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Games Entertainment

Forum: Future Ports of Games to Linux 687

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it's-been-awhile dept.
It's been a long time since I posted an open forum like this, but I'm curious what people think on this one. What games do you most want to see ported to Linux in the next few months? Of course, for me personally it's StarCraft and Diablo 2, but I'm curious what games have come out or are due soon that people would most like to see a port of (and note that WINE doesn't count. ;)
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Forum:Future Ports of Games to Linux More

Forum:Future Ports of Games to Linux

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  • if you still want to play it, click HERE [ou.edu]
  • These two games look awsome. I'll probably buy both as soon as they hit the shelf
  • And for more text-adventure madness, check out the newsgroups rec.games.int-fiction [rec.games.int-fiction] (for discussion of playing text adventures, or "interactive fiction" as they're currently called), and rec.arts.int-fiction [rec.arts.int-fiction] (for discussion of writing text adventures). Yes, people still write text adventures -- in fact the genre is thriving, with a yearly contest that attracts more and more entries each year -- and the winners of the contest are stunning.

    Also check out the Interactive Fiction Archive [ftp.gmd.de] at gmd.de -- but if you're in North America, use the U.S. Mirror [ifarchive.org] instead.

    Highly recommended FREE games to play: Jigsaw and Curses, both by Graham Nelson. The guy's a genius: not only did he write the Inform programming language, for creating text-adventures compatible with Infocom's format, but he also wrote two of the best text adventures out there. You must experience Curses for yourself! And no, it has nothing to do with the UNIX cursor-manipulation programming library.
    -----
    The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

  • I presently use the Linux client under Linux Mandrake and it works great...! But: Sound does not work....a major deal helps warn of impending danger.... Macro changes do not save back correctly... and most of all....they are so busy patching the thing night and day that they are continually breaking the Linux client....and a broken client for 90 days means you lose all your chars, your house, your bankbox....etc... Hell....don't worry about fixing anything...just make it an official supported client....least I know I don't have to keep a windoze box in my freezer for when they break the Linux client again making windoze specific patch changes...

  • According to this interview [voodooextreme.com] (and lots of news at LinuxGames [linuxgames.com] (search for Tribes)), Tribes 2 is being ported to Linux by the development team.

  • My buddies and me have made Starcraft a part of our get together at the beginnings of friday nights. Someone complains of a certain unit being too powerfull, and then they figure out a great way around it and the roles reverse. This game is very well balanced and holds our interest. Awesome!

    C'mon Starcraft ][ !!!!
  • "Frist thing I want to see ported is Starcraft, which even after 3 years is still the best RTS on the market IMHO." It's not three years, it's actually less than two. Starcraft came out in March 1998. And Brood War, which essentially made it a new game, came out in December 1998. Starcraft's life is definitely not over. Not until some other RTS comes out that pushes it from it's place. Tiberian Sun sure wasn't it.

  • I get *so* tired of the endless yapping about Quake IV, Monkey Island XIII, and other churn-out-a-rehash crap...

    Anyway, there are plenty of Infocom interpreter knock-offs available. The IF (Interactive Fiction) Archive's main site is an FTP site in Germany that's bog-slow [ftp.gmd.de]; a list of mirrors follows.

    Go to the subdirectory "infocom" then "interpreters" and pick your poison -- my personal favorite is Frotz. Happy adventuring.

    in the USA:
    http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc /if-archive/ [wustl.edu]
    http://ftp.nodomainname.net/pub /mirrors/if-archive/ [nodomainname.net]
    http://ifarchive.org/ [ifarchive.org]
    ftp://www.plover.net/pub/ifarchive/ [plover.net]

    in Finland:
    ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/misc/if-archive/ [funet.fi]

    in Australia:
    http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/if-arch ive/ [aarnet.edu.au]

    in the UK:
    http://www.firedrake.org/if-archive/ [firedrake.org]
    or ftp://ftp.firedrake.org/if-arch ive/ [nodomainname.net]

  • Pong (Score:1)

    by X-Nc ( 34250 )
    Games are, for me, non-essential. I haven't played a computer/video game since the first SSI D&D game "Pool of Radiance".

    I'm game for pong.

    ---

  • Wrong.

    A GPF is x86-specific, not MS specific.

    Whenever a process _tries_ to do something that it wasn't supposed to do, it GPFs.

    Linux, Windows, BSD all have them. But, if the OS is designed well, they won't bring the system down ;)
    They exist in nearly all architectures that support priviliged/user modes, but have different names if they aren't x86.

    (further reading: http://www.freebsd.org/~jhb/386htm/s09_08.html)

  • I believe there was something like this for the 3DO, if anyone remembers what that was. You would stick a card in your box and it could play CDs from your CD-ROM drive. I don't think it's too practical personally, I'd rather have the console as a seperate device that I could have in the livingroom and turn on and off quickly.

  • I dropped my account on UO mainly because they pretty much completely let the Linux support fall off -- I could not get sound in my client after last January's upgrade to the new client and eventually they changed the encryption and I could not log in at all. However, the endless bugs, modifications to the world code and 'split using kiddies were also a factor in my decision. It was obvious that we were still playing beta code.

    With any massive RPG, they should ship the server as well as the client, so that users can run a smaller world if they wish. Then the server administrators can simply eliminate any unwanted riff-raff. This seems to work pretty well for MUDs.

  • Sure Loki could do it. Andrew Meggs successfully ported Half-Life to the Mac, at which point Valve pulled the plug. Loki could do a great job porting Half-Life and Valve would still pull the plug and refuse to ship the port, judging from what they actually did to the actual Mac port. Therefore the fact that Loki could do it isn't relevant- Valve are actively blocking anything that isn't Windows, even to the point of writing off porting efforts and keeping the resulting basically finished port under tight wraps. There's no reason to believe they'd allow a Linux port to ship even if they had Loki do one. It's the same old song, 'inadequate market share to support...', better spend your money with companies which make even a token effort at supporting platform diversity. Valve actively discourages it and have killed a perfectly good Mac port based only on not wanting to support more than one platform. Sorry.
  • Some of the best games would be the ones that, in fact, are the easiest to port -- the side-scrollers and overhead ones. They could be enhanced for 3D support where appropriate now (using Z depth instead of stacking layers for moving backgrounds and taking advantage of acceleration).

