Slashdot Mirror
Unreal Tournament Linux Client
James Massa was the first of many to note that there appears
to be official word on an Unreal For Linux client appearing on the Epic Unreal page. Renderers for Glide & MesaGL. Some screenshots are also available. No sound yet, but that should be coming. Loki's got Myth II and Railroad
Tycoon II coming together soon too. Its pretty excellent seeing real
games coming out faster. And I think that playing them should count
as "Investigative Research" for me.
A few clarifications:
:-)
.deb, etc) In fact, I think the concept of distribution specific install methods is a bit silly.
- I was unaware I wasn't supposed to refer to Mesa as "MesaGL." Frankly, I think its a little silly, as the GL suffix is not a copyrighted symbol, but I will accord with the authors wishes. Anonymous Coward says "its not politically correct" but I don't really care much about politically correctness.
- The Unreal Tournament Linux Client will be a client to the full game. UT is a large game and requires 2 CDs to ship on. When I said "it will be on the second CD" I was meaning that it would be on that CD because there would be additional space.
- Some people here are not clear on exactly what Unreal Tournament is. It is not Unreal. It is a new game that has not yet been released. It is a first person 3D action game focusing on multiplayer combat. The single player mode is a series of deathmatches against increasingly difficult aliens and humans. It contains variations on deathmatch like Capture the Flag, Domination and Assault. For more information check out www.unrealtournament.net.
- I (Brandon Reinhart) made the Tech Page update not Tim. And my pimping KDE isn't to say that it is better than GNOME. Rather, its what I installed when I started and I haven't seen any reason to try other window managers. I don't have the luxury of time to try all the various window managers, nor would I want to. I use what gets the job done and right now I'm getting the job done just fine in KDE.
- One use commented that Unreal isn't new, so the news isn't really that great. Unreal Tournament is, in fact, quite new. It hasn't been released. Its a new style of game and it has new engine technology. If everything goes well with the remainder of the port, you should be able to go into your local software store on the UT release date and pick up a copy of UT off of the shelf to run under Linux.
- Once again, the KDE being better than GNOME thing is lame. Tim Sweeney doesn't even use Linux.
- RelliK asks "how does it work." The answer is that it uses a graphics library to access your hardware 3D accelerator to render the game's scenes. UT will require X because:
* glX is good.
* Input under X is easy.
* I can easily do windowed rendering under X.
* Making windows is X is easy.
* X is good.
- Unreal Tournament can render inside a window if you have a good non-3DFX accelerator. Unreal Tournament will not support software rendering under Linux. (It does under Win32.) If you have a 3DFX card, then you have to use fullscreen mode. If you use the Mesa renderer and a 3DFX card then you can play in a window, but you will get a terrible framerate (less than 1 frame a second). This is because Glide does not support rendering in a window and Mesa emulates it by doing a frame buffer copy into the X Drawable. Yuck!
- Posting information about this port has opened up a lot of questions from people who don't know alot about Epic, Unreal Tournament, or games in general. I will try to keep my updates on the Tech Page (unreal.epicgames.com) as free from gaming slang as possible. I suggest that if you are not familiar with 3D games and modern gaming (because it has been a very Win32 PC issue) you educate yourself. Check out:
* www.bluesnews.com for 3D gaming news.
* www.tomshardware.com for information about 3D accelerators and what they do.
* www.unrealtournament.net for what UT is about.
- Finally, give me a little leeway with the Linux advocacy political-correctness stuff. My personal interests do not lie in the realm of operating system advocacy. I am persuing this port because:
* We need to make the Unreal Engine support multiple platforms.
* People like to run servers on Linux.
* People want to play games on Linux.
I am not a regular Linux user and I don't follow the Linux scene. As such, I am not necessarily aware of the correct usage of terms and so forth (just as you may not be aware of gaming lingo and the current state of 3d gaming).
- I have enjoyed working with Linux. I have enjoyed working with X windows. Epic will continue to produce new games for Linux.
- Epic uses their own installer application. I may port this installer for the purposes of installing the new games we make. I prefer this over making distribution specific install files. (.rpm,
- There might be a port of UT to LinuxPPC.
- It is unlikely there will be a BeOS port. I will get BeOS and evaluate whether or not a port would be worth my time. (Frankly, I'm ready to start developing new tech for our next game, as UT is almost ready to ship.)
I hope this clarifies things. I can be reached at brandon@epicgames.com.
Brandon Reinhart
Do you ever notice those " Foobar wrote in to say that..." at the beginning of the postings? Or were you too busy writing that flame to notice that 99% of the stories are SUBMITTED.
If you're not seeing any news about Mac or BeOS ports, you have no one to blame except yourself. Submit some BeOS or Mac gaming news and I'll bet we'll start seeing some of it appear on the front page.
And judging from the recent poll, more of us are Linux users anyhow, so it makes perfect sense that most of the OS stories are about Linux (since they're the ones submitting the most stories).
In short, you have two options -- live with the fact that you are a minority, or start submitting news for your OS and hope that the /. demigods bless you with a posting. Either way, quit your futile whining.