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Games Entertainment

Hugo Engine and Guilty Bastards for Linux 83

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-smash-on dept.
Kent Tessman writes "I've released a Linux port of Hugo (an adventure game creation system for BeOS, DOS, Win32, Amiga, Acorn, Macintosh, OS/2, and Unix in general) The major Hugo release so far is Guilty Bastards, a tongue-in-cheek Los Angeles detective story. Screenshots and more information are also available Both Hugo and Guilty Bastards are free--I hope people have fun with them. " Actually looks surprisingly interesting.
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Hugo Engine and Guilty Bastards for Linux More

Hugo Engine and Guilty Bastards for Linux

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  • Go to ftp.gmd.de into the if-archive directory. There are a lot of high quality text adventures made by fans of the genre. My personal favourites are: Jigsaw and Curses both by Graham Nelson and Web (I think thats the name) by Andrew Plotkin.

  • I really like slashdot. It's a great site for reading news about stuff that I'm interested in. Every now and then, though, I run across a meaningless story like this one. These stories belong on freshmeat [freshmeat.net]. Slashdot is "News for Nerds," not new applications for nerds. Guys, stick to what you're good at, and let scoop do what he's good at.
    --
  • Umm... OK, so there is no support for 3D sound, or weird input devices. But we have 2D covered (X or ggi), 3D (OpenGL), sound (OSS or ALSA)... What more is needed? Sure, a lot of hardware isn't supported, but that isn't due to lack of APIs, but lack of support from hardware vendors.
  • Well, since this thread is about Hugo, a program for writing Interactive Fiction (text adventures, to the rest of you), I don't think you can get too far from the CLI. Of course, Hugo (as well as TADS and Inform, it's competitors) allows both graphics and sound, so a gui is nice too. Maybe it's time to compromise?

    Can you say Sierra Interactive? The King's Quest games were basically IF with graphics and mousing. So another comment was right: This is about the place DOS games were in the 1980's.
  • I thought there was a Half-Life player client for Linux already? There sure are plenty of Linux *servers* for HL and Team Fortress Classic...
  • I tried that too. The wxGTK-devel-2.1.0-9 RPM was missing an include file (wx/gtk/setup.h), so I built wxGTK from scratch, which worked. It still didn't copy that include file when I did 'make install', so I copied it by hand.

    Then I build hewx and, while it did build successfully, it was messed up enough to render it unplayable. On the normal game screen I couldn't see any of the text output. If I went to 'show scrollback window', I could see the game output, but then I couldn't type.

    Oh well.
  • Same here (a segfault). Although the BUILD file for hewx in the source distribution says that "wxHugo was developed with wxWindows 2.1 snapshot 8 and later" it only seems to work with snapshot 8, not 9!
    I got it from here [hw.ac.uk]. Brilliant game, BTW!
  • Looks quite boring to me. I guess this is as good as it get's on a platform that doesn't have a broad selection of industry recognized multmedia standards. Oh well I guess that's what DC and 95 ar for.

    Amazing... why do you feel that in order to be interesting a game must have lots of graphics and sound, and such. While there's nothing inherently wrong with either, it's quite rare to see a game that really takes advantage of them.

    Myst is probably the best, and it's nothing more than a glorified text game.

    And much as I like Marathon, first person shooters have a lot more to do with reflexes than anything else. Slapjack is not wholly dissimilar. (and id games are really ugly anyway... so much brown...)

    I'm a big fan of text games. I played most of the old Infocom games on an Apple II in their hayday. And there are still a *lot* of really good ones out there. Of course, it's not usually listed in the system requirements, but you need to have a functional IMAGINATION. When you 'look' you have to use your brain to interpret the flavor text. But, as it happens, the imagination is very good at this sort of thing, if you've got one. The scariest picture in the world can't come close to what really scares you. 'You see a shady glen.' tells me a great deal with a mere 20-odd bytes. Maybe there are birches. I like them, so there are. I'm not reliant on what some other guy thinks it looks like.

    While pretty much any computer nowadays can put up 3d spaceships and a midi soundtrack (hell, I played flight sims on a Mac Plus many moons ago) this does not always mean that a good game requires 3d spaceships and midi. Or whatever.

