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 know they aren't action. (at least not any i've heard of) But online game sites are pretty fun, and you don't need a good computer either to play on Yahoo, Playsite, or the likes.
Nothing like it
P4 1.7s and 2 year old graphics cards are just GREAT for Quake and the like. I play Quake3 weekly on such a system. The Nvidia card is slightly newer, but not much, and I'm playing at 1600x1200. Even with a GeForce2 for instance, I would expect excellent gameplay, if at a slightly lower resolution.
NeverWinter Nights works very well on the same system. There's lots of options.
I can remember working the Christmas shift and playing Warcraft many years ago on much lesser systems (albeit on Windows back then)
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Freeciv. Sorry, its not action though.
With Linux being free and America's Army being free.... all you need is the PC hardware and a broadband connection. "Frag out" indeed.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Freeciv is multiplayer and works on about any machine that can run X comfortably. If you want more action, may I suggest the classic XPilot?
Marklar: marklar
I have to agree with you. I've played a lot of multiplayer games since Tribes, and while the graphics have gotten (marginally) better in most of them, none of the newer games seem to foster the same team effort that Tribes did (I could be remembering it through rose colored lenses, though). The pace was excellent and I was able to run it on the original Voodoo 3D addon card. I'll definitely reload it now since apparently there's a server or two still running.
well i remember playing quake on my p1 100 Mhz with NO 3d acceleration at 30 fps, so i'm sure that a p4 1.75 GHz can easily do 50 fps without a 3d card.
so my recomendation is easy off that christmas punch and consider games like quake and it's sequals, which still run on my celeron 400a with a tnt2 card can run quake 3 and rtcw at over 30 fps with a couple things turned off but not much really
i might also suggest that not being able to play it acceptably as you not being good at playing the games themselves very well. just cause someone continually schools you in the art of fps doesn't mean it's unplayable at a certain speed, it means you need to get better and adapt.
There is a great game being developed with Garagegames' "Torque" engine. It has rock-solid 32-player multiplayer, high fps, emboss terrain bump-mapping, and, most importantly -- great, unique movement dynamics.
:) Great guys on that dev team, though -- download the game, it comes with a modified version of a stable auto-updater program. Download it once, and if nobody is playing, you'll always have it -- when the next release comes out, you can autoupdate! Also, the team is very good about arranging regular scrimmages for everyone that is interested.
Well, not unique entirely. Some might even argue that the game is nothing more than an independent resurrection of a type of gameplay that was accidentally (bug) introduced in the first game of a franchise, was LOVED TO PEICES by the fanbase and introduced thousands of players to the game, and then was nixed in the second installment because an arrogant jackass (*cough*he made Planetside*cough*) who got owned every time he played the game in multiplayer decided that player skill was overrated and unfair to the majority of players.
http://hosted.tribalwar.com/legends
My work here is done.
Summary:
Legends. A team-based multiplayer FPS with a very deep and well-developed movement-and-combat model.
Gnocatan, the Gnome 2 settlers of catan clone, is a lot of fun.
I've never understood this... can somebody please explain why on earth you would want to turn vertical sync _off_? It can give you a faster frame rate in numerical terms but surely it means that your monitor is showing two or more frames at once (eg the top 1/3 of your screen showing two frames ago, middle 1/3 showing one frame ago, bottom 1/3 showing current frame)?
If your monitor is set to 100hz vertical refresh then that's your optimal frame rate. No more. No less.
Everyone says turn it off though, so either they're all wrong or I am. Please enlighten me!!!
Two reasons. The first (and undisputable one) is that for scientific purposes of measuring system performance, you want to have as precise numbers as possible. So when starting to tweak for speed, you certainly have to be in a configuration where the effect of every setting changed can be detected. Vertical-sync locking might hide the effect (positive or negative) of weirdly-labeled OpenGL options.
But there's another reason, so people may want to leave vsync disabled after figuring out the tweaks they want. It's almost too simple to bother typing out: "Because it gives higher frame rates".
You said "faster frame rate in numerical terms". But that just means "faster overall".
surely it means that your monitor is showing two or more frames at once (eg the top 1/3 of your screen showing two frames ago, middle 1/3 showing one frame ago, bottom 1/3 showing current frame)?
Not three, just two. Your description is as if there was no such thing as hardware pageflipping. In reality, there will be a single "tear" line going horizontally across the screen, with the prior frame above it and the current below. (vertical syncing forces that line to always stay at Y=0 at the top of the screen, meaning you see only one frame)
The reason the tear-line doesn't matter at all is a fundamental principle of visual perception. "Persistence of vision". I won't go into lengthy details, just look it up.
Hint1: A movie projector shows you fully black screens 50% of the time, yet that doesn't bother anybody.
Hint2: the higher the framerate is, the smaller the difference between the prior and current frame will be, making the "tear" even less detectable. At above 50 fps, it's hard to see, even if you're looking.