    Examples:
    The old Commander Keens (yes, big fan, especially #4 and 5)
    Command and Conquer (who wouldn't!)
    Sim City x000 (is this being done?)
    Starcraft (original -- overhead)
  • Post your ideas, I'm sure that even those of us who can't (or just won't) be designing it would like to hear about them. I agree that an RTS engine would be a good idea, as I can't say I've seen any RTS's for linux except ALE-Clone [freecraft.org] (now freecraft?)

    Well if this does happen, I wanna know about it... :-) I'll be happy to try out some alpha (and of course beta) releases. (I live on beta...)

    --
    linuxisgood:~$ man woman

  • Halo [bungie.com].

    'Nuff said.

    (though Oni [bungie.com] would be welcome, too)

  • Zork! (Score:3)

    by Valur ( 87561 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:34AM (#1326874)

    How about all those good old Infocom games? I'm sure the source code could be had for a song, and someone could bundle a nice CD filled to the brimmed with the greatest text-based games all capable of running on Linux!

    As far as recent stuff, I'd have to go for Half-Life and Starcraft.

    -V

  • Whoops, forgot about that... yes, Myth 2 is an RTS but you're right, the lack of building anything (afaik from the demo also) kinda makes it less interesting to me.

    --
    linuxisgood:~$ man woman
  • I don't know the model #, I ripped the manufaturers label off to repair the unit, but it's not the small white one they made later.

    Atari-brown, boxy rectangular top-feed tape drive with 'Atari Tape II' in raised silver plastic letters directly above the black buttons. Mechanical tape advance indicator, with painted silver reset. Atari labelled 9-volt power cube. Originally purchased directly from Atari with an Atari 400 computer a few days after it became available. Manufacturers back-panel label was removed in 1992 so I could replace the broken rubber belt and play 'Frogger'; it hid two screws.

  • Port? (Score:2)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 )

    Why only old games that have already been released on other platforms? The obvious candidates for Linux games are whatever games the are currently being developed.


    ---

  • Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    Because people have been petitioning for a port since it first came out. So far, zilch. Nada. Not so much as a smurf icon.
  • Infocom collection (all the games in one package) would keep people who don't mind text-based adventure busy for a good long time. I loved these games with an unnatural passion as a child. Who can forget the "huddled masses, yearning to drink blood" from Enchanter or the pet animated hand from The Lurking Horror.

    However, Infocom games are by their nature non-social, a game that would be fun at parties is M.U.L.E. a game about the economic exploitation of a small planet. It's sort of like Monopoly, but a lot more fun and less arbitrary.

    Oh, and of recent PC Games, I'd love to see them do System Shock 1&2 on Linux, and this is not just because I'm deeply in love with Shodan, either. I missed SS1 and am overcoming SS2 addiction, it would be more fun if I could boot into Linux to play it.

    Oh, and a decent SegaCD emulator would be cool, too. My SegaCD player is showing it's age, so I'd like to know I could use Linux to play Lunar and Popful Mail.

    Incidentally, this is the short list... so many other titles I could include.

  • Playstation 2 and Linux (Score:3)

    by Hnice ( 60994 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:55AM (#1326938) Homepage
    The PSX2, as those of us who spend too much time thinking and talking about games are fond of mentioning, is going to be this monster of a machine.

    If you want to talk about the future of porting games to linux, you really need to consider the next sony console as a primary source for the games. I know, i know, console games lack the depth and intellectual demands of pc games, bla bla bla, but that's all going to change, and quickly, with this machine.

    I have no idea what the dev kit for the psx2 is like, and I don't know how often games get ported from a console to linux (ever?). But windows-to-Linux isn't the only porting that's going to go on, going forward. Which is nice.

  • porting older stuff (Score:3)

    by banky ( 9941 ) <greggNO@SPAMneurobashing.com> on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:55AM (#1326939) Homepage Journal
    I for one would like to see a lot of older stuff ported. Some people have mentioned the Wizardry series, for instance, and Starcraft. I think if a game is fun, its worth having (and given the price of HD space these days, no big deal keeping an extra 20gig around for games and junk).

    Especially for games with a lot of depth (Ultima for instance). I've forgotten enough of it to make me want to replay it - without screwing with emulators and such. Seems like a huge untapped market to me: release a CD of older games, ported and possibly "prettied up". I am sure some people would buy them for nostalga alone (I would).

    Of course, as someone said, the possibility of games is bad - I saw my productivity go WAY up when I moved to Linux, since there were no games. Now I can just stop what I am doing and play some UT or HOMM3, rather than solve those pesky problems.
  • EverQuest!
    EverQuest!
    EverQuest!

    Or, as we call it around my neck of the woods, EverCrack.

    That would be so cool.

    -Doug

  • I'd like to see more RPG's (none of this Nethack crap :) as well, especially non-fantasy based one. Wizards and all are cool, but gimme a good cyberpunk or even Bond-style RPG anytime.

  • Re:Not Starcraft (Score:5)

    by Thrakkerzog ( 7580 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:57AM (#1326955)
    I don't think you understand the roaring mass of people who want starcraft ported.

    Just because it's new doesn't mean it's fun. Starcraft is one of the best games I have ever played, and has a lot of life left in it.



  • I figure if I ask for enough stuff, maybe I'll get one or two of em.

    Top of the list is difinately Starcraft, I would gladly buy the game all over again just to play it in Linux. I personally could care less about Diablo, but I know a lot of people would love it, and I'd buy it just to support more ports (hear that Blizzard? I'd buy it and never play it, so I'd never hog bnet!) Warcraft 2 BNE is another one I'd like to see, but not nearly as much as Starcraft.

    Other goodies would be X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Dungeon Keeper 2, Starcraft, Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossover, Starcraft, Worms 2, Ultima Online, Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Starcraft, and the old Atari game Adventure.

    Oh, and porting Starcraft would be really nice too.

  • The Awesome Power of WINE. (Score:3)

    by jelwell ( 2152 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @10:19AM (#1326968)
    I've noticed a lot of people asking for Games like Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft etc. I'm wondering if these people know that WINE has been running these games since barely after they came out. PEOPLE: go download WINE [winehq.com]. Maybe the game you want ported works already!

    A little note: Most DirectX games will work flawlessly. Last I checked Direct3D did not work well.

    Joseph Elwell.

  • Settlers! (Score:2)

    by szo ( 7842 )
    I & II at least!