    Text games are more or less the heart of computer games. They create a story and a setting with a minimum of cruft. At the heart of any good game (barring cards, or number games, or basic things like that) is going to be some kind of story. Multimedia just narrows down the possibilities that the story might contain to the narrow few that the author envisioned. It leaves little room for interpretation. It doesn't really let you make the story _your_own_.

    I haven't played this particular game, but it might easily be a jillion times better than the best game on Dreamcast or Windows. Try to imagine it, but maybe it'll be a jillion times better because it gets you involved and isn't just eye candy. Crappy games are going to be crappy no matter how sparkly they are. Good games are going to be good even if they're 7bit ASCII text and require you to invest in a good stock of graph paper.

    I suggest that you try it. If you let yourself, you might even like it....

  • >And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to /.? -sigh-

    Well, all the folks that started with overclocking their Voodoo cards to get an extra 0.3 fps in classic Quake later graduated to spending that excess energy reading the minutae of software licenses and expounding endlessly about them on Slashdot, while blindly moderating up anything posted by Bruce Perens or Alan Cox.

    Recently, most of those have also moved on again to being specialists in evolution theory and theology, although there is still a healthy population of Slashdotters who remain in the original two categories, some of which have made a sideways move into the exciting hobby of finding new ways to misspell "Windows" and "Microsoft."

    That's about what's happened to Slashdot while _I've_ been around....
    --
  • But do you really want your mother playing Quake, and possibly getting fragged by her? ...when you're supposed to be doing your homework? Heh. :)

  • Re:They have the right idea (Score:3)

    by Nat Lanza ( 952 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @06:20AM (#1687622)
    It's not just them -- pretty much all of the Interactive Fiction community cares a lot about cross-platform compatibility. It may be a small community, but the people in it use a freakishly large range of systems. Because of this, most of the IF developments systems use specialized languages that compile to platform-independent bytecode.

    The most well-known of these is Inform [demon.co.uk], a language written to produce bytecode for the Z-Machine, which is the virtual machine that Infocom used for their classic adventures. So, if there's a z-code interpreter available for your machine (which there almost certainly is), you can play all of the old Infocom games and most of the new Interactive Fiction games with it. Inform has some bitmap graphics capability, but few games use it -- most of the ones that do were written by Infocom (Zork Zero, Shogun, Arthur, and Journey).

    There's also TADS [tela.bc.ca], the Text Adventure Development System, which is somewhat similar to Inform but not as well known. This might be because it used to be shareware. TADS interpreters are also available on a wide range of systems, but not all of the interpreters handle all of the fancy new TADS features, like styled text, sound, and graphics. HUGO, the system mentioned here, is generally thought of as the third of the big three IF languages -- it's not quite as popular and not quite as ported. It's still a good language, though, and it's great to finally see a Linux port of the environment.

  • XFree 4.0 will have the direct rendering infrastructure. This will allow hw-accelerated windowed and full screen OpenGL (Mesa actually, but hey...) for any card with drivers ( TNT, matrox and 3dfx are likely to be in at the start)
    The GLX code in the new release will also allow network-transparent OpenGL - i.e. you can run hardware-accelerated OpenGL programs /across the network/, running the program on one machine, and using the hw accleration on the computer you're displaying on.

    OpenGL is an excellent 2D and 3D graphics api, much better than directx. (yes, though most people hear of opengl for 3D, it's fine at 2D too...)

    OpenGL /is/ very fast, very easy to program for,
    There is also the persistent myth that X is slow.
    - well, across a network it wouldn't be fast, but X has had shared memory extensions for years for accelerating local clients, and DGA for fullscreen 2D rendering. It's /not/ slow.

    q3test for linux is already running great on my voodoo banshee, thanks to Daryll Strauss' efforts (glide.xxedgexx.com) It uses the Mesa OpenGL api running on top of the linux glide port.



    check out www,precisioninsight.com and www.xfree86.org


    More worrying is sound... perhaps ALSA will result in better sound support. I still miss AHI on the amiga. but then again, the amiga was near-realtime ( by sacrificing such luxuries as memory protection...d'oh!), so latency problems were much smaller.




