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Games Entertainment

Jagged Alliance 2 for Linux 79

Posted by Hemos from the yet-more-games-coming dept.
Vesper writes "Sir-Tech Canada announced that there will be a Linux port of the popular turn-based strategy game, Jagged Alliance 2, ported by Tribsoft. Saw a blurb on this over at AVault. The game will be bundled with the expansion, "Unfinished Business", and available in Spring 2000. The rate at which publishers are announcing games for Linux seems to be increasing. "
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Jagged Alliance 2 for Linux More

Jagged Alliance 2 for Linux

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  • Didn't know they were still in business. Weren't they the ones that came up with the Wizardry series? Guess they couldn't really keep up with the state of the art. Wouldn't it be cool though if they released the entire wizardry series as open-source?

  • more games (Score:3)

    by Sublimed ( 122984 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2000 @05:03PM (#1378005) Homepage
    i think it's great that more and more games are being released for linux. I personally think it's something that is really needed. I mean, alot of people who run linux may not be interested in the gaming aspect, but with the recent rise in console and PC gaming, it's becoming a more and more important aspect. I mean, more games == more users == more support? At least, that's the way i'd like it to happen =).

  • The turnaround has yet to happen (Score:3)

    by Sludge ( 1234 ) <slashdot@@@tossed...org> on Wednesday January 12, 2000 @05:07PM (#1378006) Homepage
    When I choose games to buy/play for the PC, usually I choose them based on how they play, not based on the Operating System they run under.

    That being said, Linux has a ways to go until games can be chosen before the platform becomes an issue.

    Every little bit helps. Between JAL2 and Loki's latest additions, I could game my ass off all year if I purchased all those titles.
  • check out http://www.wizardry8.com/ [wizardry8.com]. It doesn't look like its that close to being ready, but some of the screenshots are pretty nice looking.
  • is usb mouse support. Every windoze game I play requires 3d (which I'm very impressed with for linux currently) and extremely high rates for my mouse. I can honestly tell the difference between ps/2 and usb performance under windows (even with ps2rate) and I've had really bad ps/2 problems. I haven't checked out the usb support in the 2.3 kernels, but from what I've heard, it uses ps/2 emulation for mice so that things like XF86 will be happy with it. I would think that would give me the performance problems I'm getting with real ps/2 devices, and I haven't been able to find any resources for setting the ps/2 mouse refresh rate under linux (apart from XF86's configuration, which didn't really work for me).
  • I know the article says its a port, but is "The rate at which publishers are announcing games for Linux seems to be increasing. " justified? This is just a Windows game put onto Linux hoping for more money.
  • totally right, I wish Linux were a good gaming platform, it just doesn't get enough support. I'll have a windows partition, and use it a lot, until this weakness is corrected. It is kind of a catch-22, no users, no support, less new users. 'course wit' Linux being on the up and up, more users, more support, more new users, more support, more users, repeat 10x, more users, GAMES!. Seriously though, this could be the year for it.

    Can anybody comment(guess) on how much it adds to dev time to do a port/do 2 OSes on avg?
  • prediction #10 [dolinux.org]
    ----

  • Encouraging (Score:5)

    by HoserHead ( 599 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2000 @05:12PM (#1378012)
    I'm very encouraged by the number of games being ported or already ported to Linux. I've made a point of buying games (from Canux [canux.com]) for Linux which I might not have bought before, simply to show both Loki and Canux support. For example, I certainly wouldn't have bought Quake III so early after it was released had it not been important to me to show the numbercrunchers at id and Activision that Linux is a valid platform.

    I'm very discouraged, however, by the fact that one very important game to me hasn't been ported or announced by Loki: Half-Life. Valve have to know that this'd kill, and that more people would buy that port than would buy Quake III, probably. I know I'd snap it up right away. And I've made it very clear to a number of companies, when inquiring as to their Linux port status, that I wouldn't buy their games if they weren't available for Linux.

    It might sound a little crazy - support for only games for Linux - but, simply put, it needs support. I'm the biggest Free Software advocate out there. Hell, I don't even like the term "Open source." [woot.net] But games are sort of different - I'm not so sure [woot.net] that Free Software will work for all games.

    And, in the end, by buying Linux-ported games the market itself is expanding, and more people will get into Linux - and isn't that what we all want?

  • atleast it's a port. more companies ought to produce their games to linux, even if its only for more money. It's about time Windows lost its role as the dominant gaming platform.