    Szo
  • Just found this: Civ II Evolution.
    It's an open project to develop a Civ with good AI, among other things. I oughtn't look at it too much now, but it is here [steffengerlach.de].

    (Why, oh why, doesn't cut&paste work in mozilla?)

  • If Linux doesn't run Diablo II flawlessly the day it ships - I will not be running Linux until it does. Or I'll have to at least buy another machine.

    Diablo ruled my life once, I hope Diablo II can do the same.

    Joseph Elwell.
  • Absolutly! NFS III would be perfect! I played it almost exclusivly between QII and Q3A. There already exist 3dfx/Glide versions of NFS II & III, so they're not so terribly dependant on Direct-anything that a port would be difficult..

    The classic I'76 (for which 3dfx/Verite versions also exist) would also be a great choice..

  • Just speaking for myself personally, I would love to see Linux ports of Ultima I, II, III, IV, V and VI. Those games don't have all the fancy graphics of, say, Quake, but they were a of a lot of fun to play. Ultima IV, released I think in 1986, is still a great game. Since most of these games are over 15 y.o. I would think it would be a sinch to get them ported.

    What would be better is to have these games GPL'ed. A GPL Ultima IV would be better than NetHack! :)


    TOYWAR [toywar.com]!!
  • The buzzword of games these days is 'Massively Multiplayer' -- games that include hundreds of players in a persistant, online world. There's a few neat aspects of games like this:

    1. Companies can often charge monthly fees to the players.
    2. They are patched automatically everytime you play.
    3. Technical support is available online while playing.
    4. All player's clients must be functionally equivalent.

    Point 1 above is why we're going to see more MMGs in the market -- as gaming becomes bigger and bigger business, the game companies are going to want steady dedicated income.

    Point 2, 3 and 4 are why Linux isn't going to be used for MMGs, at least not in the foreseeable future. The game companies need to provide real-time technical support, self-patching code, and a standard non-hackable interface regardless of the underlying OS. It's inefficient to do any of these for more than one OS...which is why the game companies will continue to bring out their products for Windows. Add to this the reputation Linux has for difficulty in providing tech support, and fact that an open OS will be a tool for hackers who wish to cheat at these games, and it's pretty plain that there's zero interest in coding MMG games for Linux. And MMG games are the future.

    I will consider Linux gaming to have gotten off the ground when I see the following games available for Linux:

    Ultima Online
    Everquest
    Shadowrun (upcoming; will be big)
    Sovereign (upcoming; may be huge)

    I think the Linux community should settle for being one or two generations behind in game technology. Play Zork and Doom; it'll be years before the OS is ready to play cutting edge games.

  • You've got it - Blizzard Games (Score:3)

    by Chandon Seldon ( 43083 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @10:57AM (#1327044) Homepage

    Yup all of 'em

    • WarCraft III
    • Diablo II
    • StarCraft
    • Diablo
    • Warcraft II
    • Warcraft

    Now lets all go over and post on the Battle.net suggestion forums... [battle.net]

  • Yes! When Battlezone (and hopefully Battlezone 2) gets ported to Linux, I can finally chuck my Windows partition. I have other Windows games, but I can (and am willing to) learn to live without them. But not Battlezone. No way. I need Battlezone.

    -Steve
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If there is one thing I miss about MS Windows, it is Flight Simulator. Most of the other games that are mentioned here I now play on the Playstation - and as far as driving games go, NFS II and III are excellent, but nothing beats Gran Turismo 2.

    But, back to FS and why I think we should have one on Linux - First, I just really enjoy it. Secondly, there is a thriving group of developers making scenery, airplanes, utilities, etc. One of the coolest things is the addon ATC. You start off sitting at an airport and you must contact ground control, who is some guy sitting at his computer who knows where. He will get you to the runway, and then you have to contact departure etc. etc. etc.

    Some of the planes people make are pretty good too. But the best thing that they create is the scenery - the guys who do the OzPack stuff [pcsa.net.au] are fantastic.
  • Now, once I get M.U.L.E., the Archon Games, the Ultima games, Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, the Spy vs. Spy games, the Eidolon, Seven Cities of Gold and Temple of Apshi I will have completely recreated my childhood... mwa-ha-ha-ha...


    Not all of the Ultimas (only up till.. 5 I think), but the rest of these games are all available as images on some of the various emulator sites for older systems like the Apple ][ or Commodore 64/128...


    Might be worth a search.


    -LjM
  • There is a poll up to have Shadowbane ported to Linux - everyone check it out and vote!
    (it looks like its going to be a great game)

    Here is the poll [drtwister.com]

  • No, OpenGL would NOT be a complete rewrite (Score:3)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @11:05AM (#1327102)
    Quake 3 uses the same OGL code on all 3 platforms - Windows, Mac, and Linux. Mesa is that good :-)

  • None. (Score:2)

    by Daniel ( 1678 )
    Mass porting of games to Linux would mean that I would have to play each and every one that my hardware can handle. nethack and freeciv are bad enough already! Since I'm too lazy to develop real self-control, this would totally destroy my chances of ever getting anything productive done. Therefore, I would like to request that no more games be ported to Linux and that library APIs be changed to render existing games unplayable.
    Thanks for your time,
    Daniel
  • Let's see:

    UT: Check!
    Q3A: Check!
    Civ:CTP: Check! (and hopefully Civ3)

    Howabout:
    Everquest (time sink #1)
    Mechwarrior
    Operational Art of War (I think that's the name)
    Rollercoaster Tycoon

    what else do you really need?

    As for games we're likely to never see for Linux:
    AOE
    AOE2
    AC
    FS2K

  • Driving games (and Diablo 1) (Score:4)

    by 198348726583297634 ( 14535 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:35AM (#1327115) Journal
    I'd like to see something like Need for Speed 3 ported..or Wipeout XL (or even the outstanding Wipeout 3!) I've never been able to get into FPS shooters, so having Q3 native means nothing to me. Likewise with a native port of halflife, etc.

    The original Diablo would also be quite cool... it had just the right amount of complexity and playability for my tastes. It seems to me that the sequels to good games sometimes try to cram in twice or thrice as much complexity into the game, and just learning the usefulness and function of all the new features/abilities/characters takes too long for me to remain interested. (even GT2- it has over 500 cars? how'm I ever going to find the one I can drive the best??)

