Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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.
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.
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.
What if the user could extract for example Unreal Tournament 2004 demo for Linux installation binary in Windows. Then boot the LLGP with all the 3D hardware detected like a charm, and run the demo from a readonly mounted NTFS/FAT32 partition...
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
There are lots of people complaining that too many games focus on eye-candy.
Linux could do fine in terms of RTS Turn based strategy, adventure, etc.
The awsome multiple window features gives great possibility for hotseat gaming.
Why is Linux trying to be an FPS platform, that's just silly.
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
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.
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?"
Linux might be fine if you like the top of the top First Person Shooters (and occassionally a port of something popular over a year later), but what if you like something less than mainstream?
For instance while all of my friends were getting absorbed in Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft I was left out because everytime I went to the store to pick up a copy of WoW (and to a lesser degree, HL2) the stores were out of stock.
While looking for something to play I managed to stumble upon a gem that caught me totally off guard.
I noticed Pirates! on the shelf. After reaading the back I realized it was a remake of the old C64, Mac, Amiga, and PC title and I had to buy it, even though I hadn't heard that they were remaking it.
I can honestly say it was not a waste! The game captures so much of the feel of the original while still being made modern. They haven't overlaiden it with stupid features, nor have they made it full of some lame linear storyline.
A good game, and certainly not one I'd expect to find ported to Linux, or even Mac. I just can't see it being popular enough with most people to justify it. Still, games like this are the reason I play PC games at all. As for the top first person shooters, blah. Sure I play them sometimes, but it would take more than that to get me to ditch my Windows box as my primary gaming machine.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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.
....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.
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.
No you are AN end user. A rather stupid one too.
I'm stupid because I want to get things done rather than waste my time? Insulting people isn't going to sway them to your cause. I'll ignore it, though, because I realize technical people aren't always the most socially adept. And hey, I'm not the most technically adept, either, but I'm still better than the people who are using their CD-ROM drive trays as cupholders and who can't grasp the difference between left-click and right-click. That's who is going to be using Linux if it becomes a widespread desktop operating system. Scary, huh?
Linux is much better at staying out of your way then windows 2000. You can't make it work but I can.
I'm just going by my experience, where I had to be familiar with all the refresh rates my monitor could handle of in order to use every screen resolution it was capable of. It's not all that difficult, if you have your monitor documentation on hand, but it begs the question, why should I have to deal with that? Why can't the system gracefully auto-detect it or use reasonable defaults? It's possible. Windows does it.
And note I never said I couldn't make it work. Wine, yes, that never worked for me, but as for the rest I eventually got a nice stable system that I could install or compile software on and use. But it's more work for the same result I can get from Windows with literally zero configuration. I don't even have to know what a command prompt is, though I realize its usefulness and use Cygwin to get a bash shell under Windows.
[Talking down to clueness n00b about comments]
But the comments are nowhere near a thorough documentation of all the configuration possibilities. For example, the Xorg.conf said nothing about how to get my multi-head setup going. It took the help of the guy who introduced me to Linux to get it working, and even then neither of us could figure out how to get the PCI card higher than 1024x768, when it is capable of up to 1280x1024. And of course, a bad config file could keep X from starting up at all, something which would never happen with a well-designed GUI configuration applet.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I would hope that everyone would mod the parent up. Not that I agree with it - I vehemently disagree with it. But hopefully the more people who see this kind of attitude, the more people will realise that advocating Linux boxes as gaming machines is really just pie-in-the-sky thinking. For god's sake, people - PC gaming is declining because people think installing and configuring games on Windows is too complicated! And then here comes the usual zealot whose response to some well-founded criticism is "Well, nyah, you're stupid".
At work, I use Linux and Windows; at home, I use Windows. Let me tell you, it's a relief to get home, away from the pain of having to endlessly search forums in order to do the simplest things. It took me two hours the other day to install Firefox! A frickin' browser!
P.