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First Person Shooters (Games) Quake Software Entertainment Games Linux

QWCD Quake Bootable Linux CD Released 66

Posted by simoniker from the nice-and-fraggy dept.
Ozh writes "QuakeWorld players will want to try this interesting light Penguin-powered 'live distro' : QWCD provides a ready-to-frag nothing-to-install QuakeWorld installation, playable from the bootable CD. It includes popular Quake clients FuhQuake and MWQCL, comes with an up-to-date Kernel, and every piece of software a player should need (ATI and nVidia drivers, internet connexion and browser, IRC client...). Has Quaking at the office ever been easier?"
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QWCD Quake Bootable Linux CD Released More

QWCD Quake Bootable Linux CD Released

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  • Where do we get the Pak files? My Quake CD is long gone.

    Are there any freely available Pak files that can be used as replacements to the originals?
    • You can buy them from ID Software [idsoftware.com] if you don't mind paying fucking $20 or more for it. ID's pricing really pisses me off for their older stuff. I mean, yes, Quake was a great game, but $20? And that's for them to ship you a physical CD of the thing. If you want just a little digital download of the thing, it's an extra five bucks! That makes no sense at all. Also note that Quake 3 only costs $20 as well.

      Also notice how Wolfenstein 3D is $20, but for only $5 more you can get Return to Castle Wolfenst

      • PC games are already far cheaper than console games in general. $20 anything, I almost can't complaint.

      • Up at the best buy near me, Quake 3 is only 10 dollars. So, you are accually paying more for Quake 1 than Quake 3.
        • Heh, yeah. It's pretty easy to find 'em at used places pretty cheap too. ID's online pricing scheme just continues to boggle me, is all.
          • Seriously, it is no different than other software companies who sell through retail. ID pretty much -has- to sell at the MSRP, even if the majority of retailers sell for less. That way they are not seen as competing against their distributors.

            In alot of cases, this is a contractual obligation. Even when not, it is good business sense.

            Besides, what you are paying for when buying online is to have (almost) immediate gratification through electronic download (while still having it be legal). You don't have t

            • Besides, what you are paying for when buying online is to have (almost) immediate gratification through electronic download (while still having it be legal).

              Ah, but you're also paying for the fact that you don't have a hardcopy, so if your harddrive crashes and ID's site doesn't let you re-download, you're screwed. Or you've got to make a hardcopy yourself. When you buy the hardcopy, you're getting actual physical materials which cost money (not that bandwidth doesn't cost money, but I can't imagine t

              • If idsoftware.com were an exclusive outlet, I'd be complaining. But it's not. The only person I know who bought from there did so at 2 in the morning for an all-night gaming session because the closest Wal-Mart was an hour one-way and he had no interest in pirating -if- the publisher had a clue.

                Point? Then buy it from the store. Seriously, I would guess the percentages of people who only know about buying ID games from their website (as opposed to finding out about the website after seeing the game in a st
      • In the case of quake 1, along with the game on the cd, you also get an awesome set of ambient music. You would pay almost $20 just to get a cd full of Britney Spears or Barbara Streisand at the record store. Why not cut your losses and figure you are paying $15 for the soundtrack, and $5 for the game?
        • You would pay almost $20 just to get a cd full of Britney Spears or Barbara Streisand at the record store.
          Well, no I wouldn't, but the point's taken. :) I had forgotten about Trent's soundtrack on the CD itself. That'd be worth a bit more, to be sure.

          Okay, so let's say Quake's worth it at $20. What sort of ambience do I get with Wolf3d?

      • Also note that Quake 3 only costs $20 as well

        I just bought Quake 3 recently at my local Wal-Mart for $10. Check at your local friendly Wal-Mart to see if they have it that cheap. :)
    • That being said, how does it expect people to load content into the games? Over a network share? USB key?

      If I want to play at work after hours, I can't go around installing pak files on the machines so that the bootable CD can play from it. Any ideas?

      It seems like there would have been a freely available pak file by now.

    • Legal Quake datafile replacements (Score:4, Informative)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:53PM (#9306337) Journal
      Are there any freely available Pak files that can be used as replacements to the originals?

      There is a free reimplementation [quake.cz] of the textures.

      There is a free reimplementation [mindabuse.com] of the audio effects.

      It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be legal full "drop-in replacements" for the id pak files simply because the maps must be identical to interoperate (not just "kinda work similarly) and the maps are copyrighted by id and were never made free-as-in-beer.

      It is entirely possible that people will just start using new (freely-available) maps, however. For example, the Team Fortress maps are freely redistributable.

      I am not sure if there has been a project to fully reimplement the Q1 models (it'd be neat if someone did higher-poly-count versions).
    • There isn't a free replacement pak yet? I know there is one for Doom (freedoom - its ugly but it gets the job done).

      As an aside, is there one for Quake II?

      Hmm - perhaps this project could be used for game distros of other opensource GL games such as Cube or Armagetron.
  • Uh Oh! Get ready to see office productivity take a nose dive and those afterhours electric bills skyrocket! ;) Man, I love stuff like this, no muss, no fuss!

  • Only 46MB (Score:5, Informative)

    by SpaFF ( 18764 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @11:04AM (#9304175) Homepage
    The ISO is only 46MB, which means you could put this thing on a business-card CD and tote it around in your wallet. How cool is that!

    • Re:Only 46MB (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @11:15AM (#9304321)
      I guess it would beat actually talking to people.
    • Just make sure you don't mix it up with your other business-card CD's when you give 'em to clients.

      Hmmm... this candidate looks very interesting, but I'm not sure what this "fragging noobs" thing is or how it fits in with our business strategy...