    Alternately, if the WINE people could emulate DirectX enough to play these windows games on my desktop (and if my X would gain the ability to do full-screen, which it mysteriously has never had [slackware X funny in any way?]), then I'd be happy and noone would need to port anything. :)

    </end long-winded rant>

  • What I think would be really interesting is if sony took the core of the psx2 and put it on a board that you could put in a pc... write some drivers that let you use it as your video card, write OpenGL drivers for it so other people could use it for their games and write software that would work with normal dvd drives so you could play psx2 games on your pc... of course, doing something that seems to make so much sense is probably out of the question for them...

    Although, i can understand why they may not want to do that... they make most of their money of the licenses they grant to game makers... so if they tried to just make money off the hardware, it wouldn't be worth it to make a combo vid card/3d accel/psx2 for the PC... but, they could still sell games for it... so I dunno...

    /me imagines playing Gran Turismo 3 on his PC w/ a psx2 card...

  • Hmmm... (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    Of course, for me, at the top of the list would be Archimedes Elite - still the best space action game ever written, by a long way.

    I'd like to see the -ENTIRE- Wizardry series ported, too. Again, this is VERY unlikely, but it's still unquestionably the best dungeon game out there.

    The Populous trilogy would be nice, too, combining sentimental planet-bashing with modern gaming.

    The Command & Conquer series also fits in the "nice, but it'll never happen" category.

    Virus 2000 was considered by David Braben, but rejected (something he's promised to explain, but has never done so). This, despite the almost-certain guarantee of better Linux sales than he had with Windows. Personally, I suspect it's because a Linux version =WOULD= have outsold the Windows version.

    An updated Sim Earth, with finer resolution and better atmospherics, would be absolutely wonderful. I'm not holding my breath.

    All in all, the possibilities are phenominal. The potential staggering. The apathy awe-inspiring. I've never known such a bunch of daffodils as commercial software houses.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • X-Plane is _way_ more of a geek flight simulator. Nothing else in the game sphere does blade element modeling of all the flight surfaces on the fly. In X-Plane you get to _design_ planes and set just the surfaces and control geometry and the CG and weight and then you fly the model and see if you designed it right >:) it's the closest thing to genuine aircraft CAD I've ever seen, NASA has a copy, a company is designing their new twin turboprop using it as the rough draft- it obliterates MSFS for geek credentials.

    Unfortunately there is only one (1) developer, our beloved Nazi Soup Kitchen Chef Austin Meyer, and I don't think he has any experience with Linux at all. On the bright side, X-Plane is already Mac and Windows, so it's therefore that much closer to a Linux port than something that was just Windows. X-Plane uses OpenGL, too. GFX are not great by today's standards but framerate _is_ great by today's standards, and again, nothing comes close to the flight model and capacity for design.

    X-Plane forever! Aero geeks unite!

  • NANOSAUR!

    my 4 and 5 year old kids dig it. They got my wife addicted. Then I could linuxify the imac 8-) Supposedly it is now shareware and partially open source but with a severely restricted license.
  • *Not* BZ2, but the original Battlezone.
  • I want things like Grim Fandango, Monkey Island or Indy and the Infernal Machine. I mean, we already have umpteen billion first-person shooters, how about a little variety?

  • Here are my ideas:

    Zork and Hitchhikers (already mentioned, but they still rock.

    The Ancient Art of War and the Ancient Art of War at Sea: Two great games without a modern equivalent.

    Adventure Construction Set: OK, this wasn't all it could have been. But we mean to call Linux a true OS when it doesn't even have a roleplaying game developer's tools yet? We could call it gtk!! Wait, that's taken. How about RPGtk?

    Omega: This was an Origin game that let you make an AI tank, then code it to find other tanks and kill them for the Apple ][e.

    Doom: Well, ok we have Doom.

    Starcraft and Diablo: Already said, but they bear repeating, since they rock and roll.

    Ascendency: By the Logic Factory. Great game with wonderful atmosphere. It didn't get the marketting to really take off, but it was very polished and cool.

    Sexplosion!: Originally for the mac, this game loses its luster in translation, since we don't have GPFs.

  • A mix (Score:2)

    by ajs ( 35943 )
    Ok, one humorous: W2K

    One off-the-wall: nethack -- will someone please write a decent configure/build/install process for it, and then distribute an SRPM?!

    And several serious:


    • Diablo 2 would be best bang for the buck
    • Everquest would be good because it's still got a good strong on-line following
    • Starcraft also has a loyal on-line following, so would be a good late-port
    • I'd love to see Soul Reaver and, in general the Tomb Raider/Soul Reaver/Edios 3rd-person rendering engine.
    • For that matter, I'd love to see adom 1.0 ;-) !


  • and note that WINE doesn't count. ;)

    I partly disagree with this statement, Wine can be used either as an emulator or as a development library to port your software under Linux (what Corel use it for), I think that the former don't count but the latter certainly count.

    Anyway, I don't follow that much the game scene now and i am stuck with Windows (because I'm doing my studies 1000km from home and I couldn't take my computer on my back in the train/ferry).

    Second anyway, given that i have, at last, received my grants and that I don't have an overdraft anymore I will be able to buy Quake 3, the Linux version of course (but I will use it under Windows ;) because of the lack of Linux for me :().

  • Not Starcraft (Score:5)

    by delevant ( 133773 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:37AM (#1327155)
    Yeah, I know I'm gonna get flamed back to the Stone Age for this one, but let's not have someone waste time porting Starcraft . . . it's just too old.

    There are so many newer, up-and-coming games that Loki could be spending their time on:

    • Halo
    • Oni
    • Tribes2
    • TeamFortress2
    • Warcraft3
    • . . . et cetera . . .
    After all, why don't we aim our proselytizing at games BEFORE they come out? Have you seen the Halo trailers? Good lord, we need to have that game on Linux.

    . . . of course, I could be wrong . . .

  • Halo and Oni both need to go to Linux. These are, in my humble opinion, the best games we can expect to see anytime soon.

    Rather than play catch-up, I'd like to see the Linux versions right there, up front. Star Craft is cool, but we don't play a lot of it the Lan Parties in Omaha anymore. (open invitation)

    P.S. Moderators: Since this is an opinion, not fact based column, moderate the above comment up if you agree with it please.

    -----
    Want to reply? Don't know HTML? No problem. [virtualsurreality.com]

  • It seems a number of people have clued in that we need to have a Linux version first .

