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Linux Live Gaming Project
Fabio writes "The mission of LLGP (Linux Live Game Project) is show to Wintendo users that also Linux can be used to game. And now a new version is out. Features: KDE 3.3 with Plastik theme and Nuvola icons, kernel 2.6.10, Nvidia drivers, TORCS, Wesnoth, SuperTux, TuxRacer and much more! It's based on Knoppix, but contains deep changes in the startup scripts. Now the hardware probing is completely based on hotplug and udev; kudzu was removed. Challenge your friends on LLGP, and convert them to Linux!"
Speaking of getting Linux more popular (more games...), Finally there's a how-to guide you can get all your friends and neighbors tuned-in to using Linux.
How to convert to Linux in 12 easy steps.
Check it out folks, this is very useful - as we edge ever closer to taking down Micro$loth!!!!
I hope that this takes off. We've been looking for a kickstart in this area. Bah..almost first post.
WHen people say that they don't use linux because they cannot game on it, they are not talking about playing tuxracer. They are talking about playing HL2, Doom, the latest RPGs, etc. This distro couldn't be further from what people want.
Is this a label we can really endorse? I mean, come on, you Lynux people, get your head in the game.
Leveling up builds character.
A big problem with live CDs is that because few residential users can justify spending money for vmware, it takes a reboot to use a live CD. A lot of users leave their PCs on all the time, and many just minimize apps instead of closing them before they start a game. How will they get used to 3-minute task switch times, with mandatory closing of all applications?
I've been playing Vendetta (vendetta-online.com) for a while now and it's superb.
I've been playing it on a Mac, but there's also a Linux and Windows version wich is equally beautiful.
No one doubts Linux could be used as a gaming platform. You guys simply have to sell the idea to game developers.
http://www.tlm-project.org/torrents/llgp/llgp-0.1p re0.iso.torrent
But I want to play half life. I understand that OS projects take a huge deal of time to get off the ground, but lets face facts, PS2/Cube/Xbox/PC are all gaming platforms. Linux is not, it was never designed as a gaming platform and probably never will be as long as video card manufacturers refuse to open source their drivers. What is the point of porting games to a platform if the likelyhood of them working is minimal. I fully support the idea of trying to make linux a gaming platform, and would dearly love to see it. But IMHO it's not going to happen.
Next thing, this guy will be telling us to steal OSX users 'cause linux is easier to use...
/dev/random
What the community needs in order to show that 'Linux has game' is to have a group create and publish a full game that people would buy in the shops.
We have plenty of 'game distro' CDs that contain Neverball, Wesnoth, SuperTux, et al, but we don't have anything that you could get attached to like people get attached to Half-Life, Deus Ex, Diablo.
Give me a singleplayer game with a plot for Linux! Yes, sir, I am willing to contribute.
Hmm, I think Linux should be promoted as much as possible, but this avenue will probably be a dead end. I dug around on the website, and found this list of supported games... admittedly it is the 'old' list, but still apparently rather accurate. Here is the URL: http://tuxgamers.altervista.org/llgp/games-0.0.1.p hp
Now, the simple fact remains that this is insufficient, and Linux can simple not be promoted as a gaming platform at this time. This may be promising news for software developers who may elect to use the Linux platform, but I don't think I'll be able to 'convert my friends to Linux'.
Although, I must admit such samplings as 'Penguin Solitaire', 'Penguin Minesweeper', 'Galaga' and 'Pingus - Enhanced Lemmings' do sound tempting.. especially the last. I just don't see it as a show stopper, or anything special.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Man, tux racer is da bomb!!!11!!one
I'm gonna convert some of my hard-core gamer friends for sure! "Hey man forget World of Warcraft, check out TUX RACER!!!!"
I have tried out tux racer on both Windows and linux and I have noticed that the Windows version runs significantly better. I have a computer with a AMD 3.2 Ghz processor and a Nvidia 6800 GT. When I run Tux Racer on Windows it runs very smoothly. I then tried it in Fedora and it was unbearable. I had the updated drivers for my card installed and all the packages were up to date but it still ran horribly. I wanted to confirm that this was a fluke so I tried this out on my laptop (which runs Mandrake) and got similar results. If people want linux gaming taken seriously then the games will have to be built more reliably. I have also noticed that in order to get anything with 3D support there are often several packages that need to be installed and these aren't always included with most distributions.
[quote]
Challenge your friends on LLGP, and convert them to Linux!
[quote]
To play wich games??
Most gamers have different gaming needs then your average techie.
As long as the new games with the cutting-edge engines and graphics do not run NATIVE on linux, stop wetting your pants about Linux as a gaming OS.
Run FCE Ultra or VisualBoyAdvance in Windows XP and tell me it's not a Wintendo.
Run any Xbox game on an Xbox, as the Xbox kernel is based on Windows 2000's kernel, and tell me it's not a Wintendo.
Oh man, Wintendo! A derogitory phrase for Windows that I haven't heard before. Not only does this one degrade Microsoft ( always a good thing ) by implying that their OS is only good for games, but it also ribs Windows users by implying that the majority of them use Windows imply to play games. Holy crap is that hilarious!
Come on, seriously. Since when is childish name calling a good idea, especially when you want to promote your own idea? HINT: Being a dick doesn't inspire others to join you.
Grow up.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
I just don't think Lt. Skat is riveting enough to make hard core gamers switch :-(
I put on a bisemester LAN party for my University's ACM chapter. We always have the two or three linux game boxes, and a vast majority of windows boxes. It would be pretty cool to be able to pass this disk out at the beginning of the lan party. They only problem is, this is too hard of a sell with this list of games. I really don't think the gamers at the party will want to reboot their boxes to play torcs! when the alternative is UT. We really need some competitive open source games to compete with the non-open alternatives. That's the only way this kind of project could ever be effective.
