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Games Entertainment

Kohan for Linux 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the games-people-play dept.
XarsonX writes "A demo of Kohan Immortal Sovereigns (a real time strategy game) is out on linux. The full version should be coming soon. News, stuff about the game, and the demo are available at www.timegatestudios.com." I hadn't heard much about this game, but the graphics are definitely impressive. Might be worth a download.
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Kohan for Linux More

Kohan for Linux

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  • You can pre-order this title through Tux Games [tuxgames.com].
    The price is $46, and we hope to ship at the same time as Loki ships.

  • Great... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by EvlPenguin ( 168738 )
    Now if only I could get this fucking Voodoo 3 to work under X 4, I'd be in buisness.

    I think I'm just going to go back to 3.6. The only thing 4.x has given me is headaches.
    • I've been using XFree v.4 with a Voodoo3 2000 since it was released. Problems? Yes. Many? Only OpenGL (DRI) and only when I want to use the bleeding edge stuff. The dri.sourceforge.net site is helpful for released versions, but not friendly; you have to dig through it if you want to try the latest and greatest.

      Here's a cheat sheet for getting the latest;

      1. Backup /usr/X11R6 /etc/X11. If any of this doesn't work, restore these and X should work once again. (Suggestion: backup as root, use "cp -a" to perform the copy -- just to be paranoid!

      2. Get the DRI sources; make a directory -- dri_cvs or some such -- on a volume with 1.2gb (minimum) space available. From that location, execute

      1. export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.dri.sourceforge.net :/cvsroot/dri

        cvs checkout xc

      3. Change to the xc/xc subdirectory.

      4. Execute "make World" (note capital "W")

      5. When done, if there are no errors, exit from X and (as root) run "make install".

      6. Start X (as user) and check that simple OpenGL programs work. A good one to try is "gears" from Xscreensaver. Use "gears -fps" to check the frames per second. On my system, I get about 40~ (PII-465).

      7. If you have a recient kernel (2.4.6~) this may fail. If so, you need to either downgrade or switch to a newer kernel (2.4.8+, 2.4.7-ac11+). If you change kernels, recompile DRI if you encounter a failure. Suggested combination: XFree 4.0.x with an older kernel, or XFree 4.1.x (the one from DRI) with one of the kernels mentioned above.

  • There's a broken link on their site. Try this:

    http://www.kohan.net/main/press/linux_demo.htm [kohan.net]

    This looks like my kind of game!

    Zooko

  • Kohan Review (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord_Pall ( 136066 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @11:50AM (#2121479)
    Okay.. I've owned kohan ever since Rich Laporte over at Gonegold (http://www.gonegold.com) raved about the beta version..

    For a quick description, Think heroes of might and magic, masters of magic and warlords 1-3 combined, and then made realtime

    But not realtime in the negative clickfest sense.. Very methodical and well paced real time

    Mix in great cooperative multiplay, random map generation, a scenario editor, and at least for the windows version an integrated gamespy client, and you get Kohan

    The entire game is structured around heroes(Kohan's), and "squads" of units.
    So instead of controlling a zillion little units, you're instead controlling groups of units that you construct

    Each group of units has a zone of conflict, and when zones of conflict overlap, the units will engage one another..
    Combat is fairly passive, but still has an extremely large amount of tactical depth

    There's also a really nice resource harvesting model.. Unique in the sense that it strongly discourages hoarding.. Any excess resources for a timeslice are discarded instead of stored..

    Overall its a great game.. One of the best, if not the best rts game i've played this year..

    And to top off a great product, the developers (Timegate) have done a great job supporting and updating the product..
    They're very active in the community, and host tournaments every now and then..
  • One less game for me to boot into Windows for.. Kohan is an excellent wargame for thinking individuals, one were blind rushes and other common RTS tactics are far inferior to solid combined arms strategy and logistics. I've been playing this one exclusively for months, now..
  • no where does it list system requirements.. doesn't require hardware acceleration but the game looks good.. the demo is around 66 megs (not too bad) and has a couple tutorials you can play through. I will definitely be pre-ordering this title.
    • Well, it doesn't list system requirments, but I can tell you the Linux version works on a p3 450 and 64 megs of RAM. 3d acceleration isn't needed.

