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Games Entertainment

Loki selecting beta-testers again 69

Posted by Hemos from the sign-up-again dept.
Faizout writes "Lokisoft is once again selecting beta-testers, this time for `Myth II: Soulblighter'. There are a few spots that are already taken; some of the people are those who failed to make it onto the beta-test list for Civ:CTP. "
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Loki selecting beta-testers again More

Loki selecting beta-testers again

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  • I hope they're going to support Linux in general,
    instead of just the x86 variety. If they support
    Linux 68k, then I'll buy a copy.

    Tip to the Linux beta-testers: Don't really rush
    the wights with your dwarves. That's what your
    berserkers are for. Your dwarves are for rushing
    the fetch. Hope this helps.

  • Problems with their last port (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 1999 @07:49AM (#1869992)
    I don't know if I am the only one having these problems so I'll post here and see what y'all think.

    I bought CivCTP from the Loki booth at Linux Expo this year. I was pretty excited but the excitement ended shortly after I got the wrapping off the box.

    There were no installation instructions. Oh sure I figured it out myself in short order but really there should have been some kind of sheet or card telling you how to install the product. That was problem #1.

    Problem #2, nearly 400MB got copied to my hard disk. Is that really necessary? This is a CD ROM game; why can't I play it off the CD ROM?

    Problem #3: The install script has a flaky parser. If you put a trailing slash on the install path, the result is that the install script tries to use a double slash (DOH)

    Problem #4: None of the symbolic links placed all over my filesystem worked. They weren't flagged as executable by the script (DOH!) This was just plain sloppy of Loki, IMO.

    Problem #5: Start the game up, no sound. Seems this requires OSS sound drivers to run. It says so on the fine print on the box so I can't be too mad at Loki for that. Had to recompile my kernel though.

    Problem #6: I can't play the game under KDE or Gnome. Even with the panel hidden, enough of it is still there to sufficiently block a good bit of the game. I started X with no window manager in order to play the game.

    Problem #7: This is the big one. After many hours of gameplay, the game burps. Segmentation fault. This has happened to me three times in a row. Seems to happen after many hours of play, but I haven't been watching memory or anything to know if there is a leak.

    For reference, my system is based on a Cyrix M2 233MHz CPU, 64MB SDRAM, Adaptec AHA2940UW SCSI controller with 1.5GB of hard disk. Sound card is a Sound Blaster AWE64 "Value". Network card is Intel Etherexpress 100B. Video is S3/ViRGE PCI with 4MB. OS is Red Hat 6.0 with out-of-the-box kernel source recompiled for OSS support.

    I tried going to Loki's web site to see if there were any patches to fix this but their site was dead (it was before this story was posted so it wasn't /. effect)
  • Just thought I'd point out that the M68k's didn't stop at 040.. They're up to at least 060, but I don't know how that stacks up to a Pentium or anything else..

    However, I'm not sure that the M68k market is big enough investing games on (Alpha is probably popular enough, PPC might be, etc.. ARM probably won't happen since it doesn't have a math coprocessor..)

  • Re: HOW? (Score:1)

    by Alan ( 347 )
    It seems to indicate that they'll be picking from the pool of applicants for the civ:ctp beta. I'm guessing that if you didn't sign up for civ:ctp you won't get on :(

    ObUPSBull - they came to my building on thursday, it's now almost a week later... WTF is my Civ:ctp??? Darn you to heck UPS! To Phil with you!

  • There were no installation instructions. Oh sure I figured it out myself in short order but really there should have been some kind of sheet or card telling you how to install the product. That was problem #1.

    Some people received a little card with instructions, however all I got was this wordperfect 8 cupon. The instructions were actually located in a README file... tho they basically said, "run install" :)

    Problem #2, nearly 400MB got copied to my hard disk. Is that really necessary? This is a CD ROM game; why can't I play it off the CD ROM?

    366 Megs to be exact, and that's without the movies installed. Games today are silly like that, but I suppose it's better to use up disk space then cache 60 megs of graphics in RAM.

    Look at Quake 2, damn thing is over 500 megs with CTF and other levels.