This is from 0.0.1, but the maintainers claim that it basically hasn't changed.
[Damn lameness filter, had to re-write post]
Arcade
imaze, Abuse SDL, Amphetamine, Armagetron, Atomic Tanks, bomberclone, Bugsquish, Bumprace, bzflag, Chromium, Circus Linux, Egoboo, Galaga, gl-117, Heroes (SDL version), KAsteroids, KBounce,KFoulEggs, KGoldrunner, Kolf, KSirtet, KSmileTris, KSnakeRace, KSpaceDuel, KTron, lbreakout2, Mad Bomber, mangopeeler, mangoquest, Neverball, Neverputt, pinball, Powermanga, Starfighter, SuperTux, Thrust, Toppler, Trophy, Tux: A Quest for Herring, Tuxkart, TuxRacer, WING, X Abuse, Xboing, Xbreaky, Xkobo, XKoules, Xracer racing game, XScavenger, Xscorch, XSoldier, ZBlast
Adventures
Falcon's Eye, GGZ, GGZap, Completition Calendar, Fyrdman, Keepalive Control, KGGZ, KTicTacTux, ModSniffer
Board games
XBoard-ICS, Atlantik, GnuChess, GtkAtlantik, KBackgammon, KBlackBox, Kenolaba, KMahjongg, KReversi, KWin4, Muehle, Penguin Taipei, Shisen-Sho, Xboard
Card games
KPoker, Mah-jong, Penguin Canfield, Penguin Freecell, Penguin Golf, Penguin Solitaire, Penguin Thornq, PySol, Solitario, Tenente Skat, Xmahjongg, Xskat
Games for children
Potato guy
Brain-teasers
Codebreaker, Enigma, Gtans, Imemory, MirrorMagic, Penguin Mastermind, Penguin Merlin, Penguin Minesweeper, Penguin Pegged, Xjig
Shooter
Cube
Sport
CannonSmash, Foobiliard
Strategy
Freeciv, GNU Gaming Zone, Pingus - Enhanced Lemmings
Tactics and Strategy
Boson, Katomic, Kbattleship, KJumpingCube, Klickety, KLines, KMines, Konquest, KSokoban, SameGame
Tetris and similar
Cuyo, Frozen-bubble, LTris, Netris , Quadra
The ______ Agenda
The mission of LLGP (Linux Live Game Project) is show to Wintendo users that also Linux can be used to game.
To really cultivate games on Linux, the community first and foremost needs to convince game developers that Linux is a viable platform. Users come later, when there are must-have games they want to play.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
we don't have anything that you could get attached to like people get attached to Half-Life, Deus Ex, Diablo.
You could put a whole bunch of DivX porn on a CD, put some sort of plot around it like the crappy Sega CD FMV games did, and call it "Deus Sex".
Or more seriously, you could make a new DDR mix based on the StepMania engine if you manage to score some song licenses. Roxor Games is doing this with In The Groove, an arcade version of StepMania.
The collective outcry from gamers clamoring for this deafens a small cricket.
Scratch that, a *very* small cricket. About the same size as the list of games worth playing on this live CD.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
I belive the one thing to really work on to make Winodws User switch to linux for gamming would be to get good driver support. For example Nvidia is the only one who cares right now about Linux drivers and yet even theres arent that good.
Um where are they, because the first thing that I look at when picking a distro is pretty pictures. pretty pretty pictures.
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hottest Firefox ever!
In all seriousness folks, you cant just make some CDs with Linux on em and say "HEY! LOOK! I can game on Linux!" People want to see the proof. Gamers will not give up ANYTHING in performance, and running something non-natively sounds kind of dumb when you want 300fps. Most of us (inclusing me) want to play all the games WHEN they come out, not wait for some emulator/patch to come out 1 week later. Until you get tons of native Linux games, there is no way to convert these users.
My a the paesan Fabio writes "The mission of LLGP (Linux Live Game Project) is <word a missing on a purpose to show where I am a from> show to Wintendo users that also Linux can be used to game... Challenge your friends on LLGP, and convert them to Linux!"
Keep a dreamin'! Paesan, you are a cool, but I am not a gonna play with a your silly distro, capisce? And learn a some English for mama's sake, you making us all look a bad!
Fabio is into computer games? On Linux??
Yeah, the first-person shooters get ported to GNU/Linux rather quickly, but what about things other than FPS? Yes, other game genres exist, even though someone who took his/her nick from the name of the hero of a popular FPS may consider such an idea blasphemous.
Windows gaming != Tuxracer. Linux is not nor ever will be a gaming platform until the major players start making games for it (EA, Sierra, Square, whatever). Throwing nethack and tuxracer and whatever other pathetic excuse for a game you can find (like that stupid tank clone from the 80's) and putting them on a LiveCD does not constitute as news worthy. It does prove you still think Bush senior is President, however.
And if you're going to try it out, be nice on them and use their torrent link.
The ______ Agenda
There are good game for Linux. In particular Vega Strike and FreeDroid RPG
But you know what? It doesn't mean a damn to the commercial industry, the General Public wants its Half Life, and its Halo. Why? Because the commercial gaming industry floods the market with them. I do wish that FOSS Would band together and work to really push the good FOSS games out there and get Linux some exposure, but it won't happen until the Linux distributors get their heads out of their asses and realize that they need to really REALLY promote these games to their residential customers and stop shovelling them off in 'contrib' where you have to know what to look for to find them.
You know what? When I was 8, my mind was absolutely captivated by 'Star Master' from Atari. when I was 15? Descent and Doom.
Vega Strike would have made my crap my pants!
Do you realize how many Commodore 64 'Paradroid' fans were Orgasmically enthused over Freedroid RPG? We need to appeal to this emotion in people. and Promote our greatest accomplishments
>The mission of LLGP is show to Wintendo users that also Linux can be used to game But apparently they can't construct gramatical sentences.