  • As a beta tester, I can say that it is a great gam (Score:4, Informative)

    by PhilLong ( 42015 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @12:22PM (#2131050)
    Sam L. et. all have gotten the Linux implementation tight as . The gameplay and economic model ARE different from your standard total annihilation / warcraft /starcraft fare. (Well, those were the last time I touched a game under win32). The economic model focuses on balancing lots of different resourcecs which can be generated by towns themselves. Takes a bit of getting used to, but it is much more interesting than "energy/metal" all harvested from "mines". The unit play and tactics are also very interesting - morale, formation, terrain bonuses, flanking. Military historians should love this. Oh, and they fixed that damnable "rush" tactic. As of now, I don't miss bilzzard at all (well, that's a lie. I still kinda wanted to try DiabloII in my copius spare time). And it has additional cool Loki - type features such as the "middle mouse map drag/scroll" that Win32 folks don't. Check it out!
  • I'd personally like to thank TimeGate Studios and Lokigames for (1) writing a great, original RTS game and (2) porting it to Linux. I really like being able to play games with some of my friends who still use Windows. I don't really care who is using what OpSys as long as we can all play games together.

    I got to beta the game - I've run it on a k62-350 with a voodoo3, a TBird with a Geforce and a Thinkpad with a neomagic video card and on all 3 platforms it ran great, installed without a hitch and was just an all-around ball.

    If yer a Linux user looking for an RTS check out Kohan - its great.

    Note that I only use the aforementoined voodoo3 as a 2d card with excellent color and picture quality and I havent tried to install the 3d support as it's not required.

    Thanks again to Loki and TimeGate.

    The Kohan will return to their former glory!

  • Kohan is infact a very good game. (Score:5, Informative)

    by dustin_c1 ( 153078 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @02:10PM (#2132172)
    Kohan is a very good game

    Kohan is considered a strong game among the RTS (real time strategy) gaming crowd, but it has not attained the popularity of Starcraft or Age of Kings. This is due in part because of having a new and inexperienced publisher, Strategy First. The publisher never marketed Kohan heavily. Strategy First was the publishing company responsible for the WWII online debacle - they don't have the best track record as a publisher. Members of the online gaming community will be very familiar with this.

    Also, Kohan is lacking in the graphics department when compared to their peers. It doesn't look any better than Age of Kings or Starcraft. Some very good 3d RTS games are just around the corner, including Warcraft III, Age of Mythology and Empire Earth. Kohan is a day late and a dollar short in a department that is really a must among the people who really matter - the people in the middle of the curve who buy a lot of games and are not hardcore players.

    For the hardcore player Kohan is one of the most unique and best RTS games ever. It is not a clone of more popular RTS games at all. The economic model is unique in a good way. Most other games have over simplied economic models (a good example being starcraft) or an economic model that requires too much micromanagement (a good example being Age of Empires series). The kohan model requires no micromanagement and is complex enough to be very rewarding. The military model adds in aspects of moral and costs of transportation. Slain troops are automatically replaced. This feature alone pushes the economic model to a class above all others. In stead of a static buy stuff/earn stuff model, there is a flow. Costs are higher than income, or costs are lower than income. In my opinion that puts a Kohan feature at the front of the future of RTS gaming.

    Unfortunately, Kohan never took off on the windows platform. It deservedly earned rave reviews. It tanked among the online community and the typical community. It was marketed poorly and the graphics technology are below par for it's time. On mrfixitonline, soon to be rtscentral, a place for the most hardcore RTS gamers, our Kohan forums are near dead while after almost 2 years our Age of Kings forum is still rocking solid.

    Ok, I'm going to give a shameless plug: I've been volunteering time for an RTS (real time strategy) gaming network for over a year now. mrfixitonline [mrfixitonline.com] has really taken off. We do neat things like run tournaments and online gaming events, RTS news, expert strategies and forums. We don't make any money doing this. (The site loses a ton), but it is incredible fun.

