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Games Entertainment

Gamecenter on Linux and Gaming 30

Posted by Hemos from the because-it's-saturday dept.
Ant was among a number of people who alerted us to the latest Gamecenter feature Linux and the Gaming Community. It's a bit sparse but attempts to bring the gaming community up to speed, and what it's good for.
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Gamecenter on Linux and Gaming More

Gamecenter on Linux and Gaming

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  • Other than Quake III are they any 'new' or coming soon games for Linux? The ability to play a game I played 3 years ago isn't all the facinating.
  • Actually it's Civ: Call *TO* Power, but anyway...

    Also, coming soon from Lokisoft: Myth 2, Railroad Tycoon 2, and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire (or something like that - why they picked THAT one is beyond me).
  • It should be possible to ship Linux with the game. Either make the CD bootable or include a utility to make a boot diskette from an image on the CD from Windows. The advantage of this would be that you'd have total control of the environment. Currently you have to worry about the various shared libraries that the user has on his Linux box or if the user has Linux at all. Shipping a small Linux implementation with the game would allow you to avoid all those questions. Just stick the CD or boot disk in and reboot and the game starts right up.
  • heh. Never underestimate the popularity of Solitaire! Tour any big bureaucracy in the middle of the workday...

    I thought the article was very positive and encouraging to Linux newbies. All in all, a good thing.
  • But you have to remember that the kernel has to support the hardware, X has to be configured for the monitor/vidcard, etc, etc. I believe this topic has come up many times before.

    Anyone interested in developing a GPLed 3D game should head over to http://www.timecity.org - it's just about getting to the stage where code is being laid down. Or visit #timecity on SlashNet.
  • Oh, yes, that's right...you hate Microsoft because they're successful!

    I don't hate MicroSoft because they're successful, I hate them because they distribute bloated crap software that occasionally invades both my privacy and my legal rights.

    I don't hate Intel for making a business of faster, bigger chips, but I do dislike those ID numbers they want all their Pentium !!!'s to broadcast.

    And Red Hat doesn't bother me, so long as they don't try to make their Linux the only Linux out there...which is a monopolistic practice that calls up shades of MicroSoft's marketing practices, and hints that the quality of the software will degrade when the choice of software is lacking.

    "Such a well-thought-out and thoroughly mature rationale," indeed.

  • MS and open source (Score:3)

    by irishmex ( 496 ) on Saturday June 19, 1999 @09:15AM (#1843024)
    Anyone else notice the line: "Whatever the reason, more companies, Microsoft included, are jumping on the open-source bandwagon."

    All MS had to do was invite ESR to speak, keep anouncing that they're "thinking about" opening up Windows, and invest in an open source project that focuses on the Windows-only version of Perl and now they're beginning to be included in all of the good press that open source is getting. And this article is really just about games on an open-source platform and MS still gets some good press.

    All hail MS PR.

  • Linux and Gaming (Score:3)

    by Fantus ( 39640 ) on Saturday June 19, 1999 @06:06AM (#1843025)
    It's good to see Commercial Games coming to the market. I know a lot of people cringe at the word Commercial, but it's a fact of life that most "quality" games have commercial roots, and for good reason. The cool thing about Linux is a Game can be commercial, but developers from different companies can all work on the same open source API's and drivers. They can even delve into the Kernel if they need to. So yes, the game engine and graphics and story line are all proprietary, but the framework that talks to the computer and its devices can all remain open source, and benefit from it too.

    On the lighter side... I asked my father 17 years ago for an Atari, and ended up with a computer. I was devastated, but in retrospect, it was the best damn investment he could've made. Although he must of cringed when I was going to Radio Shack every week spending his money on upgrades. Games are important to me. Even though I don't use Windows anymore, and don't want to, I sometime miss some of the Games I use to fire up after going buggy (pun not intended) from coding after 6 or 7 hours...

    Long live Linux Games....

    Fantus

  • The following are a few quotes from this article. Exact copies -- the typos are theirs.

    "The creation of Linux began nearly a decade ago, in 1991, by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and was completed in 1994 with the release of version 1.0 of the Linux Kernal."

    So Linux was finished in 1994?

    "Red Hat is definitely leading the distribution pack, and it's easy to understand why. As far as Linux goes, Red Hat's distributions are relatively simple to configure, and the $79.95 that the latest distribution, 6.0, will cost you gets you not only the OS but also a gang of other goodies as well."

    People should stop talking about Red Hat like it's the only distribution worth considering.

    I guess I should stop being so negative...

    ---

  • This article should win some new linux converts. Not only did they say the magic words "faster" and "more stable" that will bring the power gamers into the fold, but they showed a bunch of X screen shots too. This might bring some rabid "windows customization" people (as if that's really possible)over as well.