  • and, according to the site, uses wxWindows as the graphics toolkit.
  • Well, since this thread is about Hugo, a program
    for writing Interactive Fiction (text adventures,
    to the rest of you), I don't think you can get too
    far from the CLI. Of course, Hugo (as well as
    TADS and Inform, it's competitors) allows both
    graphics and sound, so a gui is nice too. Maybe
    it's time to compromise?

  • The licensing for those that are concerned (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For those that are concerned about the issues concerning free software, be advised that this product may not meet your needs. It's "without cost" software, not free software. While the results of the compiler are licensed according to the writer of the game, the library required to use them is nonfree. It reads:

    The use of the Hugo library files and the distribution of the
    Hugo Engine are authorized so long as all transactions are
    non-commercial and free of charge (except in cases where any
    charge is to cover the cost of distribution), and that the
    library files and engine are not distributed in a modified
    form.

    Innocent1 (Dalnet Irc, #Linux)

  • How Free? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 12, 1999 @07:05AM (#1687628)
    First, I'm very glad to see this, and will probably try it out.

    Second, I think s/he who writes the software can choose whatever license s/he wants.

    But I'm just trying to understand this license. It's at best contradictory. From http://www. ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/hugo/manuals/ manual.txt [ifarchive.org]:

    I.a. Legal Notes

    ...
    The use of the Hugo library files and the distribution of the Hugo Engine are authorized so long as all transactions are non-commercial and free of charge (except in cases where any charge is to cover the cost of distribution), and that the library files and engine are not distributed in a modified form.

    So, no distribution of modified versions, which means non-[libre-]free. But then there's section I.b., which says:

    I.b. (Less Legal Notes)

    ...
    The source to the Hugo Library, of course, cannot be distributed in modified form unless it is expressly indicated that it was a.) written by Kent Tessman, and b.) subsequently modified and distributed by someone else.

    First, that "of course" is just a bit silly, given the huge amount of truly open source software in the world today, including the Linux kernel itself. But regardless, these two statements are contradictory. A clarification needs to be made.

    And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to /.? -sigh-

    Flames to /dev/null.

  • Except I got a different error:

    hewx: error in loading shared libraries: hewx: undefined symbol: _9wxAppBase.m_appInitFn

    But then, I'm on Debian (Potato). Maybe there's some kind of library version incompatibility here. I dunno.

  • it should be fairly trivial to add multiplayer code

    I don't know, it's not just the language object model that needs to be made multiple-Player-Character aware, it's the library. I don't know enough about Hugo's library to comment accurately, but I expect it's (like most of Hugo) sort of like Inform and TADS, only cleaned up. And that would require more than just a simple bodge because the library contains a lot of game logic, and game logic is wildly different when there is more than one PC, especially on massively-multiple-PC MU** systems.

    I guess the reason for the difference is that a single-PC game is telling a story and knows a lot about what has happened so far; it can provide very specific responses which may aspire to being actual literature and that. Whereas a multi-PC game has far more possible states and cannot hope to give the same sort of response as single-player IF; its reponses are by necessity much more formulaic, and less suitable for story-telling.

    The exception, perhaps, is games that don't attempt to tell a story; simple collections of puzzles like the original Zork, Colossal Cave and so on. But it is still extremely difficult to design puzzles that can equally be solved by a single player or multiple concurrent players.

    So what I'm saying, I think, is that single-player IF is a sufficiently different beastie from MUD-style to make a common framework system for both not especially useful. And I don't think it's possible to design a satisfying text game that can work equally as a single- or multiple-PC experience.

    Unless anyone wants to prove me wrong...


    --
  • > and that the library files and engine are not distributed in a modified form

    - Binaries, for running the game

    > The source to the Hugo Library, of course, cannot be distributed in modified form unless ...

    - Source, for hacking with / improving

    Not contradictory, but still confusing
  • Went there in Windows, using IE 5.0, and all I get is a dead applet that's spewed out a java.lang.nullpointer exception.

    (Yeah, yeah, so I was in Windows. I only use my Windows partition for games and DVD's. And I just finished watching Tron, to myeahh)
  • Just curious, but did you get this? I know for awhile, Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II were in their catalog online, but they'd sold out of stock a year or two ago. And between those two collections, you had EVERY SINGLE Infocom game. More than the Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces.