    It is nice to see Kohan make it to Linux. I am a gamer. I also love Linux. I have never played a Loki game in my life. I will buy Kohan when it comes out for Linux. It is as simple as that. If Loki games keeps coming out with strong titles and gaming hardware like soundcards and graphics cards are better supported, people like me will become converts. Kohan is a very strong RTS game. If any of you guys are interested in Kohan, drop by kohan.rtscentral.com [rtscentral.com] and check out what we have to offer for the game. I hate to have to say this, but while still viewable, the Kohan site doesn't display properly under Moz. Grrr.....
    • While the numbers of players are nowwhere close to the big guys (AOK, SC, D2, etc), there are plenty of game available during peak hours, and I rarely have trouble getting a 4v4 game rolling. I point this out because I fear your terminology will give people the impression that there is no multiplayer community, when in fact a strong core group exists, they just don't post on MFO. And things will get better, the European release is just around the corner, which will give a strong boost. Just a few months away is the expansion which will revitalize the community even further. I have confidence that the Kohan community will attain enough critical mass to persist for awhile because the game is just that good. A good example of a game that truly tanked was Submarine Titans. You were often hard pressed to find a game at any time. This game was too similar to previous RTS's to pull people away from the old standbys. Now, as far as I can tell, Subtitans is deader than dead, even the news updates on the main sites are many months old.

  • Kohan is an outstanding game (Score:3, Informative)

    by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @02:55PM (#2132996)
    While it posesses all of the features of the standard RTS, they're blended in a combination that works very well.

    Here are the primary features of the game that I enjoy:

    The economic micromanagement aspect that one normally sees (peons harvesting resources) is almost entirely absent, so economic growth is based mainly on the decisions you make, not how well you manipulate virtual slaves to hunt deer.

    Units must be supplied with resources in addition to being purchased. Having to support your existing armies is a feature that hasn't really been tried in this genre (yes I know you have to make houses in AOE, but the cost is only noticeable in the beginning). The result is an interesting game dynamic, in that wiping out an army is only effective if you follow it up with some capturing of towns. Give him some time and the troops will be rebuilt and you will have gained little.

    Experience for troops is excellent, careful management of your armies lets them effectively go up in level, getting somewhat more powerful(but not overmuch). This rewards the careful planner as opposed to the sloppy turbo-economy player who cranks out troops and lets them die.

    Tactics are key, unit companies keep their artillery and leaders in the back (archers/mages and captain), so doing an end run around the front line and hitting the rear is absolutely crippling. It really is a game of how you use your troops, not what troops you buy.

    Teamwork is heavily emphasized in that there are few obstacles to trading money or cities back and forth. Also, you can immediately see what your allies are doing (unlike AOK which requires tech research to expose the allied minimap). The result is that there is far more cooperation in the average Kohan game, perfectly accentuating the benefits of multiplayer gaming. Other RTS's often end up being a series of parallel 1v1 matchups on the same board.

    The action is very quick. You are generally fighting something or someone within 5 minutes of the start, so there's no 15 minute SimCity game.

    The network code works fairly well, disconnected players remember the IP address they were at and try to reconnect. A status indicator lets the whole game know if the player is gone, or attempting a reconnect.

    I would recommend this game to any serious strategy gamer without hesitation.

    All in all,
    • The economics of this game *are* quite different and it's refreshing. I've only played it on my LAN at home but it seems like it will be a blast once I can get on the net and play with a few win32 friends across the state...

      Great game - I'm overjoyed that we finally have an RTS for Linux.

  • I've been messing around with the demo since yesterday, and it is pretty cool if you like that type of game. The game runs very smoothly (as do all of the Loki games I have tried)

    -Randy

    • Re:Pretty cool. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Darth Maul ( 19860 )
      Strange. I downloaded the demo last night and it ran very sluggishly. All the other Loki demos/games run well, as do Quake 2 and Quake 3. Perhaps it's something with the particular 2D rendering engine? I have an nVidia TNT2 with the latest driver...

      • On my system, (Duron 800, 256MB, TNT2), Kohan runs great.

        I have noticed some crappy performance, however, when I was running Loki_Update in the background. I am not sure but it seems that if some other X program is in the background that is updated graphically (like Loki_Update progress bar) it will hurt the performance of the game. Try killing all GUIed apps that update often (xmms, etc) and see if you have the same issue.
      • It seemed quite sluggish to me as well when I tried it, however when I ran it in DGA mode (need to be root and then run kohan --dga), it ran much smoother.

