Slashdot Mirror
Multiplayer Linux Games
gooshy1 writes "Ok it's getting near the end of the year and people are beginning to wind down for the holidays. What I want to know is are there any decent multiplayer games that an office of about 4-7 can play, preferably action. The machines that we use are not all that great, P4 1.7Ghz with 2 year old NVidia graphics cards, so Quake and the likes are out of the question. A favorite is BZFlag due to its playability and nice tunable graphics. All thoughts welcome, and Merry Chistmas/Happy Holidays :-)"
I've played Quake 3 on and AMD Duron 800 MHz and it works fine. Some of the newer games though...eh wouldn't work to well.
Starsiege: Tribes.
It is old, came out around 1998 or so. Single best multiplayer game. Infinite skill ceiling, fast gameplay, dirt cheap, and runs well on anything. I still play it regularly. (can you tell?)
I set this up for a few of us at the office, and now we have up to 20 players on a friday afternoon, including some VPN'ing in from home to play.
We've managed to also include managers and some people 40+ who haven't played FPS games before, and after a week they become a lot more proficient.
Currently running it on a linux server (700 MHz box next to me), and we play it from our 2.0Ghz desktop PC's.
Best thing about it.. it is FREE.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
How about counterstrike? It doesn't require a high end machine infact P4 1.7 is a over kill for counterstrike.
http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/
Definitely Cube! It's like a basics version of half-life for free.
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
Esoteric reference.
it'll run on 486 machines, what are _you_ on?
http://gtetrinet.sourceforge.net/
Loads of fun, multiplayer, great for an office enviornment, and very light on hardware...
-PhaseBurn Welcome to Linux country. On quiet nights, you can hear windows reboot.
Wolfenstein Enemy territory would be an ideal game.. It should run with no difficulties on your machines and it is also free..
A quick google search turned up this URL, for example, to download from..
grab from here
yes, yes it will, ran it on a 486-133 myself, but min. reqs stated a P60, IIRC
Give Freedoom a go - the PrBoom port runs on Linux and supports multiplayer. Not all the freedoom levels support deathmatch yet but theres a huge archive of deathmatch wads you can play under it instead.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
http://legendsthegame.com - action game, multiplayer, scalable graphics etc. download from any of these mirrors http://shiftermod.com/legends/legends-0.3.6.1.tar. gz
http://borganism.com/legends/downloads/legends-0.3 .6.1.tar.gz
http://themasters.co.za/legends-0.3.6.tar.gz
Unreal Tournament Classic (not UT2003) runs great in Linux. You can purchase it for around $10 in the bargain bin at my local CompUSA, so everyone could afford to legally have a copy on their machine. It runs just fine on my daughter's Celeron 700 with a four-year old Voodoo card, so I suspect it would run great on your newer faster better office PCs.
There are lots of mods for it if you get bored with the factory DM, CTF, and assault modes.
Also, as many have mentioned, quake3 runs fin on a box like yours. It's a great game and is getting pretty cheap now too. My family and friends still find UT classic and Q3 just as fun, if not more, than the newer games.
those machine should be able to handle Quake 1-3 and Unreal Tournament fine in linux. UT2K3 and tenebrae quake would take a better vid card. If you are willing to install WinE Half-Life and Counter-Strike will also play perfectly fine. check out more at linuxgaming.net
doom 3 isn't capped at 30 fps at all. the SYSTEM fps in doom 3 is capped at 60 fps. this has nothing (at all) to do with how many fps your graphics card and monitor will display. in doom 3 the system fps will control player collisions, damage and physics, but it has nothing to do with how many frames per second you display.
Downside is that you need a lot of patience to play AA:O, because there are no respawns. Not something my co-workers have a lot of. :-(
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Assuming you have wine set up, run the HL installer, then the CS installer, just like in Windows. Set up your controls and resolution and you should be good to go.
Steam (and therefore CS 1.6) is pretty much windows only though.
Try few free (of cost) games:
strategy
FreeCiv - new version was just released, FreeCiv is not as good as Civ3 in single player, but it's very playable in mp
TEG - if you want simple strategy (it's risk clone)
lgeneral - panzer general clone
action
RTCW ET - IMHO best team action game
Cube - simple multiplayer FPS, with nice graphics
Armagetron - 3D tron implementation
sport
CannonSmash - table tennis simulation
foobillard- billard simulation
misc
Scorched 3D - scorch (or for younger slashdot users: worms) clone
If you were a fan of scorched earth then scorched3d shouldn't disapoint. link
kyjello is too damn smooth to make a signature.