    Ports are great - StarCraft is the obvious one, as is SimCity 3000, and even The Sims, but ...

    Game Developers should be writing for Linux and porting to Windows, not the other way around.

  • Hunt the WUMPUS! (Score:3)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:38AM (#1327183)

    that's the only true computer game. all others pale in comparison ;-)

    (yeah, this was a test. anyone 'old' enough to remember the Wumpus?)

    --

  • RPG's, Adventures, Flight Sims. (Score:4)

    by DrCode ( 95839 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:38AM (#1327196)
    The title says it. I'd buy Ultima 9, Monkey Island 3, Wing Commander 5, and anything similar. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in the current crop of ports, which consists entirely of strategy and FPS's.
  • The UO Linux port has been poorly maintained, but the UO Linux community page (http://uolinux.dhp.com) still has info. Last I read, Network Dragon (siteadmin) was praising the virtues of VMWare.

    Never mind that, there's a better game coming out this summer, called Shadowbane. The developers of this title are already planning to use OpenGL to develop both Windows and MacOS ports, and have acknowledged that they might do a Linux version if there was enough of a response.

    A news site I help run has started a petition. Sure could use some more entries.

    http://sb.drtwister.com/linux/

    I suspect it might be a lot easier to approach at least one prospectively great game in development to get the port you want. In this case, this game might come to Linux users, if that's what you want.

    But for all other games, I suggest you support the petition site at http://www.tuxgames.com/ -- they do good work.

    J.
    damned vulpine
    http://sb.drtwister.com/
  • These are the games that keep me rebooting into windows:

    Need for Speed III
    Need for Speed IV
    Falcon 4.0
    Starcraft
    Mechwarrior 2 - Netmech
    Mechwarrior 3
    Final Fantasy 7

    Yes, Starcraft plays well in WINE, and I did get Netmech running in DOSEMU, HOWEVER, I play them over the net via Kali [kali.net], and Kali95 does NOT work in WINE, and I did get KaliDOS on the net from within DOSEMU, however, the network code slowed to a virtual standstill when I tried to play a netmech game (netmech ran beautifully..)

    Future games that NEED to come out for Linux:

    Halo
    Diablo 2
    Warcraft 3

    -- iCEBaLM

  • Re:Zork! (Score:2)

    by Yarn ( 75 )
    I think they're all written in 'z-code' or something.
    There are definitely players for the games, as a friend brought a CD full of infocom games and I managed to get em running.
  • While us game developers would love to port our games to Linux, until Management can justify the price of porting versus the number of sales, we're stuck in a Windows world.

    Sign the Linux Game Petition here...
    Linux Games Petition [tuxgames.com]

    Michael
    3D Game Developer

    Cheers
  • First of all, let me just say you're generally wrong... :>

    Point 1 above is why we're going to see more MMGs in the market -- as gaming becomes bigger and bigger business, the game companies are going to want steady dedicated income.

    This is pretty much right, and there are other sources of revenue to be had here... imagine playing a game and seeing a billboard for AT&T in it... there's all SORTS of reasons why gaming should go this direction...

    2. They are patched automatically everytime you play.
    3. Technical support is available online while playing.
    4. All player's clients must be functionally equivalent.
    Point 2, 3 and 4 are why Linux isn't going to be used for MMGs, at least not in the foreseeable future.

    Although they may not be in the immediate future, there is *no reason* why they couldn't be made to work on linux, all the elements are there... perhaps even more so than in other OSs.

    The game companies need to provide real-time technical support, self-patching code, and a standard non-hackable interface regardless of the underlying OS.

    What about linux makes this so unobtainable? The real-time tech support you talk about already exists in so many ways w/ linux that i'm not going to bother expounding on it. Self-patching? QuakeWorld, Quake2, Unreal Tournament... these all do essentially that when they download levels, skins, etc, that the player doesn't already have. There's no reason why they couldn't download a binary and replace or patch the old one, so i fail to see the problem there, as well. And as per the third point, there isn't such a thing as a "non-hackable interface"... there are SO many levels that you can "hack" things on, and it's no harder to do in windows or MacOS, so what are you after there?

    It's inefficient to do any of these for more than one OS..

    That's why Loki is in business... they'll port the game for you...

    Add to this the reputation Linux has for difficulty in providing tech support, and fact that an open OS will be a tool for hackers who wish to cheat at these games, and it's pretty plain that there's zero interest in coding MMG games for Linux.

    I didn't know linux had a reputation for difficulty in providing tech support... i know linux has a reputation as being hard to use, but I didn't think that reflected the kind of tech support you can obtain. And about the hackers, that's a foolish point. Why would an open OS be any different than any other OS when it comes to "hacking" these games? You seem obsessed with this kind of abuse, but it would be just as rampant on other platforms. Perhaps your feeling is that to port the games, the need to open source the clients and that would lead to some of the problems that arose from the quake source release. I could at least understand that, but that's not the case. There is no need for them to expose their code if they don't want to.

    In summation, if a gaming company writes good, portable code (which they should be doing if the intend to call themselves programmers) then porting to linux, or any other OS that provides the necessary tools (openGL, the right compilers, etc) should not be a problem and should be nothing but a win/win situation for them.

  • Andrew Meggs (iconoclast Mac gamecoder) basically _finished_ a Mac Half-Life port, at which point Valve killed the project and refused to release the port or the code. Meggs flipped out, I don't blame him after completing all that work. Their argument was that it wasn't economically viable to support it (the whole marketshare thing). Now, Mac users _pay_ for software, yet the project was killed. Mind explaining how you're going to convince the treacherous Valve to port to Linux when most Linux software is downloadable at no cost? Again- they have already had a Mac port done. It's practically finished and they are sitting on it letting it ROT. Even _if_ they hired a Linux programmer to do a port- let's look at the record, shall we?

  • Sims, sims, sims (Score:3)

    by Scurrilous Knave ( 66691 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @11:26AM (#1327240) Homepage

    I'd really prefer to see new titles as opposed to older titles ported. Oh, I wouldn't mind if some of my old faves got ported, but I'm not expecting it.

    I pretty much skipped MS-Windows altogether--went directly from DOS to Linux. So I can't name a bunch of MS-Win-based titles that need porting. But I do know what kind of games I like!