        It is a hardware cursor problem..

        Another reader suggested that you could use '-x -f' on the command line so try that and you may not need DGA
  • I want this game... until now I've been a Westwood whipping boy playing Tiberian Sun and Red Alert (not the lack of anything written after the year 2000). I realize that making games costs money. But $50 USD?? By the time that gets shipped to me, duty, GST and the good honest reaming that the the good ol canadian beaver will get from good ol uncle sam at the banks. This game will cost me somewhere in the area of $90 CDN. I can run down to Business Depot and buy a win32 version for much less including gas. This frustrates the hell out of me because there is no way the wife of this poor sap will let him live if she see's this on next months VISA statement. :(

  • ..and don't forget (Score:2, Insightful)

    by linuxpng ( 314861 )
    it's availble through loki_demos too.. so you don't tax one mirror too hard.
  • I am glad the folks at Loki have got started to port Real Time Strategy Games though this one is not my favorite. RTSG is definitely my favorite type of games except RPG. From time to time I have played RTSGs such as War Battle II, Red Alert, Myth, Ace of Empires, and resently Empire(The Battle for Dune). Just hope one day I can play such great RTSGs on Linux, so keep working hard Loki!

  • Linux game development, or lack thereof.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @11:42AM (#2142985) Homepage


    This is gonna sound like spam, but i'll say it anyway.

    If you're interested in developing games for Linux, alot of the work may already be done for you. I recently started up a project called System 26 [system26.com] a little over a week ago, that aims to provide Linux developers (and Win32 developers, for that matter) with a resource they can visit, and grab all the raw materials they need to build basically anything. By "raw materials", I mean things like images, icons, other graphics, music, sound samples, things like that. They're organized into kits that developers can freely download and incorporate into their apps. In exchange for doing so, we even offer them the ability to showcase their work via our page, to encourage others to do the same.. In essence, we provide the lumber, the developers build the house.

    We're trying to build the project's popularity by word of mouth -- I don't believe in banner advertising, and there really is no money to be made by running such a project.. I just thought it would be cool to set up a nexus where artists and coders could exchange their work and loosely collaborate on building high-quality apps and games.

    If you're interested, especially if you're going to be building games for Linux, feel free to swing by and check us out. We'll see you there. :)

    Cheers,
    • I like the idea of the project, but I am concerned about the proliferation of games that are all using the same base for graphics, sound, etc.

      What happens when there are 20 different RTS games with the same sound samples and graphics tiles?

      Seems to me that this would have a negative effect, in that the creative aspect of the graphics tiles and sound samples (how your game "looks" and "sounds") would be lost.

      On another note though, I really like the idea of a GPL'ed repository of this stuff. Thanks, and great job!
      • It may also work for the better. Gameplay would be emphasized rather than gee-whiz graphics.
        • That may be true, but that issue has been tackled before from a different standpoint.

          Libraries such as SDL exist to speed development on graphics and sound I/O, and things like game engines exist (the quake engine, for example) as open-source re-usable engines.

          The graphics engine is what creates the "gee-whiz graphics" that you speak of, not the graphics tiles and textures themselves. (Although they do help).

          I think that an open source graphics engine is more useful than re-usable graphics tiles and sounds.
          • Quake, CrystalSpace, WorldForge, WorldFactory, and Nevrax just to name a couple off the top of my head.

            All of this is important (Not all developers can design commercial game quality sound tracks or textures...) so all endeavors are welcome.
    • On the webpage [ibiblio.org] it is stated: 'All the toolkits available here at System 26 can be freely incorporated into your apps, royalty-free, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or "GPL"'. So why isn't the description at the top of the page "A GPLed GUI Component Stockpile For Linux And Win32 Developers"? "GPLed" is the precise description of the license, not "Open-Source".


      • Hi Jones,

        True, GPL and "Open Source" are not synonymous. I'm still tossing around which license I want to settle on (keep in mind, the page, and the components have only been up for a week or so) and haven't quite comitted to going with the GPL at this point -- I thought I would, at the time the very first news article was written. Infact, I thought it was inevitable, because anything less than saying "It's GPL" would potentially scare off developers.