Wintendo????
Fuck you!!!!!!
... that you can see that Slashdot is more of a Linux trolling sites than posting news for nerds.
And you can start by Freedroid and VegaStrike
Using Links!
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Doesn't have tome, zangband nor angband... the three best games of all times! :P
Probably one could spend more time with the cd if it had just these three.
I've always wondered why people don't combine Knoppix with retail games. Doom 3, for example, could boot from the CD directly into itself, no matter what system or OS you ran. The interface would be dirt simple, and boot times could probably be optimized to be bearably fast. You wouldn't have to worry if your game was Longhorn or Win 98 compatible... it just would be.
Now, you would have to keep your drivers up-to-date, which might be a pain, but it would probably be a smaller pain than supporting every OS and software combination under the sun.
The ______ Agenda
I think you should consider a career as a Slashdot editor.
kudzu was removed
What games should be included in the distro, but aren't?
StepMania or Pydance.
Vega Strike's interface is ass. Sure, it looks purty (if you ignore the interface) but i'm spoiled for choice when it comes to games, why would i want to spend hours trying to figure this one out?
Game consoles use memory cards for "[s]ave games, ... high scores, online game profiles." There are PC memory cards.
Almost any 10 year old you know is going to master running this in no time and on pretty much any box you want to park them at!
Its Great Stuff and a Winner that'll keep them busy and even let them play network games with their friends.
Yeah, and when they're done laughing at your selection of games, you can impress them with your l33t grammar skills too.
Sigs? Sigs? We don't need no steenkin' sigs.
Then keep in mind two things: 1) which is quicker, 2) which is *easier*. Yes, #2 is actually a real consideration as well.
What is easier is having games ported to Windows, minimizing your app, starting the game, and then letting the NT kernel's swap file manager sort it out.
America's Army kicks arse. It is a great game on Linux. Any Linux distro that wants to specialize in games should contain America's Army.
I have heard of a live Linux CD for America's Army based on the Gentoo distro but I was never able to find where to download it. Did the folks at Gentoo abandoned this idea? Do you know where I can find the iso?
If they're going to avoid all the FPSs I've come to love on the Windows platform and concentrate on the "board-game style" games, the least they could do is throw in a Settlers of Catan clone.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
I was able to view that just now using firefox in linux :)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Would you rather buy vmware or a game console?
So how does one reliably put a game CD into a PC's CD-ROM drive when the computer is off? You can't open the CD door until the power supply starts supplying power to the CD-ROM drive, and if you don't have the CD in the drive in time, the BIOS goes straight to the copy of Windows on the hard drive.
I just looked at the screenshots of the linked games. Now I am ready to make a review:
TORCS: First Linux game to look like it was made in the 90's. Keep up the good work!
Westnoth: Nice graphical improvement over ancien versions. Might give it a try on Windows since gameplay is the essential component of fantasy turn-based games.
SuperTux: Pretty shitty.
Seriously, people are making console systems out of old pc's and pac-man technology games, so why not use something like this for it instead.
There used to be a live cd that contained Enemy Territory and another one of America's Army, I believe it was part of the gentoo games project. If another distribution were to offer those 2 games on live CDs there would definitely be more of a reason to try to convince others that gaming is possible on linux.
Ah yes, here's one.
One, Two and Three. Could probably squeeze in the UT2004 demo as well or even the Doom 3 demo. Show em something they may actually recognise.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Is DirectX a better game programming platform than OpenGL?
Does this have anything to do with the issue? (aside from the pure economics of the wider Windows base).
However, I must say that I have changed my mind.
The game that changed my mind was Wesnoth. It is a superb game and one which has challenged my ideas of on the limits of what open source can accomplish in content-rich areas such as games. Wesnoth is an *awsome* game as far as turn-based strategy games go. The competition doesn't even come close. If Wesnoth was sold in stores, people would buy it. Only thing is-- it is not even 1.0....
Wesnoth offers days of game play or more. And each release sees new campagns being added. In the end it will beat the pants off many established turn-based strategy games.
Tux racer is fun too but it is a very different kind of game than the games that get sold in stores. The games that get sold in stores are the epic games which offer hours and hours of game play and which take a long time often to get from one break to another. Tux Racer is pretty good for those 10 min. breaks. TuxRacer is the sort of game you would expect to see at an arcade.
I have not played SuperTux. It doesn't look compelling, but it could be. I don't know.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
FreeDroid RPG looks like a horribly cheap "linux" themed remake of Diablo and Syndicate combined. Vega Strike looks good though, but why not play the game it's based on BattleCruiser 3000AD and get the real deal?
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
Unfortunatly, while Linux does have support for games such as Doom 3, UT2004, and Half Life 2, the quality of the support is almost always lower.
Here is an example. In both Doom 3 and UT2004, Windows gives you tight integration with the built in editors. In the Linux versions of these, games, however, the editors are both MIA.
In addition, while Cedega boasts a wide range of supported games, the quality of that support is even lower than the native games. For example, to get pixel shader support, you need a Geforce 5 class card or better. In Windows, you only need a Geforce 3 class card or better. And while ATI arguably has some of the best hardware, they also have the worst driver support in Linux . And while people say that they got game X, Y and Z working perfectly under Cedega, it probobly took them X number of hours to configure, hack, and crack the game before it would actually run. (Trust me, I've been there.)
The obvious solution is to dual boot. This becomes a problem, however, for people who can't afford to buy Windows. But then again, if you can't afford Windows, maybe you shouldn't be buying games either. ;)
The bottom line is that we won't get good game support until publishers believe that Linux is a viable consumer market. Furthermore, most developers use DirectX, which is a Windows tehnology, not an open standard.
I enjoy Linux for it's other benifits. I don't mind that it's not the ultimate gaming platform, although it would be nice if it was. I instead enjoy that it has a stable enviorment for me to explore UNIX, program, and explore free software.
hahaha.
hahahaha.
haha.