Americas Army (www.americasarmy.com) is great in an office. Particularly because it is totally FREE and runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
It's an up-to-date engine (unreal 2003) and seems to work fine even with older cards and laptops that have graphics accelerators. It has lots of adjustments to sound and graphics quality to tune performance for slower machines.
If you run your own server you can relax the playbalancing requirements so people can get any weapon they want.
I've found it's kind of a pain sometimes to download, with all the primary sites being slow but if you search for it on Google you can usually find a secondary site or bittorrent server for it.
There is also a self configuring linux bootable CD of it for people who don't want to install it on their hard drives.
Milo from Kangaroo Koncepts
Quake 4 is being built on the Doom 3 engine. I don't think Doom has much reason to be scared of itself.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
If you like Risk, there's always TEG. No 3D graphics or even sound, but somehow I got addicted to it.
Just get version 0.10.x (for Gnome 1) because 0.11 (for Gnome 2.x) crashes under Gnome 2.2 and 2.4 (only works in 2.0).
quake 3 should get a perfect 125 fps on a p4 1.7 Ghz. quake 1 should get a perfect 77 fps [with fuhquake.net + better graphics than counterstrike.. actually you can play counterstrike levels if you somehow wanted to] and quake 2 should get, i don't remember.
i've played q3 for 3 years on a p3 733mhz with a tnt2 and 384mb of ram. i get around 100 fps constant, which is perfectly fine.
since it doesn't seem to be working for him he's doing something wrong. he probably needs to change settings on his vidio card.
(1) turn 'anisotropic filtering' off / set 'texture anisotropic setting' to 0 x.
(2) turn 'vertical sync' off
(3) set option for 'mipmap detail' to best performance
(4) set 'hardware acceleration' to full
(5) in the quake 3 system window lower the resolution to 1024x768, 800x600 or 640x480 (i've always used 640x480).
(6) in the quake 3 system window choose 'normal' or 'fast'
(7) if that's not good enough go to www.esreality.com and read how other people do it, there are tons of tricks.
You're dead on. Any of the Quakes would fly on these systems. I even find it hard to believe the question was asked honestly, with the description of those relatively hot systems in the very same sentence! After all, he's talking about boxes that were top of the line two years ago with then brand new Nvidia cards, and claiming they can't be expected to run Quake games that came out two or more years ago!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yeah, right. Anybody can tell the difference between a headache-inducing 60 hz refresh and a 75 hz refresh; very few can tell the difference between 30 fps and 90 fps. The vast majority of those who say they can are liars. Your eye isn't able to differentiate between a continuous motion and small sudden changes in 1/30 sec time increments unless something unusual happens; it can easily tell when the screen flashes to black and back as slowly as it does on a 60 hz refresh.
Q3 ran fine on my oldskool radeon with no accelerated drivers through wine with no problem at all.
Several older games have linux ports if you can manage to find original coppies.
Some really good action games:
Descent1 http://d1x.warpcore.org
Descent2 http://www.icculus.org/d2x
Freespace2 http://www.icculus.org/freespace2/
Serius Sam: http://icculus.org/betas/ssam/
..and he talks about just QUAKE, it runs on anything p100+.
Team Fortress with that and he should be set..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ravage has made a bunch of Linux installers for Windows PC games including:
Alteria
Devastation
Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition
Freespace: The Great War
Freespace: Silent Threat
Freespace 2
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide
Rise of The Triad: Dark War
Soul Ride
Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror
Unreal: Return To Na Pali
Unreal Gold
Unreal Tournament 2003 Digital Extremes Bonus Pack
Unreal Tournament 2003 Epic Bonus Pack One
All you need is original Windows CD for the games, and possibly some graphics cards tweaking. I've used these installers to get Unreal Tournament and Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror working on my Debian (woody) box.
Check out the ravage's web site here: http://www.icculus.org/~ravage/
Legends is trying to remake tribes 1
Did a search on the titles and it seems nobody has yet pointed to Liquid War (at least not properly naming it in the title of their post). Winner of Most Unique/Original Game in the HappyPuppy 2002 awards. Simple, yet fun. Controls couldn't be any simpler and multiplayer action is reasonably well paced, not "frantic" (usually), yet not slow, either (again, usually).
Worth a try.
Basically, my understanding is that in older clients (q3 and back), you execute certain moves if your machine could run the engine at higher speeds. What Carmack has done is take away that exploit and make the playfield a little more level by taking the hardware out of the equasion. This of course assumes that you have hardware capable of outperforming the system.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
The mod/port is quite a treat and can help you get enjoyment out of some of your older equipment! Besides the fact Doom was just fast paced and action packed. With the scripting and multiple level floors, they have picked made the original Doom up to speed with todays expectations. Sprites aren't the best, but with them, you can still fight off hundreds of monsters without a slowdown.