    I want flight sims. Combat flight sims. I used to spend considerable sums buying new flight sims for DOS. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Birds of Prey. Red Baron. Falcon. And my all-time favorite, for its balance, smoothness, and complexity--Domark's AV-8B Harrier. Man, that was a sim! On Linux we have, what, ACM and FlightGear? Both nice, but not in the same league.

    I want space sims. I actually bought WABI so I could play MS's Space Flight Simulator. It was so pretty it made me drool. But just drooling can get boring after a while if there's nothing much to explore and no way to blow things up. Oh, I'll take the things in the Wing Commander, Mantis, and X-Wing category, too, but as far as I know, there isn't an existing full-bodies physics-based (that's also not afraid to allow a little plausible SF) space-flight and -combat sim out there to be ported.

    And I want tactical combat sims. Something that will make me think of the old hex-based board wargames, like Squad Leader. I understand that there are actually a few MS-Win combat games out there, but I don't know any names. So, port those, I guess, or make something new especially for X.

    Now, that's quite a shopping list, I know. And I'm not just sitting on my fat rear hoping someone will come along and feed my jones--I'm actually doing something about it. I have preliminary design work done, and some prototype code, for a space sim and a tactical combat sim. Both will be GPL'ed, will use X and OpenGL, and will be done as soon as my little fingers and my schedule permit.

    I encourage everyone with the proper skills to do the same.

    Oh, and lest I forget, I have played and loved Myst and Riven, too. But those are almost trivial from a programming standpoint--I made a "Myst clone" in a couple of days using Gtk and Python. But one needs actors, graphic artists, musicians, and storytellers to do justice to the concept, and I ain't none of those. So I'd love to see them, but I'm not holding my breath.

  • Oh, hahahaha, lol... Sorry to burst your bubble...

    While I'd love to see FFVII/VIII ported to Linux, to exponentially increase their sales, you'd have to practically get all six billion people in the world to buy a copy. Square's games sell like wildfire in Japan, I think FF8 has reported over 6 million copies sold worldwide (1 million here), and should top 10 million by the time it leaves the market.

    Unfortunately, Square is one of those companies who are LEAST likely to port games to Linux. They enjoy such great sales for the PSX that perhaps the Windows market barely would scratch about a 50th to a hundredth of the PSX sales. Porting their games to Windows is hardly profitable to them -- if we can't convince some companies who sell around 200-300k copies of a software to port it to Linux, how are we going to convince a company to invest the resources to port a game that sold 6 million copies? :P Plus, their US publisher isn't going to help matters -- EA (SquareEA). Have any EA games been ported over yet? I'm still looking at the vacant sports games market in Linux, the vacant Dungeon Keeper market, and you get the point. EA has been resolute in not going for a venture that isn't deemed profitable, and they just don't see Linux as being profitable at all.

    I would LOVE to see the FF series on something other than Windows or Playstation, but It's a pipe dream, and it's mostly smoke :(




    _____________________
  • I agree with the Ambrosia bit. Escape Velocity was such a fun game. All my friends were Mac-Heads, so I was introduced. Played it on Ardi's Mac emulator while running in Windows. THAT's class. The mods were shallow, but cruising around in a Super Stardestroyer is a Good Thing(R). I never got into EV:Override though. Too _much_ of a good thing.
  • Driving games would ROCK under linux!

    Nascar 2K with some good amped sound. . . Yeah Baby!

    Never knock on Death's door:

  • Tax! (Score:2)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 )
    The greatest government-mandated spring game: Tax!

    Of course there's a different version already for each country that needs one, but a good Linux tax calculation program would be nice. Notice that actually all that's needed are

    • Spreadsheet
    • Spreadsheet definition for this tax year
    • Printing program (to print the spreadsheet info in acceptable format)
    Those of us in the USA know that the most popular programs aren't available for Linux. All that's needed is for one company to make their tax rules definition public so a Linux tax program can be written to use it -- then the tax product company is actually selling copies of their annual tax database.
  • The Infocom text adventures are written in a language called ZIL, Zork Interpreter Language. You may have noticed that each adventure game consisted of one moderately-sized executable and one or two enormous data files, and that the executable image for each game was usually identical to all the others. The executable is a Z-code interpreter that runs the ZIL program stored in the data files.

    There are Z-code interpreters on the net that work pretty well. I own a copy of The Lost Treasures of Infocom (about a dozen of the classic games), and once upon a time ran a Z interpreter to play these games on my Linux box.

    There is a wealth of information about Infocom at Peter Scheyen's Infocom Page. [csd.uwo.ca] Apart from links to the Z-code interpreters and information on buying the classic games, there is a wonderful archive of historical and technical articles about Infocom. Check out especially How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine, [csd.uwo.ca] Marc Blank and Stu Galley's technical exposition on the design of the ZIL language and the Z-code interpreter. Great stuff.
  • Or, at least, it does for me playing Starcraft; I really haven't tried it on any other DirectX stuff.

    It's quite odd, it plays Starcraft flawlessly (and fast/faster than Windows, using DGA) for a random amount of time (seems to be a half-life of around an hour), then suddenly slows and hangs solid within a fraction of a second. You can play through the single player this way without getting too annoyed if you save often, but it's just unacceptable for multiplayer.

    But anyway, the Wine people have had it working but buggy since at least this time last year, when it had horrible memory leaks and was slow over IPX, but ran.

    Does anyone have Starcraft under Wine working and perfectly stable? If so, could I hear details?

    Off topic: Does anyone know why DGA is so much faster than MIT-SHM, and why it needs root? I don't like running Starcraft as root, but it doesn't run as smoothly otherwise. For DGA, couldn't the X server create a file mmaped with the necessary I/O range on the graphics card, then set permissions on it to let the X client mmap that same file to write directly into that chunk of RAM without security concerns?

  • Re:Zork! (Score:4)

    by Loligo ( 12021 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:42AM (#1327271) Homepage

    There are open source interpreters for the Infocom game "databases" (for lack of a better word) available, and a while back Activision (who now owns the rights to these, I suppose) released a CD with about 30 or so games on it, including the three Zorks. In fact, it had just about everything except Hitchhiker's Guide... It also included the Invisiclues hint/map books and promotional material (well, like the little magazines and such, no toys) in PDF format.

    Here it is [activision.com], still available. 15 bucks. I can't recall how it stores the files on the CD, so you might have to extract the files under dosemu or wine or something...

