GamniX

Linux and Gaming: Full Steam Ahead

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:14:18 +0000

There’s been virtually continuous cause for celebration here in the Linux blogosphere over the last month or so, but it seems safe to say that few news items have caused quite as much jubilation as what greeted one tidbit last week, in particular. “It has taken longer than most anyone would have anticipated, but the fact remains that Valve is in fact creating a native Linux port of their Steam game distribution client and of the Source Engine to run natively on Linux,” read the announcement on Phoronix on Wednesday. Think gaming is trivial? Think again: In a matter of seconds, the topic was on fire on Slashdot and throughout the Linux blogosphere.

‘Widelands’ Updated

admin — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 10:51:04 +0000

Widelands is an open source real-time strategy game inspired by Settlers II.

In this game, you start out on a small piece of land with nothing more than a few of useful resources. Using those, you can build yourself an empire with many thousands of inhabitants. On your way towards this goal, you will have to build up an economic infrastructure, explore the lands around you and face enemies who are trying to rule the world just like you do.

Game Features

Four Worlds (Tile Sets) (Greenland, Winterland, Blackland and Desert)
Three Tribes (Barbarians, Imperials and Atlanteans)
Several playable single player (tutorial) missions
Maps for single and multiplayer mode
Save and load of single and multiplayer games
Ability to build a settlement from scratch
Military and warfare (Attacking, Training, defending, conquering of military buildings)
A map editor, to build your own maps and campaigns

A new version (build 17) of Widelands has been released bringing in lots of new features and fixes:

Basic sea-faring functionality
Improvements to the Editor
Multiplayer scenarios
Support for dismantling buildings
Support to adjust the number of wares in a building
A new in-game help system for many buildings (WIP)
Improved in-game statistics
Improved rendering engine
New maps, sounds, music, graphics & animations
Improvements to the usability and performance, as well as numerous gameplay improvements and bug-fixes
Full changelog here

Widelands for Window, Mac and source package for Linux can be downloaded from here.

You can install latest version on Ubuntu from PPA by running following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:widelands-dev/widelands-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install widelands

Unknown Horizons 2012.1 Release

admin — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 10:50:15 +0000

Heya everybody,
today we proudly announce our latest release: Unknown Horizons 2012.1! Almost on time, and we think fixing the last known crash was worth waiting a few days. Enjoy this great release!

Before we go into the details, we’d like to thank our friends at FIFE for releasing their newest changes prior to schedule, specifically for us – making this release possible. Cheers folks!

A short overview of the new features in 2012.1:

Usability and interface overhaul: especially these blog posts
Components and object files, as explained here
New buildings which are listed here
Multiplayer save/load
Status icons for buildings
Catastrophe system (currently implemented: fire)
An update checker that will inform you about newly released versions in-game

(You can check out the complete changelog here.)

As expected, packages for Unknown Horizons 2012.1 can be found in the download section of our website. Packages are available for Windows and many Linux distributions. Downloads for the remaining Linux distributions and OS X will be updated as they become available.

Known issues

Since Unknown Horizons is still under development, we left some minor hints in our release to indicate this

OpenGL – Support broken on certain netbooks – please stick to SDL in these cases. More information in our FAQ.
Fisher boats stay on the map after tearing: This is a feature, we will add a re-assign mechanism to other fishers later
The preview when placing an iron mine looks like placing a mountain
When rotating view, some buildings may get confused about their Z coordinates. Working on a fix here, stay tuned.

Return the favor

Please report any crashes or problems through our support page.

If you have feedback or ideas on how we can improve your gaming experience with Unknown Horizons, please also share them on our IRC Channel or the forums!

Want to help out but aren’t the coder type? Check out the list of open areas to tackle! Amongst other important tasks such as scenario writing, game design or balancing, we’d like to emphasise that Unknown Horizons is still in need for a lot of translation work.
We are adding more and more content from release to release. With pootle it takes seconds to start translating Unknown Horizons to your language! Visit out pootle translation server to get familiar with the system or go to our wiki page Translators Guide for more information. Contact us on IRC if your language is missing.
No matter if you want to help out with game design, writing, graphics, voice recording or programming: If you like UH, check our “Get involved” page!

If you like playing Unknown Horizons please consider donating to the project. This helps with paying our servers and to continue development. It also serves as a motivation to all team members

Have fun with 2012.1!
Your Unknown Horizons Team

StuntRally 1.6

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:44:31 +0000

The game features 79 tracks in 11 sceneries, 10 cars and a Track Editor.

