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.
For those like me who have had problems with RTCW 1.0 you can get the Patch Here
http://www.kubuntu.org/
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.
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.
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
If you could enter to the FTP site you could note there's an OSX directory there... but since the whole thing is slashdotted, you can't. I'm really sorry. Just be patient and wait a few hours, by then everyone will have stopped clicking the pretty links...
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
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?
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.
Yeah?!!?!
;)
why do us mac users always get shafted on games, and instead only get stuff like photoshop and illustrator that work properly, unlike windows that gets broken graphics apps and all the games? what's with that?
btw, if you want games, get a ps2...much better than a win box
do not read this line twice.
... 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.