    SIgh

  • I think that the story only made slashdot cause it got ported.
    You mean that the story only made it because it got ported to Linux. I submited a story about an announcement by Be Inc. that Shogo: Mobile Armor Division was being ported to BeOS. The port is even being done by the same company who makes the windows version. I figured this was a major step for the game industry because it showed a game company (Other than Id) that is going to make it's game for windows and an alternate OS in house instead of outsourcing it. But since the game was being ported to BeOS, and not to Linux, it wasn't good enought to be Slashdot material...

    PS: This will probably be moderated down as a Flamebait
  • >EVERY SINGLE Infocom game

    Not entirely true...

    There were a few non-IF games out of Infocom (some came out after Activision absorbed Infocom) that are not on the LTOI collections. "Frobiscky" (sp) was a multi-player party quiz game. "Quarterstaff: Tomb of Setmoth" was a graphical RPG for the Mac (I'd still give an arm for a copy of it.) And a Battletech game ("Cresent Hawk's Inception", I think) that was an overhead, turn-based RPG-like adventure game. I'm not mentioning Cornerstone or the dreadful InfoComics, but neither really qualifies as a "treasure" anyway.

    As a side note, the ads for Quarterstaff, my experience playing Cresent Hawk's Inception, and reading a description of Larn for the Amiga all led me to write what I now recognize as a Rouge-like for the Commodore 64 called "Orn", but by the time I got done with it, I was off of Q-Link and didn't think anyone on the Internet would want it.

    Towards the end of my C-64 days, I was spending a ton of time playing games from an IF-creation system that had been ported from Apple II, but I can't remember the name of it. The cool thing was that you could carry your character over from game to game. The bad thing was the parser sucked (verb/noun only). Ah, the good ol' days!
  • Apparently there was a problem with the binary linking to the latest wxGTK developer snapshot. That's been fixed and uploaded to ftp.gmd.de. The library used is wxGTK-2.1.0-b9 (so if you have something earlier chances are you'll have to get the latest and recompile if wxHugo doesn't run or build properly).

    It's in

    ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/incoming/hugov25_wxwin _linux.tar.gz

    and will migrate to /if-archive/programming/hugo/executables/.

    The reason for doing this in the first place (a Linux binary release) was to incorporate the fixed MikMod library (since a couple of important things are broken in the current release).

    Sorry for any inconvenience.

    --Kent Tessman

  • I've used Hugo in the past and it's a great system. Glad to see it finally has a good Linux port.

    Mycroft-X
  • Hugo is a nice system, great with a Linux port. I haven't actually played a Hugo system but I've studied it from a MUD coder's perspective and it has a lot of nice features. (Cool parsing, for instance.)
  • I'm curiuos:
    If there's already a "Unix version" where's the difference to the Linux version? Isn't Linux "Unix" enough for a unified Unix port? I really doubt that there are special Linux features that make sense to support for this kind of application.

    Sorry that I'm too lazy to download the different sources and make a comparison on my own :-)

    BTW: It's really cool that there's an Acorn port. Long live RISC OS! Reminds me of mame where sometimes the Acorn port was more uptodate than the Windows one.

  • This really looks like cool stuff, and a neat project.

    'Course, as anyone else who only uses Windows for games, anything that advances gaming on Linux is a very Good Thing (tm).

    I can't help but think a lot of people could use this to create some really amazing and fun things.

  • I hope the amount of linux games and gaming systems continue to flourish. The more games linux has, the more attractive and legitimate the average user will see it. This will encourage more people to buy and support linux software which will fund future development of more games, device drivers, and other projects. Round out the personal apps in development with games and linux can be a legitimate contender to MS at home.
  • Nethack is loads of fun. However, the best has got to be ADOM [www.adom.de]. It has many of the familiar "Rogue-like" game qualities, but feels more like a pencil-and-paper RPG than any of the others (IMHO)- there are multiple dungeons, quests, etc. I have lost far more hours than I care to admit trying to beat that game...
  • more games to fuel my crazed mind. I suppose this will make it easier for me to pull more from the ms ranks and make them join the resisitance. Viva!!
    char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
  • is it like a mud? could it be set up that way? that would rule, playing somthing like LOD on it.

