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Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

[Posted August 5, 2005 by ris]

NewsForge reviews the game Nexuiz. "Nexuiz is free software, so anyone can download, modify, and share it as they see fit. It's put together by volunteer programmers and artists, and for the most part they did a great job on it. The program itself is stable, and it worked on most of the distributions I tested it on. The sound and animation are decent, though not up to modern standards. Playing Nexuiz will give you a Quake 3-like experience in terms of gameplay, graphics, and sound."
to post comments

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 19:14 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (15 responses)

Why is this story here?

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 19:56 UTC (Fri) by jonth (guest, #4008) [Link]

Because it's an open source game that runs on Linux?

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 20:06 UTC (Fri) by marduk (guest, #3831) [Link] (11 responses)

Admittedly I haven't put too much thought into it, but it appears to be a news item related to Linux/OSS for which LWN has been known to post every now and then.

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 21:05 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (10 responses)

An announcement of a new game (or other program) that runs on Linux might merit mention, if it seemed particularly interesting. A decision by a game vendor to release Linux versions of future games coincident with other platforms would be news. Even Linus winning a gaming tournament might be news. A review of a (barely even mediocre) shoot-em-up hardly seems like news.

Did Slashdot reject the squib, and it ended up here?

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 21:18 UTC (Fri) by marduk (guest, #3831) [Link] (1 responses)

So because you don't find a particular item interesting should be considered when an article is worthy of being on LWN? Perhaps you should contact LWN directly; there may be a desire to have you on their staff.

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 23:33 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Slashdot ran a squib on June 3, when Nexiuz was announced. If it wasn't News then, what makes it News a full two months later?

Slashdot is much better at keeping up on the gaming milieu. Anyone interested in gaming certainly doesn't rely on LWN to keep current. LWN's strengths lie elsewhere, are unique, and won't benefit from lost focus.

Q.E.D., odd. Not criminal, not immoral, just odd. Maybe a headline like "Free Software Gaming's Corpse Twitches" would have have put it in context.

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 21:22 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, it wouldn't be news if it weren't for the fact that the whole Linux gaming scene has been utterly and completely moribound since the death of Loki Games. (Except for Wine stuff, which LWN does talk about.)

As such, anything going on in there may be interesting.

-Rob

Re: Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 22:48 UTC (Fri) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] (1 responses)

utterly and completely moribund since the demise of loki
  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
  • Enemy Territory?
  • America's Army?
  • Unreal Tournament 2004?
  • Doom 3?
That's a really wicked slam against icculus and others.

More:

Posted Aug 6, 2005 5:01 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

I'm glad this info was posted on LWN.

Posted Aug 6, 2005 9:36 UTC (Sat) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (4 responses)

Actually, I'm glad this info was posted on LWN, even if the game itself was panned.

Multiplayer first-person-shooters (FPS) are an incredibly popular genre. Here we have an FPS that (a) runs on Linux, and (b) is open source software; that's a rare combo. I haven't researched it, but it may be unique. Strategy games don't count, and I think many FPSers would think that tank games like BZFlag aren't the same thing either. FPSs aren't really my thing, but do not ignore them. They're an important market force; they are one of the commercial main drivers for today's graphics cards.

And frankly, I think the reviewer is a little harsh. I doubt the developers consider it "done", and as good as games 5 years ago, that's pretty darn impressive. People paid serious money to run the FPSs of 5 years ago.

I'm glad this info was posted on LWN.

Posted Aug 6, 2005 19:08 UTC (Sat) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

I guess uniqueness qualifies for LWN's attention. I had no idea that Doom 3 had not already been networked, years ago.

Readers over 40 might be equipped to understand this: http://cantrip.org/gamers-desiderata.html

I'm glad this info was posted on LWN.

Posted Aug 7, 2005 15:49 UTC (Sun) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] (2 responses)

Doom3 isn't open source... Yet... Given Carmack's history, though, there's
a high probability it WILL be one day... Already, Doom1/2 is, Quake1/2 is,
Wolfenstein3D is... And, Carmack has said he really wants to open source
Quake3 sometime RSN... So, this particular game in question is most
definitely NOT unique in being an open source first-person shooter that runs
on Linux... Linux has had FPS games running on it for as long as they've
existed, really... And, the inventor of the genre (id Software) has both
ported all of their commercial games to Linux, as well as eventually open
sourced them, after a few years... So, the talk about Linux not having many
FPS games available is highly strange, since that's really the ONE genre
that Linux has had an overabundance of, if anything...

I'm glad this info was posted on LWN.

Posted Aug 8, 2005 9:19 UTC (Mon) by pontus (guest, #3701) [Link] (1 responses)

'inventor of the genre' is a bit too much credit to id. Technically, Atari's Battle Zone from 1980 is a first-person shooter.

I'm glad this info was posted on LWN.

Posted Aug 8, 2005 10:23 UTC (Mon) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

I don't really think it's too much credit... Sure there may have been
previous games with a first-person perspective, and pretty much ALL games
tend to boil down to shooters of some sort... But, honestly, nothing
I'm aware of pre-Wolf3D is at all comparable to it and all of the games that
came after it... Ie: you're in the role of a lone gunman, running around
a map on foot, trying to survive, and seeing everything from the perspective
of the character... That's the modern first-person shooter genre, and I'm
really not aware of any pre-id games that fall into that category... Even
if there are, then id are at least the popularizers of the genre, if not
its inventors... Either way, they are the spiritual fathers of the genre...

Odd

Posted Aug 5, 2005 20:59 UTC (Fri) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe because the editors of LWN have been playing it 24/7 for the past week and now want to spank the readership?