*wipes tears off his eyes*
because dead gamers are even creepier.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Does people who work on with Linux really play Doom and other games?! I have my doubts...
The one unique and compelling game that I've ever played on Linux was 'Koules' which was a two-D 'push piece around in frame' game with great sound effects and addictive gameplay.
Does anybody else remember playing Koules? I have tried bringing the old source tarball for it 'forward' into a modern Linux distro, and it just won't build anymore. It might even be time to take a spare machine and roll out an old Slackware, something like Slack 3.4 (with a 1.2.13 kernel) just to play that game. I remember it playing great back when all I had was a Pentium 75 box with a SoundBlaster 16.
Does anybody else remember Koules? Has anybody built it successfully to run on a current Linux?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
See, I _am_ one of those people who mostly use Windows for games. In and by itself, I have no problem with calling it "Wintendo" or whatever. Sure. This computer is an oversized console.
The real problem with starting with derogatory terms, is that that-a-way lies making a crap product.
Just as an unrelated example: if you get a bunch of people together that whine about "idiot windows lusers who just want colourful buttons and icons" and ask them to make a GUI, you get a crap GUI. Sure, you'll get lots of buttons and icons, but it will miss all the real points, like usability.
But to get back to "Wintendo", this distro is exactly such a case of missing the whole point. _Especially_ for "Wintendo users" like myself, dumping Tux Racer and a couple of other such mini-games on a CD does _not_ make it a gaming platform. _Especially_ for a die hard gamer (or "Wintendo user"), basically telling me "you could give up all those hundreds of Windows games and play Tux Racer and Kshisen" is idiotic and missing the whole point.
It'll be a gaming platform when I can go to the shop, pick one from an aisle full of games (either native or which are _well_ emulated), and run it on that platform. And by running it, I mean as in "pop the CD in and it runs", not as in "you could spend a week re-compiling and re-configuring Wine to run a 10 hour game. Oh, and you need to crack the game, 'cause the copy-protection isn't supported."
If they wanted to make it a gaming platform, how about compiling a database of settings needed to just run games off the shelf? That would help more to make Linux any good for gaming, than pointing me again at Tux Racer. I already knew about Tux Racer, thank you very much.
(And before someone points those out, yes, I knew about Doom 3 and UT2004 too. I'm not a FPS gamer. What about the other hundreds of games I actually want to play, and don't run on Linux?)
And as I've said, this is the kind of madness that starts when someone starts with derogatory terms instead of with trying to understand and solve a problem. They end up with something completely missing the point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We'd all hate to see your e-penis shrivel a little.
there were an available DE-COMPILER !
What's this!? No Defendguin!?
We are Linux users, and as Linux user we should stop complaining that the commercial industry that cares nothing for us isn't porting games.
Games are nessessary for this OS to market itself. I really wish we had more people. As someone who has contributed time and energy to Linux gaming I know something very VERY important. We need the Human capital to pump out good games. They don't have to be masterpieces, just reasonably well done, and those of us who are able should contribute more to this OS.
We really REALLY need Human being pumping out better quality (conservative) code.
What I mean by conservative code is code that does more with less resources. We need artists and we need ideas. The technology exists and I honestly don't think that it is a lack of Linux's ability to be a good gaming platform, I just don't think people are taking advantage of the green and unharvested pastures that are the potential for Linux games.
We need volunteers producing quality GPLed content to create a desireable product. Its time that the people step up to the plate and show what they are capable of when the effort is put forward.
Stop asking the commercial gaming industry to do it for us, they won't.
Reminds me of those freeware discs you'd buy at the seedy tradeshows. Where's Enemy Territory? Where's the Doom/Doom2/Quake/Duke3D/Quake2 engine ports, with SIMPLE instructions to get your full version running?
I wish the Enemy Territory Knoppix LiveCD someone made a while back was updated, and with easily addable mods, that's something I would carry around me for boring days after school, and the such.
This just goes to prove that namecalling is only effective when the receipients knows what you're calling them. If you keep expecting an subtle insult, then don't complain when you see one :)
Besides, even if it was one, its only purpose would be to highlight the very annoying aspect of that OS' in the market, not to, say, call its users stupid.
This is a joke, right?
I know I'm going to be modded troll for that, but if the linux movement really wants to pick up speed with gamers... this isn't the way to do it.
Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss.
As a keen Linux Desktop user, the chance to switch gaming platforms from Windoze to Linux is something I've been waiting for for a long time. Directx is too much of an easy option for developers, and Winex just isnt good enough. And as for the Opengl games that DO run? I installed a clean Debian system, just to try Doom3 on Linux, installing the NV drivers and finding as many good performance tweaks as I could. The graphics looked awful, there were issues with almost every aspect of the way the game looked, and the frames per second hovered jerkily around the "completely unplayable" level. Sound was mashed up too. Linux needs a dedicated gaming team, not just a distro. We need a full competitor to DirectX, that can run all the games, not just a handful, before Linux can come anywhere near challenging Windoze for gaming supremecy.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
No no you guys are right linux doesnt run games, dont even try. just stick to windows. please. It'll at least keep #linuxhelp clean.
Neverwinter Nights has a Linux client, very easy to run as well
My fav units are dead Mavs
That was more or less what I was thinking too.
I would however disaggree about "mainstream". Die-hard in-your-face online FPS clansmen are a very vocal minority. But make no mistake, the keyword is: minority.
The fact is, The Sims outsold any FPS ever made, including any Epic, Id or Valve game. Ever. (And for that matter, any other game.) Think about it.
Or how about these quick facts: Quiz games routinely outself FPS. EA's cash cows aren't some FPS franchise, but sports games. And between the N64 which had FPS games, and the Playstation which had Final Fantasy and Grand Turismo, the Playstation won by far. And for every single online FPS player, there are tens of PS2 and GameCube systems sold _without_ the broadband addapter.
