Slashdot Mirror
LGP brings back Loki, Kind Of
michaelsimms writes "Linux Game Publishing has announced a publishing deal with Epic Interactive to publish Northland for Linux. What's this about Loki, you ask? Well, Northland is a game featuring the Norse god Loki, and a group of heroes battling to save the world in the time of Odin and the gods of Nordic myth."
Hell, I'd settle for them releasing a 'best of lokisoft' collection. I can't find a damn copy of alpha centauri / alien crossfire other than the used copy selling for $145 on amazon.com.
Anybody got a copy they're not using? Please?
I got that feeling until they said it was an RTS game. At that point, it's more like Age Of Mythology, but specific to the Norse mythos.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I can see it now Knoppix Northland! This is what everyone was talking about a year ago: Bootable Linux game CD's.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Linux is not a viable platform to sell games if the games are only for Linux, but If developers took it into account beforehand and developed in opengl they would have an easy 2 (osx, linux) decenctly sized platforms to sell copies on without a _huge_ ammount of effort. It seems to be working for Epic. In fact epic licenses their engine by platform, Windows/OSX/Linux are considered a single platform for pricing
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Which begs the question: is it immoral to pirate a game when you can no longer buy it legally? (because the publisher went bankrupt)
And, is it legal? (who's going to come after you for doing it?)
I was looking forward to a flood of game ports to Linux. I guess one more is better than no more. Why companies don't release executables for Linux (like Id for quake(1-3) and Bioware for NWN)? Most of the games today are datafiles anyway (ie. pictures and sound that would work on any platform). Are game companies so locked in to using Microsoft's APIs like DirectX that they can't program a game to be portable anymore?
Electronic arts probably pisses me off the most as they make a few changes to Id's engines (MOHAA) and neglect to release binaries for Linux. Yes, I am aware of the port on icculus.org, but EA could have done a port of MOHAA long ago.
Actually, Epic did recently say that GNU/Linux sales account for fewer than 1% of client sales, so they don't produce cross-platform clients for commercial reasons.
... even if it doesn't make you money." And "our feeling is we can't give them a Linux server and not give them a Linux client... that wouldn't be fair."
Rather, according to Epic's Mark Rein, "Sometimes you've just got to do the right thing
This is a very, very misleadingly titled article. Shame on you editors!
Vote for global prefs bug
IMHO problem was bad set of people and terrible organisation of whole project.
A bad set of people? I think not, the group were a talented bunch. I would not argue that organisation was a problem either, though it is hard to organise a distributed group of people on a major project.
From selected 8 coders only Steve Baker and I were experienced in graphics - and in 3D at all.
Whether or not the group were experienced in graphics or not (I forget who had experience in what), how many developers do you think need to be experience in graphics on a game project? A game's graphics are only it's visual representation and is a very small part of development.
Steve Baker left, when it was clear that LGP wasn't able to give us good artists
I think, although Steve may say differently, that he left due to lack of progress and not lack of good artists.
Then even discussions on mailing list dissapear. And I think it was exact moment of death.
Interesting. I received 1,147 e-mails from the list after Steve left (of a total of 2,809). This wasn't the moment of death, though it didn't help.
In all honesty the project was going to be incredibly difficult to make work due to the lack of regular monetary motivation (as in a wage), which meant maintaining motivation for the project was incredibly difficult.
On the topic of motivation, it didn't help to have a person who is quite possibly the most pessimistic (sic?) and most difficult to work with ever (certainly of all the people that I have ever worked with). Oh, that was Jacek btw.
Oh well, c'est la vie.
Everyone's boat floats in some kind of water, but Northland's kind of water doesn't float mine.
::tardcasm:::) I'd put my 2cents towards UT2K4.
The game is a case study of the effects of extreme co-dependency. All the villagers need you too badly, they need you to tell them to get shoes, where wood is, where tools and weapons are, takes a few hours just to get the tech-tree up enough to be able to survive some battles.
Detailed to the nth degree, but I don't think having some things being autonymous would of been so bad. Like let them find their own mates instead of the player being forced to play cupid, things like Populous were successful in achieving that. Have a Norse god cast a decree "Go forth and hump like rabbits!" to have more children. Instead of telling each female in the village to produce an offspring.
I played the demo for a few weeks, it's not a bad game, just too tedious for my tastes.
If you only buy one game for linux this year (you're lucky, you've got more than one to choose from this year
In norse mythology you find several gods which are almost duplicates Thor/Tyr and Frigga/Freya/Frey. Some historians claim that the same goes for Loki/Odin. A theory states that these doubles appeared as two Germanic peoples mixed into one at some point in prehistoric Nordic history. As the people merged, their pantheons also merged into one. This merge is said to be the origin of the story of the war between the asa and the vana. As the pantheons merged, new roles were invented for some of the gods. Freya became the Goddess of love, whereas Frigga became the goddess of mariage. The male god Frey also got a place in the resulting religion.
The following story is said to support the view that Odin and Loki originate from the same god: A norwegian king had chosen Loki as his God instead of Odin. A young hero went to the cave where Lokis was chained to check him out. He saw that Loki was a hideous creature, and to prove this point he stole a hair from Lokis beard. He took the hair home to show it to his king. Seing the hair the king got so angry and disappointed that his stomach opened. This became the death of the norwegian king. After that day the norwegians followed Odin.
The story is supposed to originate from the point where Odin was replacing Loki as the leader of the pantheon. In other words it was originally a propaganda story. A few centuries later Jesus was replacing Odin, the same story was reused with Odin on the roles of Loki. A young hero went to pick a hair of Odin.. etc
IMO, if there had been a good game designer on board with the power to dictate aspects, and a good software architect with the power to impose his architecture, the talented programmers assembled could have turned something great out.
And, sibling post notwithstanding, while there was an art team, they had almost nothing to work with to see results. The game could've proceeded with placeholder art long enough to prove stuff out, then engaged the artists to put things together.
Basically, the team was unable to organize itself.
I was lucky enough to beta test for Loki on Tribes 2 and the most frustrating thing was the release. No it wasn't that we had problems making the deadline and getting all the bugs worked out for release, it was that Loki wasn't allowed to release at the same time as EA. We were ready before the windows release. We had better performance and stability then the win guys.
I remember reading the listservs and hearing all the win guys bitching about frame rates and how they had to turn everything down while I was running everything maxed and had a comparatively old system.
So when the release day came, all of us linux testers where sitting there with our beta accounts laughing at the win guys bitching about performance. It was a shame to because they ended up taking a lot of cool features out in the name of performance but on the linux side we already had no problems. Seems to me we had to wait at least a month before Loki was able to ship out the linux copy, and all we did during that time was check the patches that kept us compatible with the windows version.