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Linux/Mesa 3D Game Beta
Steve Baker writes "Tux-the-Penguin - A Quest for Herring.
A full 3D game for Linux/OpenGL (Mesa). Released
with full source code under GPL. This is a first
public beta and the start of a web-based project
to bring this to completion.
What's available now is a couple of playable
levels. You *WILL* need a 3D accelerator that
Linux can support under OpenGL (that pretty
much means a Voodoo-1 or 2 or a RUSH).
Well, (I'm the author BTW) I *do* intend to
get it going under Windoze. Two reasons:
1) Tux-aqfh started life as a demo for my
portable games libraries (PLIB). Portability
is what it's all about. Why? Because if
we can convince people that it's as easy
to write games that are portable as games
for just one platform, there will be more
games for Linux and that would be A GOOD
THING.
2) I like the irony of Windoze users having
to watch Tux run around their screens.
Yes - I believe that someone *does* have it
running under Windoze already using CygWin's
toolset.
At any rate, the 'PLIB' library certainly runs
under windows - and that's 15,000 lines of code
versus only ~7,000 for the game itself. It won't
be hard to port.
All the nasty portability issues are buried in
PLIB anyway. I already have portable sound,
GUI, Graphics, Windowing and Joystick/Keybd/Mouse
I/O.
I just downloaded it and got it to compile (I had to comment out a line calling XMesaSetFXmode to fullscreen to get it to compile, but it did eventually, and this is an amazing game! It's not really much of a game yet. You just walk around and eat fish, but Tux can jump and dive and burp like he never could before! Don't try it on software Mesa, though. It's SLOW. I was getting about 5 seconds per frame. But I did get it to work with the in-development G200 driver, and it was more than playable (except that there's not much of a point to the game yet). It's far from finished, from the looks of it, but the graphics engine is very impressive. I can see the game ending up with great appeal for kids.