The state of Linux gaming [LWN.net]

October 6, 2010

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

All work and no play makes for unhappy users. For Linux users, finding satisfying games to play can be a challenge, though not an insurmountable one.

History and Failed Attempts

Many have hoped to replace Windows and other proprietary desktop systems with Linux, so it has naturally been a focus of many commercial and community efforts over the years to target Linux as a gaming platform. Many, if not most, of these efforts have failed or have only enjoyed a modest amount of success.

Consider, for instance, Loki, which struggled and ultimately failed in its bid to port Windows games to Linux. The company landed several major publishing deals to port major (at the time) games to Linux. It brought very popular games to Linux, including Unreal Tournament, Sid Meyers Civilization, and (this author's favorite) Quake III Arena. Despite providing a decent selection of popular and current games for Linux, the existing Linux desktop market in 2000 and 2001 was simply too small to support the company — and the existence of a selection of popular games was not enough to drive adoption of Linux.

One of Mandrake's (eventually Mandriva) unsuccessful products was a Gaming Edition based on Mandrake 8.1. The Gaming Edition added TransGaming's WineX to help install Windows-based games, and a copy of The Sims. Despite being only slightly more expensive than buying The Sims standalone, the Gaming Edition didn't merit a repeat and Mandrake never released a second attempt.

WineX was a customized version of Wine optimized to play Windows games. Eventually that became Cedega, which is still in active development and competes with the, similarly Wine-based, CodeWeavers CrossOver Games.

All of these efforts were or are proprietary in whole or part, and derivative of existing efforts. They were either porting proprietary games to Linux, or enabling proprietary Windows-based games to run on Linux. But several projects are also trying to bring quality, native, open source games to Linux.

Going Concerns and Native Efforts

Finding games for Linux is not difficult, particularly if one seeks only simple puzzle, card, or board game analogs on the computer. For example, GNOME and KDE each ship a handful of simple games that provide ample amusement during conference calls or to while away a few minutes between more productive tasks. Users who enjoy card games, Mahjong, Sudoku, Chess, and other similar games will find the selection much to their satisfaction.

But users looking for games that are competitive with more complex, immersive, arcade-style games that one can find easily on Windows will come up with just a handful. For example, Armagetron is a multiplatform game that takes its cue from the lightcycles in Tron. Several games have been developed based on the GPLed engine released by id Software from Quake III Arena, like OpenArena, Nexuiz/Xonotic, World of Padman, Tremulous, and ioquake3.

Players who enjoy role playing games and multiplayer action have found Battle for Wesnoth to be particularly satisfying. Other players prefer old DOS games reimagined, such as Scorched 3D, or clones of Super NES games like the addictive Crack Attack! Aspiring air guitarists might enjoy the Rock Band clone Frets on Fire, which lets players test their virtual guitar skills via the keyboard.

Ryzom was a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that went through a long journey before being released as open source. After various campaigns starting back in 2006, it was finally released as free software in May. Ryzom looks to be under active development and if you poke around long enough on the developer site you can find the install instructions for getting it running on Linux.

Another MMORPG is WorldForge, which has been under development since 1997. It seems to be a fairly active community with plenty of development going on. It's no substitute for World of Warcraft, as it is under active development, but it does look like something that will provide a rich environment for many styles of MMORPGs down the road.

Bundling Linux games

Still, Linux doesn't quite match Windows for games in terms of variety or quality. One can find a handful of quality games for Linux if you are willing to look, and certainly enough to while away a few weekends or evenings in front of the computer, but hard-core gamers are going to be dissatisfied. The latest and greatest blockbuster games usually don't run on Linux.

Casual gamers will fare better if they can find Linux games. Users who are new to Linux and searching for games can have a hard time discovering suitable games for their tastes without guidance. It helps to have a unifying project that pulls together a selection of games, such as the Fedora Games Live DVD, a "spin" of Fedora that focuses on Linux gamers.

The Fedora Games Spin serves several purposes. First, it's good test disc to see whether hardware is suitable for 3D gaming on Linux. It also, of course, bundles many native Linux games that are fully free software. Not only the standard-issue arcade and FPS-type games are included, but games suited for kids, and flight simulators as well.

