?
"Old man yells at systemd"
I bought HalfLife the day it went out, loved the single player game but the multiplayer aspect of it was so horribly slow. Waited a few months and it was still laggy as hell so I finally gave up on it.
Maybe by now they released a few patches to improve the multiplayer experience but it's kinda late I'm already hooked on RTCW.
A list of mirrors (which may need some time to propagate) is at:
http://www.fileaholic.com/
I seriously doubt the fat filesystem had any bearing on *how fast a 3d game ran*. Last time I checked my drives weren't spinning when I was playing RTCW, only when it was initially loading. Visual FX don't make a damn bit of difference when you're gaming either. Go back under the bridge little troll.
Does the new installer for linux require an existing windoze install, or is there a way I can play this thing without having to boot to windoze and install it there first?
Sure man, Doom / Doom 2 are awesome games. If you like those, pick up serious sam EBWorld did a survey of all the big gaming sites and magazines, and Serious Sam walked away with best game of 2001. It's 20$. It's Doom (complete with funky sense of humour, 300 enemy battles on absolutely HUGE maps, 20 story tall final baddie) with 2001 level graphics. It's amazing; if you deem FPS's of today a little too involving, Serious Sam is non-stop heart-pouding action. No story, no dialog, no stupid NPCs, just shooting and shooting and ambushes and shooting and armies and shooting. If you think you like Doom over other FPS because of the awesome enemy spawning and item placement and non stop action, Serious Sam is your leap into the 2000s ... and at 20$, you have no excuse not to give it a shot! Shit, I'd have spent 50$ on it .. it truely was one of the most enjoyable games I've played and completed in YEARS.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Except for the fact that the Germans don't speak German! Just pseudo-Sgt. Schultz Germisch dialogue. You have no idea how "annoying zees sort uff sing isss".
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
RCTW wasn't actually developed by ID Software. ID merely "produced" it. RCTW's multiplayer part was developed by Nerve Software and the singleplayer was developed by some other developer who was recently bought by Activision. Can't remember the name though.
Actually a strong argument can be played for playing on Linux instead of Windows, at least for Quake 3 engine based games. Just today The Register posted an article discussing how Quake 3 on Linux (on a p4-2.2) achieved significantly higher (80.2 vs 72.7) framerates with identical hardware (dual boot machine)
While Windows is still the general platform of choice for gaming because that is where games are, don't knock Linux games when they perform better than the same game on Windows
-Frums
Actually, if you can find it at Best Buy, it's only $10. And the "sequel" comes out in two weeks.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
... or anyone that is reasonably adept at first person shooters.
While the (full) game is gorgeous, as you will see if you download the demo, it seemed a bit "short" to me.
I completed the game on hard setting in 4 hours and 50 minutes play time. Sorry, but that's just not the kind of value I was expecting.
Replay value is IMHO low, since the sluggish handling (as opposed to, say, Counter-Strike) makes it hard to use your carefully honed FPS skills.
As an example, any long-time Counter-Striker will automatically aim for the head of the enemy. While headshots exist in RtCW, they are not easy to land and generally seem very random, although every shot will go exactly where you aim. Even Counter-Strike's very random firing pattern feels more precise.
The final boss I managed to kill on my second try. On hard setting. That was disappointing.
Overall, I'd rate the game B+ for eye candy, coolness and first-time wow factor. After 5 hours though, it drops off fast.
By releasing the single player game so long after the multiplayer-only binaries, I suspect that Id has ensured the existance of lots of players like me, who bought the game for a fun multiplayer experience without the hassle of frequent reboots, but who weren't somehow "morally" above rebooting to Windows for a couple days to play through the single player game a month ago. Also, the RTCW single player game, although it's the best such that I've seen from Id, just doesn't cut it compared to Deus Ex or even Halflife. I could easily imagine busy people buying this for the (most fun shooter I've ever seen) multiplayer experience and ignoring the single player game altogether.
It takes a whole lot (Deus Ex is the only example I can give you right now) to get me to buy a game without a Linux port at this point. Linux is enough of an improvement over Windows for most of the productive things I do on a computer that my desktop spends most of it's time there; why would I want to have to spend minutes rebooting every time I want to take a break and goof off?
Last time I checked there wasn't a windows port of tuxracer ;)
Gee, Maybe I don't have halflife.
Not directing this towards you, but this board is very confusing. Do slashdot users want more games for linux or don't they?
RtCW comes out with native Linux binaries and you people bash it with statements like "Half Life is better, we don't need RtCW".
The only reason my primary OS is Windows is because of games. I bought RtCW for Windows and was excited when I saw it had linux binaries available. I installed them, copied the data files over from my windows partition and bam! I'm playing RtCW on linux without problems.
Every app that is ported to linux is a step in the right direction. This article wasn't doing a game comparison, it was trying to point out the cool fact that developers are noticing Linux.