  • I hope that the support is good for these games. I've been trying to get Quake III [lokigames.com] to run properly for days now. I just asked Loki support to help via email and they seem to have decent support services. I doubt that the average end-user would be able to trouble shoot anything with the sparse documentation that comes with the game, however.

    Just the thoughts of a frustrated gamer




  • Although undeniably the rate of software being ported to Linux is increasing, it is still w_a_y t_o_o s_l_o_w by all account.

    If we are to achieve the "world domination" status, in the current slow-pace of software porting to the Linux environment, by the time the existing crop of softwares are ported to Linux, newer and more useful software would have emerged.

    That means, we in the Linux community will be always lagging behind the "you-know-who".

    The only way to win the war is to concentrate on a totally new front - RESEARCHING AND DEVELOPING NEW GENERATIONS OF EXCITING KILLER-APPS for Linux.

    I understand that there _are_ a lot of software projects being launched for Linux, but unfortunately, most of them are re-hash, or reverse-enginnering of old-softwares, such as word processing, spread-sheets, window-managers, graphic-manipulators, and so on.

    There is a need to find out where the industry is heading, and there is an even more urgent need to FORESEE where the current horizon ends, so that we in the Linux community can GO BEYOND the current horizon and start charting NEW SOFTWARE TERRITORIES.

    Only in that way can we create a whole new cropt of EXCITING KILLER-APPS for Linux, and only that will get Linux to have the too-long-denied respectability it deserves.


  • This is a good step for Linux and gaming, but right now, it isn't the best. Linux gets games a good while after they are published for other platforms, with notable exceptions, and besides Quake 3, never gets them at the same time. Even Macs sometimes get this.

    As an avid game player, I don't want to run a game months after it is out. I hope the best for Linux, it could and probably is our only hope for more competition in this world. It needs work, before it ever becomes an attractive market for game players.
  • We have approached Sir-Tech since we were thinking that JA2 would be great on Linux. They liked the idea of having JA2 available for Linux, and they even received request from Linux users which helped our cause a lot. Mathieu Pinard Tribsoft Inc.
  • The above post may be offtopic, yes, but I think that it is definitely of general interest and should be moderated up.

    YMMV but that is my opinion.

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Well, I haven't resorted to a Windows partition on any of my Linux boxes -- but I do "borrow" my kids' Win98 box to play Quake ][ from time to time.

    Has anyone here had the opportunity to compare the Windows version of Q2 with the Linux version on the same hardware? Assuming a decent port is available, just how well does Linux compare as a gaming platform?
  • Depends highly on the video card/ driver set..
    With my Voodoo 2, celeron 400 CPU, performance is about even with Windows 95, +-5%
    One of the main advantages of quake2 under Linux has been lower memory footprint of the OS, especially with the server, or non-glx (doesn't require X to be running) 3d acceleration.
    Also, the better drive caching helps lots too...
    The only real things holding Linux back now are X overhead (xfree 4.* should relieve this) and no 3d sound (though this is being worked on.)

  • JA2 delay... (Score:3)

    by mpinard ( 125537 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2000 @05:32PM (#1378023) Homepage

    I've noticed that a lot of people complain about the delay to bring games to Linux. The big delay for JA2 was more about starting our business...

    In the future, we will try to release games more quickly on Linux (what about 2-3 months later). However, JA2 is more a game with deep game-play that you can play for months so I feel it's great to make it available for Linux.

    Mathieu Pinard
    Tribsoft Inc.

  • Let there be Standards, and it was good. (Score:3)

    by fishlet ( 93611 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2000 @05:33PM (#1378024)

    Well if me rusty brain recollects correctly, it wasn't until DirectX became ubiquitous (sometime after DirectX 3) that gaming really took off on Windows 95. I remember just a few years ago, there were still lots of games being written for DOS and DOS extenders like those available from Rational. Then DirectX started to improve... and now almost all games are written for Windows. What Linux needs is a graphic/audio/3D standard that everyone agrees on. It looks like OpenGL will be the winner for 3D (judging on the number of windows developers adapting OpenGL, it seems migrating to Mesa would be easier). Still, there hasn't been any bright shining star in the form of a unified gaming services library. Not to say they don't exist, theres CGI, XFree86 v4, and plenty of others... but not clear winner yet.



  • Can anybody comment(guess) on how much it adds to dev time to do a port/do 2 OSes on avg?