    -LjM

  • There used to be a game for the Amiga and Atari ST called OIDS - it was a great combination between chopifter and asteroids. Even now, it would great to see a port of that game especially if it could read old user generated maps.
  • I really, really, would like MicroSoft Age of Empires II ported to Linux. But I would wager that there is a greater change of the WINE people getting DirectX implemented before that would happen.

    Can you deny that MSAoE II is not a great game? I love it when MS Buys Great Gaming Companies (sic)!

    -AP
  • I for one prefer turn-based games over all the newfangled realtime stuff.

    Give me Space Empires III (didn't work with the last WINE I tried, although I'll be trying it again soon and often until it does work.)

    Give me Chaos Gate, and give it to me with source code! (The publisher gave up on it even though there is a large, and growing, body of players who would like to see extensions, and is raring to start coding them ourselves.)

    Give me X-Com: UFO Defense and derivitives.

  • I shall use my +1 bonus for good.

    Moderate this up. Informative.

    If you really want to see your favorite titles on Linux, don't just post here. Email or post there. Let these developers know.

    They have a good track record of porting many titles.

  • The only two games I've been interested in playing in the last 5 years were Quake II (and now III) and StarCraft. StarCraft got me through my first semester in college (before I switched to linux). Wine simply doesn't do it justice. I've been waiting for this game to come out on linux for the last year and a half. I even e-mailed Blizard about it, though they said they had no plans of porting it. Sounds like a job for Loki :-)

  • Wish #1 : Starfleet Command. They did an admirable job of bringing Star Fleet Battles to the computer, and it's really, just *fun* if you know what you're doing.

    Alpha Centuari has already been announced, that's one check.

    UT with OpenGL support as opposed to Glide would be nice.

    After playing the demo of HOMM3 yesterday, I'm already going out to get a copy when I can.

    But, Loki (and Paramount), if you're listening, STARFLEET COMMAND !
  • Cassettes and 1571 disc drives were the staple of the C64..

    I had Apshai on 5 1/4 (175K) floppy for my Atari 400/800.. Never had a use for the damn Atari Tape II, except I could play the audio tapes in it. (Press 'play', cload"", and unplug the cable.)
  • Well, I'm not real sure, but some of the webpages make it seem like The Sims will be MPAA of R or more. Not sure if I want that level of detail ...

    But, are you sure it doesn't matter if it comes out for Linux or Windows first? Think about it ... if Linux is always the "we'll port to Linux if we're sure we can make a bundle" platform, we'll always be dealing with code optimized for Windows, not for Linux.

    I don't want to have to wait 18 months to get it on Linux!

    This is why I make darn sure I record all the Linux Games and Books I buy for the Neilsen Home Shopping Panel - so they know I spend money on Linux Games. And I try not to buy the Windows games, just the Mac compatibles (for my son's iMac).

    (with apologies to Brittney Spears)
    It's all about the market share,
    It's all about the dumb dumb Divx dumb dumb,
    And I think I'll just buy Linux games today ...
  • Oh yes oh yes oh yes! Not just one and two but three as well.

    Settlers and Braben's original Elite and I'd be happy...

    Simon, already has CivCTP.

  • Since SimCity 3000 is slated to go, that's one of my biggies, but we need to be in the First Wave of game releases. Maxis should be working with Loki to port The Sims to Linux ASAP! Use the work on SimCity 3000 to springboard, do a big ad campaign to push the fact it's Ready For The 21st Century!

    Will
  • The Papyrus sims would be nice... especially the excellent Grand Prix Legends. In that game, you
    • attempt
    to drive Formula 1 cars from 1967, before there were the artificial grip-enhancing devices known as wings. It takes a very long time before you are successful. Fortunately, you can practice with cars with less horsepower, simulating the F2 and F3 classes of the era.

    Theoretically, it should be simple to port, because it has five modes:

    Software rendering using DirectDraw (I think)
    Rendition chipset native acceleration
    3DFX Glide acceleration
    OpenGL acceleration with a patch
    And I believe a native Matrox G200 driver

    What could be easier? There's no Direct3D that I know of in the entire game!

    Of course, Papyrus is probably still wondering "What's Linux?" There was a petition for the port, but it seems to have failed >:-(

    There's even the potential for the OpenGL version to run
    • better
    under Linux. How? Well, if the utah-glx drivers implement GLCopyTexImageSub2D properly, the mirrors will redraw quickly, eliminating the need for an ugly hack which redraws the mirrors every 2-8 frames!

    So, I think it's worth a shot. Anyone else interested?

  • I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm an RPG fan through and through. First it would have to be Baulder's Gate and Diablo 2. I would also like to see the entire Warcraft series (1,2,3) ported along with Starcraft. For certain, the Might and Magic Series (yes all 7 and the Heros).

    Inorder for this to work though the Linux version would need to be released the same day as the Windows version, if not earlier. I never bought Alpha Centauri, but since it has been or will be ported to Linux, I might just pick it up.

    I think in a way this is a dumb question, what would you like to see ported? The answer, everything... everybody has different tastes of gaming and becuase of this every games needs a Linux port, or should I restate that... a Windows port.

  • GREAT game. Too bad it isn't quite as easy to modify
    as the Quake series is, but still, the game is fun as shit.

    And besides, Trek has a high geek ratio -- a perfect reason to port. ;)
  • Frist thing I want to see ported is Starcraft, which even after 3 years is still the best RTS on the market IMHO.

    Next I want to see Stars! [webmap.com] and Stars Supernova (when it is released) ported so I don't have to play them under Wine all the time, and because a port would draw attention to these excellent games.
  • I know, I know, this is slightly off-topic, but for all of you out there jonesing for Fallout 1 & 2, both work perfectly fine under Wine. Other people (not in this thread) have said no, but it's possible, just get the latest wine release. Basically, install it under wine (no windows partition needed, either! Wish Kingpin would do that), mount the CD on your wine-mapped CDROM (or just copy it and make a directory that wine maps to for FAST playing) and then run it with your X server at 640x480x8bpp. I beat Fallout without ever installing it on Win9x and now I'm going through Fallout 2 the same way. Sure, occasionally it'll lose sound or crash, but hell, it does the same in Windows!

  • From Tribsoft... (Score:5)

    by mpinard ( 125537 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:46AM (#1327389) Homepage

    Hi I'm working for Tribsoft (we are porting Jagged Alliance 2 to Linux).