As I've said, online FPS clansmen are awfully loud, but they're a minority. The majority of the world's gaming (or gamers) is off-line and _not_ FPS.
Either way, you're not alone. Some of the best PC games I've played over the last year include:
- yes, Pirates
- The Fall - Last Days of Gaia (third person post-apocalyptic RPG)
- Crusader Kings
- Vampire Bloodlines (based on the HL2 engine, but a third-person RPG. Well, more like action-rpg.)
- The Sims 2 (well, after disabling aging. Never liked that addition.)
- Evil Genius
None of them is a FPS or RTS. So, yeah, I'll fully aggree with you. I'd like to see more of _those_ supported on Linux, rather than yet another "but you have Doom 3 and UT2004" argument.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Games can be written for linux, just as games can be written for pretty any computer ever made. Hell, Spacewar was written on a PDP-11, and there are numerous games for handheld calculators and the like. The question here is can commercial games be profitable on linux. At the moment, the answer would appear to be, "No." Why? Well, big developers like id and Epic have ported their games to linux, and even though those two developers provide the engines for probably 90% of the non-sport, non-RPG games out there, you rarely hear of licensees porting to linux. Where's Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six 3 for linux? Both of those (actually, most of Ubi's current lineup) are based on Epic's Unreal engine, which has been ported to linux several times over if you consider the engine "new" for different games like Unreal Tournament, UT2003, and UT2004. You won't see them, because the money's not there. It doesn't matter if it's possible or even easy to port. The fact of the matter is that it takes some amount of time to target another platform (even if the engine itself is written in a platform-neutral way, which really is the case with many commercial games these days since many target multiple consoles as well as PC). More time means a later ship date and more money spent on development (and potentially lost money in sales, if they have to slip significantly to accomodate the port), all to support a platform with a very small marketshare. It's all numbers. For PC gaming, you're talking ~95% of the market on Windows, ~1-2% on lnux, and ~3-4% on Mac (and that's probably generous). Is it any wonder that both linux and Mac get shafted on games?
Loki tried to make a business out of porting games for developers that didn't have the time or expertise to do it themselves. They failed. Granted, it's been a few years since Loki imploded, and we did get some good technology out of the endeavor like SDL, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that a similar effort today would die just as Loki did before. Games have a very short half-life (pardon the pun), and if the ports don't ship at the same time, nobody will really care. (Yes, I know there will be the few platform zealots that will wait and wait for a port to their OS, but by and large if you can't buy the game within six months of release, you're probably never going to buy it.)
I'm not even going to mention the difficulties surrounding multiple distros of linux (how should commercial games be packaged? RPM? deb? tarballs? some proprietary installer that doesn't play nice with any distro?) or multiple platforms (it's nice that your game works on linux, but is that for x86, PPC, sparc, alpha, or what?). I'll leave that for a different post, except to say that even if the linux market was large enough to matter, the test matrix for such a game would be hell.
I just found a couple of new interesting games for Linux to test from that post - and we're discussing games for Linux so why is that Redundant? Mod parent UP!!!
Energis is a UK based ISP/Telco, not a security firm, like Pipex. This is about ISP protecting their infrastructure and their customer again DDOS.
The industry had already started to design device to help the situation, Cisco is just late in the area but doing lots of Marketing noise.
You could look at at the new gen of routers with flow-based filtering like http://www.caspiannetworks.com/ or manny others are now looking to deploy. Caspian have a dedicated page about it on its site tho, as DDOS protection is part of their Marketing argument with P2P control.
"there are a lot of great games on linux. breakout....super breakout....Gimp..
....has been running a lot of windows OpenGL demos that I've downloaded at very good speeds. Even the Torque SDK runs over wine (Not that you need to as there is a native version, but it was amazing to see nevertheless). I know l33t users look down their nose at wine, but seeing a windows opengl demo running with music at 568fps in a linux window in X is pretty impressive.
When I bought Quake 3 for linux several years back (had already owned the windows version for sometime), I installed it but apparently didn't get my drivers straight as it would default to the software OpenGL driver instead of my shiny new Geforce3. Of course my frame rates were atrocious (2-3 fps, vs. 100+ on windows). Of course it was unplayable and I eventually got it the nvidia driver to work and enjoyed a bit of fragging on linux before giving up gaming for awhile. The thing I find odd, though, is how nice it looked in software mode. Everything was much more crisp and clear than it was in hardware accelerated windows or linux. This might've been the result of some nvidia driver hack to sqeeze more fps out, but I have to admit I was surprised. On windows you couldn't even run the game without a 3d accelerator, and it had never occurred to me that other operating systems might be capable of such "magic". I still wish I could have had the great looks of the software driver with the performance of the windows configuration.
Anyway, about the live cd--it looks decent, but I really don't see any hardcore windows gamers being that impressed. However, this might server as a further bit of enticement for the friend or family member who just wants some simple, generic games and isn't loyal to a particular developer or game franchise. Of course, there is always cedega. But as far as gaming on linux goes, I figure it will pick up when it needs to. Mainstream linux is far from critical mass. However, the increasing prevalence of online gaming might bode well for the linux user who misses mass market games, as these systems 1) generally have to be more standards-minded to function on the internet, 2) many times have backends running on non-microsoft code and 3) can handle automatic updates which would help with "tuning" the game for linux. I definitely hope we see a shift towards broader gaming markets. Of course, any game that relied on TC would exclude linux users.
Personally, I have to admit I'm a bit surprised that PC gaming is as strong as it is, because when I started gaming (10 years ago or so) most PC gaming magazines were predicting their own obsolesence and death at the hands of the almight PLAYSTATION. As someone who enjoys PC gaming much more than console gaming (jesus, please, no flames--its just my preference) I was worried at the time, but the pc gaming industry seems very vibrant (thank you valve!). Also, let me just say that I would marry Sid Meier if he would but have me, even though I'm not gay and would even be willing to undergo the necessary "kernel recompile" to give him the heterosexual relationship he most likely desires. Okay, christ, now I know why I quit gaming for so long, serious issues....