Cheers!
-The world is flat like the back of a spoon-
Nobody's mentioned Enemy Territory yet? This thing is fantastic. It's a special release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (totally free, and legal) that allows network team play of Allies vs. Axis. Pretty realistic, and definitely runs on slower hardware (I have a 1.2 GHz Duron, and ancient Radeon card). Versions have been released for both Windows and Linux. Here is the distribution site with BitTorrents but the download is available from lots of other places too.
I really like xbattle and xpilot. Both of them are really old and therefore will run on very minimal equipment. They both provide a lot of hours of fun however. Over the summer we had a couple of interns working for us and they both had fun with xbattle. *smile*
I've been playing Savage for the last few weeks.. they have a free 130mb linux client demo download. It's a great game, 3d FPS for up to 32 players per team.. and one person on each team is a commander, who is in overhead view RTS mode. It's a bit warcraft like in the RTS mode.. gather resources, build tech buildings, build spawn buildings. main goal is kill the other teams stronghold.
in the full version, there are 2 races, humans and beasts. There are also more maps.
check it out.. http://www.s2games.com
mangband! It's kind of like a realtime, multiplayer nethack. Not quite as advanced as nethack in terms of creatures and items, but a huge amount of fun nonetheless. And I promise your graphics cards will handle it.
For something a little more flashy there's Crossfire, which takes the graphics all the way from Nethack levels to Gauntlet levels. I've had some problems at LAN parties with the Windows client, but if you're all Linux you should be OK.
These games prove that fancy graphics aren't necessary to make a game fun. Plus, call me a wuss if you want, but I like that they can be played cooperatively.
Here are the burnable ISO images:
Enemy Territory (torrent) (ftp)
America's Army ISO (ftp)
Don't be daft. He wanted recommendations for good multiplayer games, which isn't the same thing as "are there any games that work on Linux?"
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Phosphors need to be refreshed before they expire. If they start dimming before they are refreshed, then you will notice slight blinking compared to looking at a piece of paper. Your monitor tries to do this at as fast hertz as possible. If 85 hz means that for your monitor, pixels are refreshed before they even start dimming, then you won't ever be sick from it.
However, when frames are refreshed (in a game), they do not "dim". What I mean is, old frames don't expire. If you are staring at the same thing that doesn't change, it won't matter if it updates 200 frames a second or 1 frame a second--YOU WON'T KNOW. In a game, people will know the difference between 90 fps (fluidity) and 30 fps (not fluid around fast jerking around of mouse.) The person will FEEL the difference in speed. There will be a laggier feel as opposed to the 90 fps. 30 fps doesn't just mean less fps, it also means there's more time needed for the computer to draw that frame before showing it. People will see much faster updates at 90 fps, regardless of hz your mointor supports. 2/3rds of the frames the gamer gets are older than the ones the 90 fps guy gets, only 1/3 (every third) frames might match up with the new 90 fps the faster comp guy gets. You are missing the point about fps. It's not for eye candy. Higher fps makes you a better player, gives faster response time, and allows less bottlenecking. Lower fps shows a deficiency on the computer to run the game properly, and in a low fps case, you know that if it's that low, then networking and other systems might be affected. While at 90 fps, you know that everything is going smoothly for you to get that high.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
You do know that Quake 3 runs natively on Linux, right? :)
Armagetron is a networkable, 3D light cycle game, as seen in Tron the movie. Check it out at http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/. Latest version even supports Internet multiplayer!
In case anyone doesn't know, it wasn't anything about the gameplay that doomed Tribes 2. It was the copyright protection. Not only did it require a CD key to play online, which is fair and understandable, but you had to have the disc to play and the disc was uncopyable. So no letting your friends try it out at LAN parties. The lawyer who talked the publisher into that should be hanged...
You mentioned Bzflag, I think you would like XPilot also, perfect for team games about 5 a side. It might have been mentioned under this post already but heres some more info..
The official homepage gives you some tips on how to play the game (it DOES takes a little while to learn). It's rated the #11 best game on www.happypenguin.org, works under most Unixes, linux distros and even windows.
