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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.
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?)
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.
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!
I ran it on my ZX-81.
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 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.
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.
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/
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
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)
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.
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!