    Problem #6: I can't play the game under KDE or Gnome. Even with the panel hidden, enough of it is still there to sufficiently block a good bit of the game. I started X with no window manager in order to play the game.

    You know everyone says this happens on their machine, yet it doesn't on mine. I have Gnome w/ E installed and when I run Civ, it runs full screen. I don't see any part of the gnome panel.

    Problem #7: This is the big one. After many hours of gameplay, the game burps. Segmentation fault. This has happened to me three times in a row. Seems to happen after many hours of play, but I haven't been watching memory or anything to know if there is a leak.

    Haven't had one problem with crashing yet. I played for about 10 hour straight without so much of a hiccup.

    My system, for reference is a Debian Potato (bleeding edge). Glibc 2.1.1, Gnome Panel 1.0.5, etc. Basically it's synched with June 1st Potato dist.

    --
  • Even though linux is in many ways more efficient than Windows or MacOS, keep in mind that the system requirements for any of these games that are being worked on will be very similar to the originals. MythII, or any new game for that matter, won't run on a 68k machine.

    If you want to play an immersive 3D game (which is about all that's being made anymore) make sure you're running a relatively new system with plenty of RAM and preferably a 3D accelerator. I, for one, have always thought that it was great that linux runs so well on older platforms. They make great file servers, firewalls, workstations, etc., but don't expect to be able to run everything you want unless the harware's up to the task.
  • This is essentially laziness on the part of game companies. However, I don't mind this so much IFF I can run the product without the CD. It really annoys me when a product requires the CD to be in the drive and then doesn't allow me to run a sensibly minimal install.

    CivCTP fortunately (at least v1.0) doesn't require the CD.

    Hopkins FBI doesn't require the CD at gametime either.

    BFRIS does, although it keeps Music on the CD. Aegis tried to run this one strictly off the CD but couldn't manage it.
  • [lokisoft.com]
    Will you be offering support for PPC and Alpha platforms?

    The release CD contains i386 binaries and data files. In the next few weeks we will post PPC and Alpha binaries for download from our website. Those binaries will work with the data files on the release CD.

    The PPC version will remain 'beta' and unsupported until LinuxPPC reaches version 5.0, as 5.0 is required for thread support. To play Civ:CTP on a Mac, you'll need to buy the Linux version of the game, download the PPC binary (about 8MB right now) and install LinuxPPC 5.0 beta.


    cristiana
  • the guys at Bungie did a real good job of abstracting away from those same APIs

    Given that Bungie does their stuff Mac/Win hybrid as it is, I'd guess they've got their own API set already. Loki would just have to port that set, and given their work with Civ:CTP, I'd guess that much of the work was effectively already done.
    --
  • Dagnabbit, they don't even have their long over announced patch for Civ:CTP out. I'd like to be able to play network games with glibc 2.1 as well as play with windows users.
  • I hope so, I'd have a blast with this- I went without this game because I forsook buying Windows games.
  • So I think they're more like Id in the cross-platform regard...
  • On sound...
    Why did you assume that you wouldn't need sound drivers? Why did you recompile your kernel? Running 'sndconfig' is much simpler.
    Double slashes in the install path should not "break" anything.
    Try setting the GNOME panel to autohide, it will only take up a few pixels on one side of your screen. Or use Window Maker! :)

  • HOW? (Score:1)

    by Petra ( 3428 )
    I've looked at there site... now the only question remaining is... "How do I sign up" ...

    any pointers are welcome
  • Bungie Software started as a Macintosh geared software company and only started porting their games to Windows (to the best of my knowledge) with Marathon 2. As far as i know, Bungie still releases all of their games to the Macintosh first. I am sure there is more information at www.bungie.com.
  • Does anybody really play network games of Civilization? I just got my copy last week and I'm still playing my first game. The year is 1905 and I've got a city in space, a city undersea, and I'm using my rail launcher to send fusion tanks to all corners of the world to wipe out my enemies' archers, cannons, knights, and cavalry. It's taken at least 10-15 hours of gameplay to reach this point on the easiest level.

    If I were playing against some real competition instead of the "Cheiftan" level computer it would take at least 24-48 hours of continuous play to finish the game. How do you get people to play for that long? And how do you keep people playing once their civilization becomes a lost cause?

