


Galactic Civilizations Demo Released 17
Galactic Civilizations is a recently released PC space-based strategy game (see our earlier story on it, or check out an elegant review at Gamespot), notable for favorable comparisons against the none too favorably received Master Of Orion 3. There's now a Windows demo (51mb) of Galactic Civilizations available, originally released via Gamespot, but also downloadable from Gamershell, Fileshack, and from Gametab's BitTorrents page. Not bad for a game originally developed for OS/2 back in 1994.
Re:All these games are for Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
How about Quake 3? Unreal Tournament? Unreal tournament 2003? Neverwinter Nights? Devastation? America's Army (soon)? And that's not even covering mods...More and more games are coming out for Linux, it's not an overnight thing, but it is happening. Give it time, there are benefits to Linux gaming (I get 20 more fps under Linux playing Quake3 than under Windows). Just wait, it will happen.
Re:All these games are for Windows (Score:1)
I was under the impression that Linux 3d speeds were still lagging behind win32's. Do you have any evidence to the contrary (some website's side-by-side comparison would be great)?
The way I see it, so long as NVidia and ATI are making most of their money on windows boxes, they'll continue to pour more of their efforts into windows drivers... and since they're not really big on sharing (last
Am I mistaken? (Score:3, Informative)
In some cases, Linux beats Windows on 3D speed, though I can't cite the reference. It isn't across the board, by any means. But in some cases.
There's much touted that the nVidia drivers are single-source cross-compiled for the different platforms. Supposedly with minimal glue, the same source generates both Windows and Linux drivers.
There is also rumbling that the new ATI "Catalyst" drivers use the same philosophy, except that there are also Open Source drivers for the Radeon.
Now all I ne
Re:Am I mistaken? (Score:1)
In my experience, OpenGL can be faster, but when there is a lot of action, the frame rate drops much more than with Direct3D. This have been true with at least three PC's with different GeForce cards.
Also, the driver is really the Windows driver with some kind of HAL programmed for it. Also, Linux is built for more security, and the security and integrity checks make it all go slower.
I can only speak of my own experience w
Re:Am I mistaken? (Score:1)
Although you should note that, in the case of the first, UT2k3's linux port is fairly unoptimized. (IIRC, the entire openGL rendering path is not optimized) Also, NWN is still in beta... although if you are getting framerates significantly lower in it, you probably have something setting broken. (color depth?)
In any c
Annoying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Galactic civilizations short review (Score:2, Informative)
I played constantly for about 3 weeks, until it got reptitive and tiring.
Re:Galactic civilizations short review (Score:2)
Re:Galactic civilizations short review (Score:3, Interesting)
This game is really very fun, except it has a couple deep flaws that prevent it from being a classic. I played constantly for about 3 weeks, until it got repetitive and tiring.
A game you play constantly for three weeks sounds like a great game. In this statement the bar for "classic" seems to be set pretty high, and the severity that makes a flaw "deep" seems pretty low. What, did the control scheme give you carpal-tunnel syndrome?
Or do you mean that the flaws are so obscure that it requires deep under
Re:Galactic civilizations short review (Score:2, Interesting)
A quick survey of the other five gamers present nets similar (though not identicle) responses, but we may just be weird.
The Original GalCiv was great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Original GalCiv was great (Score:2)
A great 4X game (Score:3, Informative)
I've got it... (Score:2, Interesting)
The support from StarDock however is awesome. They will be updating the game for an entire year after its release, and are giving away a free expansion pack for GalCIV in June (I think). Not to mention this is one of the most moddable games I've ever played, most of the data is kept in text files. GalCivs AI is one of the best I've ever played against. They will come fro