Slashdot Mirror
LGP Opens Beta Test for X2
zborgerd writes "Linux Game Publishing has announced the opening of their beta test for X2: The Threat. X2 was featured on Slashdot last month in LGP's mystery game contest. Linux gamers can apply for the beta at LGP's beta testing site.
Per their usual policy, everyone who pre-orders the game from one of their resellers is automatically qualified to enter the beta test. X2: The Threat is Egosoft's epic space simulation that is often said to be greatly influenced by the the classic games of the Elite series. A third game in the series, X3: Reunion, will soon be available for Windows (and hopefully Linux and OS X as well, if the X2 ports attract a reasonable number of fans on these platforms)."
Do they use OpenGL, SDL, ClanLib, etc.?
Also, do they use GCC as their main compiler, or do they use Intel's ICC, or some other compiler that may generate better code than GCC? If they are using ICC, how are they dealing with the problem of ICC generating code that may be suboptimal when running on AMD chips?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Couldn't they have chosen something easier to port? And a bit more recent?
The X series (iirc, I could be wrong) uses Direct 3D, porting it would be quite difficult. Surely porting a game that uses OpenGL would at least give the programmers a bit less trouble in porting?
On a different note, I've yet to see any Elite clone equal the greatness that is the Elite trilogy. Here's hoping for the ever elusive Elite 4 that David Braben has been working on since the dawn of time to appear, if at all.
Do you think that they may be using the DirectX capabilities of Wine to ease the port?
If so, can you comment on the stability of such code? I have found Wine to work fabulously for some code, but for other code it struggles greatly.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
These games just look awesom, I cant believe I haven't heard of them before. I wasted so much time playing Elite in my youth and still think it is one of the greatest games ever. I loved the idea of endless flying/trading/pirating in a huge universe with endless possibilities, all that on a 64k commodore. Amazing times!! If these games are anything as good as the screenshots, I think my free time will be used up for the next few months. Anyone have played these gems yet?
Blog from where blogging counts
Will it be available for PPC systems running Linux? If they're targetting PPC Mac OS X and Intel Linux, then it is quite likely that PPC Linux could be supported as well. But are they actually offering such binary releases for sale?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Loki ported SimCity 3000, which uses DirectX under Windows if I'm not mistaken, to Linux a while back. The Linux release of SimCity 3000 played just as well, if not better, than the Windows release. No stability problems of any sort.
So while perhaps not a fun task porting from DirectX to SDL and OpenGL (or some other non-DirectX graphics platform), it is more than possible.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Oolite is another free Elite type game. They have OSX, Windows and Linux versions.
Having experience dealing with WineX/Cedega on Linux, I can say that performance is definatley sub-obtimal. Did they take the time to port it correctly, or did they use the easy route and use an intermediary library to convert graphics/other functions?
It's pretty sad to see beta testing opening now on X2, when X3: Reunion's beta is wrapping up for the release candidates to start getting rolled out these days. X2 was released two years ago, and X3 both has hugely improved graphics and vastly redesigned sectors (much larger, with distancing and scale to feel more right), dynamic economy, and AI. Egosoft have a much larger team making X3 compared to X2 as well.
I wish there'd be a way for Egosoft to work more closely with LGP in the future so we don't get this huge lag between the ports and Windows releases, in case Egosoft don't want to work on the port(s) themselves.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
How does this compare to freelancer from MS?
Well I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that thought this was X-Men based. Maybe I'll give it a try sometime how since I know it's not just a movie-based game..
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Hooray! More proprietary software!
I loved the original X-BTF (beyond the frontier). Got it for 1.99$ used at EB. Best use of a toonie (Canadian and proud of it) ever. I had just finished playing Tachyon, some novalogic game (it was good too, fun multiplayer) and the drop in graphics was a huge turn off at first, and the poor voices (with no subtitles) of the taladi took a long time to get used to.
After playing for a few hours, the game had this awsome sense of immersion. It felt like a real, living breathing huge ass universe. You could see the seams around the sky-box of space, where the "stars" were (the textures were poorly done, so you knew you were flying around in a huge ass box) even though, as someone who programs games as a hobby, alot of its flaws were painfully obvious, for some reason it still felt perfect. All the space stations were large distances apart, even though the diffrence between large empty space and small empty space is none existant in computer graphics, it still felt amazing. Even though it was basically flying your ship from one end to another docking with stations and finding the best deal on energy cells and reselling them to someone else, it was great. You could manually dock with stations, not that big of a deal, especially after you got the autodock enhancement, but it made it feel authentic, no stupid crappily done cutscenes. The aliens simply didn't take your shit, you could fire a few shots at an aliens ship/station, but if you were in their territory it didnt take long until they ordered you dead, and unless your in the later parts of the game, it wouldnt take long to die. Even though the AI was shit - the bad dudes would try and ram you - it almost made sense (since they were robots) and it was easy enough to avoid fights.
X2 was good, Whereas XBTF took a long time to get into story (which fizzled out eventually and left you back to your trading and empire building, which I personally got bored of) X2 starts with the story, feels more linear, and not quite as big a universe, but much much much better looking. Maybe it does get better (in the scale sense) later in the game, i didnt get far until I switched off windows and couldn't play it, but it was still a great game, I recomend both to anyone wanted an unusual game that doesn't just rehash old ideas (well, I've never played Elite etc so I guess I'm bias, but still its an unexplored genre)
does it run on Windows?