    I'd be surprised if network games ever got past the renaissance.
  • My serial port trackball doesn't work well with CivCTP for Linux. It works fine with all other X software I've used, but with CivCTP it jitters and shakes. It also jumps randomly when I click which makes it a little tough to play a game without an "undo". Does anyone know why/how Civ would screw up mouse tracking?
  • Does anyone else know when this is coming out? I haven't even bothered to play yet- the game is way too addictive for me to justify playing it until it is a social activity. (i.e., until my glibc 2.1 machine can communicate with my glibc 2.1 and windows friends.)
    ~luge
  • They didn't include autosave in the game? Not to knock on the original writers, but damn... even Civ I had autosave!
    ~luge
  • In my (very limited) freeciv experience, this only works with people you are tight with- not the anonymous trans-continental free-for-alls that Quake players are used to. You have to set aside a fixed amount of time each night (or weekend) and save every time. You just can't do it in a stretch, really...
    ~luge
  • If you'd read the website, it's quite clear that the game is available online. (Not to mention at LinuxExpo, which is where mine is from.) It is difficult to build up distribution channels for a small company, especially when most retailers are still scared of Linux products. Id is a big damn company with a solid reputation- it could package John Carmack's used toilet paper and have it on the shelf tomorrow. Smaller companies like Lokisoft need more time. Besides, if you can't be bothered to order it online, then it really shouldn't matter that much to you aynway.
  • Most of my gaming friends (and by that I mean the Windows and Mac users, since there is yet no such thing as a gaming Linux user(which we both seem to agree is too bad)) never ever buy games at stores. They know you can get stuff cheaply and quickly on-line. Ordering online is not a geek thing- it's a "I care about how I spend my money" thing. Most of them would probably be offended that you've just labeled them a geek.

    Frankly, i think retail is going to die a slow death as more and more people get on line, but that's for another thread.
  • More power to them for holding out until the patch works. I certainly wouldn't want to complain if that is the hold-up. However, considering how many nights of sleep I plan on losing to this game, I think they should lose a couple for my benefit :)
    ~luge
    P.S. It's also going to be the first piece of software I've actually bought in nearly three years. That should count for something, shouldn't it?
  • I haven't installed RedHat 6.0 yet, although as
    I'll be putting it on a Sparc I wont be playing
    Civ:CTP on it even when I do ... Therefore I'm
    assuming that RedHat 6.0 has glibc 2.1 and no
    'legacy' 2.0 C libs.

    However, I noticed on LokiSoft's site that there
    are known problems with the game on glibc 2.1
    machines. This will be fixed in the 1.1 patch.

    Chris Wareham
  • I am one of the programmers working on the Myth II port here at Loki, so I can tell you the game is pretty much fully playable right now. We have it working in a X11 window and full 3D acceleration using Glide, all the sound and I hope to get the multiplayer support to work by the end of the week.

    It was already cross-platform so it was quite easy to get it to compile and run on Linux. That's why we're already able to play the game after only about 3 weeks of work. ;-)
  • Problem #2: 400Mb?! Yick!

    Could someone explain to me the motivation that modern games have for copying so much stuff to the hard drive? Whatever happened to having an *option*?! Are those el cheapo 420x max drives so slow that we can't run *anything* off them? Or are they being paid by the hard drive manufacturers?

    If every game had an option to run all but the 1mb or so of stuff that actually changes off of the CD, I think they'd be able to see a lot more of those fast multiple read head drives ... maybe Kenwood should bribe the developers into giving that kind of option ...
  • Autosave is in the 1.1 patch. Or at least is is for the Windows version..

  • A lot of issues. Here's some answers (I hope):

    > There were no installation instructions.

    I had instructions on mine. I believe that they were on a card, and there was a README.

    > nearly 400MB got copied to my hard disk.

    The game is about 150MB, the other 250MB are MPEG movies, which can run off of the cd.

    >The install script has a flaky parser.

    Nothing wrong with a double slash. Looks ugly, but it still works.

    > None of the symbolic links placed all over my
    >filesystem worked

    Known problem with v1.0, fixed in 1.1

    >Start the game up, no sound. Seems this requires
    >OSS sound drivers to run.

