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)."

Comments

Choose a better game?

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

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.

Re:Performance?

[michaelsimms]

We always take the time to port properly. Often that can mean it takes a lot longer than we would like to do a port, however, we never take shortcuts.

Re:What technologies do these games use?

[michaelsimms]

Technologies. We are porting the Direct3D to OpenGL, we use SDL for some things, GCC is the compiler. ffmpeg for video, openAL for audio.

Re:Using DirectX from Wine?

[michaelsimms]

Not at all, we use purely ourown code, and libraries such as OpenGL and SDL. If you follow our company history you will see that I am very very much against any kind of emulation of Windows software on Linux for many reasons I am not going to go into here cos Id be ranting on on this thread for pages (google for my reasons, they are findable, if you are rerally interested).