It is basically Multi user thrust and while that might sound a bit boring and the graphics look a bit boring, it is actually really great fun, once you have perfected control with the mouse it becomes a game of lightening reactions. Don't let the basic graphics confuse you, but you knew that already right. There are hundreds of game parameters and client parameters you can change, and loads of maps, of different modes, some of them are pure power games where you collect as many power ups as you can, there is also a race mode where its pure speed, and then there is a team play mode where you try to steal each others treasure.
You might want to check out a branch that some of us are working on too which gives the ability to define maps in XML and use polygons and as high an FPS as your machine will allow, and also has an SDL/opengl client in it (much nicer graphics same gameplay). You can find that in the CVS linked from here
It's great just to start a local server in the office on a machine and let the fun ensue. Try out a map called bloods music, where you attempt to steal each others "ball" (same idea as a flag in quake). Warning though it takes time to get into but once into is VERY! addictive.
Regards
Aleph One
Open Source fps with plot for Linux, Mac and PC
http://source.bungie.org/
The Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent, free (as in freedom) game with both campaign and multiplayer mode. The requirements are very low, and they have just released the 0.6.1 version today. Download it! ;)
Utopia: http://games.swirve.com/utopia (Angel runs in WINE and there's http://utopia.sf.net)
NationStates: http://www.nationstates.net
PlaneShift: http://www.planeshift.it
VegaStrike: http://vegastrike.sf.net
Advanced Strategic Command (ASC): (a Battle Isle clone) http://www.asc-hq.org
FreeCraft, FreeCNC. These are multiplayer iirc. C&C and WarCraft clones.
Dune2 runs fairly well in DOSbox. DOSbox and WINE are of use sometimes, among others. There's a ton of emulators for Linux.
NETHACK.
Funny, addictive, and cool.
armagetron.sourceforge.net
The first great (FREE) game is called Legends. It is very similar to Tribes and is based off the Torque engine. Fun gameplay, cool maps and an integrated map editor. Get it for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X at http://hosted.tribalwar.com/legends/
The second game is Vendetta. It is a space combat MMORPG, and since it's a pre-beta game it's free. Don't let that scare you away, though. The gameplay is spectacular, as are the graphics. The community's even fairly decent. Get that one at http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com.
Sadly, neither of these games include source code. Draw your own conclusions.
My Systems
Exactly, I can run Quake3 on my dual celeron 400, withOUT the accelerated drivers on my geforce 2, and get good results, install the nvidia det's and my performance is amazing.
If you cannot run q3 on a 1.7 ghz machine, then it has NO video card, I can't think of any other reason.
Hell, my dual 400 can run Unreal Tourney with a little work.
And yes, I would kill for more 1.7 ghz machines. I am still on a dual 400, and I can still play q3 on it!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Not exactly a First-Person-Shooter, but still don't forget the Battle for Wesnoth.
http://www.wesnoth.org/
Looks a bit like Heroes of Might and Magic, but is better.
Free and Open, Linux, Win, multiplayer, singleplayer campaign, etc
In Quake3, this is still true, and it carries over to RtCW and all other games using the Quake3 engine. It has a huge effect on what's called strafe jumping. The basic idea is that it works best at 125 fps and 333 fps. It's caused by the fact that time and space are both bounded numbers in the engine. Every frame, your computer caculates how far you should have moved in the last however many ms and moves you there. In multiplayer, a server only runs at around 25 fps, and you send an update about that frequently, so it can only do basic sanity checks-your movement speed is largely controlled locally. Result being that Quake has to round off your location quite often in its caculations, and the roundoff can have a big effect. At 125 and 333 fps, the player running velocity is such that they usually get rounded up. At really bad fps, they usually get rounded down. It has a huge impact on your actual maximum velocity. One Quake mod called OSP did away with the exploit, but it was buggy and caused unusual movement issues where you could get 'stuck' on other players, so it wasn't ever popular for competetive play. You'll find that every half competetive gamer into a quake3 based engine has a good enough system to get a solid 125 fps.
Improved XPilot
;-)
The first version of Xpilot was ready in 1991 and it was split into a server and a client in 1993 to facilitate internet play. See The Story of XPilot.
Fortunately the developers of XPilot were clever (or lucky) enough to separate the model and the view into the server and the client, respectively. Since the the model resides in the server exclusively, a client can't break the 'physical laws' of the game, which unfortunately is possible by clients of some other games.
An additional benefit of the strong separation of model and view is that players are not influenced by other players network latency (lag), since the server is aware of all the players positions and current action (e.g. key press/mouse click). In relation to the server, clients merely act as 'dumb terminals', sending input events from the user to the server and displaying info it receives from the server as graphics in the game window.
The downside of this is of course that 'locals' get an (unfair) advantage over 'lagged' players by receiving information earlier and thus are able to act faster.