    Well, yeah. For sound you have to have sound drivers. However OSS compatible sound drivers work too, like ALSA.

    >I can't play the game under KDE or Gnome.

    I play with gnome, with the panel as a corner panel and collapsed. This is a actually a problem with KDE/GNOME, where they want to be in front of EVERYTHING.

    Another option is to run it in a window, with a smaller resolution as your desktop.

    > After many hours of gameplay, the game burps.
    > Segmentation fault.

    Ahh. NOW we have a problem. This is known, and for me usually happened RIGHT after the 'Wonders' movies. I found that making the movie play in a window instead of full screen improved the stability.

    This is a known problem and should be fixed (hopefully) in 1.1.

    Don't forget..CTP is the FIRST shrinkwrapped game for Linux, and only the third by a well known commercial developer (next to Quake and Quake2). There are a lot of tools and utilities that Loki are developing on the fly to do their ports (like the MPEG movie player) and lots of pieces that they have to write to replace the DirectX calls.

    Most of CTP's problems (I think) has to do with the bloated Windows code. What native UNIX app sucks up 70MB of RAM normally?

    I think that CTP is a very good first effort by Loki (I'm holding off playing much more until 1.1, though :) and I am really looking forward to other titles.

  • A few of your problems don't seem to be real problems.

    Problem #3: The install script has a flaky parser. If you put a trailing slash on the install path, the result is that the install script tries to use a double slash (DOH)

    I don't see how this could be a problem. I haven't seen the script in question, but in general, /usr/local//games is the same directory as /usr/local/games.

    Problem #4: None of the symbolic links placed all over my filesystem worked. They weren't flagged as executable by the script (DOH!) This was just plain sloppy of Loki, IMO.

    Symbolic links don't have permissions. They simply appear to take on the permissions of whatever they are linked to. Perhaps the sources of these links had improper permissions.

    Problem #5: Start the game up, no sound. Seems this requires OSS sound drivers to run. It says so on the fine print on the box so I can't be too mad at Loki for that. Had to recompile my kernel though.

    Well, no offense intended, but -- duh. :P

    Problem #6: I can't play the game under KDE or Gnome. Even with the panel hidden, enough of it is sptill there to sufficiently block a good bit of the game. I started X with no window manager in order to play the game.

    The Gnome panel, when you slide it to the side, only takes up a few pixels. Surely these can't be crucial? Why not just kill -9 the panel if you have to? Just a suggestion. Again, I haven't tried the game, so I don't really know how the panel affects the game exactly.

    The only real problems I see from your list are the lack of install instructions (of the physical variety) and the segmentation faults. All this speculation reminds me that I still need to buy this game. :P

    logan

  • RedHat has a glibc2 compatibility RPM that you can install (compat-glibc-5.2-2.0.7.1 - part of the RH6 RPM set). Then you'll need
    to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running civctp:

    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/i386-glibc20-linux/lib /usr/local/games/CivCTP/civctp
  • Half of that 400 MB is the videos. You don't have to install those. You can run them from the CD as long as your CD-ROM is mounted.
  • By buying online, you are voting with your dollars.

    It's hard to get a product into big stores. It costs money. Companies pay stores for placement, the more they give, the better the placement. Supermarkets have been doing it since the '50s, I'm sure computer stores do the same. Even the larger mailorder outfits (you know (Micro|Mac)Warehouse, (PC|Mac)Mall) charge comapanies for ads in their catalogs.

    Interestingly enough, Bungie (who wrote Myth II in the first place) complained about this a while ago (it was on their website), and that's why they try to do most of their sales direct.

    So, by buying online, you're "voting with your dollars" to stop these practices which are hurting small startup companies and helping the giants.
  • >let the retail world know that there is a market >for Linux games.

    I should also like to add that if Loki sells 1,000,000,000 units, they've sold 100,000,000,000 units. It doesn't matter who sold them, selling a lot of a product by any means will show that there is a market for it. It's not like CompUSA sales are used as a measure of marketability.