I have come here to chew memory and kick ass... and malloc() is returning a null pointer.
Jeez.
Slashdot is getting a little tiresome nowadays. Without opening a browser, you can predict 80% of the content....
"Linux rocks"..
"No, too much config"
"Use Windows then (M$ sucks etc)"
"Use a mac, they rule"
"Linux can do everything"
"Yeah but it takes too much time, which is worth more"
etc etc...
I use a Windows laptop for work, a Linux desktop for mundane home computing, consoles for games and my wife uses a mac. I don't preach to others, I don't tell them their opinions or experiences are wrong and I certainly don't insult people just because they have a different point of view to me.
SuperTux is not going to convert any gamers ....nice try
This is one area where Windows will continue to be the only choice for many years to come.
A open source diablo clone sounded nice, but after looking at the screenshot list of freedroids:
Cant those FOSS programmers imagine a player avatar that is NOT a penguin? I mean, thre are things like atmosphere, that could have created by doing something else than the usual "steal game concept, slap tux in" that brought us tux-racer, the lemmings clone, this tux-supermario clone, ect ect.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I am a pretty hardcore Wesnoth player (I've beaten TRoW and HttT! Which probably doesn't mean much to many of you.) I've been playing TBS for ten+ years, and Wesnoth is one of the most involving and challenging games for people who like strategic concepts. (Its also a nice if somewhat cliched RPG).
But Wesnoth is not what the average Windows or console gamer is looking for. Because for the most part, "games" are not "games" in the sense of a ruleset and concept to be mastered. Most games are not even tasks at hand eye coordination. Most "games" are interactive adventures with small aspects of both rulesets and hand-eye coordination, but mostly depending on graphics and sound to make the player feel immersed. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but for people who are looking for games that immerse them in a world, playing a game like Wesnoth, which is based around mastering a ruleset, and mostly projecting the world with your imagination, is going to be a disappointment.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I am a gamer and I always play Americas Army Operations (www.americasarmy.com). It is a free FPS game. Before Linux I was playing it on Windows, and like most people here I was sceptic about the Linux Version. 1) I wasn't sure that Liux and openGL is up to the task in Graphics, 2) Sound quality. That is until I installed it on Linux. It Runs exactly the same, and the sound is eactly the same. The virtual memory in Linux helps it to run faster. I have now ditched the Windows Version and play it on Linux only. I do my part my talking to other on-line users who uses Windows and how over time it slwos down; things llike application runnings, daemon running the background and they don't understand enough to close some of them. Windows give you no hint about these background processes; spywares, adwares, and the virtual memory and filesystem performance itself. The hard of this is convincing them that Linux is not really difficult. You just need to learn what you have Learned on Windows. For example how to find the services and close some of them. On Linux at least it gives a couple of lines of description. Get a Distro, install everyting, get the game and install. The bad thing is that you have to learn how to get a new driver for your card, such as Nvidia and compile and install it (although it is simple, it scares some Windows users). I haven't tried other games, but AAO does a fine job of installing and no configuration necessary except what is in the game itself. Furthermore, it works on every distribution I tried, Fedora, Yoper, Mandrake and Suse. The nice thing about Yoper is that the nvidia driver is installed for you. Just install the game and go. I ditched Windows, unless of course there is a game I want and it is not on Linux. I think game developers need to have a look at Linux and developing a Linux version. Most games are willing to pay for their version. In my experience Linux is a much more stable platform for games. It just need a chance and if game developers work together with Linux vendors they can produce a very competitive gaming platform. My small opinion :-)
Wow, TORCS looks just like Gran Turismo 3!
Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game. That'll totally win over the RTS gamers used to Starcraft (which can run under WINE), C&C, the Warcraft series, and so on.
SuperTux is cute though. Might win the kiddies with that one at least...
Don't get me wrong; none of this is meant to slight or discourage the development of these games. In fact, I've often thought about writing games myself, quite-possibly making them OSS (I'm thinking of a fighting game).
My point is simple: these are not games you woo people away from Windows to play. There are plenty of similarly low-budget games on Windows, so why should anybody play these?
These are games that Linux-only zealots are content to play, on the grounds that most Windows games don't run very well with WINE, WineX costs money, and such people don't want to run Windows. Hence, they're stuck with these games and/or their consoles...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Fact: Linux will never take off for games.
Why? Because for doing the things that games do - sound, graphics and input, Linux is a pain in the arse. When there's a *single standardised API* that works across all distributions then maybe it'll have a chance.
But the fact is that gaming on PC's is dead or if it isn't already, it's well on its way. Just look at the sales figures compared to consoles. Hell, I'd say it'd be a fair bet that the average Mac game sells more than the average Linux game ever has.
Consoles rock for gaming. Slip the disc in, press the power button then kick back on the couch. No screwing with drivers, libraries, etc. Real plug and play. (Yes, I admit that consoles suck for FPS's and RTS's)
The parent is sadder than it is funny. The real problem is that the "We can game too" marketing mentality of the Linx community will always result in the impression that Linux is a cheap shoddy Windows clone.
What is needed to make Linux more widespread on the desktop is to find a niche where Linux is cleqrly superior to Windows and to push into that niche... then find another and another.
Taking MS on in a mass market like gaming is not going to work
Some people might be happy with this. Of course its not for the last minute up2date gamerz with their modded drivers, cracks and patches... did you realize 98% percent of you greedy gamers are plain pirates leeching off? :)
Why should companies bother to develop games for a free platform when people are just making free out of their biz?
Most "missing" games mentioned here are commercial.