        What will more than likely happen is that future components will be released under a "GPL-Compatible" license. Literally, a simple duplicate of the GPL that refers to multimedia in the same ways and manners that it refers to sourcecode. Bottom line, stay tuned. Good catch, by the way -- I missed that one.

        Cheers,
    • Make sure it's announced on LinuxGames and anywhere else pertinent so that everyone knows about it.
    • So how long until VA Linux tries to either buy or outdo this site?
  • Why is Slashdot announcing yet-another-RTS, especially if the editor hasn't even "heard much about this game"? Does all Linux eye-candy that "might be worth a download" warrant a front-page story?
    • Yes.

      A very large portion of the /. community is big into Linux but runs Windows some because it's got the games. Anything that might allow us to run less Windows yet still get the games we want is a Good Thing(tm) and you'd better believe it's gonna get posted.

      Linux users are a seriously untapped segment of the gaming market, as Mac users used to be. Loki is filling an important niche and should be hailed (and supported monetarily) for it.

  • Yes it's cool (Score:3, Informative)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Sunday August 12, 2001 @01:50PM (#2144440) Homepage Journal
    I downloaded and played the demo yesterday. It was great.

    It has some nice new concepts which I haven't seen in RTS games so far. There are unit ZOCs (Zones of Control), and Zones of Supply. The supply concept seems to work quite nicely; units automatically regenerate when in supply zone. This makes defense somewhat easier. However, the supply zone disappears when the city is attacked, so it also makes a kind of siege possible.

    The game is based on building cities. The cities automatically have a number of militia units, which is nice. The units can have four formations, each having different combat and movement penalty. That's very nice. However, some common aspects are missing, such as different ground elevations, etc.

    Some of the fantasy elements such as "the leaders are immortals" feel rather silly.

    The mouse was very sluggish on my screen, but I got it changed to hardware cursor with flags "-x -f".

    The demo seems to have a multiplay, but it was empty of players. Actually, there was some player, but he was using a Korean version of the game, which was incompatible with mine. I'm not sure if the multiplay worked properly, because I tried to host a game, but when I opened a second Kohan window, my hosted game wasn't in the list.

    The user interface is nice, but somewhat slow, especially the cursor. Even with hardware cursor, it occasionally uses software cursor, which is awful. It would also be nice to have more keyboard shortcuts to various unit functions, for example when you want to build an outpost with an engineer company.

    Also, it would be nice to have a bit better UI documentation for the demo. There were many things which I didn't fully understand, such as the meaning of the various resources and trading. Units obviously require certain resources, but it doesn't seem to bother the units if the resources go negative. Well, I guess that it just means that you can't sell those negative resources, and thus can't get money, but how that works is not very clear.

    • Hmm, I had no trouble with the mouse. The game preformed flawlessly on my IBM T21, very quick and responsive. (RH 7.1 Xfree86 4.1.0, Savage IV) I guess your mileage may vary. Though if your vid card supports it I would highly recommend upgrading to X 4.1.0. My guess is this will fix your problem.
    • Try running your X server in 16 bit mode, that seems to speed up the mouse a lot. When I first started the demo in 24bpp, the mouse was far too choppy to be usable. But with 16bpp I didn't even need to use the X11 mouse to get acceptable speed. I've got an old S3 Virge/VX graphics card, so if I can run the demo, then just about anyone should.

      Hopefully one of these days someone will create a hardware color mouse cursor extension for XFree86, so games like this can have hardware color cursors that are perfectly smooth just like the hardware B&W cursors.
    • If you hold the mouse pointer over a negative resource it will tell you how much gold per round it's costing you. So basically if you're negative you automatically buy the resources.
  • It's great to see another strategy game for linux. I only
    hope that the developers can market the game themselves
    or through someone like loki. If the game is enjoyable, I for
    one don't mind voting for more like it with my dollars.

    "First person shooter" games are nice but some of us find it
    hard to get excited about Q4 (aka oh-god-yet-another-fps)
    and that the whole world doesn't revolve around "Frames per
    second" ratings. The game developers might want to keep that
    in mind. There still is a gaming market for thinking-gamers.

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