    Linux IS becoming a major gaming platform. We are currently writting contracts for some extremely interesting games (I mean AAA games).

    In 2000, there is a lot of GREAT THINGS coming for Linux. (Damm NDAs...)

    Mathieu Pinard
    Tribsoft Inc.
    www.tribsoft.com

  • Heavy Gear II is coming out from Loki soon.. I like that one more then Mechwarrior anyway..
    Railroad Tycoon is in the same vein as Rollercoaster Tycoon(from what I hear, never played wither..), and that has been out by loki for a while.

  • Q3arena point release? (Score:3)

    by spinkham ( 56603 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @11:52AM (#1327401)
    Right now I'd settle for the Quake3 arena point release, and mod source for linux.
    I thought id was planning on keeping all platforms in sync? It's been about 2 weeks since the win. point release came out, and us Linuxers don't get to play any mods or have the benifit of the new serverbrowser or anything... Lets get that thing out the door!
  • This is the first time I've seen any interest in racing games for Linux. but NASCAR? come on... lets go in a circle as fast as we can. rally's are where it's at. hairpins, powerslides, gravel, tarmac, mud, snow... rally has it all! Personally I'd like to see Sega Rally Championship 2 or Rally Chamionship 2000. Need for Speed III, obviously, just because its fun. We also need to get some force feedback support in linux, or has that been done, already and I'm just out of the loop? Maybe some F1 games. or something like Hi-Octane!
  • Even though I really suck at it, Homeworld would be a good game to port. Since it has software and OpenGL renderers besides the D3D one, it shouldn't be too hard either...

    And for anyone who says Starcraft is "too old", come on. People still play Quake. Starcraft epitomizes its genre, and today is still nearly as featureful and often more fun than newer RTS games. Hell, I just got the thing and I can't tell that it's "old"...

    MoNsTeR
  • 1 Half-Life 2 Half-Life 3 Half-Life 4 Half-Life 5 Half-Life 6 Half-Life 7 Half-Life 8 Half-Life 9 Half-Life 10 Half-Life 11 Half-Life 12 Half-Life 13 Half-Life 14 Half-Life 15 Half-Life 16 Half-Life 17 Half-Life 18 Half-Life 19 Half-Life last, but certainly not least, 20 Defender

    I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
    what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'

  • Re: GNU Civ II -- exists (Score:3)

    by lubricated ( 49106 ) <michalp@NOspaM.gmail.com> on Friday January 28, 2000 @09:49AM (#1327441)
    The project is freeciv.
    The website is
    http://www.freeciv.org
    The newer versions have much nicer tiles and use gtk instead of the athena widgets. It looks nice and is alot of fun.
  • It's true. Writing the core of the game, like John C. did, portably is better because you have less end-user support to deal with (as there are less bugs). This is one of the reasons John did it.

    Another reason is that 1000 * 50 is 50,000. That's 50 thousand extra dollars for making your portable core run on another system. That could feed & clothe another programmer, or even an executive PHB who just wastes company money. Out of the 20 million Linux users, that's a fairly small percentage -- which means it's likely that they will see that kind of return, or even better.

    So buy Quake 3 Arena, and show your support for Linux -- the others will follow :)
    ---
  • Maybe Linux won't be the OS of choice, as such, but he has a good point about Linux first.

    Once games are developed on Linux, they will be easier to port (think John Carmack). Once they are easier to port, you can go and port it to where ever the money is, and be proud that you will likely have fewer support issues eating at the money because of the cleaner core produced under Linux.

    So you have less support costs, and can easily port your game. Now what? Think digital. Copies cost nothing to make, it's only a little porting work for each target. If you can easily port the game, you can easily make money on other hardware with other target audiences your main target will not even see. You can hit the Win32 audience, hit the Mac (l)users, hit the Linux gamers, hit the console market (at least the Dreamcast and PSX2, the N64 could be a contender if Nintendo ever puts ouf a fscking CDROM drive), and be laughing all the way to the bank.

    So it's not really a matter of "Linux getting it first," which you point out won't happen until we have the lion's share of the OS market, but "development being done under Linux" -- which is certainly feasible, as it will cost less to develop under a free (beer, libre) OS with free (beer, libre) tools -- and will lead to Linux being one of the first ports (think Quake 3) :-)
    ---
  • I've always wanted to see Bolo ported to *anything* but a mac. There was a PC port a while back, but that was put off b/c of (sort of) licensing issues.

    WinBolo is finished, and licensing issues have been cleared up (Stuart Cheshire, or whatever the original developer's name is, finally let go of his super-ego-trip)... unfortunately, I don't have the URL anymore, but I have a copy of it... email me (spong@glue.umd.edu) if you want it. Also, i talked to the developer about a possible Linux port, and he said he's considering it.

    "Software is like sex- the best is for free"
    -Linus Torvalds
  • AFAIK, VIE UK is still alive & owns the rights to Subspace. They're running the master billing server for the current community (which is around 400-500 players, I believe, it's been over a year since I've actually played the game), but none of the servers themselves. The game itself can be found nearly EVERYWHERE, it's basically freeware by now, however the source remains in the posession of VIE UK.

    The creators of Subspace, some of the former Burst Team have started up Harmless Games, and have a beta (or maybe alpha) version of their game Infantry out. Also, freeware a game called Hyperspace, bred with the same genes as Subspace, is currently undergoing closed alpha-testing, but they have applications to join the first round of the semi-public alpha-testing. The game is being created by some of the programmers that were part of the SS community, so there's a chance they would bring aboard some people who could port HS to Linux (or even better, Be. Mmmmm.... Be).

    Here are the links:

    Harmless Games [harmlessgames.com]
    Infantry Zone [infantryzone.com]
    Hyperspace [klache.com]

    I've given Infantry a shot myself, and would continue to play it, however I didn't enjoy the game that much. Also, a key issue in preventing me from getting into the game is the fact that I have issues with the CEO of Harmless Game's publisher. I've played against this guy in Subspace (he was a player who's squadron was caught using a "secret" admin code during league matches that allowed a player to see enemy ship's locations, locations of flags, and enemy ship's energy levels, all of which posed a great disadvantage to the opposing team). He was also ruthless to anyone who spoke ill of Infantry during it's infancy, including banning an entire staff of personal from a fan site because one of them wrote a critical re/preview of the game, and effectively causing the fan site (the largest one at the time) to shut down.


    _____________________

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