Show your license ahead.
big ups to this freebie, oldfashioned games maybe but still freebie.
Ah, there's nothing quite like the irrational rantings of a zealot. Thanks for the laugh!
End of Line.
But you know what? It doesn't mean a damn to the commercial industry, the General Public wants its Half Life, and its Halo. Why? Because the commercial gaming industry floods the market with them.
It certainly has nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands of hours of timely, intense, and cutting-edge creative energy put into these games by teams of dozens and dozens of talented programmers, artists, musicians, and sound designers.
Strange that they don't include ATI drivers, not even the open source DRI ones. I found this line in their to-do list:
Insert Ati and Matrox drivers (like Nvidia drivers, trying to resolve diplomatically copyright problems)
Stefano
You have no idea how many people have beggared themselves after making that assumption.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You know, if you really believe that, there's not one damn thing stopping you from selling it yourself.
Why don't you?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There is but one single lonesome professional Software studio who's officially supported Linux from the get-go and also advertised it. They've got one of the best multiplayer-games I've ever played, and yet still they don't get mentioned here. That's sad and shows how serious the Linux community are about good games on Linux. ...AND FUCKING BY IT! IT'S ONLY 19$ BY NOW FOR THE DL/KEYODE VERSION!
If you want a cool, up to date professional Linux compliant multiplayer game, do yourself and the developers a favour and check out Savage!.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"because few residential users can justify spending money for vmware"
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You can't fit those games onto a bootable CD!
Have you metaroderated recently?
Where does the poster say that Windows was designed as a gaming platform? He says that it is a gaming platform.
BTW, ClanLib + Ogre is a viable complete cross platform API. It's all there and waiting right now. The only thing stopping it is, as you say, market share.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
For any serious gamer, there just isn't a point to running an OS that doesn't even run half of their favorite games without fooling around with Cedega. It's too much work.
On a technical level, not using kudzu/hwdata seems to be a flaw. Will surely give this a spin though, even though we've been quiet we'll have our revenge [insert Borg quote here].
This sig is intentionally left blank
There's no doubt in my mind linux can technically 'game'. But here's what's needed for the OS to become a game viable platform:
Apart from linux gaining a large % of desktop, what's needed for the linux community to become a viable game company target is examples of successes in sofware making money running on Linux. Linux has a culture of OSS, so users are almost adverse to the idea of having to pay for their software. Ignoring maybe corporate server software, most of the money surrounding linux comes from maintaining systems, not coding and selling linux software. Only when linux software companies start bringing in lots of cash, will game companies be attracted to the platform.
Ok, well maybe not exactly doomed to fail, after all Live Isos are nice to play around with for a couple of minutes, but I really don't see all that much use for billions of live-isos popping out all over the place. Live isos are good for recovery purpose, to give a quick first look at Linux and maybe for some kiosk installations, but beside from that their are relativly useless.
Live-Isos are really not the solution to lots of Linux problems, instead of seeing multiple games live-isos pop-up all over the place I would MUCH prefer a repository of statically linked/self-containing free games packaged in a distribution independend way, since that would be something that I as a Linux user could make use of. Such a Linux-games iso on the other side is basically completly useless for me as a Linux users. And on the other side its equally useless for the Windows people, I mean which Windows user can you impress with SuperTux, TORCS and friends? They might not be the worst games ever, but the Windows world has tons and tons of better games to offer. Most Windows people will most likly just laugh a bit and turn back to Windows world where they can have real games.
Replying just so I can find this post when I get home from work... Good link!
TuxRacer is the sort of game you would expect to see at an arcade.
7 3
http://www.icegame.com/GameDetail.aspx?ProductID=
It's like the Switcher Ad made by the Red vs. Blue guys. "Sure, we've got games. We've got Tetris. And Breakout. And, uh. Super Breakout."
Some of those are the same games I got bored of playing on DECstations in 1992. You won't win converts with half-assed public domain versions of games everyone has already been playing since the dawn of time. At the best it'll be a distraction between games of Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2.
C'mon, this is neat, but it makes the Mac gaming scene look really really good...
This is a lovely idea, but I think it'll forever be a pipe dream, simply because of economics.
First off, Sony are (IMO) highly unlikely to buy into any kind of cross-platform collaboration, at least in the near future - the only attraction of consoles are the games produced for it. Consoles are also manufactured at a loss, which game-sales recoup.
If you can get the latest "console" game on the platform of your choice, bang goes the impetus to buy the console. Without you buying the console there's no vendor lock-in, and Sony are reduced to the status of game developer for other people's platforms, a big step down (and loss of power) for the company. This power (and vendor lock-in) is the reason why a console company makes the hardware, as opposed to just banging out games for third-party hardware.
Any game SDK on Windows will have to out-perform DirectX in every way, many, many times over. Like it or not, DirectX is now the "default" platform for windows programming, and the one with all the big bucks spent on advertising and promotion. It's also Microsoft, and therefore perceived as "safe", at least from the point of view of Windows-compatibility.
IIRC (which I may not), when OpenGL first came out it was technically superior to the then-current DirectX version. However, because DirectX was such a "safe" option (see above), most games at least included a DirectX mode. Third-party non-Microsoft SDKs don't have this going for them, so there is absolutely no reason for game developers to include the option, unless it's already widespread. Catch-22.
Apple don't seem very interested (at all?) in chasing the gamers demographic, so they're unlikely to pitch in with any work on a cross-platform SDK. This attitude does seem odd to me, because they do pitch (almost exclusively!) to the early-adopter, technology-as-lifestyle-choice crowd, and there's a hefty crossover between them and gamers. There's also a potential upside for them, in that a cross-platform SDK would free people to choose any platform they wanted for gaming, and for a less-than-50%-market-share platform, that's good news. All in all, it would probably be A Good Thing good for Apple to pitch in with such an effort, but the will just seems to be lacking.
