Temple Of Elemental Evil is, aside from bugs and bad overall flow of the game, a complete failure because of a.) random encounters and b.) user interface.
The UI's basic idea is decent, radial Menu, select either combat, spells, etc. But even if I have only one lousy level 1 spell, I need to select: Rightclick, Spells, Wizard, Level 1, Magic Missile. The curser doesn't change to give me any indication a change happened.
It's even worse, for example, when your characters are entangled. Rightclick, Movement, Break Free. Do that for every character for three rounds, which is common when you encounter your first spider, and you'll go nuts over 54 useless clicks.
There is no way to define shortcuts. All of the above problems could have easily been fixed if I could map 8 keys or so per character to the most common actions. And when resting, there's no "until healed, with spells" button like in Baldur's Gate 2. I have to manually use the horrible spell menu 4 times until I cast all my healing spells, rest, rinse, repeat (In 3 out of 4 rests you will be treated with a random encounter, unless you beat it without any loss of HP, you will have to start your healing routine over!).
There are other things. Corpses not decaying and no visual distinction to living enemies, nor a highlight around them, make it very hard to not fire at your own or the dead corpses. Ultimately I can say I have been looking forward to a game that uses the full DnD 3.5 rules as on paper, and while this idea showed promise, TOEE is just a horrible implementation of that idea.
Well, I consider myself a linux gamer - one without a windows partition. My interest in games has been a bit declining recently, resulting in me having only time to play the "big" games (it's hard to play more than one or maybe two games competitively at the same time, and I left out trying out new games to "relax" from the more "serious" games).
Each genre has its references, or very popular games, multiplayer of course. For first person shooters that is Counterstrike, period. Now personally I don't like the game, but I can say I have successfully run it under WineX. Other "important" FPS games that run under WineX are Battlefield 1942 or Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. Many FPS such as UT2003, any ID Game (Quake 3 Arena, RTCW, Enemy Territory) come with a linux client so that's even less of problem.
The real time strategy genre hasn't seen any good linux clients so far, but there are only three really established RTS games out there, Starcraft, Warcraft III and Age of Mythology, of which I can say that I've played all except the latter one under WineX. As for other genres, I don't know. I doubt that Fifa games run very well. Missing some other genres, the biggest multiplayer RPG (not MMORPG) is NWN right now, I think, which, after a one year delay, finally has gained linux support.
Short: If you are a "casual" gamer who likes to constantly try out new games, you should inform yourself and think before switching. Should you focus your attention on single games in order to climb the ladder or participate in tournaments, there's a good chance for success. In any case, check out www.transgaming.com, click on "Games" on the left and check the working rating for your favorite game.
Well, finally I can say that having an nvidia card spares you a lot of pain most of the time (better drivers). And oh, if you're one of those "strictly GNU" fanatics -> forget it, you're not going to like WineX (somewhat open-source, but 5$ a month).
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
You must be lucky, because I am the guy you have been looking for to answer all your questions - I run Gentoo on my desktop, Slackware on my Server and recently installed debian-testing. And here is the reason why I like Gentoo the most:
Slackware is a great distro, I could have been the one I liked most. It is barely "extended", everything seems to be where it should be and there are no strange custom configurations/extra control panels/pre-installed programs like on Mandrake or RedHat. But after a while Slackware got pretty tedious, because I had no decent package management (swaret sucks and no central point for mirrors) and the init script system, though I learned a lot through using it, was more than I wanted to handle on a regular basis.
debian-testing. After I found that #debian does have some more helpful users than the ones I encountered last time (Actual quote: "You tried to install unstable? HAHAHAHA"), I found debian hard to install - not because of the lack of an installer but because there is one. It was to some exten... unpleasant to work with, it expected weird things of my CD-ROM drive and I pulled my hair out when the live-installtion (net-inst) cd didn't have Bash avaible - no tab completion sucks. After having installed it, the X-Server wouldn't work and I gave up, tired and exhausted. Way too much stuff preconfigured in my opinion - not necessarily a bad thing - hey, apt-get seemed quite nice (I mean it).
Now Gentoo. I love it - but it is not because I want that so-called CFLAGS Performace Increase(tm). Yes, it's mostly a myth. There are a few apps where it matters, but most of the time it doesn't. But I love portage - I did almost everything on that system myself, except the area I don't like to touch - it has a nice init-script system (think rc-update add apache default). Portage rocks, because compiling from source, while it may be timeconsuming, circumvents a lot of dependency problems, because programs that compile with libX 0.1 will most of the time work with libX 0.2 too, and vice-versa. Also, if I want a new version of a program, no need to wait for a maintainer to make a new release of the package. Most of the time it's just down to renaming a single ebuild-file (i.e., renaming cdrdao-1.1.6.ebuild to cdrdao-1.1.7 ebuild) and portage will try to fetch the appriopriate file from the same server and compile with the same options.
And last but not least: USE flags. I like my emacs without X, thank you, so that's USE="-X" emerge emacs for me (please, no flames from the vi/nano/edit.com crowd)..
I could go on about other things I like, but that mainly sums it up. I hope that obliterates some counter arguments such as "performance myth" and "compile times" because I think those things suck too - and I still like Gentoo.