The XPilot client is very configurable and it's easy to change it to display as much graphics as one prefer or one's system can handle. Since the client (and server) is open source, you can even (easily) change it to display information differently from 'official' versions, or synthesize information to 'enhance' your client, but still you can't break any of the game's (server's) physical laws by 'hacking' your client
Outgun is a 32-player CTF game, ported to linux, and will run on a K6 II 450MHz! http://www.amok.com.br/outgun Or get the linux package from sourceforge: http://sf.net/projects/outgun
Nobody has mentioned Conquest. That game has been around over 20 years. And it still is a fun game. It's the predecessor to NetTrek. However, I think it is better. You can plan better strategies for battles and all. Granted it's not a fancy interface, as a matter of fact it's a curses interface, but once you get past that you can have alot of fun with the game. It's pretty cool to have a bunch of people playing on teams trying to take over the universe, it gets pretty heated at times too. If you people want to check it out go to radscan.com or the new source is at freshmeat.net
You're mistaken. Here's why:
First of all, you're confusing monitor refresh rate with the number of times a game redraws the screen. Regardless, I'll address your post.
Phosphors need to be refreshed before they expire.
True.
If they start dimming before they are refreshed, then you will notice slight blinking compared to looking at a piece of paper. Your monitor tries to do this at as fast hertz as possible.
True.
If 85 hz means that for your monitor, pixels are refreshed before they even start dimming, then you won't ever be sick from it.
True, but the latter assertion is subjective.
However, when frames are refreshed (in a game), they do not "dim".
False. Frame refreshes in a game function similarly to that of non-game screen refreshes, save for the region of memory that the graphics adapter scans out to the DAC/TMDS. The point is, the frequency at which I redraw the contents of my 3D (or non-3D) rendering context is completely disconnected from the speed by which my DAC or TMDS scans this region of memory in order to send pixel data to the display device.
What I mean is, old frames don't expire.
True, but this is irrespective of being "in game" or "out of game". There is a region of video (or host) memory that stores the data used to describe the desktop, application windows or perhaps a game that is running. They don't "expire" per se, rather they are written over a window update. The closest paradigm I can think that resembles "expiration" is when a window context is marked by an application as requiring an update, but still that has little to do with the contents of the framebuffer, and nothing whatsoever to do with monitor refresh rates.
If you are staring at the same thing that doesn't change, it won't matter if it updates 200 frames a second or 1 frame a second--YOU WON'T KNOW.
True.
In a game, people will know the difference between 90 fps (fluidity) and 30 fps (not fluid around fast jerking around of mouse.)
False. I'll hold off on posting a novel, but suffice to say that this depends on the individual's persistence of vision. Some people can visualize "gaps in motion" or flickering at 30 frames per second of a given animation, but on average, 24 frames per second is sufficient for creating the illusion of motion, thus movie playback standardized on that method.
The person will FEEL the difference in speed. There will be a laggier feel as opposed to the 90 fps.
False. This is all subjective. Additionally, I believe you are confusing input response delay with graphics response delay.
30 fps doesn't just mean less fps, it also means there's more time needed for the computer to draw that frame before showing it.
False. Some arbitrarily "low" framerate (again low is subjective, bear with me) is not a reliable indicator that a particular set of frames has required more time to draw. Frame limitation is a perfect example of this.
To argue your point for you, I'll provide an example supporting your assertion. Suppose I have a graphics engine that renders bouncing balls, and I am in a room with a single bouncing ball. The lighting is per-texel, texture-based (normal map) N dot L with 4 textures per pixel. With one ball being rendered my scene can be drawn 90 times per second. I then move to another room in my world where there are 50 of these bouncing balls and the time to draw each frame extends out past 34 ms, resulting in less than 30 rendering context updates per second, purely due to a limitation in the graphics engine to draw these updates. In that case, there would be more time required to draw the frame.
The point is that the framerate, as in the number of frames that are drawn per second, is completely disconnected from the speed at which that content can be scanned out and drawn to the display devi
At the risk of shameless promotion, check out Star Control: Timewarp, downloads are here. It runs on Windows and Linux, and can support up to 8 people at a time in hot-seat multiplayer (on the same computer with keyboard and joysticks). You can also play with two computers on the internet or LAN. There's a lot of cool ships and game modes, similar to the fun and excitement of melee fights from Star Control 1, 2 and 3.
This game is a lot of fun, it's open source, it's Linux friendly, and it's Star Control, baby! Check it out!
No one has ever fired for blaming Microsoft.