If your monitor is set to 100hz vertical refresh then that's your optimal frame rate. No more. No less.
Absolutely not, especially in games based on Quake. There's MUCH more than your monitor to consider. There's also the simulation model inside the game. The tight coupling between client and server can have weird effects. For example, if you're playing Quake3, the forward distance you can jump is maximized with a framerate evenly disible by 125. Going at 130 fps will unsync you from the underlying physics code, cutting 4-7 units off your jump height, and generally impairing all your movements (by a tiny amount, but serious deathmatches are won by slim margins)
(I don't know if other games exhibit fps effecting the server's processing, but that phenomena is well documented in Quake)
Oh, and another reason to leave VSYNC disabled: nonuniform scene complexity.
Suppose your monitor has "100hz refresh", and configuring the game with low or medium graphical quality will give you 100fps in normal use. So naturally you'd leave it on medium, to get a more detailed image onscreen.
But then suppose occasionally 7 enemies come over a hilltop and shoot you with laser-guided rockets. There's so much going on, that the card simply can't output 100fps. If VSYNC is on, you're dropped down to the next slowest multiple (80 fps or whatever, although these are fake numbers). But if VSYNC is off, you might go down only to 93.6 or so, making a less jarring transition, and leaving you better able to manuver when it's needed most.
Actually, it was never fixed.
.6 units/sec shaved off of it. It feels a bit floaty, and you can obviously jump a little farther.
The problem is that the player movement code snaps the player's velocity vector (floors each component) after every player command is processed. Player commands are sent every client frame.
If you're getting a solid 125 FPS and the gravity is at 800 (always is), your frames last 8ms, and your downward velocity will almost always have
The other magic framerates are 200 (.6 units error) and 333 (.8 units error).
The truncating saves about 120 bytes/sec. I suppose that would matter a lot to someone playing over 56k.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
This description is really just describing a bug in the 3D rendering libraries.
The problem is that the APIs aren't designed properly, and don't expose a proper vsync interrupt to the application. This means that vsync lock in the API actually means, "Wait for vsync when given a flip command" which is completely wrong. It means that the game gets stalled waiting for a page flip, when in fact it should be calculating the next frame while the current one is queued, and flush the current frame on the interrupt.
With a proper game engine and graphics API, there is no reason any sane person would ever turn off VSYNC.
I agree. Fuhquake, an opensource Quake client/server would run very nicely on said machines.
This description is really just describing a bug in the 3D rendering libraries.
Not exactly, but that bug would make it horribly more blatant.
With a proper game engine and graphics API, there is no reason any sane person would ever turn off VSYNC.
Even if your specific game library is free of blocking-for-flip bugs, players will still want to have the fastest drawing possible.
With VSYNC off, the screen shows part of the prior frame, and part of the current one. Enabling VSYNC means you only see the prior frame, none of the current.
And making decisions based on old data is bad. (Another respondant said the same thing, but with amazing succinctness)
Of course, as overall fps increases, the lateness of the prior frame is reduced, so that factor becomes less important. But at the same time, the penalty is reduced, as any tearing is harder to percieve.
Try Quakeworld. There's still an active community (Pan-European clan leagues!), it runs on really old hardware, and the sheer speed of the game coupled with the high skill level makes it really rewarding to play.
:)
There's some undefineable quality (and I do mean Quality!) about the way Id built Quakeworld which they (or indeed anyone else) still haven't managed to recapture with any of the other games which followed.
The Fuhquake client - http://www.fuhquake.net/ - is pretty good, as is mqwcl - http://mqwcl.n3.net/ . Both of these are used in current leagues to prevent cheats.
Quake3? It's okay, but QW still rules. IMO.
okay, so i read howstuffworks.com. says that NTSC (okay i typed ntfs wrongly at first.. i live in a PAL country) displays 60 lines and updates these 30 times a second in 2 batches (interlacing?) then it says the human eye starts to string individual images into "motion" at 15 fps.. which still makes me say "if my tv can only update at 60 fps, and my eye can see images as a movie at 15.. why the fuck should the difference between 60 and 160 actually matter?" - after all i watch tv and the images flow smoothly.
Im not being contrary here, but if you can explain better how im worng, i would love to know.. its just your source (howstuffworks) hasnt clarified a thing for me beyond cementing what i already knew.. Maybe im just interpreting the info wrongly, but id be glad to hear more
bah!*@%!
We play Descent II on a LAN using outdated machines (Pentium 233, Pentium Pro 200) and outdated graphics cards (S3). It is now open source and available for Linux, Mac, and Windows - thanks Matt Toschlog (Outrage Entertainment) and Mike Kulas (Volition Inc.)!
My new favorite multiplayer networked game is BZFlag - but it needs some horsepower (fast CPU and 3D GPU) and won't run right on my outdated machines.