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Temple Of Elemental Evil is, aside from bugs and bad overall flow of the game, a complete failure because of a.) random encounters and b.) user interface.
The UI's basic idea is decent, radial Menu, select either combat, spells, etc. But even if I have only one lousy level 1 spell, I need to select: Rightclick, Spells, Wizard, Level 1, Magic Missile. The curser doesn't change to give me any indication a change happened.
It's even worse, for example, when your characters are entangled. Rightclick, Movement, Break Free. Do that for every character for three rounds, which is common when you encounter your first spider, and you'll go nuts over 54 useless clicks.
There is no way to define shortcuts. All of the above problems could have easily been fixed if I could map 8 keys or so per character to the most common actions. And when resting, there's no "until healed, with spells" button like in Baldur's Gate 2. I have to manually use the horrible spell menu 4 times until I cast all my healing spells, rest, rinse, repeat (In 3 out of 4 rests you will be treated with a random encounter, unless you beat it without any loss of HP, you will have to start your healing routine over!).
There are other things. Corpses not decaying and no visual distinction to living enemies, nor a highlight around them, make it very hard to not fire at your own or the dead corpses. Ultimately I can say I have been looking forward to a game that uses the full DnD 3.5 rules as on paper, and while this idea showed promise, TOEE is just a horrible implementation of that idea.
Well, I consider myself a linux gamer - one without a windows partition. My interest in games has been a bit declining recently, resulting in me having only time to play the "big" games (it's hard to play more than one or maybe two games competitively at the same time, and I left out trying out new games to "relax" from the more "serious" games). Each genre has its references, or very popular games, multiplayer of course. For first person shooters that is Counterstrike, period. Now personally I don't like the game, but I can say I have successfully run it under WineX. Other "important" FPS games that run under WineX are Battlefield 1942 or Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. Many FPS such as UT2003, any ID Game (Quake 3 Arena, RTCW, Enemy Territory) come with a linux client so that's even less of problem.
The real time strategy genre hasn't seen any good linux clients so far, but there are only three really established RTS games out there, Starcraft, Warcraft III and Age of Mythology, of which I can say that I've played all except the latter one under WineX. As for other genres, I don't know. I doubt that Fifa games run very well. Missing some other genres, the biggest multiplayer RPG (not MMORPG) is NWN right now, I think, which, after a one year delay, finally has gained linux support.
Short: If you are a "casual" gamer who likes to constantly try out new games, you should inform yourself and think before switching. Should you focus your attention on single games in order to climb the ladder or participate in tournaments, there's a good chance for success. In any case, check out www.transgaming.com, click on "Games" on the left and check the working rating for your favorite game.
Well, finally I can say that having an nvidia card spares you a lot of pain most of the time (better drivers). And oh, if you're one of those "strictly GNU" fanatics -> forget it, you're not going to like WineX (somewhat open-source, but 5$ a month).
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
... unpleasant to work with, it expected weird things of my CD-ROM drive and I pulled my hair out when the live-installtion (net-inst) cd didn't have Bash avaible - no tab completion sucks. After having installed it, the X-Server wouldn't work and I gave up, tired and exhausted. Way too much stuff preconfigured in my opinion - not necessarily a bad thing - hey, apt-get seemed quite nice (I mean it).
You must be lucky, because I am the guy you have been looking for to answer all your questions - I run Gentoo on my desktop, Slackware on my Server and recently installed debian-testing. And here is the reason why I like Gentoo the most:
Slackware is a great distro, I could have been the one I liked most. It is barely "extended", everything seems to be where it should be and there are no strange custom configurations/extra control panels/pre-installed programs like on Mandrake or RedHat. But after a while Slackware got pretty tedious, because I had no decent package management (swaret sucks and no central point for mirrors) and the init script system, though I learned a lot through using it, was more than I wanted to handle on a regular basis.
debian-testing. After I found that #debian does have some more helpful users than the ones I encountered last time (Actual quote: "You tried to install unstable? HAHAHAHA"), I found debian hard to install - not because of the lack of an installer but because there is one. It was to some exten
Now Gentoo. I love it - but it is not because I want that so-called CFLAGS Performace Increase(tm). Yes, it's mostly a myth. There are a few apps where it matters, but most of the time it doesn't. But I love portage - I did almost everything on that system myself, except the area I don't like to touch - it has a nice init-script system (think rc-update add apache default). Portage rocks, because compiling from source, while it may be timeconsuming, circumvents a lot of dependency problems, because programs that compile with libX 0.1 will most of the time work with libX 0.2 too, and vice-versa. Also, if I want a new version of a program, no need to wait for a maintainer to make a new release of the package. Most of the time it's just down to renaming a single ebuild-file (i.e., renaming cdrdao-1.1.6.ebuild to cdrdao-1.1.7 ebuild) and portage will try to fetch the appriopriate file from the same server and compile with the same options.
And last but not least: USE flags. I like my emacs without X, thank you, so that's USE="-X" emerge emacs for me (please, no flames from the vi/nano/edit.com crowd)..
I could go on about other things I like, but that mainly sums it up. I hope that obliterates some counter arguments such as "performance myth" and "compile times" because I think those things suck too - and I still like Gentoo.