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Games Entertainment

Alpha Centauri Port for Linux? 33

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hang-on-while-I-wet-myself dept.
Freud writes sent us an excerpt from a chat with Brian Reynolds, of firaxis where he was questioned about a Linux port. Brian says "Certainly a Mac version; I'm assuming a Linux version too though that hasn't been finalized. Which is kind of our fault because we expressed some interest (to EA) in doing it ourselves. Worked on it for a while, then got swamped with other stuff. So we handed it back to EA, meaning some time was lost while we were fooling around with it... Anyway, my guess is they will probably do one now. Seems like it would be an easy port. Mostly it was the network code that was going to require some work... " Well, an addict can dream, can't he?
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Alpha Centauri Port for Linux? More

Alpha Centauri Port for Linux?

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  • It should be possible to create such format. It would be like the "fat" executables on MacOS which can contain the M86K and PPC versions in one file. One file containing the x86, Sparc, MIPS, PPC, m86k... versions :-)
  • If you flushed obcsene amount of time down the toilet playing Civ and Civ2 like I did you are in trouble. I now officially have life thanks to playing Alpha Centauri. A linux version would only chew up more of my time.

    Now I know what its like being addicted to crack.

    Hey wait a minute...I had no life anyways! I'm OK!
  • Posted by joakal:

    Darn right! I loved the demo of Alpha Centauri, but the lack of a Linux port kept me from buying it. I mean, I'm not going to reboot into Windoze just to play a game! But if Firaxis does a Linux version of AC, they can count on getting my $50. Companies don't take Linux seriously enough, but games like CTP and Alpha Centauri will really do well and help get more and more commercial games for us.

    Long live Linux!
    \___ I second that :-)
  • Most of this can be explaned as the use of MP3s for pretty much all of the sounds in the game. They're very processor-intensive little buggers.
  • Great idea! If Alpha Centauri is ported to linux, I will definitly get a copy.
  • Railroad tycoon was one of the few games which I have ever purchased. A port of this to Linux would be great.
  • the only thing that stops my addiction from
    completely destroying my life is the fact that
    I have to reboot to windows every time I want
    to play.
  • Hmm.. lemme see .. Using the shell program 'splay' I see with ps that it's using only 0.1 % cpu .. that's not too bad on a 300Mhz AMD K6-2, not exactly a processor of gargantuan power.
    All that slow-down these days means is sloppy code, which shouldn't be supported... but then, noone seemed to pay attention to old winblows doing that..

  • Quake2 in Alpha I have only seen as server port only. Where can I get the Alpha Linux client of quake2?
    Natas
    btw: Civ:CTp will be ported to Alpha!
  • They did mention that, if you didn't get it patched, you were playing with the tile version (which they accidentally shipped) which runs _slower_ on good computers. Then again, even with that, it's slow.
  • Attentiones Firaxis!

    Consider $50 of my cash set aside for this one. My only complaint is that this will probably distract me from the Linux RPG that I've been working on. Need anyone to help with the port?

    Some days life is actually good...

    ~hamnrye
  • This is awesome news! I would buy it. I already have the version for Windows. I was thinking of doing my own SMAC clone for linux since I didn't think that Fraxis was going to do a linux version. This is great.. I'd buy the linux version in a heart beat. Fraxis, think.. twice the profits! =)
  • I didn't think Sid had anything to do with
    Railroad Tycoon 2, since he's gone on to Firaxis now.

    I couldn't play RT2 because it insists on 1024x768 resolution, and I've a very old monitor on the Windows machine that barely does 800x600 if you ask it nicely.

    Sid Meier is one of my favorite game designers, period. Civ was my original "Oh, look, the sun's coming up" game and Railroad Tycoon kept me happy for hours watching the stupid little trains go running around. Chris Sawyer took that and made it better, IMHO, with Transport Tycoon, and now if he got his act together and ported Rollercoaster Tycoon to Linux I'd never have to use Windows again.