    It's all a matter of how you go about writing the code. idsoftware takes a really modular approach, keeping all the system-dependent stuff separate, and voila! They release stuff for Linux and Mac just as easily as Windows. The only extra work should be the view/controller portion, and that's probably one place where you can reuse a lot of code from earlier games.

    The problem are the game companies that use Win32 and all the DirectWhatever goodies MSoft has to offer. Very powerful, yet very complex and definitely non-portable stuff. I haven't coded for Windows, but from what I've heard, the API was not designed to be easily implemented on other systems (without basically re-implementing a good part of Windows itself).

    The enlightened game developer will probably want to have a look at ClanLib [clanlib.org] and SDL [devolution.com], which address this problem quite nicely. (Maybe not completely, but at least they're a start). I hope the ultra-portable game libs in that vein catch on.
  • It's great to see all these game companies hopping on the Linux bandwagon. Loki is doing an excellent job with porting Win games to our platform and the announcement of JA2 for linux is awesome. However, I think Linux needs more simultaneously released games such as Q3 or UT.

    Since more and more games are integrating multiplayer options, it'd be nice to actually have a linux game that still has an online following. I find it's easier to find online opponents following the initial release of a game as opposed to several months down the road when the hype has either died down or the game has been upgraded.

    In summary, it's great that companies are porting to linux, but it'd be even better to get simultaneous releases. Please stop treating linux like the red-headed stepchild of gaming.
  • Check out http://www.game sdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/aug99/ja2.ht ml [gamesdomain.com] for a thorough description and review of this title. The reviewer really liked it.
  • I can think of two reasons that these companies are willing to do the port. Unlike ports to MacOS, no Windows user is going to have to buy new hardware to play games under Linux. They won't have to get new hardware for their developers either. A new hard drive maybe. For the world to switch won't cost $1-3000 per desktop and more for servers. It'll cost for some CD ROMs and some good books.

    The other reason is that there are lots of people who want to be here first. If the stampeed of gamers starts happening, the company with the hot games on Linux at the time it starts stands to make a bundle.
  • Its great Linux is getting more and more games, software etc... but what I would like to see is more flight sims. Its the only thing keeping me from dumping Windows altogether European Air War? Falcon4?
  • I'll buy it even though I already have the windoze version. Gives my custom merc's catchphrase
    of 'Time to take out the trash' a whole new meaning. :)
  • Thanks Mathieu. We will support your company. I've been dying for more Linux games and I think that you'll see that the Linux community will reward those companies that do more than talk a good game.

  • Well, y'know, Valve does support Linux servers for the game. I'm not sure why they haven't ported it to Linux yet, but a friend suggests it might be Sierra internal politicking. We all know how weird Sierra has been lately, laying off people and killing very promising games only a couple of months from completion. I wouldn't put it past them to have some strange ideas concerning Linux, too.
  • I think there needs to be a page where one can go to get news on Linux games ... what games are currently available for Linux users, and what development is being done. Does such a thing exist? If not, let's make one!


    Bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh, bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh!
  • You're wrong. I'm using a USB mouse in X right now, and the smoothness is phenomenal, like using a Mac mouse. It makes a hell of a difference with the railgun, too. ;-)

    Try it out, you'll like it.
  • I think a big thing holding back flight sims are te joysticks. I haven't tried getting mine to work with linux, but something tells me my Saitek USB X36 combo isn't gonna work. Not being able to program a stick because there is no Linux support sucks. I would imagine that most major HOTAS don't run well with Linux.


    --------
  • yeah, its called www.linuxgames.com [linuxgames.com]

    I don't visit it too much but it seems pretty cool


    --------
  • You know, all this game stuff is nice and good. But all I want is to get DHCP to fucking work. Is that too much to ask? Can't get it to work with cable modems, can't get it to work with my stupid dorm room, this sucks.

    I really hope someone reads this and's like "yeah, i had the same problem, here's what to do".

    But it won't happen. Goddamnit, I'm so pissed off about this. Search on the internet, all I get is people saying "yeah, you need to add the -h for hostnames, that'll work". Well it doesn't. And also, I can't put the network info (ip, gateway, ect) in manually and get it to work either.

    Does anyone think it could be a problem with my ethernet card??? After more than 6 months of this, I've exuasted alot of options. The dhcp server is isc [isc.org].

    When I boot freeBSD, it sends out DHCPDISCOVER messages, gets a reply, but sends a DHCPREQUEST right back out to the broadcast address, and not the dhcp server's address.

    DHCP works fine on windows 98.