The full list of games is available on the Fedora Wiki. The current release is based on Fedora 13, and it is the third release since the project started with a spin based on Fedora 11. The DVD doesn't actually contain all games that are packaged for Fedora, but a selection that the spin team feels is most representative of the best gaming on Linux.

Another showcase effort is produced by Linux-Gamers.net. Like the Fedora spin, live.linux-gamers.net (the name of the distribution) is a live image that can be booted from CD, DVD, or USB key. Based on Arch Linux, the live CD contains fewer games than the Fedora spin, and focuses primarily on action games, rather than also including educational content.

There's a new site for Ubuntu users called Ubuntu Gamer that provides tips and news about Linux-based games. The site has only been up for a bit over a week, but it's off to a strong start.

What seems lacking is any concerted effort to encourage more game development on Linux and open source platforms. While you can find plenty of games on Linux, they do lag significantly behind offerings for Windows and the popular gaming consoles in terms of production values, and maturity of the gaming engines. Developers can find resources via pygame if they're interested in writing games in Python, but there's little specifically encouraging game development on Linux.

Mozilla Gaming

As users turn to Web-based applications in larger numbers, it seems natural that they would look to Web-based games as well. In fact, many already do in the form of (annoying) Facebook games like Farmville, Flash-based games, and multiplatform plugins like Quake Live. Linux users are on equal footing here, since these browser-based options are all supported on Linux as well as Windows and Mac OS X. Linux users on non-x86 platforms, however, are left behind because the games are tied to proprietary pieces that run only on x86/x86-64 Linux systems.

The Mozilla Project is attempting to encourage development of Web-based games using "open Web technology." The Mozilla Labs Gaming project was announced in early September, and kicked off with a contest launched on September 30th.

Dubbed "Game On 2010," the contest calls for developers to create a game using open Web technology, which is defined as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side code that can be PHP, Python, Java, and other languages. No plugins are allowed. The games will be judged on six criteria, including the game's polish, aesthetics, how original the game is, and whether it showcases the "power of open Web technologies." Submissions are due by January 11th, 2011, and winners will get a trip to the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on February 28th.

Aside from the contest, though, the Mozilla Labs Gaming project is little more than an idea. Whether it will pick up steam remains to be seen. It should be interesting to see what the contest produces, but it would be nice if the labs project at least had some developer resources or guidance for getting started on developing browser-based games.

For now, Linux remains a poor cousin to Windows when it comes to gaming. While you can find many good games for Linux, the selection and quality are not comparable to the thousands of titles available for Windows and proprietary gaming consoles. If browser-based gaming takes off, it seems likely that Linux users will be on even footing with Windows and Mac users.

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The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 8:08 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

The list of Open Source games in the article mentions some of the best known examples, those that have achieved a good degree of popularity. However, I've found a lot of Open Source games that look *really* good, and that nobody seems to know about:

- A group called "Parallel Realities" made three high-quality cross-platform games: "Project: Starfighter", a free-roaming space shoot-em-up with a story; "Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid", a huge and excellent platforming game, and "Blob and Conquer", a 3D platformer set in the same universe as Metal Blob Solid. They keep coming out with new games as well, and everything they produce looks great.

- Another good platformer: "Alex4", designed to look like an old minimal-color Game Boy games.

- In the same spirit as Crack Attack, "Angry Drunken Dwarves", an action/puzzle "drop things in a field and clear them based on some simple mechanic" game.

- "Balazar Brothers", an impressive 3D puzzle game

- "Bloboats", a side-scrolling action game with fun physics.

- "bzflag", (fairly well-known, an exception in this list); a 3D multiplayer action game, driving around in tanks and trying to blow each other up.

- Several great shoot-em-ups with many nice mechanics, variations, and difficulties: Chromium B.S.U., Critical Mass, Overgod, Mu-Cade, Kobo Deluxe, Trip on the Funny Boat, Solarwolf, rRootage, Rockdodger, Torus Trooper, Titanion, Powermanga, and Tumiki Fighters.

- "Which Way is Up", and "Holotz's Castle", both puzzle/platform games.

- "Trackballs", roughly similar to Marble Madness but with more unusual environment features.

- "Raincat", a game much like the old "Incredible Machine" rube-goldberg games, where you place strange items to help keep a cat safe and dry. Early state of development, has relatively few levels but many fun mechanics, and still very fun to play.

- "Qonk" and "20000 Light-Years Into Space", both fast tower-defense or simple strategy games.