    Besides, I'd rather Loki be getting full retail price for the game then letting CompUSA taking a cut.
  • here's [bungie.com] the Bungie's CEO's rant about the evils of selling a product any way except for direct.
  • Last I heard, Linux was a multi-user OS. Ok, you might be running it as a desktop, but that doesn't mean other systems don't have more than one user, some of whom might want to use the CD for purposes other than playing a game.

    I agree it should be optional, but at least there is a good reason for not running from the CD.


  • This is a common problem with recent trackballs, particularly optical ones. They detect the rotation of the ball by sampling a particular area, and if it's changed, they know that the ball has rotated.

    The problem is that if (for some reason) the rotation is either too fast or the driver can't get enough CPU time to sample regularly, you end up with random jumps that are most often in the OPPOSITE direction to the actual rotation.

    Two suggestions:
    1 - See if you can nice Civ (I know, it's gonna kill screen updates)
    2 - Get a cheap mouse

  • Yea, I guess unless you were laid up in bed with a free internet connection or something :D

    I love the way Civ can make cups of coffee and/or tea just get stone cold apparently INSTANTLY ... Amazing game :)
  • i've also had problems with this program horking after a couple of hours.. usually at a time when the game just starts getting good.. ie. cities are finally built up to a decent size and taken over a few other civilizations.. I *seriously* hope that the patch will address this.. it gets quite annoying to have to start over from the beginning..

    now where's that autosave feature?

    I'm running pII 333, 128Meg ram, Western Digital 8.4G, Matrox g200, Sb 16 VORTEX (using 4-front sound drivers) RH 6.0, kernel 2.2.7

  • > After many hours of gameplay, the game burps.
    > Segmentation fault.

    Don't forget..CTP is the FIRST shrinkwrapped game for Linux, and only the third by a well known commercial developer (next to Quake and Quake2). There are a lot of tools and utilities that Loki are developing on the fly to do their ports (like the MPEG movie player) and lots of pieces that they have to write to replace the DirectX calls.

    Most of CTP's problems (I think) has to do with the bloated Windows code. What native UNIX app sucks up 70MB of RAM normally?

    The problem with this is a precedent. If this concentration of bugs will be in the second and the third games, it will state, it is OK to have commercial software for Linux MORE buggy than
    Windows software.

  • There is no sign-up... (Score:4)

    by Steelehead ( 14790 ) on Wednesday June 02, 1999 @07:48AM (#1870031) Homepage
    From the Main Page:
    We are selecting 50 from the list of users whom we were unable to use for Civilization: Call to Power, and adding a few of the testers who contributed many reports and sleepless nights to that cause.
    Read the details, people.

  • Problem #4: None of the symbolic links placed all over my filesystem worked.

    This is a known problem. The symbolic links that are created by the installation script point to the wrong location. You can manually fix them to correct the problem. But I can understand how this could be confusing for Linux newbies.

    Problem #7: This is the big one. After many hours of gameplay, the game burps. Segmentation fault. This has happened to me three times in a row. Seems to happen after many hours of play, but I haven't been watching memory or anything to know if there is a leak.

    The game definitely leaks memory. You'll probably want to save and restart your game every few hours (depending on how quickly you play and how much RAM you've got -- your 64 MB is the same as mine, so you'll probably notice some thrashing after several hours of game play).

    The upcoming patch is supposed to address some of the crashes that people have seen. (I haven't seen any crashes yet except for the alien life form ending.)

    There is actually an autosave feature in CTP, though it's undocumented and unsupported in 1.0 and requires manual intervention both to turn it on and to get at the autosaved games. To turn it on, edit ~/.civctp/userprofile.txt -- I forget exactly which line to change, but it's not hard to find it. The autosaved games in 1.0 don't go where the normal games go (this is fixed in the 1.1 patch).

    For those who have been asking, the 1.1 patch is currently in beta testing (though I don't know how many people were chosen for that). I'm one of the testers, and I've submitted about a dozen bugs against the patch -- but many were trivial user interface issues that can probably be ignored (though fixing them would make the game feel more "polished" IMHO).

    Saved games are not compatible between 1.0 and the 1.1 patch, so make sure you finish crushing everyone before you apply the patch when it finally does come out. (Since I had to start new games for beta testing the patch, I haven't actually had enough time to do both endings yet; but the military conquest ending worked OK in 1.0, so I suspect it will work fine in the patch. The alien life ending worked fine in the patch, for me.)