    Alpha Centauri for Linux would make me very happy indeed.
  • Well Civ:CTP will be on the alpha eventually
    (Also planned for the sparc)
    This is from loki themselves.
  • Well, i don't have a windows partition any more (Apache is too fun) so i don't have the windows version of SMAC, but i know what you mean! I will buy this game if there is a port! I will also buy CTP when it comes out! Sheesh, i'll be buying all the games that come out for Linux for a while just to support the OS's growth.
    Buy Linux games at retailers so they learn to stock them on the shelves!!!!!!
  • This game got a 98% from PC Gamer. Having a great game of this quality availible for linux will help to convince people to switch to linux. Not only that, a great seller would increase the likelyhood of more companies making commercial linux versions of their games.

    If there is a linux port, we should all buy it!!
    Long live Linux!!
  • Sorry, i forgot about that one. I tried the demo as well. It was fun but not the type of game i would buy and play through.
  • This is great! I posted a few days ago that we should bug the firaxis people to port their games to linux. The kind of games that they make are perfect for linux and its users:

    1. their games are intelligent and intended for adults.

    2. their games doesn't need 3D cards.

    3. their games, esp. alpha centauri, tries to be as "open" as possible. alpha centauri uses a text file that can be used to customize almost all aspects of the game. this is a perfect game for hackers (not crackers!)

    besides those, i've been continually impressed with their supports. the patches (now at 3.0) are actually more of enhancements than bug fixes. they also put out an optional patch for people who are color blind.

    firaxis has also been bucking the industry trends:

    1. the in-box manual is much much better than the rip-off "strategy guide"

    2. they don't put CD-check copy protection on alpha centauri, except the european version (because no retailer in europe would carry a game without some sort of copy protection). however, with 3.0 patch, they removed the CD-check. before the patch was released , a certain firaxis employee has subtly hinted in the newsgroups that the european players could get the US version of terran.exe to get around the CD-check.

    as far as I'm concerned, any games from firaxis will get 5 moderator points from me automatically. (NO, i'm not a moderator).

  • Most of this can be explaned as the use of MP3s for pretty much all of the sounds in the game. They're very processor-intensive little buggers.

    That's actually not quite true - anything Pentium or better should have more than enough CPU cycles for decoding MP3s - the problem is that MP3 playing is both somewhat CPU intensive and real time, which means if your MP3 player doesn't have special priviledges and goes 10ms without running, it's going to skip.

    Off topic: does anyone know which MP3 players for Linux can do a sched_setscheduler() when they're suid root? x11amp 0.6 did this, and on my system it made the difference between occasional skips and unskippable music - but x11amp 0.6 is getting old.

    Anyway, Centauri should still have more than enough CPU cycles left over to animate a small sprite or two quickly, even if every sound effect was being decoded on the fly (and if they're not caching wav data of the small sound effects, they've got a coding problem right there). It honestly feels like the whole game is being run in an interpreter, like it's some Tcl/Tk or uncompiled BASIC app. That doesn't sound likely, but I can't think of anything else that might be sucking up that much CPU.
  • If they do get a Linux port out, I hope they take the time to fix their atrocious speed problems. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game... except that it was running slower on my friend's PII-400 than it should run on a P166. I'm sorry, there's no reason that popping up an icon menu or scrolling across a 2D map should be anything less than instantaneous on a modern computer.

    The lack of a Linux port (when Civ:CTP has one in the works) was one strike against my buying Alpha Centauri, but the fact that Centauri would be unplayable on half my friends' and relatives' computers was just as bad.
  • I already have purchased SMAC for Windows. If a version for Linux is released, I probably would purchase a second copy for Linux. It wouldn't be too difficult to dump the Windows version.

    Cast your vote for Linux games with your dollars!

    To never reboot again...
  • Now we will have all of the Civ's for Linux! Im beta testing CTP and running the message board athttp://natas.kfa.cx/~natas/wwwboard/wwwboard.htm l and let me tell you that CTP is rocking! I ordered it from Software Ect yeterday hoping that this will help out the sales in stores. Anyway, I say we bug the people who make Diablo2 and have them talk to Lokisoft about porting it!
    NaTaS

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