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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 :-)"
No offence, but I think your concept of "all that great" isn't the same as most of the world. For example, Quake 3 was designed to run comfortably on a 300mhz machine with one of those newfangled "3d accelerator" cards (in my case, a voodoo3 2000). A P4 1.7Ghz with a 2 year old NVidia graphics card would still be considered by many people to be of "gimme gimme gimme!" quality.
quake runs on pentium ONE machines, what are you on?
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.
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
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?)
Where have we come as a nation, as culture when a P4 1.7Ghz is classified as a "not all that great" machine.
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.
There's a difference between "getting the program to run", and "running with an acceptable 90fps framerate". I think that all of us hardcore gamers can agree that anything below 50-60fps isn't even worth touching.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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
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!
With such low end systems, you'd better stick with MUDs.
If my _great_ P2 450MHz machine with 128MB RAM and an Nividia TNT2 with 16 MB of VRAM can play Counterstrike via Wine, I'm really not sure what to recommend for your "not that great" machines...
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.
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
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
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
You must have meant .17 Ghz because otherwise your system will play just about any game on the market.
So if this is the case fire up a good old game of Hearts. I've played it over the network on a P133. With all the eye-candy turned on and full resolution.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
in a really cool office. If you want something that works on a "puny" P4 with a "measly" 1.7 ghz...will "Hearts" work ok?
What?
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.
Let's play Global Thermal Nuclear War.
paintball
Ok, I'm going to rant so mod me down appropriately.
The system you just spec'd isn't too far off from one of mine (P4 1.8A, 512MB RAM, GeForce2MX400) from which I play Enemy Territory from perfectly fine (from Fedora, and RH8, 9, Mandrake 9.1, Slackware 9.0, a homespun distro, the list goes on). Your system is more than capable of playing a good deal of games including but not limited to:
Quake 3
Unreal Tournament 2003
Americas Army
Duke Nukem Forever (just kidding folks) :)
So, you have plenty of options out there and these games will play on lesser machines as well. Hell, some of those games can be spun up on Live CDs (Gentoo Live Game CDs come to mind) so you don't even need to install them to play. Just do a little hunting and you will find plenty of current games out there that work. Granted, most are FPS but if you're into that thing, you've got plenty to play around with....
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
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.
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.
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/
shedding some of those extra pounds and starting a table tennis tournament...
if you have a table, of course
100% Insightful
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
Fucking rich? Cool, I like being here.
A P4 can look like real shit if it's got a 100MHz FSB and sdram to match it. In that case, an Athlon 1600 with DDR can run circles around it. When top of the line is 800MHz FSB the 100s are over anyway.
That being said, Quake 2 is playable on a 650MHz slot 1 with crummy old pc133 sdram. Playable, but "not that great"
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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*
This entire thread is the best (or worst, YMMV) Linux dis ever.
The fact that somebody must ask Slashdot if there are any games that their office can play on decent hardware is, um how shall we say it, ouchie.
Ya, ya, troll post. Don't bother flaming, I run Linux too.
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)
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.
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!
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!
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
The guy who submitted this was a moron.
I submit that if he was able to find BzFlag, he already knows how to find good Linux games. I also submit that if he thinks a P4 1.7 GHz and a GF3 isn't enough to run any Quake game he is a moron.
So he's asking a question he already knows the answer to based on a false premise.
Sorry, but that's just stupid.
The enemies of Democracy are
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
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
I've been playing this game since my final year of college. If your office is full of Tetris fans, then load this on your workstations and have fun.
Quadra homepage
She can play with my "joystick" anytime. Just make sure you use the right combinations. And yes...there is force feedback.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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.