  • My serial port trackball doesn't work well with CivCTP for Linux. It works fine with all other X software I've used, but with CivCTP it jitters and shakes.

    I haven't seen precisely that problem, but I can point out two possibly related issues:

    • The game is a CPU hog. It busy-loops, consuming all available CPU cycles. (I assume this is a legacy of the Windoze code, and I hope that as Loki gets more experience with Windoze-to-Linux porting this sort of thing will become less common.)
    • If your X server is running in 24-bit or 32-bit mode, the 16-bit CTP graphics are being converted on the fly. This slows everything way down, and I noticed extremely poor mouse pointer responsiveness (on a K6-2 @ 333 MHz!). Running X in 16-bit color instead of 32-bit color led to a dramatic response time improvement.
  • I know Myth I (and I think the sequel) were released for Macs too. That means that Bungie had to have it at least somewhat abstracted, unless they're masochists.
  • :) Well, its good to see that Loki is picking up steam. I was real pleased with Civ:CTP when it arrived on my doorstep. It actually surprised me that Linux turned out to be a superb platform for gaming, on par with Mickeysoft's slue of games. Lets hope they do as good a job with Myth II as they did with Civ, and not try to rush it.
  • Problem #5: Start the game up, no sound. Seems this requires OSS sound drivers to run. It says so on the fine print on the box so I can't be too mad at Loki for that. Had to recompile my kernel though.

    Well, no offense intended, but -- duh. :P


    Well does this mean that SBLive users are SOL if they want to have sound in Civ? iirc, you have to disable OSS to use the SBLive drivers..
  • Really cool. Loki is doing one heck of a great job on converting WIN9x games to linux....Civ:CTP plays great!
  • 68060 marks the end of the true 680x0 family.

    I have a port of redhat 5.1 running on my old Amiga 4000, with a 68060 and a clgen-using graphics card (along with 80 megs of RAM and a nippy SCSI card). It's usuable, but I am not about to compile GNOME on there :)

    A 68060/50 is a bit slower than a Pentium 75 (though not by much), so not really fast enough for modern games on the whole. Quake, for example, is playable, but only managed about 15 FPS in 320x240-ish resolution. So, earlier comments were right; it's not reasonable to complain about modern games not being released for this platform.

    What's more, there's a lack of decent 3d hardware for most 68k boxen.. For the Amiga, there's a permedia 2 based video card which you can use if you have a certain mindblowingly expensive (and slow) PPC card, but the developer support from the company (phase 5) is worse than awful, so usefulness is limited. Goodness knows what the Mac 68k and Atari boxen are like..

    Anyway, end of ramble, hope this helps.

    -A-

  • It's worth noting that the memory leaks/segmentation fault stuff might easily be a problem on activision's side, not lokisoft's ...
  • I found pretty clear installation directions in the README (or similar file can't remember) on the CD.

    -cpd
  • I'm highly disappointed in Loki that I still can't get Civ:CTP on the shelf. I don't want to hear the excuses. Quake for Linux is on the shelf right now. Loki is getting into the bad habit of announcing things way too early so that they get the press, and then when they end up having problems releasing, we're expected to say "Oh, hey, we understand, you were rushed." You rushed it yourselves, Loki. Don't, next time.
  • First off, I implied nothing about vaporware. If I didn't make it clear that I was referring to the retail availability of the game, I apologize. But I intended to imply nothing about vaporware. I know the game is available. I read slashdot, linuxgames and all the others just like the rest of us.

    Second, if I can't be bothered to order it online? How dare thee, sir. I don't know about everybody else, but I'm tired of Linux being a geeks OS. I'm tired of explaining to people "Oh, the best stuff is 'out there', but you have to go find it, you can't buy it on the shelf." For months now we've said that one of the inroads to making Linux a desktop OS is the availability of games. To me, that doesn't imply games that you can order online, it implies games that you can go to the store and buy. If we all go off and be geeks and order our game online, CompUSA will have that many fewer sales of the retail game, and how will that look to them? Will they bother to carry the next one that comes out? I would love to be playing Civ:CTP right now. Hell, I already had Quake and QuakeII, but I went out and bought them when they hit the shelf. I am attempting to wait patiently for Civ to hit the shelves, so that I can "vote with my dollars" and do my part to let the retail world know that there is a market for Linux games.