  • They have the right idea (Score:3)

    by davidu ( 18 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @04:42AM (#1687649) Homepage Journal
    This is direct from their web site:

    Our software development takes place across a broad spectrum of computer platforms, helped by the highly valued contributions of talented individuals around the world.

    You can use our software on a wide variety of computer systems, including such leading-edge platforms as BeOS and Linux. Other supported operating systems range from Unix-powered workstations to Macintosh, Amiga to Acorn/RISC OS to OS/2, and even a couple you might have heard of from a company called Microsoft.

    I think they have the right atitude; they support as much as they can. They also support the open-source community. By supporting an enourmous number of platforms and involving outside developers this company seems to be doing well.

    I think we will see more companies use this type of model as more alternative OSs become popular.

    More platforms + more developers = better code and more users.
    -Davidu

  • Re:In search of "The Game" (Score:4)

    by Cactus ( 5446 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @05:15AM (#1687651) Homepage
    What you describe are IF (Interactive Fiction) games, and a big bunch of those use the Infocom ZipCode-format, which is a virtual machine that runs byte-coded games, and is therefore of course platform independent (can you say Java made in the 80's?). There are plenty of ZipCode interpreters for Unixen, the two most widely used are Frotz and XZip (sorry, no URLs this time, but there are nice Debian packages for both of them, look around at your local Debian mirror). A huge archive of IF games can be found at the GMD IF archive [ftp.gmd.de] (look for the files called .z{number}).

    A good place to hang around if you're into IF are rec.arts.int-fiction [rec.arts.int-fiction] and rec.games.int-fiction [rec.games.int-fiction].

    STD disclaimer: yes, my English is crap. But surely you can make something out of it...

  • I got into the whole BBS just as it was on the way out so I didn't get a chance to piss away 1000's of hours playing telnet adventures. The fact that I started out on the dark side of the OS world also made me think that text was boring. Since those early, misled days I have learned to love using a text interface, though using the web with lynx still isn't nearly as fun as with netscape... Anyways, for the past few months I have been searching for some cool text based adventure games that I could play locally (no multi-player necessary to make this kid happy). I want(ed) some games that use very little resources so that I that I have something to do while I'm waiting for something to compile. I have a fairly fast machine but I just don't want to have X sucking up any of my resources while I'm compiling something. I'm not creative enough to design a game in Hugo, but I can't wait to play some... In my search I came across adventure++ which looks like Hugo's old grandpa. Also, I found nethack, but have been unsuccessful at compiling it... Nethack sounds like exactally what I'm looking for, a text based local adventure game. I can't wait until somebody manages to build a little tetris game into vim...
  • I installed wxGTK-2.1.0-9.i386.rpm, downloaded hugov25_wxwin_linux.tar.gz, ran ./hewx, and got:

    ./hewx: Symbol `__vt_14wxImageHandler' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
    ./hewx: Symbol `__vt_13wxJPEGHandler' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
    Segmentation fault (core dumped)
  • Last week Kent Tassman posted on the wxWindows user list that he had developed a wxWindows port. I compiled it from source, using the current wxWindows cvs version as library and it worked fine. It's unfortunate that the wxWindows is currently in a beta cycle for 2.1, so the API changes somewhat from time to time.

    If you compile hewx from source (shouldn't take too long) you'll probably get it to work with a binary wxWindows rpm.

    I think it's worth it if you are into these games. I only gave it a short try, but the parser felt much more sophisticated than the infocom one.

    Finally, partly it's my fault. My debug wxWindows lib found a couple of small details that need to be fixed, but all last week I didn't find the time to send the author a bug report, let alone a
    fix.

    As an offtopic note (and shameless plug for wxWindows); touting the wxWindows port as a Linux port is a little beside the truth. wxWindows has bindings for gtk+, but gtk+ is hardly linux-only. It also supports Motif, Win32/16, with Mac and BeOS ports in progress.
  • I hear what you're saying. Me and my friend were all into the local dial-up BBS thing a few years ago. We played the BRE net (coincidentially we were always the most powerful empires) and.. oh what was that game, operation overkill!