It focuses on closed rally tracks with possible stunt elements (jumps, loops, pipes).

Full features list can be read here: link.

Releases

The latest Release version is 1.6 (19 Apr 2012) for changelog see: link.

Windows and Linux Releases are here: link. (Downloads on this page are old)

For Linux users see Wiki page Packages and Compiling (links left).

Be sure to read Hardware Requirements before downloading: link.

About

Car simulation is done by VDrift a great game by itself.

Rendering is done by OGRE, trees/grass by PagedGeometry, Gui by MyGUI.

The road is based on a 3D spline and it’s fully customizable in editor.

For more info, read the Wiki pages and Readme.txt file: link.

You can also visit us through IRC at #stuntrally on freenode (webchat) for a real-time chat or a multiplayer challenge.

Screenshots

Screenshots gallery (from all versions): link

Gameplay videos and editor tutorial are at: link

Free and Open Source RTS Game ’0 A.D.’ Now Available in Ubuntu Software Center [12.04]

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:43:17 +0000

0 A.D. is a free and open-source real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D.

The project is highly ambitious, involving state-of-the-art 3D graphics, detailed artwork, sound, and a flexible and powerful custom-built game engine.

OpenTTD 1.2.0

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:42:33 +0000

Cancel all your appointments, today we present you OpenTTD 1.2.0, the first stable release of the 1.2 series.

The additional RC release resulted in fixing a few more bugs, so you can enjoy this stable release even more. We thank you for testing, and finding and reporting these errors.

Have a lot of fun playing with all the new features. To download, point your browser to http://www.openttd.org/download-stable. There you can also find the full list of changes.

Have a lot of fun today, and remember to take some breaks to eat something every now and then.

Diablo Like Action RPG Game ‘Flare’ Now Available in Ubuntu Software Center [12.04]

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:41:53 +0000

Flare (Free Libre Action Roleplaying Engine) is a simple game engine built to handle a very specific kind of game: single-player 2D action RPGs. Flare is not a reimplementation of an existing game or engine. It is a tribute to and exploration of the action RPG genre.

Flare is currently in development. Though it is meant to be a game engine which can be used to create more games, it is turning out to be a full game in itself. Check out gameplay video:

Trigger Rally

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:36:19 +0000

A fast-paced single-player racing game for Linux

Download Trigger Rally 0.6

Packages available for Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, NixOS. OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and as Ubuntu PPA.

Talk about Trigger Rally at the forums and use the tracker to report bugs and feature requests. We also have a developer mailing list.

Get the development version via:
svn co http://trigger-rally.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/trigger-rally trigger-rally

To learn how to create new tracks, please read this tutorial.

Video: Pulp – Cars Can Fly

Video: Desert Rush

Arx Libertatis 1.0 “Bloody Gobblers!” released (2012-04-19)

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:34:02 +0000

After over a year of work we are proud to announce the first release of Arx Libertatis. While some minor graphical glitches remain, the game is fully playable on both Windows and Linux as well as other platforms. There are packages available for Windows and Linux. On other systems you may still be able to run the game by compiling the source code yourself.

Besides porting the game to SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL and the amd64 architecture while maintaining native Direct X backends, we fixed some performance issues with newer operating systems, added more configuration options and improved the interface scaling for widescreen resolutions. See the wiki for the full changelog.

But that does not mean that the work on Arx Libertatis is done. There is still much code to clean and features to add. Contributions, small or large, are welcome: Feel free to fork the project on github or join us in #arxfatalis on the Freenode IRC network.

PlayOnLinux 4.0.17 released

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 04:31:53 +0000

PlayOnLinux 4.0.17 has been released!
Here’s the changelog:

- Support for GoG games (www.gog.com)
- Support for MS-DOS games (with DosBox integration)
- PlayOnLinux checks that wine is run on a valid unix filesystem to avoid problems.
- Translations updated
- When you click on cancel button during an installation process, all windows programs are closed;
- Un bug corrigé au niveau de la sortie de wine qui causait des problèmes lors de la création de raccourcis
- playonlinux file.exe did not work with 4.0.16 on Linux. We’ve fixed it.
- Searching for .exe file is faster
- First use assistant can’t be canceled
- Bug fix in PlayOnLinux wineprefix’s logfile, which reported that a wine version was patched when it was not the case.

Download it from:

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/download.html