    What am I doing wrong, I'm really desperate. I'm also sorry for posting this offtopic stuff to slashdot, but someone has to have come across something like this.
  • i agree, i have the non-USB Saitek X36 Combo, I forgot about that, I haven't attempted it either. I also have a separte game card, remember those? I dont think you can get them anymore. Has anyone here gotten programmable sticks going?
  • Sir-Tech sort of went out of business....sort of :>

    In the past, there were two divisions to Sir-Tech, the development division and the publisher division. I'm pretty sure both were called Sir-Tech. One was based in the US, and the other in Canada (though, I don't know which was where).

    Sometime within the last 2 years, the publisher division went under. This ended up making it really hard for the development Sir-Tech to get their long awaited Jagged Alliance 2 out the door. They claimed to have the game done for months while looking for a publisher.

    Well, eventually they found one..thankfully :> And its a great game!

    whm
  • The publishing side of Sir-Tech was closed in '98, but the development studio that is called Sir-Tech Canada survived.

    Sir-Tech Canada is located in Ottawa, Canada

    Mathieu Pinard
    Tribsoft Inc.
  • At least working on JA2 is very fun...

    Mathieu Pinard
    Tribsoft Inc.
  • Just did a followup to the Jagged Alliance site and the link to the Sir-Tech Canada site chokes and a Whois says that NSI owns the name in DNS.

    Seems that someone at Sir-Tech might just want to check up with NSI on sir-tech.com and wizardry8.com (if they still want it...)
  • Actually, I never tried the mailing list. I just sent off an email. Thank you. But I'm no longer concerned with the cable modem. Right now I'm at my dorm. As for "weird MS servers", the dhcp server here is ISC on some sorta unix, probably solaris. Another goofy thing, I can manually set up my network info on FreeBSD, and DNS resolution works, but I can't ping the gateway or anythign else for that matter. Damn goofy stuff. And all I wanted to do was get networking to work with linux or anything besides windows. Nuts.
  • I seem to remember a /. thread about that. Of course, Glide is still hardware dependent, so that would give OGL and edge, anyway.

    /me liking OpenGL more and more since I got my Geforce...


  • not bad, but why didn't you post your predictions in chronological order??? 8-)

    Can't wait for 1/2 life for Linux. opleasepleaseplease...


  • but what you gave as a reason is also a problem. If I buy a mac I can't run windows so unless they bring the game to macos there's _no_ way i can play the game. If I buy a PC it already comes with windows. Why port to linux or any other OS on the PC if you could still play that game on Windows? Developers will be lazy and only do Windows because all PC's come with it.
  • here's my take - the number of linux games seems to have doubled in these past few months. UT, Q3A, among others, and now JA2. What does this mean? The truly great games seem to be cross platform and transcend os boundaries ... who do we thank? I think John Carmack from id should get the big prize for this one. Years ago id said they ported to other os's because they thought it was just cool ... and now other companies have followed their lead. I've spent a week getting Q3A to run on my linux box with a voodoo3. I'm not experienced, so most of it was just me. But in a 6 months or less (hopefully), we'll have Xfree 4.0, new 3dfx drivers, and the whole process will just simplify (hell, we might even have mozilla) .. I think as a community, we need to recognize that the release of Q3A and UT for linux has really brought linux gaming out of the niche and into the mainstream, mainstream linux wise that is, is that mainstream or still niche? What am I talking about? :)

    - jorge
  • it's really hard to do on that end because the game companies that develop for windows will always have more money than you'll ever imagine. On the other hand, Loki can't port all the games by themselves. You need several companies doing what Loki does plus support from Redhat (because they have the $ and they 'make' the OS). That's just to get your feet wet. There are several game porting companies for the Mac, Bungie is very very innovative, Steve Jobs loves to say "games, games games" but even that platform doesn't have major traction in getting Windows games.
  • I have heard some inside information from a person who has worked with the sourcecode as to why Valve has not ported the client: The code is too messy.

    Look at it this way: Zoid did the server port to Linux. Zoid has been known to port software to obscure ( in the context of games ) for the price of giving him the hardware to do it on.

    Halflife's code must have all sorts of MFC lying around in the main functions. Yes, I know it's the Quake engine, but it's highly modified. Hell, that's the Quake ONE engine Valve bought, and those are coloured lights, added by Valve.
  • The article lacked some URLs, so I thought I'd post them:

    JA2/Linux page [tribsoft.com]

    The official JA2 page [jaggedalliance2.com]

    Great to see new Linux titles. I'm looking forward to the day when I can drop the Windows-partition.
  • Don't do that ! I allready lost TOO MANY weeks playing that great game !
    If you release it on linux ... horror ... I think nobody can talk to me then for the next 2 weeks at last !
  • You really deserve a BIG hug and a no smaller THANK YOU.