    I still think text-based adventure games are the best kind. They're always so much more imaginative, and incidentially require a lot more imagination to play. They aren't limited by graphics and animations. You see with your mind, not your eyes.

    It's the same with books vs. Movies and television.

    Anyway, it'd be cool to get back into those games. Maybe soon. I just wish I weren't so busy! Hey, maybe I'll set up a BBS on my Linux box and play Operation Overkill with my friend over telnet ;)
  • Home use will amount to nothing if it doesn't have a nice GUI *WITHOUT* any need for the CLI at all.
    The Linux world's inability to address this issue will not give most people any reason to switch to Linux.

    The linux community IS making inroads in this respect. From the rumors of corel's beginner friendly installation to tools like linuxconfig to xdm to the redhat xwindow package installation system to the file managers... Granted, it's going to be tough to completely eliminate the need for a command line but the CLI is still the most powerful way to do system maintainance amongst other things. It's not quite ready for primetime yet but given the current momentum not only in the marketing and buzz of linux but also in the development, I think we'll be there within a year from now. When we reach that point, it'll only serve to increase game and application development for linux which will attract more people...
  • go to www.opengl.org and compare that to the DOS of 10 years ago. libGGI is a lot less of a pain in the ass than the VBE(or god forbid, before VBE). The only place linux is really lacking in terms of APIs for games is something like Window's DirectSound3D, and the more advanced extensions to it.
  • Hmmm. Thank you both!

    But your answers were not very satisfying for me, neither X11 nor wxWindows [wxwindows.org] is Linux specific. (wxWindows even runs on Win32).

    Ok.
    I've downloaded the sources and all I can tell now: There's nothing that qualifies it as "Linux" version, so talking of a new "linux port" is very missleading IMHO. On Unix systems you now have the choice of a command-line only, a Glk (if this library/toolkit is available for Unix...) or a wxWindows versions. That's it.

    I'm currently trying to build wxWindows/gtk (for hewx) on my machine. But after ages of compiling I had to see that it doesn't like gtk-1.2.4 I have on my system :-(. So I've install gtk-1.0.6 as well and started over.

    But then I noticed that hewx needs wx/caret.h wich wxWindows 2.01 (the latest stable release) doesn't have. }:-( - Argh! (The BUILD file of hewx tells you that it was developed with wxWindows 2.1 snapshot 8).

    Since I'm too lazy and tired now to get a newer developement snapshot of wxWindows and (try to) compile it a third time (it really needs a lot of cycles!) I give up for today...

    I really hope that my time was not completely wasted and this keeps other people from falling into the same pitfalls like me:-)

  • The situation's not really as bad as some people are making out

    DGA solves most of the basic "Make the GUI go away and give me 2D graphics with non-jittery pointer stuff" problems which were a complete pain just two or three years ago (remember crashes in SVGAlib Doom!)

    OpenGL solves all your 3D niceness (yes, even extensions, though some stuff like the T-buffer may be too gimmicky for OGL)

    The sound stuff is a bit of a mess, I admit, and while the OSS APIs were OK in an era when DOS games rolled their own DMA code I look forward to seeing something better from future Linux dists, perhaps ALSA?

    Aside from the inevitable "Huh?" questions you get on any new platform, porting to Linux looks pretty OK to me. 90% of publishers just don't give a damn (they often feel the same way about NT) and that's fine, but don't blame their financial decisions on Linux.

    Nick.

  • ALSA and latency (Score:3)

    by Bill Currie ( 487 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @09:32AM (#1687661) Homepage
    From what I've gathered by following the alsa-dev mailing list, they've gotten latencies down to arround 2ms max using Ingo's patch (sched? timer? can't remember the details of what it's for) and some optimisations in alsa itself. Most of their work seems to be currently concentrated on midi timers, but I beleive they were also discussing sound samples/effects as well. Alsa and Linux are gaining (soft?) real time capabilities and are slowly making RTLinux needed only for true hard RT applications and BeOS less relevant (not meant as a troll, but when Linux and BeOS get similar multimedia performance, BeOS loses it's standing as `the multimedia os' and becomes required only by BeOS enthusiasts (more power to them, viva la diference)).
  • Java's slowness is only partially due to problems with the JVM implementation. Mostly it's because Java is inherently slow 'cause it's interpreted bytecode. Which is fine for a lot of things but not particularly great for arcade style games. Basically, to get acceptable performance in, say, an FPS, you need a hardware specific implementation of the rendering engine, if for no other reason than it's the *fastest* kind.

