Unusual Physics Engine Game Ported To Linux 117
christian.einfeldt writes "Halloween has come early for Linux-loving gamers in the form of the scary Penumbra game trilogy, which has just recently been ported natively to GNU-Linux by the manufacturer, Frictional Games. The Penumbra games, named Overture, Black Plague and Requiem, are first-person survival horror and physics puzzle games which challenge the player to survive in a mine in Greenland which has been taken over by a monstrous infection/demon/cthulhu-esque thing. The graphics, sounds, and plot are all admirable in a scary sort of way. The protagonist is an ordinary human with no particular powers at all, who fumbles around in the dark mine fighting zombified dogs or fleeing from infected humans. But the game is remarkable for its physics engine — rather than just bump and acquire, the player must use the mouse to physically turn knobs and open doors; and the player can grab and throw pretty much anything in the environment. The physics engine drives objects to fly and fall exactly as one would expect. The porting of a game with such a deft physics engine natively to Linux might be one of the most noteworthy events for GNU-Linux gamers since the World of Goo Linux port."
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just who in world though this is good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
My thought exactly. Think of a horror movie where you are sitting on your seat's edge because the protagonist fumbles with reload of his revolver while that zombie dog is dashing towards him. His hand shakes as he peels out the spent cartridges, he tries to load a new cartridge, he fumbles, the bullet drops into the black void below, the metal clanc as it hits the ground while you hear that unearthy bark and growl of the dog sprinting towards him, and only one more bullet in his hand... Then finally he manages to get it in, he raises the gun, tries to aim and just as the dog leaps to him he fires, blindly...
Way scarier and more suspense building than spitting out a full ammo box of machine gun ammo towards the dog and pretty much tearing it to bloody shreds that splatter down around our hero.
Re:$5 each platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is just fsck'ing $5, not $60. Spend $10 instead of $5 and get both. The price *IS* right here. Geez!
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've not much use for Linux in my every day life, but I've used it enough on multiple hardware platforms, both stationary and mobile, and neither of them had any problems with rendering graphics.
The HDMI output on my laptop does not work at all under Linux (Quadro 2700M.) And I can't do dual-display without my system actually failing to bring up X if I don't have the external display connected.
Graphics and sound are in fact the two places where Linux falls on its ass the hardest, and if you don't acknowledge these problems, you're living in denial. Maybe YOU haven't had problems with either, but both are common. Intel boned the graphics driver for my lady's laptop, too. I thought open source intel drivers were supposed to make graphics reliable?
Linux is great in a lot of ways, but graphics are still a sore spot due to incompetent drivers from all major manufacturers.
Re:No 64-bit version? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a 64 bit system and I play 32 bit world of goo without any problems once you install the 32 bit libs.
On my ubuntu machine is 101mb (installed), if that is a lot of space for you then you have a reasonable complaint.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
I maybe fall into the 'power user' band as I sometimes use dual displays, but I certainly have had sound problems with both my MBP and my Dell mini 9 when running Ubuntu. Recently some update screwed up pulseaudio on my Mini 9 (sound kept stuttering every 30 seconds or so) so I've just removed it for now. General sound playback is working fine again, but for some reason the login sound now stutters instead. I'm willing to live with that since it's only once a day, but the sound situation on Linux is still a bit of a mess. Dell Mini 9s are definitely not intended for 'power users'..
The Mac also had regular and annoying sound crackling/whining issues in the left speaker - apparently very common in MBPs - but since it's a fairly specialised case I know it's a bit much to expect devs to concentrate on solving Mac issues, especially when I could have just stuck with OSX.
The only other annoyance I have in Linux these days is that evolution occasionally crashes for no reason (usually when I go to use the search option, but sometimes it just seems to be random).
Re:So... (Score:1, Insightful)
nVidia officially supports its cards under Linux. No, I do not like that is is proprietary. (Because) Yes, it does make X slightly unstable. But the graphics card is completely supported. And fast.
As for translucent terminals: use konsole (in KDE4). Set "background transparency" to, say, 25%. Actually, do not. Any serious use of the terminal is negatively impacted by seeing text underneath your own text. KDE 4 has more eye candy than a 6-year old after Halloween. There are things to bitch about Linux, but support for standard support of nVidia graphics is not one of them.
Re:It's Only $5 (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea... I really wish people would wise up and knock that shit off.
It's not that the users or webmasters are really at fault - it's the programmers who write the underlying code that think such things are acceptable - the people who should know better!