    Interestingly enough, the screen shots were not E/Gnome or KDE. At least one was WindowMaker. That was cool. I myself use E/Gnome, but its nice to see the other folks get some press for a change. The more options the better

    Skippy

  • Re:MS and open source (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    s/jumping on/sniffing at/

    perhaps. Aye; MS is doing what's expedient, and looking out for their own (i.e. developing sofware that's strictly for Windows 9x/NT.). They're a *massive* proprietary software company which has far, far too many spots to change over a short term; more importantly, they're successful at what they do, so they have little reason to change.

    The writers also took what's expedient: feed off of releases and so forth, rather than deep investigations (not surprising, since most probably have neither the time nor inclination to track every emerging computer trend. There are enough game companies to track, already...). Even in fairly reputable papers like the WSJ, I still see computing articles with errors that make me *cringe*...
  • Maybe I'm just a f'ing ( use fucking or friggen ) old hag... I don't get it anymore.... A BBS (if this is one or not) used to have replies on the subject.... What does Unreal have to do with anything. I was in my glory days for a second and nobody can say anymore... Sorry... Computers suck really bad... and my rapid use of periods mean I am pissed. Get Off my thread....

    Yeah, get off my thread... (To the Stones tune get off my cloud...)

    Because I'm a pissed off drunk old hacker who can't take anymore of this global non conformist bullshit....

    Fantus... Mail Bomb me if you must... I hate my ISP (and job that it may be).....
  • that's why on almost the first try a beta project like WINE ran it almost flawlessly.
  • I know when I spent my $50 on Quake II, linux was facing the negative impression that its users were some kinda hippie deadbeats who were not going to BUY any software. id was among the few pioneers willing to buck the trend, and they are at least 50 bucks richer for it. ;)

    It felt a little odd for penny-pinching me to spend $50 on the linux box of quake2 when the windows version was sitting next to it, at half the price, and I knew it'd be easy enough to just download the linux binarys and save $25. But this is one of those cases where voting with my wallet felt right. Keep it up, Id, and pay attention, other software companies.
  • Is it also why it was shipped admittedly incomplete, with totally unusable netplay code, and required two dozen beta patches before it would run acceptably on non-glide accellerators?
  • Civ: Call to Power is quite a new game. It only hit the store shelves about two months ago. Granted, Myth II and Railroad Tycoon are older, but at least Loki is bringing us up to date on Railroad Tycoon by porting not just the game, but the most recent expansion. Besides, new game or old game, who cares? It's a Linux game now. The only reason I keep a Windows box around is to play games. And some of the games I play regularly are OLD games. If I had a Linux port of C&C: Red Alert, Dark Reign, and Mechwarrior 3, I would fdisk and install Linux on my Windows box as well. New games for Linux are important. But Linux versions of old games will sell just as well. All of the Linux users I currently know keep a Windows box around just because of the lack of Linux games. And we all bitch about it. None of us WANTS to run Windows. But we ALL want to play Mechwarrior 3... hehe
  • Retail or Open-Source? Last I read, their FAQ said they had no intention of making a client for anything but 9x.
  • there ought to be a permanent test thread on slashdot
    <blah>


    --
  • Amen. If any of those games are ported and I get a Linux compatable scanner [if i knew then what i know now about compatability], my windows partition will become hda4
  • He said new games, not Linux ports of old games.
  • Well, yeah, old games rock (I'm personally a fan of Doom2 and the original Master of Orion), but to sell an OS, you need new games as well. You're not going to get people to switch by telling them "well, no, we don't have Unreal or Alpha Centauri or Need For Speed 4, but we do have Quake 3 and a nice selection of old games."
  • This article mentioned that Origina Ultima Online is availble for Linux. This is the first I've heard of this, and is the reason Linux is sitting on a 486 in my corner instead of on my PII 400. I've already E-Mailed Origin for more information, but would like to ask you folks: First, is this a hoax? Is there really UO for Linux? Second, what OWO will never tell me: what is the qualtiy of the UO client for Linux. I mean UO even sucked on NT; Win9x were the only platform it ran well on.
  • According to the Loki web site [lokigames.com], the wholesale price of the Windows and Linux versions of Civilization: Call to Power are the same, but Loki has no control over retailers' pricing and expects the Windows version to be sold for less by some retailers. I was pleased to see this was not the case at Beyond [beyond.com], which is selling the Linux version for $46.45 and the Windows version for $48.95. The downside is that the Windows version is shipped right away while the Linux version takes up to 2 weeks.
  • But Linux only has clones/ports of Windows games. So whats your point?

    D

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