    All that said, this type of game might lend itself nicely to a Java implementation. I haven't played it yet but it looks like 2D graphics and text. The mild Java slowdown ought to be acceptable for things like language parsing.
  • They might be just acronyms to you, but I've written code for all of the above APIs. Let me tell ya something; if you don't care that the APIs are not from MS (DirectWhatever), then Linux is just as good for game development, excluding 3D sound support, which I mentioned. The moderation worked perfectly, the origional poster though that writing games for linux was like writing games for DOS. This is obviously untrue, as anyone who has written code for both systems can tell. I pointed people to resources to actually learn about these APIs, so they would not make incorrect, unqualified statements like the origional posters, and yours.
  • The average user does NOT play text adventures.
  • That's right, it doesn't currently work under IE, only Netscape and Appviewer (If you notice I *did* say that it's playable over the web, "under netscape"). Unfortunately, the IE JVM doesn't seem 100% compatible with Sun's JVM (no surprise there, really) and I am lost to determine what is causing the NPE - although I have a feeling it has somethign to do with an anal security model (which actually would be a surprise)

    If you're still interested, give it a shot under netscape...
  • The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition [textfire.com] is now in its 5th year and each year there are more entries with 90% of them being either TADS or INFORM/Z-code, all Linux friendly formats. Too late to enter this year but the contest starts the 30th. See you there, with my crappy games. I'm rybread. www.ifarchive.org has gigs of interactive fiction stuff. Here [ftp.gmd.de], to get you started, last years Inform entries! Acid.z5 is mine. It's a big in-joke.
  • Wait, Win95 has a "broad selection of industry recognized multimedia standards"? I see OpenGL and DirectX being the only ones used today. Not exactly a broad selection. And DC has WinCE and Sega's proprietary thing, so no broad selection there, either.

    Developers don't want a broad selection of standards, they want one standard, so they only have to support one driver. If the Linux world wants to see more games, then it needs one good API for graphics, and one good API for sound (how about Alsa [alsa-project.org]?). In particular, fast graphics in X is a requirement.

    Of course, the thing that will really draw the game companies is more users. Without users, APIs are useless. X needs to be really easy to setup for a wide variety of graphics cards and monitors before there will be more users. The basic Linux install has gotten quite easy, but the X configuration still needs work.
    ---
  • The UNIX version, as far as I know, was a text only console engine. The Hugo platform also allows for optional graphics, sounds, and mouse interation, and these are now available in the new Linux version which runs in X11.
  • I know this was a flamebait but, to tell the truth, you are basically correct. Currently, Linux lacks any widespread standard for creating high performance games.This situation reminds me of early 1990s on Windows 3.11 and DOS. There were nice games back then but every game company had their own way of doing things which resulted in terrible headache for the customers ( dozens of different autoexec.bat files etc..)
    It has to change and it has to be done at the OS level ( possible XFree 4.0 will bring some sort of solution, don't know much about that yet - will see)

  • For those who are interested in IF (Interactive Fiction) Engines, you might want to take a look at the COG Engine, a Java-Based, GPL'd Online Gaming Engine that will let you play your games via the web, through netscape:

    http://cogengine.linuxbox.com
  • No, we need more games that are multi-platform. Imagine, an online game, lets say Quake2, ported over to *every* OS, it would be a wonderful thing Im sure. Everybody and their mother could play it, thats GREAT! As its going, I really hope to see more stuff like this come out in the future. Hell, Quake3 and Descent2 are being ported to BeOS, least I got THAT going for me. Judg3
    *******
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Plus hardware support. "The average user" probably has very wierd hardware in their computers (generally, all-on-motherboard type deals, winmodems, etc).

    More games for Linux == good. Linux drivers for wierd hardware so people can use Linux games == even better.