    Can't be bothered indeed. Sheeesh!

  • Thats a pretty quick turn around from announcing they would be doing a port to looking for beta testers (I take this to mean having something close to running.) I guess this either means that those guys at Loki have a pretty complete linux version of the mickeysoft APIs and/or that the guys at Bungie did a real good job of abstracting away from those same APIs. Maybe they should donate a little expertise to the wine project.

    Matt
  • Ever tried Navigator 4.x > 4.5 recently. Mine crashed 1/5 times when loading slashdot. I'm not sure if the windows version is better but I am certain that 20% failure rate isn't good.
  • I with a little of the above. On #3 at least I think he means that installing to /usr/local/games/CivCTP/ will install to /usr/local/games/CivCTP/CivCTP. It was this way for me. It was annoying, but not really all that serious. All it meant was moving the files down one directory. I also don't think OSS drivers are strictly required to run the game. I have a ES1471 card, which is supported under the kernel but not under the OSS driver set. The sound runs fine. I think all the game is looking for is /dev/dsp or /dev/audio and pipes all the sound through there. I had some trouble with the symlinks as well (probibly because I moved the files, and that could of been his case as well), but I just removed them and went on my merry way. Granted the install producedure is not like installing a Win32 game, but being such a new beast, a shrink wrapped Linux game I was thinking there would be some minor problems. The install stuff was par for the course. Otherwise I haven't had a problem with it and its run really, really great. I haven't even seen those crashes yet. Guess that's my luck.
  • I read an article on gamespot several months back. They were talking about gaming on the Mac. The company they talked to the most was Bungie, because their games are released on the Mac and PC at the same time. They were saying that when the make the game, they have cross platform in mind, and develop it knowing it will be available on more than one platform. It's not like a lot of other companies, which only have PC's in mind, and then take a year or two(Blizzard) to finally port the game over. I am sure the article can still be found at Gamespot.
  • As of now, bungie will always release simultaneously, on Mac and Windows (since myth I was a hybrid when it shipped.)

    All bungie games are going to ship hybrid i believe, (mac/pc on the box) so there shouldnt be a problem.
    Oh, by the way.
    15% of the game code is system specific
    The Program itself (the game engine) is 880k, so bungie did a very good job of keeping it "portable"

    -Pfhor
  • Bungie *did* do all of their development work on the MacOS when they were still a small company doing Mac-only games. Since they've expanded dramatically and gone multi-platform (Marathon 2: Durandal was ported to Windows, but was done at a later time; Myth was their first game released for Windows and MacOS simultaneously), their development machines have become varied as well. I think they still like Macs better though. :)

    Perhaps with enough support they will include Linux in their development cycle, and we won't have to wait for Linux ports to be made (well, my main machine is MacOS so I don't have to wait, but you get my point...). Carmack has obviously seen the light, with the (almost unheard of) 3-platform upcoming release of Q3A, and it is time that other game developers follow this trend. Are there currently any other major developers that include Linux as a viable gaming platform?

    Daniel


    -----
    Daniel Whelan
    President - Ophelan Enterprises [ophelan.com]
    Editor - Dualism.org [dualism.org]
    -
    Editor - Dualism.org
    President - Ophelan.com
  • Couple things:

    We received the 1.1 patch code from Activision on Monday, May 24 and had a patch uploaded for testing the next day. It hasn't been released because it broke several parts of the game.

    The problems we are hearing about have proven very difficult to duplicate, even with 4 of our people working on it together with a number of tremendous testers on the outside. Our guys are really good, so I'm confident the patch will be ready for prime time shortly.

    The PPC version (including the 1.1 patch) is also nearly ready--several people are beta testing it now.

    For future projects, we have bugzilla up and running, and will be making it available to customers. We think that sharing support/bug information with people is a Good Thing. After all, we're counting on you all to keep us honest!

    SD
    President
    Loki Entertainment Software

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