I got my Linux version of Quake3 from a retail store, just after it was released. (yes, the actual linux version with tin box and everything...)
:)
The store clerk said they couldn't keep it on the self. Yup, they were selling like, 5 copies a week.
And this was at the Mall of America, not a low trafic mall by any means.
Putting out a retail version of Quake3 was a nice test, obviously it told them that the market wasn't ready yet. But every now and then you do see Loki games on store shelves. MicroCenter had them for awile. I've yet to see newer titles like Tribes 2 show up though.
Oh well, TuxGames is a great store.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
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.
Last time I checked there wasn't a windows port of tuxracer ;)
Check again.
This is a large reason the mac version didnt sell as well in my opinion. When I went to buy the game, the store had the Mac version, for 49.99 It had the pc version for 29.99. I bought the much cheaper pc version, went home, copied files from cd to my drive, and downloaded the mac binary. I greatly appreciate the fact they released a mac version, and I wish I could have supported it, but I'm no fool, and not was not going to pay 20 dollars more for a game that I would have ended up having to download the binary update for anyway.
This pricing/availability problem isnt the fault of id tho, if anything it is the retailers, and activision. Activision doesnt buy any shelf space for linux titles, and the retailers can sell the windows version cheaper because they sell a lot more of them (surprise surprise!) This results in greatly skewed results for OS sales for a few games, quake based games in particular it seems. id seems to realize this tho, which I suspect is why they keep releasing versions for other OSs and pushing licensees to do the same despite the 'horrible sales figures.'
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Germany has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world.
This kind of logic is ridiculous. Germany's rate of violent crime is directly a result of them selling RTCW in adult only stores...... This is about as ridiculous as people citing gun control laws as responsible in the UK.
We couldn't possibly have worse crime in the US because we put too much stock in rehabilitation...., or because people don't take the time and care to learn to use weapons for self-defense....., or etc....?
No, wait - you've convinced me. If we take RTCW off the shelves we will be so much better off as a society..... But why stop there, let's just ban the XBox, too (not such a bad idea, now that i think about it). And Personal Computers (so you can't play RTCW or MS Flight Sim). And box cutters - you know they're dangerous after 9/11 proved it. And....
Just so you know, the version of Windows used was Windows XP. Windows XP has been known that it can perform slower than Windows 2000 or 98 in tests.
(see The Register for an article discussing Win2k vs XP performance)
Also, since both OSes achieve framerates higher than 60, its not going to make much difference when actually playing the game.
A difference of only 7.5 fps is not insignificant, but its not very significant either. I am willing to believe that the same tests can be repeated by others, and get results that show the same, and the opposite from what The Register saw.
So what can you conclude from the Register article? That both systems play the game well.
Greg
While I can appreciate Tuxgames' wanting to package a complete game, I (like many other people) primarily want to play the MP version. And I assumed that when I ordered it early last Decemeber that it would ship as soon as they had packaged it. But that wasn't the case. I wrote tuxgames and asked them what they were waiting on, and they told me to join the mailing list so I could find out when it was going to ship. Not especially helpful.
If you make it hard to show support then only diehards will. If you make it easy, then id gets to see plenty of Linux gamers. For example, everyone at work has been bugging me to set up a server on our game machine. I've been telling them to wait until I get my copy. Now many of them are beyond the game, having played it for the last two months straight. So I'll get my copy, put it on our game machine and it won't get played very much because everyone's moved on. At least I'll have shown my Linux support. If they would have shipped with MP only and then emailed me a download link to the SP binaries when they becamse available, I'd have been very happy I bought from Tuxgames. I would have been playing on Linux with my Win32 friends damn near after the game went GM. As it is, I'm just grumpy that I paid for a game over two months ago and am just now going to get it.
I almost bought a Win32 copy a couple weeks ago, and maybe I should have. It just seems to me that waiting two and a half months is asking a lot simply to show "support" for a single-player portion of a primarily multiplayer game (how many of you still play Quake2 or Q3A in single player mode?). Besides, id ought to be able to gauge Linux support from their ftp logs, right?
I guess sometimes I feel left out enough as a Linux gamer without having to tell people why I'm waiting to set up a RtCW server...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
That's interesting. My son's name is Thresh. They should play together sometime
psxndc
If you haven't played Half-Life with the new netcode you're missing out. It's excellent, best lag-hiding netcode I've ever seen. I can play with a 300ms ping (26k dialup) and usually enjoy myself on a decent server. Unlike RTCW which is unplayable with 300ms lag.
Its pretty intereting to note that in the last few months a few sources have been getting osme pretty good results when benchmarking Linux against Windows for gaming - specifically Quake 3 on GeForces. Hover a proper installer would be great. The CD uses Wise installer archives. There is a free Unix Wise archive extractor (sorry, lost the URL :( )but it needs to be updated for the latest archive format.