- "Pydance" and "Stepmania", both variations on DDR dance-pad games.

- "Neverball" and "Neverputt", 3D puzzle/platform/action games based on rolling a sphere around a world and trying to reach the goal without falling off. Combines physics, precision, and (for Neverball) reaction-time.

- "Pathological", an action/puzzle game.

- "Hex-a-hop", a very challenging take-as-much-time-as-you-want puzzle game.

- "Magicor", a platform/puzzle game based on sliding blocks of ice around to put out fires. (Despite what it sounds like, no similarity to sokoban.)

- "Endgame: Singularity", a simulation/tech-tree game about the sentient AI trying to learn and grow while not getting discovered by humans.

- "Freedroid", an action/arcade game: take over or destroy successively more powerful roving robots on a derelict ship.

- "Freedroid RPG", a single-player role-playing dungeon-dive (non-roguelike) game with nice graphics.

- "Hedgewars", a multiplayer online version of Worms: blow up your fellow hedgehogs with comical and overpowered weapons.

- "Zaz", a graphically impressive action/puzzle game based on grabbing and throwing colored spheres with the mouse; unusually non-rectangular for the genre, very curvy.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 12:48 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And for those of us who like our nostalgia updated, Oolite is perhaps the best Elite ever produced, extensible to boot, and with a decent 3D card with shader support can look stunning as well. (Its hardware requirements are... quite a bit bigger than old-style Elite's, though. But if you've ever hankered for the fabled ArcElite with its independently-running solar systems, this gives you that.)

Oh, and it's free software of course, as well as proof that the Mac and Linux communities can do great things if they work together (it's a GNUstep+SDL+OpenGL app).

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 18:40 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

I think it's worth adding FreeCol to this list, a surprisingly complete clone of Colonization. It's less well known than FreeCiv despite being at least as complete.

GL-117

Posted Oct 11, 2010 11:19 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

GL-117: A nice 3D flight simulator-style shooting game. The site http://www.heptargon.de/gl-117/gl-117.html indicates further development has been abandoned, but at least the version in Mandriva repositories works fairly nicely, even on my trailing-edge Radeon 9200 card, when the detail setting is reduced a bit.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 15, 2010 18:55 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Your list's good and most of those games actually seem to be included to the Fedora games spin linked in the article:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Games_Spin

It also lists some good games that you missed. :-)

Some of the games you list aren't included (even to whole Fedora) due to licensing reasons:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Games#List_of_games_we...

Of the ones that you list, e.g. following very good & polished games which are in Debian seem to be missing from that spin: neverputt, hex-a-hop, openttd (is in Debian in contrib although license says GPL?).

I might include to the "Good Games" list also following games available in Debian (i.e. compatible with Fedora policies), but not listed by you nor included into Fedora Games spin:

- "XBoing", 2D Breakout or "Briquelo", 3D Breakout
- "Tomatoes", 3D multiplayer "dynamiting in dungeon" game
- "Monsters", variant on Crack Attack
- "Luola", multiplayer "cave-flying/fight"
- "Xpilot", networked multiplayer "cave-flying/fight"
- "Barrage", bomb everything in sight
(when you have only couple of minutes...)
- "Tower Toppler", "Nebulus" clone

Regarding last one, there are also some nice children games like "CircusLinux".

Many years ago this was also fun, but it's not anymore included into distros: http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/AndyBattalion.html

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 17:04 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

The fact is, games are not different from any other software. You get many times more silent users that will never give anothing back than peple that actively contribute, and that should be fine (human nature, you can do nothing about it).

And you answered to the first part of your comment yourself. Current FLOSS games use a componentized approach. Some people develope the engines, others create the ambient art, and yet others write the stories and think of challenges. One has many opportunities to contribute in any or all of those differents aspects of a game.

As with any other aspect of FLOSS, the more people that joins the culture, the better stuff we will get.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 18:56 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I'd say that developing a game is often like writing a work of fiction. That's not to say that community participation isn't possible, but it does mean that it's not the same sort of interaction.

Open source developers can write KOffice, but it would be crazy to have KDE manage the documents that people write in KOffice. Wikipedia works on a very different development process from MediaWiki. Open source can provide the game engine and could provide the world and environment in which games could take place, but playing a game involves consuming content which is established as "canon", and that's inherently a process that's append-only once something is established.

