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.
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
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.
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/
my girlfriend is an avid gamer...
;)
Oh yeah, I totally fucking feel your pain, you bastard.
The enemies of Democracy are