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Myth II and Railroad Tycoon II For Linux
pridkett writes "Loki Games, the same people who brought us Civ:CTP for Linux have just announced that they will be porting Myth II and Railroad Tycoon II to Linux. " This just came across my inbox as well-I've played both games on WinX before-let's hope they do as good a job of porting this, as they did with Civ:CTP.
hey guys as you probally already know there is a webpage at http://natas.kfa.cx/~civ that is dedicated to Civ:CTP for Linux. I run this website and next week should be opening http://natas.kfa.cx/~loki which will be dedicated to all the games that Lokisoft is porting. Right now I have decided to make a page for each game and have a news section, Faq, message-board ect. Now I am looking for people to help me out with these sites. I myself will take care of the main page http://natas.kfa.cx/~loki but I need people to help make and maintain the pages for each game. So if anyone out there wants to help me out email me at natas@natas.kfa.cx saying you wanna help!
Thanks,
NaTaS
Not likely since they way the convince game companies to allow to port is through residual profits. These companies can get a little extra profit at low risk from selling to people who wouldn't buy their Windows version. Thus is the binaries are free for people who already have the Windows version then they don't get any gain out of it.
I've just discussed it with my cohorts, and we at handeye.com plan to sell these games on our web site, just like we're selling Civ:CTP now.
By the way, if you're one of our Civ:CTP customers, sit tight, because your game is on the way. I finished Perl-ifying our shipping process a few hours ago, and conveniently the boxes should be arriving today (5/18) from Loki. We'll slap labels on 'em and shoot 'em out the door as soon as we can see cardboard.
Excuse me if this announcement is a little premature, but we're like really excited, primarily because we're such Linux nerds. So bear with us. (And go to our web site.)
-Ben/me crunches some numbers...
We ( handeye.com) are one of the sites that sells this game. Our sales have thus far been pretty healthy, considering that everything up 'til now has been a pre-order. We have around 1000 copies of Civ:CTP, about 20% of which were pre-ordered. As of today, when we actually receive the boxes from Loki (and ship out the games), we expect our sales to perk up a little.
News like this (the porting of these two games) makes me very happy, as a long-time Linux enthusiast and occasional gamer. It's great to see that there's a market for Linux games and a growing market for commercial Linux software in general. (What else is new, though, right?)
<kiss target="ass">
-Ben (who hopes his lt's and gt's don't get mangled when he submits this)I'd like to thank quite a few of you (you know who you are) for making us a well-trafficked web site. We've gotten about 400,000 hits since our public launch in late April/early May, and people have been sending positive feedback. We especially get warm feelings when people tell us we're giving back to the Linux community. Anyway, I'll keep churning out the Perl as long as you folks are interested in buying games.
</kiss>
More important than the fact that games are being released for Linux is the fact that gaming subsystems are being developed for Linux. Carmack's recent investment in the Mesa project and the release of games like the Q3Test show that there's an interest in taking advantage of some of Linux's possibilities. I don't know how well it's going to work out as right now, Linux really doesn't have the strongest of foundations for gaming, but the beginning holes are there as more and more processors and video chips are being supporting (the OSS drivers were a big step forward). Unfortunately for me, one of the biggest reasons that I run Linux is also one of the biggest reasons that I don't play games on it: my computer's simply too old.
I look forward to seeing how the market responds to this. I hope companies actually start developing Linux binaries that they can include on the shipping CDs so we don't have to wait for some other company to port them. id has already shown that the process can be relatively simply. Not that I want to see Loki Games disappear, but I hope we won't have to depend on just them for Linux versions of our favorite Windows games.
Loki and Activision sell their respective versions of Civilization: Call to Power independently of the other. In addition, we pay royalties to Activision based on sales of the Linux version. We currently have no plans to provide a Linux 'upgrade' for purchasers of the Windows version, but will announce an upgrade policy on this website should that change.
guess i'll have to wait...but i still want the box damn it! heres the link to the faq if yr interested.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
It isn't fair to label, sure, and I am using broad generalizations about the community here (shields up!) but I would guess these games are "more portable to Linux" for the following reasons:
:)
:-/
1)most of us grew up on early "classics", running on Amiga's, Atari's, Mac or god forbit, a CGA-equipped IBM PC [erk!].
2)Since we started out on those "alternative" platforms, we were also the most likely group to switch to Linux... and here we are...
3)As a group it could be argued we prefer strategy games over other types.. these are the only games we had (like freeciv, nettrek etc.) when we switched to Linux/Unix. It could also be argued a higher percentage of us at one time played D&D/AD&D even though most of the population never has.
5) A large percentage of us also have played MAME or MESS-based games. MAME made it a lot easier to mostly convert my PC to Linux, so I could do something useful with the system.
When I finally switched from Atari ST to a PC clone, the only game worth playing on it was Civ... at least until DOOM came along!
If these games are successful, I would like to see them include "original" versions, like Railroad I (cheezy CGA graphics and all). Sure, MESS or DOSemu might run the original if you can locate an old pirated copy, but I'd rather buy it as part of a "remake" which includes the original.
Commercial games have their own appeal, but does anyone besides me doubt a commercial company has the creativity and resources to match a driven open-source movement like the MAME project, which now has OpenGL support and soon "netplay"? Williams and Activision simply rereleased their old "classics" without [optional] enhancements.
I already own Myth II on a hybrid Mac/PC disk, running it on both computers. Unless there's some kind of trade-up I won't buy the Linux version..
Has anyone seen any sales results for CIV Call to Power yet? I'd like to know how well it is selling. I noticed that it is out of stock everywhere I have seen it for sale on the web. More games is going to make it A LOT easier to convert others to linux and make booting to Windows completely unnessessary for some!
Would be interesting to see if Loki or Id would ship a linux distro with their linux based games.
Would get more people into trying linux. People would see Quake 3 or RC2 for linux and think "woah, that's neat, too bad I don't have linux..wait what's this? comes with redHat 6.0? I think I'll try this"
Of course, you can replace RedHat 6.0 with any other distro, just that that's the one that would probably ship with a game.
This is great news. Myth is one of the most innovative and enjoyable games out today. It's a cross between Chess and Quake. Incredibly Bloody with great strategy. Who could ask for more? I still keep my Mac around so I can play...but it looks like now I'm going 100% Linux. Yipee!