Of course, there are also games which have little content and a lot of structure, like Street Fighter, Tetris, or Go. These work well for open source development. And there are sorts of content-heavy games where the tool support is sufficient that authors can take turns writing and releasing their games, which can be closed-source releases for portable open-source platforms. But there is, in general, something different going on from what happens when people write applications.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 19:17 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> I'd say that developing a game is often like writing a work of fiction. That's not to say that community participation isn't possible, but it does mean that it's not the same sort of interaction.

As someone involved in amateur drama, I would think that community participation ought to work well. You just need your equivalent of the director, who provides the overall artistic direction and makes sure that everyone's contributions come together to form a consistent whole. (I have also taken part in productions with no director, in which everyone shared that responsibility, but that is a much greater challenge.)

> Open source developers can write KOffice, but it would be crazy to have KDE manage the documents that people write in KOffice.

Not quite sure what you mean by that. I would love to see KOffice limited to the actual editing, with all else pushed to other KDE components (open this document, manage recent documents, whatever) but that is probably not what you had on your mind.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 19:50 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

As someone involved in amateur drama, I would think that community participation ought to work well.

It's not that a community can't do it. But you don't incorporate audience feedback into a production once it opens. The community you start with does a particular production, and the audience can join for the next production. So an open source game community is like a theater troupe, rather than like the cast of a single production; your new energy mostly gets directed to the next episode.

Open source developers can write KOffice, but it would be crazy to have KDE manage the documents that people write in KOffice.

By this, I meant that, when you write a story in KOffice, the KDE team doesn't decide whether to reject or accept the changes you're making to your paper. They provide the tools for you to edit your content, and the content is under your exclusive control. With a game, what the player often gets is something like a story embedded in KOffice. After playing the game, the player might sensibly fix the functional aspects (similar to fixing KOffice to make it more pleasant to read your story) but it doesn't make so much sense to change the content aspects.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 20:11 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> It's not that a community can't do it. But you don't incorporate audience feedback into a production once it opens. The community you start with does a particular production, and the audience can join for the next production. So an open source game community is like a theater troupe, rather than like the cast of a single production; your new energy mostly gets directed to the next episode.

Right, I take your point. That is not always strictly true of course, as you may well put on subsequent shows after the first run, and since that usually means replacing the half of the cast who are no longer available, you can also end up reworking the production quite a bit. It is still a very controlled feedback though of course.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 7, 2010 19:20 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> The fact is, games are not different from any other software. You get many times more silent users that will never give anothing back than peple that actively contribute, and that should be fine (human nature, you can do nothing about it).

Perhaps you can do something about it. The harder it is to give back the less people are likely to do so, but if you do everything you can think of to lower the bar you might be surprised (I'm using "you" in the general sense of the word by the way). In the end, giving back is a rewarding process.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 9, 2010 22:20 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Procedural generation helps here. A good few long-lived free software games (notably Nethack and Oolite) have mostly or entirely procedurally-generated content, and lots of flexibility. That way, merely knowing what can happen isn't going to spoil the gameplay, because you never know when the game will choose to hit you with what, or in what combinations.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 12, 2010 14:58 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> Procedural generation helps here. A good few long-lived free software games (notably Nethack and Oolite) have mostly or entirely procedurally-generated content, and lots of flexibility. That way, merely knowing what can happen isn't going to spoil the gameplay, because you never know when the game will choose to hit you with what, or in what combinations.
Do you think that could also be applied to e.g. arcade or platform style games? It seems to me that it is only suitable for certain categories, but perhaps that is just my lack of imagination.

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 17, 2010 21:39 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You can certainly apply it to platform games: nethack is pretty much just a platform game turned on its side. A lot of arcade games have always been procedurally generated (the real exception here is R-Type, in which the aliens always arrived in the same order and position every time). The only domain I think you'd have no chance in is adventure games (which unfortunately seem to be a mostly dead category nowadays).

The state of Linux gaming

Posted Oct 22, 2010 16:55 UTC (Fri) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link]

Even in adventure games there is potential. I've played gearhead for a while (the console version), and it includes a "playwright" module which takes preprogrammed snippets of plot and weaves them into a storyline at the start of every game. It's still primitive (the patterns become predictable after 5-6 games) but I think the idea can go far.