LINUXGAMES

Version 0.6.0 of Odamex, a free software multiplayer DOOM engine source port, is now available. Changes include:

• slopes
• advanced voting system
• new netdemo format
• optimized mouse input
• network enhancements

Download: [ sf.net ]

Thanks to jaggerz for sending in the following!

You’ve covered Kickstarter projects for Linux games before (Vigrior, and coryholl’s big list, for example)… recently there has been a HUGE renaissance of old-school game developers bringing their goods to our favorite open-source OS.

Currently, the creators of the old-school Sierra On-Line Space Quest series, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (“The Two Guys from Andromeda”) have a campaign going for a spiritual successor to the beloved Space Quest series! It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and the Linux port is right there in their committment, from the beginning, no overfunding goal required.

These games are remembered for their self-deprecating humor, fourth-wall breaking metagame jokes, popular culture and science fiction references, and for turning gaming cliches inside out!

This campaign is also novel in a couple of cool ways; one, they are planning to turn HTML5 prototype demos at
each $100,000 mark; they’ve hit the first within two days, and release them at no cost on Google’s Chrome
App Market. The first HTML5 demo plays great with the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS packaged Chromium browser (I’m not currently using Chrome). They’ve also already polled for the second prototype to ask backers what they want to see next. I’ve never heard of any campaign so interactive in that way, supporting Linux out of the gate, and using standards-compliant web technology for truly cross-platform gaming demos!

Currently the project is called “Two Guys SpaceVenture“, as the final game title has not been announced yet.

Version 1.5.4 of Wine, this being the latest development release, has been announced. Changes in this release include:

• A new DirectSound resampled.
• A Negotiate authentication provider.
• OpenGL support in the DIB engine.
• Beginnings of support for .NET mixed assemblies.
• Support routines for Internationalized Domain Names.
• Various bug fixes.

Download: [ Wine 1.5.4 ]

infraRed let us know about his game project, gFifteen:

I coded a GTK+ based implementation of the old puzzle game Fifteen. It is a fun and challenging little diversion, with multiple attractive tile sets to choose from. RPMs and Debs are available for 32 and 64 bit platforms!

The Razer Nostromo is a gaming mini-keyboard that provides remapping of keys to any keyboard or mouse event. This is great; however, the drivers are only available for OSX and Windows. Not anymore, the jnostromo project aims to provide GNU/Linux drivers that provides E-Sport legal keymappings for Linux gamers everywhere. The feature set is similar to the official drivers with the elimination of macro’s.

Download the amd64 drivers here

Note, 32-bit drivers will be available in up-coming releases. Also, the configuration gui is cross platform capable. So check it out!

Thanks Conzar!

Thanks to arvd for sending this in!

FleetCOMM : Operation Vigrior is a Kickstarter indie game worth checking out. It’s a real-time strategy game introducing a novel gameplay mechanic. Instead of fumbling over disorganized blobs of units, the player controls a synchronized squad of ships.

They’ve been very supportive of Linux game development; they already have a Linux64 build out on Desura. The complete game can be obtained with a $10 Kickstarter pledge. For $15 you get the game and all DLC, expansions, future editions, etc. forever.

A live demo can be found here:

A new development release of Wine has been announced. This release being 1.5.3 has the following changes:

• Support for graphics bounds tracking.
• A number of fixes to the builtin Internet Explorer.
• Support for displaying ARM code in the Wine debugger.
• Various DirectMusic improvements.
• Better namespace support in MSXML.
• Various bug fixes

Download: [ Wine 1.5.3 ]

Phoronix’s Michael Larabel has posted a (somewhat defensive, given his past coverage) article relating his experiences at Valve Software, where founder Gabe Newell revealed that the lauded studio is actively porting both their game distribution platform Steam and a Source-engine title, Left 4 Dead 2, to Linux.

There’s (understandably) no current public ETA, but very cool nonetheless. Thanks to shyguy for the heads up!

There’s a new Humble Indie Bundle on the scene, just in time for Earth Day:

We’re debuting the brand new game, Botanicula, for Windows, Mac, and Linux! In Amanita Design’s latest adventure/puzzle game, you must guide a motley band of tree creatures in a journey to save their home from brooding, parasitic invaders.

Buying the bundle also gets you two more award-winning games from Amanita Design: Machinarium and Samorost 2. If you pay more than the average, you’ll receive Windosill, a charming point-and-click puzzle game by the interactive
animation studio Vectorpark, and Kooky, a Czech feature-length film with art direction by members of Amanita Design.

The games are DRM-free and soundtracks are included! Customers who choose to pay above $5 have the option of receiving a code to redeem the games on Steam.

You can also support nature conservation efforts by designating a part of your pay-what-you-want purchase to benefit the World Land Trust, an organization that works to protect rainforests and other wildlife habitats worldwide.

Here’s the word from Cheese!

Last month, I published a lengthy shallow analysis of the comparative purchase, revenue and average statistics for Humble Bundle promotions. I recently updated the article to include additional quotes from a top Humble Bundle contributor and explore some additional figures as well as the notion that the high Linux average may not be indicative of Linux users paying high amounts (exciting stuff!).

If you’re not into reading what I have to say, the article is also sprinkled with quotes from Humble Bundle contributors including Notch (Minecraft developer), Garry Newman (Garry’s Mod developer), TPJeff (of Team Phobic), ExpiredPopsicle (of Cryptic Studios), NimbleDave (of NimbleBit), Mt.Gox (a Bitcoin site whose CEO is excited about indie games), tantepose (a technology journalist with DinSide.no) and humlebrony (a community of My Little Pony fans).