*ducks*
Vendetta is another option for space-sim lovers. It also runs on Linux and OSX (and used to run on MacOS9, BeOS and Irix).
...that even in the far future, they still haven't solved the textiles problems that cause women's clothes to shrink for no adequately explained reason.
I'm guessing she's got that gun because she's going back to the boutique to get a refund.
Since I couldn't find any information on X2 website I looked on GameSpot and found these requirements. I'm assuming the Linux verison will be comparable.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Derivative... Dx(x^2) = 2x
Booo
Although I checked out the windows release of X2 when it was new, and thought it looked awesome, I refused to buy it because it contained Starforce. Starforce is a particularly insidious copy protection tool that installs device drivers without the user's consent or knowledge. Read about it here http://www.glop.org/starforce/. My question is, will this Linux port contain similar garbage?
That's unfortunate, though I can understand where you're coming from, of course.
... what are your thoughts?
I'd be interested to know if copy protection actually visibly improved sales, though. In my experience it's totally ineffective (I generally won't buy a game until I've played it and confirmed it doesn't suck / isn't hopelessly buggy, so I know this first-hand), and it also significantly discourages me from buying a game. In particular, I'm vastly more willing to pay good money for anything that won't force me to find the blasted disk every time I want to play it. I'm *much* more willing to buy games with non-offsensive or no copy protection.
The pile of boxes beside me shows that rather clearly (well, except half life 2 - I'm not a zealot, and while I don't like Steam at least it doens't require the bloody DVD in the drive!).
What confuses me most, though, is that copy protection doesn't appear to actually work. Not for big name games, anyway. It's trivial to find either copies of the game that are illegally distributed with the copy protection removed, or programs that will remove copy protection from an installed copy. It's been like that for more than 15 years. (As I said, I generally play a game a bit before I buy it. Remove that option, and I just stop buying games I haven't been able to try at a friend's). Do you find that it actually makes a difference to your sales? I've always suspected it was pushed on developers by a publisher who "doesn't get it" or a 3rd party copy protection product's sales guy doing some fast talking to upper management. I'd be fascinated to know, since I often suspect that in the case of big name games all it achieves is annoyance for legit customers.
I've "fixed" several of the games I've bought simply because finding the CD/DVD to play it got so annoying. The most offensive thing is that people who illegally copied the game don't have to do this - it's actually *better* for them.
The only effective copy protection I've seen is the requirement for a valid key for online play using the company's servers. What's more, that's not disruptive for the player and pretty much inoffensive. I can't wrap my head around why these games, in particular, still use CD copy protection.
I bought Neverwinter Nights partly because of its Linux support - one less game I have to reboot to play - and especially because that support was entirely free of copy protection. Similarly I was very happy with Quake 3.
I only bought Quake 3 a *long* time after it came out, when I was finally in a position to actually buy games. I hunted it down specifically because it's a well built game with nice linux support and 100% inoffensive copy protection. I bought BF 1942's expansions in no small part because, while copy protected, they let you play with multiple people on a LAN at somewhat saner prices. AU$300 per person is kind of stupid for a game, and that's what it would've cost if each player had to have the game and all ex packs.
A linux-supported game with minimal or no copy protection is much more likely to get my money, and I'll pay more for it too. I'm much less likely to wait 'till it hits the bargain bin, and will generally be a bunch happier with it simply because it makes playing it fun, not infuriating and frustrating. Ditto anything that doesn't force me to sit through 5 mins of unskippable logos etc just to play the thing, doesn't require the disk in the drive, etc.
So
It was the first time an Elite clone didn't outright suck.
Sure, the controls are hazy at best, but most people mistook that game for what it truly is : An economy simulator with a spaceship look-and-feel GUI.
There are lots of annoying things in the game, many things that should be automatized (I'm not a native ingrish speaker, so bear with me), but the game is scriptable, has seen many outstanding mods, there's a very tight-knit community on the egosoft fora, and there is a level of satisfaction you just can't describe when you start building your economic empire, sending your universe traders gain maximum profits while your factories make the X-Universe a safe, economically balanced place.
It's one of the two games that make me say "MMORPG's? What for?" (the other one being Morrowind)
In a way, I refer to those as "Filtered MMOG's", because you only accept the input from other players of the game that you want. No trolling, play the game however you want it to be, and there are TONS of mods.
Last but not least, even best of all... In-game console!
So, Mazel Tov to this company for porting a good game to Linux. I'd have been willing to shell out the cash, and to wait, for the next installment, though.
Repeat after me: Its not a bug, its a feature
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
You can download the X2 - The Threat Mac OS X demo from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/demos_ updates/x2thethreat.html
Its ported by Virtual Programming Ltd., I never heard of them before, and never heard of X2 before either, but the screenshots looked cool and im a huge fan of Freespace 2, so i'm downloading the demo right now :)
Why? Because it causes warez groups fits. A lot of games using that protection haven't been cracked yet, including the game you mentioned, and the ones that haven't been cracked can't simply be copied 1:1 either; you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to play a clone image properly. Damn shame, considering how intrusive the protection is in regards to your computer as well as to the game itself.
Rob
Gee, it worked so well with Windows XP....
I think that you've proved the point against yourself -- copy protection doesn't work. Only good ethics will.
Was Derek Smart involved in this X2 game? Did he make the enemy Coca Cola vending machines or something? Why should I even bother to play a game that does not even have an original sounding name, and sounds like an obvious X-Men ripoff, or at least an X-Com ripoff.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.