That would be fun

Posted Aug 5, 2005 23:42 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Imagine the scene:

corbet: "Take that, ncm!"
cook: "Haha allesfreser, got you!"
bodnar: "Fragged again! Now what, Leon? Feel like writing another letter?"
ris: "You are undone, peace, and by the way are you too cheap to subscribe?"
zonker: "Who is this 'man_ls', and why does 'it' keep beating me?"

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 5, 2005 21:53 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

One little thing that people might find useful: if you're trying to run nexuiz on Mac OS X, you need to go into the .app package and make the actual program (nexuiz-sdl) executable (via chmod +x or equivalent). A rather odd slip, but once you do that, it runs fine.

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 6, 2005 12:09 UTC (Sat) by burdicda (guest, #10272) [Link] (5 responses)

Thank You LWN
I had not heard of it till now and slashdot is so quick that I sometimes
miss them..
I appreciate your efforts and that is why the second url I go to
following slashdot is here...keep up the good work..

I pay to read your sight but do not for slashdot...that say's something
doesnt it ???

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 7, 2005 12:25 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes. Slashdot sucks, it's pretty obvious. :)

And Linux gaming is perfectly healthy. It's a lot better off now then back in the loki days... Maybe if a few people didn't spend so much time dual booting into Windows to play games they'd know this. ;)

And Nexius isn't the only open source FPS that's been released lately (past 6 months or so).. there have been several others.

If your interested in Linux gaming news check out a few sites:
http://www.linux-gamers.net/
http://www.linux-games.com/
http://www.happypenguin.org/
www.icculus.org/lgfaq/
http://www.linux-militia.net/index.php

And there are a few others, but those are the ones that I check out regularly. If your interested in OSS games then happypenguin is the best source, and they do cover closed-source stuff, too.

If you have a hankering for BF2 then Linux isn't going to work for you, but otherwise there is plenty to keep a normal person perfectly occupied and happy without ever having to boot into any other OS.

And always a nice indy game publisher that I tend to like..
garagegames.com

Most of them are windows/linux/OS X compatable. A couple of the big games they've actually released to linux first.

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 8, 2005 6:37 UTC (Mon) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link] (1 responses)

I wandered around looking at gpld games yesterday, and I couldn't a single one to build cleanly. Most of them are written for windows build environment, and don't provide any useful dependency information. I think it would be good if someone with some interest and skill could set up an autoconf or autopackage system for them. (I tried ogrenew, cube and nexius)

So gpl games might be good, but it's clear to me that it is in fact window development that is making them, not linux. Probably because linux's graphics subsystem is so completely fragmented (SDL, opengl, cairo, X11 etc) that nobody gets around to writing games because they are still trying to work out which toolkit to use ;)

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 8, 2005 13:50 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

They generally use LibSDL.

Most games use that for Linux one way or another.

Ut2004 uses that in combination with OpenAL (because at the time it was released libSDL didn't have adiquate sound resources aviable for it, since then it's improved.)

SDL provides a thin wrapper around OpenGL and is handy because then the game designer doesn't realy have to worry about hardware resources and such.

SDL is pretty much it. It's the OSS version of DirectX and OpenGL is the OSS version of Direct3d, pretty much. It simplifies programming by a large amount.

I don't know who would, aside from old games, use X11 directly for anything and I realy doubt that anybody would use Cairo except for simple small stuff.

SDL has support for a wide veriety of programming languages, C, C++, Python , ruby, whatever you want. It's very cross-platform and offers native look and feel to Windows, Linux, and OS X platforms.

That garagegames.com I pointed out earlier, that has most of their games aviable for OS X and Linux.. Lots of the programs other indie game makers sell thru there use SDL.

Most of the compalation issues stem from lack of experiance amoung the developers and lack of interest in Linux gamers in Linux games. It's pretty sad, actually.

Face it. You never going to get great support for linux in games using commercial sources because most of the major game makers are the sort that are the type to have very anti-linux or at least pro-Microsoft leanings.

There are a few major exceptions, like ID software who generally like innovation and such, but lots of it is like EA games, which sucks. Or Valve, which is run by a ex-Microsoft execuative. Any promising game makers are being bought up by Microsoft, like Bungie games the original makers of Halo. People like that like the status quo because it's making them buckets of money for churning out the same repetative genre games and are pretty hostile to anything that would change that.

The future of Linux games has to come from GPL'd games, Indie game makers (who would become big game makers if you support them and they avoid being eaten by EA or MS or whatnot), and a small handful of publishers like Id, or it's simply not going to happen at all.

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 8, 2005 10:07 UTC (Mon) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] (1 responses)

No. It still sucks.

There's FPS and there's puzzles. That's pretty much it.

FPS migth be "immensely popular" but that doesn't mean there's not people out there bored with them.

There's no (or very few) RPGs, RTS, Action, Platformer, Adventures, Driving, Sports (of any kind), Empire-building, Simulators, etc

There's some of all of these, but honestly, cannon-smash does not cut it these days. For me as a gamer and longtime Linux-user Loki was a lone star. They published quite a few games I enjoyed. I bougth Railroad Tycoon, Sim City 2000, Heroes of Might and Magic and Alpha Centauri from them, and enjoyed all of them immensely, even though when they where published they where a fair bit behind the state of the art.

Where's those sorts of games today ?

Nexuiz: Open source deathmatch (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 8, 2005 10:47 UTC (Mon) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

> Where's those sorts of games today ?

Here, and here, and here...

Sure, there may not be as many getting ported these days as in the days of Loki in its prime, but its not all doom and gloom...

My favorite Loki game (now published by LGP) was "Mindrover"... Man, I loved that game... Combine writing code with building robots and letting them fight/race/compete-with one another, and how can any code-monkey like me resist?? ;-) I really really wish they'd release a sequel to that, or even just some new missions for the original... (Yes, I have the downloadable add-on pak, already... And, have seen most of the user-created stuff...)


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