* This months Atomic (a well known Australian overlocking / hardware geek mag)
* The Register
It was inevitable, but I'm glad its happening. Onward penguin soldiers.
Now if Slashdot would post the news that Tuxracer 1.0 is avaliable for ordering I'd be a happy man.
I've played the RTCW demo on Windows and have been seriously underwhelmed. They've slid downhill ever since the first Quake as far as I'm concerned. I think they really need another Romero to help channel their technical abilities into a more exciting and presentable package. No Id game has creeped me out the way the original Quake did, until Half Life. I really liked the quasi-medieval-sci-fi angle to the whole thing which was entirely original, and eventually panned in favor of a 'safer' alternative.
Oh well. It ain't my company!
**>>BELCH
Is a 'Coronel Custer' anything like a Beowulf Cluster?
**>>BELCH
Having read The Reg for a few years now, I'd say it's very unlikely that they purposefuly tried to stack things against Windows and conceal it from the readers - say what you want about their quality, but they just don't do things like that.
But yes, they do (for the most part) like Linux and they do (for the most part) hate The Great Beast of Redmont. More importantly, this whole hardware and benchmarking kick they've been on, only started a few weeks ago. They just aren't the [H] and are pretty new to the whole thing (from what I know at least) and I wouldn't rely on their benchmarks as being able to hold up against the exacting standards we are used to.
All that said, I find it completely plausable that QIII would perform better (actually, make that "run faster" to be precise) under Linux than WinXP - for many different reasons (not excluding the ones that make XP look bad).
No need to get your panties in a knot - just one benchmark on one persons two systems - interesting, but hardly conclusive.
sic transit gloria mundi
Basically, I find it helps to realise that Half-Life is effectively the R-Type of the FPS genre. Developers can now go on and make more graphically impressive, complex, realistic, deep and engaging FPS games, but millions of sad pedants will come back with "ah, but it's not the same as Half-Life, now there was a game..."
Let's let people make their own minds up. There's a place for Half-Life as well as RtCW. Plus scads of other sub-genres of the FPS. It's not such a tragedy that Wolfy doesn't do anything stunningly new, at least it does what it does very well (and for that matter, name another FPS - ack! except HL! - that has stealth, survival-horror, objectives, big big levels and kick-ass multiplayer out of the box?).
Just my dual helping of minor currency.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
If it performed better in 16 bpp, I don't see why it would not at 32 bpp...Are you saying that WinXP is more efficient at higher color depths?
Different results at different colour depths aren't that uncommon, at least when hardware is being compared (remember when teh Radeon first came out and was put up against the GeForce all over the place?), though I am not sure if the same difference would occur on the same hardware with a different OS - not like I know anything about it.
I was actually hoping that someone would clear something up for me - I run X at 16 bits but it cites the same number of colours as I used to have in Windows under 24; I also vaguely remember reading something about Linux and Windows doing these things differently - am I just making things up again, or is it true? Or something that doesn't apply to 3D? just curious...
sic transit gloria mundi
Nothing really, it is a conglomeration of some good things from many sources, but there is NOTHING NEW in the game. Not that that makes it a bad game, I really liked the variety of sniper rifles in the single player. I've not played the multi player yet so I could not comment.
And for the bank AC, mouse look, online play, and half way decent AI, though there is still MUCH room for improvement in RtCW. The holes in the AI show up at extreme range. They will just stand there and watch their buddy take a sniper round to the skull, without reacting in any way. Beyond that the game was a bit steep on the $$'s side but 10 hours of fun.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I wonder if they fixed the SMP issues -- reportedly, the Windoze side of things will take advantage of two processors, but on linux RtCW can only use a single processor. I haven't been able to get the linux side of things going to actually test this on my SMP system though.
Haven't played enought to say anything about gameplay yet, but it certainly looks sweet as hell with all the eye candy jacked up and at high resolution (runs like a champ too - better hope BillyG doesn't see it, he might have a heart attack)
Just might have to go out and buy a copy - will that make me one of the 50 or so people who've bought Linux games? ;)
Oh yeah - anyone know how I can get it to display fps? Just idle curiousity...
sic transit gloria mundi
I don't care to buy hardware from a company that might oprhan me or DRM me, when their priorities change(only a fool would argue that Microsoft dosn't carry a big club in their xbox deal). GPL is required for software infrastructure in my book.
Do you know what the highest Linux card that works with video capture and 3d is? Is it the 32meg Radeon AIW? Is there a 7500 aiw type tv card?
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
can anyone comment on whether RtCW can use >1 processor? Maybe I should just check the Windows side, but I'd rather not reboot. :) I can say with certainty that it doesn't use >1 processor on linux, at least according to "top".