    Hopefully, soon there will be Linux drivers for everything a company makes. Be it software modems, integrated devices, odd-interface devices, etc.
  • I know this may be blasphemy, dunno, (or flamebait? I hope not), but I remember one of the first games I really loved (besides the el-cheeso games I played on my Tandy) was Oregon Trail, runnin' off a good ol' 5 1/4 disk. (woo hoo!)


    I _know_ you guys remember that game. For some reason, I just thought it was cool.. I'd play that thing for hours. (ok, not _that_ long, but..)

    just browsing through the recesses of my mind...
  • One thing to point out is that IF games typically are not open source... perhaps because there isn't the demand because the games are often only written by one person and the source code would give the game's solution away :)

    I suppose there would be a lot of reusable code and good working examples of how to implement puzzles, though...
  • Has anyone running Debian Potato got any luck yet? (Or have they established what the problem is?)
  • I think you mean 'Spider and Web'. And yeah, it's a great game.

    There are several mirrors of the ftp.gmd.de archive in the US -- you might try http://ifarchive.org [ifarchive.org] for a nice web-based mirror.

    Also, there are a variety of review sites for IF to help you choose a game you'd like. My favorite is Baf's Guide [wurb.com], which has nice capsule reviews and good subject indexes.

  • Do you have any opinions on the system? How difficult would it be to learn to use, in your opinion?

    I wonder about stuff like this, because on one hand it can be very useful to let artists concentrate on the content of the game. On the other hand, it can constrain a game. I mean, if you look at some of the best games around, most of them don't really have the same or very, very similar engines. They share some characteristics, but in large part they're different.

    I don't know if you'd ever see a really successful game come out of this type of engine. I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.

    Sujal

  • There's almost no twiddling required -- the PC version of the Infocom games tend to have an interpreter and a .dat file for each game. The .dat file is the z-code for the game; just feed it to your favorite interpreter and it'll work fine.
  • Looking at a review for "Oregon Trail" which the 25th anniversary edition is selling for $70, it hit me that using Hugo or something similiar would be an excellent application for free educational software that will run on the old warhorse machines under Linux.
    http://www.currents.net/magazine/texas/612/gmrv6 12.html
    http://new.shoptlc.com/corpproduct.asp?corp=1
  • It is easy to support this kind of game. Try doing something more graphic intensive and you will see that , in this regard, Linux is nothing but the headache for the developers.
    We are in the position DOS based games developers were about 10 years ago ...
  • That's exactly what I said: "one good API for graphics". DirectX is an API. Linux and X don't have a good, fast, standard API, AFAIK. That's what it needs.

    Does anyone know what development is going on in this area?
    ---

  • Great to see some Interactive Fiction coverage. (Score:4)

    by Torbjörn ( 1956 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @05:59AM (#1687689)
    Most people seem to assume that the text adventure died with Infocom, makers of such classic games as the "zork" series. But it has lived on and improved in secluded parts of the internet. On the way it changed it's name to Interactive Fiction, and now we have advanced systems such as Inform, TADS and Hugo. Games produced now by amateurs for free and with no compensation other than recognition among their peers (why does this seem familiar;-) ) are now approaching and in some cases even surpassing the old masters. I especially like playing these games on my Palm V. That way I can snuggle up with it in bed, like I would with a good book. Try doing that with Quake 3!

    If anyone is interrested in interactive fiction I can recommend the online fanzine xyzzy news http://www.xyzzynews.com/ [xyzzynews.com]

    And to those complaining of the lack of graphics and 3D, I suppose you never read books either! To paraphrase an old quote,"Interactive Fiction has the best graphics in the world, your own imagination."

  • 2? Interesting? What's new here that isn't a "given" or in the article?

    Sometimes I wonder about my dear Slashdot.
  • It is not designed to be inherently multiuser. However, if the player is also treated as an object (like all the "other characters" are), then it should be fairly trivial to add multiplayer code. It depends on how elegantly coded it is. If everything about the player is object-oriented (interface, location, posessions, etc.), then it would only require adding more players and a way to interface with it.

    The main problem with making it multiplayer is the possibility for graphics. If it's in text-only mode, though, then it could be connected to with a simple telnet (as MUDs generally are).
    ---

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