  • more! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 )
    I can't wait for pc games to be officially released in LiveCD format. It would definitely give a much needed boost to PC gaming. Making it easier to make games run and not having to configured crazy drivers and such makes it better for all gamers.

    Not only that, but having the game be the only thing occupying your system gets rid of a whole heck of a lot of useless overhead and can help to crank up the fps and such on lower powered machines. Lower system requirements means more potential customers. No soft
    • Nice idea for a game utopia, but the boot cd still needs an OS (this case linux) and still needs drivers. Plus there would be a little more overhead actually bcs you have to load all files off of a cd which would be slower then a harddrive. This is only a convenience to be able to play quake on any pc w/ a bootable cd bios.

      • Re:more! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Jahf ( 21968 )
        So load the games off CD with an option to install locally.

        A number of folks still don't have 3D working on their Linux box, so it is a convenience for them. If you are one of those who take the time to get it all working, use the copy option to get better speed.

        I admit that having to reboot to play a game can be annoying (it's been awhile since that was a common practice), but it makes a good option. Plus, if done right and the game is small enough, you could have a bootable Linux version -and- an instal
    • What about game patches? Driver updates? Support for newer hardware? The static nature of the LiveCD makes it complicated. You could save updates to disc, but that would be a hassle.

      Also, most people aren't really thrilled at the idea of rebooting just to play a goddamn game. This is a long, time wasting and annoying procedure.
    • this is just like how consoles work, except due to the varrying nature and specs of pc hardware, your experiance may vary. users with little ram will experiance lagging frame rates and sloooow loading times, even worse with a slow optical drive. make a live dvd would be nice as games that require multiple cd's wouldnt require cd swapping, but then again if you want seamless operation with games get a ps2!

  • I thought (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <.adavis. .at. .ubasics.com.> on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @11:33AM (#9304527) Homepage Journal
    Since Emacs is an OS, why don't they port quake to it, and then make a boot CD out of that? Quake under Emacs should only be a 2-3 line script anyway.

    -Adam

  • Game OS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fiz Ocelot ( 642698 ) <baelzharon&gmail,com> on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @12:53PM (#9305529)
    This just gave me an idea. What if game devs were to do this, like a customized operating system for their game? It could be just like this, stripped down bare bones, just enough to run the game very well.

    It sounds cool from a pure performance stand point, but of course you'd be missing a lot too. None of your custom configs and other programs etc. But just performance wise, it could be awsome.? Well overall it would be inconvenient, yet another crazy idea.

    • From a developer's standpoint, this might be at least a bit of a hacking deterrent.

    • Re:Game OS? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CableModemSniper ( 556285 )
      They did do this, they were called custom boot floppies and they were a pain in the neck to setup. I think gaming has become much less of a hassle now that those days are over.
    • They have those. They're called consoles. It's a custom os running on custom hardware, and runs games very well.

      The problem isn't what gets stripped out but how much still needs to be included in order to run the game on the vast variety of hardware out there. It's one thing to tune your OS for a specific target machine, but when you don't know anything other than it's an x86 box and can boot from CD, there are a few more things you have to add just to get the OS running, let alone the game itself.

      So,
    • They used to do this with DOS. A stripped down OS that was so stripped down you couldn't do anything with it without more software. And then it required driver software to be installed. Then boot disks. Then requiring to restart your computer whenever you wanted to do something else after running boot disks.

      We've come a long from those days. As much as I hate Microsoft and Windows, I'd hate the idea of going back to the days of DOS. (Good luck getting games like Wing Commander II running back then...)

    • Avoiding this kind of thing is one of the major reasons that I think things like directX / openGL came along.

      There are 3 major problems with your idea. Lets see them:

      1) Where to save games / read internet connection details from? Are you going to know how to do this from multiple OSes? I refuse to re-enter my network details into each game I download
      2) So, I have to reboot every time I want to play, and close down my P2P/web server/MSN?
      3) Patches. What happens when a) a new graphics card comes out, or b)
    • Actually, what would be really cool is a gaming tuned distro that on the site you selected from lists all the hardware in your system and then you were directed to an iso containing all the needed drivers, installers, and other requirements of games that currently run under Linux. It would take a lot of time, money, and space to individually tweak an iso for as many possible combinations as you could make, but I think there are alot of people that have a gaming machine separate from their regular internet/
  • Is there an easy way to get these on to the CD?
  • I have been telling game makers for years to do this. Why bloat out your games making them run on Windows? Windows uses too many resources, making game play slower. Why not make a Linux based game that you boot from the CD? It could install the data files to your hard drive to make game play faster, but it would not have to rely on Windows running in the background to play the game. When I worked at Microprose I suggested this to the programmers. Nobody really liked Linux back in that day.

    I don't kno
    • As another replier already said, it's not exactly what I would call a panacea to all of PC gaming's woes.
      • A user would have to reboot the system just to play a game. Switching between games becomes a hassle, especially if you only play for short spurts at a time.
      • You still have to support all of the hardware. Even if you based it on Linux, you'd need a reasonably competent hotplug system to auto-detect hardware configurations. Even though you might think this puts everything on "your terms," it's not rea
      • 1) You have to reboot your Windows system anyway or it becomes corrupted.

        2) Linux will support all the hardware you though at it. No need for the game developers to have to support it. Plus, if you have ever worked in the game industry, you would know they have to support all the hardware anyway. I used to work in compatibility at Microprose.

        3) Why would saving game data to the hard drive be "awkward"? That's how it's done now days. And I'm not really saying to use a "LiveCD". I'm saying, boot linux
  • This is release 0.0.3 of the client. If you check the release Changelog file, you'll see that ATI support won't be there until 0.1.0. The submitter jumped the gun.
  • Looks to me like the site is down, anyone have a mirror, or at least the LiveCD around? Maybe throw up a BitTorrent for the ./ community?

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