    Jagged Alliance 2 was about the last reason for me to boot Windows. I hope that Jagged Alliance 3 will appear on Linux too :).

    Anyway, if it gets out, I'll buy it ASAP.

  • They had no idea how to treat real talent. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They published Wizardry, but hardly "came up with it." Its not that they couldn't keep up with the state of the art, its that they couldn't keep people with a clue -- some of the best craftsmen ever. First they screwed Robert Woodhead, and then they screwed Andrew Greenberg and then they screwed David Bradley. With a rep like that, is it any surprise that these guys had trouble keeping "technology" up to date?
  • It was attempted to make a Mac port, but it was given up after several months of development. They said they couldn't make it as good as the windows version, so they gave up instead of putting out a shittier version for mac. If it would be the same for linux, I would rather just have a windows version that kicks ass rather than seeing how hurt it is under linux.
  • I would LOVE to play quake 3 under linux (I have both windows and linux versions). But its not happening. I have a voodoo3 that gives me 50 fps timedemos at 1024x768 in windows (with a tweaked out config), but in linux I get like 25 fps with the same config. I WOULD play in lower resolutions (I can get it up to 50 in linux by turning down the resolution), but the mouse is completely fucked up in linux. It is unplayable. It try to turn around, and I'm looking at the ceiling. I hope the mouse is fixed when they release a linux patch.
  • Well, Loki has been doing well in that area. They're endeavoring to release games before the windows version comes out. I know it was that way with Railroad Tycoon II.

    ---
    btw, it's good to see someone else who has discovered the genius of Nick Drake.



  • JA2 was the best game I ever owned. All of what makes gaming fun for me: strategy, tactics, guns, plot, realism, variety, mercenaries, and little unexpected surprises. A game that is truly refined, and a standout in its genre.

    I'll buy the thing all over again just to have it in Linux, especially since the expansion is coming. I just finished JA2 for the third time after a brief hiatus, and it was still as fun as the first time.

    Hoo-roo! It must be my lucky day!

    MJP
  • i agree. games are the reason we are as far as we are in computers. i'd like to see all sorts of games ported to linux. then we get support, more specifically.. hardware support. i'm big time into games, but the reason i haven't gone over to linux yet is hardwre support for mainly my game-playing devices. i would switch to linux in a second if i had the support.
  • ...at happypenguin.org [happypenguin.org].
    --
    - Sean
  • Since Loki supports SDL, and it is used in many free and commercial games, you might consider it the winner for a unified game API (at least for loki ported games). Of course, you could always write directly to linux API's like OSS, ALS[Some letter I forgot], and Mesa. Ohh yea, SDL doesn't include 3d, so you still would have to use mesa for that.

    But why does there need to be a winner for a game API? If just one is good, or hell, if many are good, I would think that's fine. Worst case scenario, 100 commercial games come out for linux next year, and they all use some different, yet high quality game api. The size of a game and its media would dwarf the size of the library it needed, which would probably be staticly linked anyway.
  • Interesting comment. Please give us more details or give us a link because I find learning about these old companies to be incredibly fascinating!

  • Of course I know . . . (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I knew Robert and Andrew from Cornell, where Andrew wrote the first version of Wizardry. This story is for them to tell, but I hear that Andrew is still suing Sir-Tech for not paying royalties and Robert settled earlier for pennies on the dollar. IANAL, but that doesn't seem to me the ordinary way these things are supposed to end.

    The proof is in the pudding. Why did all three out of three of the best game writers of their time leave Sir-Tech at the peak of their careers? Who develops anything at Sir-Tech's "development boutique" in Canada?
  • This will be the best game released for Linux yet.
    Loki's stuff hasn't been that great so far ( not their fault,simply the games they ported weren't that thrilling )
  • Well, Unix was close sourced once too...

  • Update: Thanks to efforts of the Loki Entertainment email tech-support staff, I can now frag in Q3 with the best of 'em. (To bad I'm not that good of a player ;))

    It turns out that because I had installed Glide I was having a conflict problem. Also the version I bought was one of the first produced and had a small bug that messed up a config file. I was able to edit the file and run the game! Yay Loki, yay id!

    Just the thoughts of a happy gamer

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