Red Hat and SuSE could well make such an effort, but the money is in large-scale enterprise computing, not in making Linux a better games platform. Even if they did decide to pitch in, they're facing unseating an entrenched DirectX on the Win32 platform, and without Win32 (or Sony) the whole project is dead in the water.
Even in the best-case scenario (Red Hat/SuSE decide it's worth it and Apple wakes up and joins the dots), you're still looking at a vanishingly small percentage of the games-software market. Without a majority from the get-go, you're never going to unseat DirectX on Win32, and without Win32 or Sony you're in trouble. And I can't see anyone convincing Sony to adopt an open SDK, unless it's forced on them by technology change (eg, cell processors) that make it too expensive to implement a new closed one from scratch.
So, the only hope for this seems to be convincing Sony to use an open SDK for the PS3. If this happens the SDK has a shot, but it's still doubtful you'll ever get Sony on-board because of the degree of control they'd have to voluntarily give up.
Just my (utterly unsubstantiated) $0.02...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
As per another recent Liux gaming post and an article on Tom's Hardware Guide, Linux may not becomae a gamer's platform for a long time. The problem is that 1) most games are written around Microsoft's DirectX, which cannot be ported to Linux without a blessing from MS. Games need to be written in OpenGL, right now, to be linux compatable.
That piece of cake is 'iced' with a another problem, the graphics card driver sets. We already see a 'leadout' type of problem with later release cards where the Windows based game is released and some late release higher end cards cannot support the game, due to a compatability issue with the graphic cards driver sets. Companies such as ATI and Nvidia have a decent sized group of coders to resolve those issues in a resonable amount of time, but they have very very small Linux staffs (with respect the drivers sets), to handle Linux issues with games. This is justified on their part due to their sales in each catergory. It is going to take a lot more Linux based higher end graphics card sales to push the manufactures further in the right direction. Of course without the support for gaming in Linux, the sales aren't going to be there. There is a BIG chicken and egg problem with gaming on this platform that needs to be overcome before it's going to be prevalent.
That they have to try and prove that Linux can be a gaming machine is really just proof that it's not.
/Windows user, and proud of it
Seriously, the Linux community needs to get their priorities straight. Get a computer with Linux onto it in Best Buy and Circuit City, and actually get the thing to sell, then move on from there.
> It certainly has nothing to do with the
> hundreds of thousands of hours of timely,
> intense, and cutting-edge creative energy put
> into these games by teams of dozens and dozens
> of talented programmers, artists, musicians,
> and sound designers.
Umm, that's *how* it floods the market with them.
You aren't going to convert anyone, except maybe a compulsive flash gamer with crappy linux games.
However to me this looks like a great deal for kids, theres plenty of hours of fun in there for a young'n.
I saw a game in the store the other day called "Savage" which says on the box that it supports Linux in addition to Windows. I normally wouldn't have bought this kind of game (online multiplayer RTS/FPS), but I did immediately without even thinking because it included support for Linux. (Sadly, in the French version, they forgot to include the INSTALL.linux file mentioned in the manual... so I ended up playing it on Windows. But the online servers don't require subscription, so you can play for free and there seem to be a few active servers in Europe at least. Really fun to play, though I don't have any experience with other online games so I couldn't make a comparison.)
Guess what? The asshats at XFree rejected the patches from ATI.
But is Xorg more receptive to patches?
Yesterday I told my friend that he can play the latest games on Knoppix, because it uses udev and hotplug. I also told him that Kudzu is gone, and Knoppix has Torcs and Wesnoth.
His reply was: "WOA!!! with all these games, who really needs Windows? I bet Kudzu has incredible graphics..."
(seriously: what the f*** is 'Kudzu', 'hotplug', and 'udev'? why should I care about them as a gamer? who cares about what the kernel has? and what is a kernel anyway? The Linux community should realize that non-technical game players don't know anything at all about these things.)
A bittorrent link. Lemme see.... 21 hours left on the download (and I'm on DSL). I'd much rather use ftp. Bittorrent... "decentralized", but slow as hell... total crap. Spooning my eyes out of my skull would be more fun. Of course it's "free" so it much be better.
You fuckers with the modems are probably the ones slowing down the download rate. Get off the net or move over into the breakdown lane.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Onward Linux exclusivity!
You know, the only issue is that nobody will buy a program marked "Version 0.8."
Who says I might not try once it reaches 1.0..... I do sell other open source software on CDROM (for those with dial-up access who don't wnat to spend hours downloading various programs).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Between the video card bios, the system bios, autodetecting all the IDE devices, and figuring out what it's supposed to do afterwards, one has plenty of time to leisurely put a cd in the drive.
Many name-brand PCs now come shipped with a "fast POST" option turned on, making it harder to push the power button, open the CD door, stick the CD in the drive, and close the CD door. Racing the BIOS, especially with "fast POST", reminds me more of Saturn and PlayStation timed disc swap tricks than anything else.
For those earlier posters whining about lack of a good FPS, they should make sure and check out bzflag, a networked 3D version of Battlezone with outstanding playability. Works out-of-the box for linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Easy server startup and config; easy to run locally. "easy to learn, hard to master."
The graphics are not as beautiful as Quake II or Doom 3, but I know people who have been playing it for years and still aren't tired of it.
More info: http://www.bzflag.org/screenshots
my wife is a gorgeous woman with very little computer expertise. She and I have been very competitive in tuxracer, and it has given us both hours and hours of entertainment.
Are you people really *that* socially retarded?
"Challenge your friends on LLGP, and convert them to Linux!"
I am almost at a loss for words after that one.
Well, they're not written in natural English, that's for sure. Config files are written in a language designed to be interpreted by a computer program, and this language has strict rules that aren't always self-evident to a novice user.
we need some people to put wolfenstein ET and Americas army on live CDs with gentoo livecd base