Enjoy!

eihrul has announced Tesseract on the Cube Engine forums, which adds these features to the venerable FPS platform:

• deferred shading
• HDR rendering with tonemapping and bloom
• omnidirectional point-light shadowmaps
• sunlight cascaded shadowmap
• screen-space ambient occlusion
• screen-space water reflections (no more reflection plane limits)
• refractive alpha cubes
• refractive glass material

The actual code is at a github repository for the moment:
https://github.com/lsalzman/tesseract

See the README for some more details about running it.

The code is still under Zlib license.

The work on this code was done in collaboration with Benjamin Segovia over the last month or so.

The codebase is still in a state of high flux, so I would expect a lot of changes coming in the future.

The goal of all of this is not really to replace Sauerbraten and development on Sauerbraten itself will continue into the future. This is just a fork, a what-if experiment to see what it might look like if it dropped all concerns about compatibility and good performance on old hardware and just tried to modernize.

Tomes of Mephistopheles, a dungeon hack/slash game in alpha testing, is now at version 0.07a. Changes include savegame functionality and AI obstacle clearing. The patch is available by logging in to the Kot in Action E-Shoppe.

A new development release of Wine is now available. New items in this release includes the following:

• Improved naming scheme for audio devices.
• Better support for finding system fonts on Mac OS X.
• Beginnings of support for JPEG encoding.
• Several printing fixes.
• Improvements to the URL cache.
• Various bug fixes.

Download: [ Wine 1.5.2

A reader (thanks coryholl!) sent in the following compiled list:

At present the following game projects promising Linux versions are seeking funding at Kickstarters:
The Banner Saga
Bump N Brawl
The Earth: Battle for Survival- A Game of strategy
Gravitaz
Rebirth (?)
Shadowrun ReturnsNekro (?)
Wasteland 2

I know of the following funded projects which have promised Linux versions:
Double Fine Adventure
Proppa（プロッパ） (Linux version only available to backers?)
FTL: Faster Than Light

And the following game projects imply that a Linux version may be made in the future or added to the project should the project become sufficiently over funded:
BIONITE: Origins
Chuck’s Challenge 3D
Commander^3
The Dead Linger
fleetCOMM : Operation Vigrior
Jane Jensen’s Pinkerton Road: “A Year of Adventure”
Make Leisure Suit Larry come again!
Plague
Starlight Inception™
That’s Why You’re Not Ugly! – The Game
Yogventures!

Any missing? And what do you think about this new trend?

edit: arvd also posted this list in our comment section; thanks!

OpenGOO (wiki) has a new video update:

Features for the World of Goo clone now include SVG levels, background animation, and improved physics based on Box2d. The project is also looking for testers and other contributors.

Notch (of Minecraft fame) has posted screenshots from his next game, a space adventure project set in the far future, that game blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun has helpfully collected:

It’s worth bearing in mind that these screens represent a build so alpha it probably mostly exists as the dreams Notch’s computer has while in sleep mode. But there’s still fascinating details to be glimpsed here. Excitingly, the 16bit Basic computer seems to already be functional in 001, the blue screen displaying a happy little message about the keyboard working while being observed by shadowy floating balls.

The Liberated Pixel Cup, a contest to create openly-licensed game art, has been announced:

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game authoring competition being launched in cooperation between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt!

Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of this… but that will only happen if people like you get involved!

Technically the project will run in three phases. One of the major goals of the project is for the community to be able to produce content that’s stylistically consistent. To that end, “phase zero” of the project is to produce a style guide that people can work off to produce content that meshes together nicely, something along the lines of what the Tango style guide does for icons. We’ve been working with a few excellent artists to commission a base example set to build the style guide out of, and we’re fairly thrilled with where things are going!

Ensign-1, a space combat game where players can board other ships, has been released on Desura (thanks onionman!):

Ensign 1 is multiplayer space combat game that allows players to leave their ships on foot to commandeer turrets, and other starships. Players will also be able to purchase weapons, upgrades, and brand new ships.

We received the following press release today:

DarkForge is excited to announce Nekro – a twisted, dark and stylized summoning game on Kickstarter.com. Nekro is a game about conjuring evil minions and conquering empires in a randomly-generated world. Through Kickstarter, DarkForge is hoping to raise $100,000.00 to aid in the production of the game.

In Nekro, you play as a powerful necromancer summoning hordes of undead minions to do your bidding. Unlike a standard RTS, each creature you summon within the game is not under your direct control. Each unit will exhibit a handful of special behaviors unique to its playstyle. The challenge of the game comes from picking the right combination of summons for your situation. The world you explore is generated randomly, and offers a fresh experience with each play session. Nekro takes a different approach to the way modern crafting systems are handled by allowing players to “brew” spells they use in cauldrons. These special brews augment the game rules and allow players a very direct control over their experience. In Nekro, the world is always growing, expanding and changing, offering players a different challenge every time they play the game.

Nekro will feature:
-Stylized, randomly generated worlds
-Deep, situational summoning-based combat system
-Rich ‘brewing’ system for making new items and spells
-An ever-expanding world to conquer

DarkForge is a California-based group of industry veterans hailing from studios such as Sony, Microsoft, Blizzard and more. We have many years of experience making quality games and are looking forward to sharing our vision for Nekro with the world!

This post was submitted by NekroPenguin.