LWN: Comments on "The state of Linux gaming"

The state of Linux gaming

JettyZ — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:31:39 +0000

They recently released games like Portal and Left 4 Dead 2 (beta versions though) for Linux. ( Check http://gamesonlinux.org )And the Steam platform is working pretty well.

The state of Linux gaming

dark — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:55:27 +0000

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.

The state of Linux gaming

nix — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 21:39:08 +0000

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

oak — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:55:43 +0000

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

pokerth 0.8.x now has a persistent ranking system

filteredperception — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 02:21:25 +0000

FYI since a grep of poker in this article/thread didn't yield anything- check out pokerth.net. It seems to have stepped up AFAICS to be the dominant FOSS online poker solution. And as of a couple weeks ago with v0.8, they now have a registered account system with persistent online ranking system. Which of course tipped the scales for it becoming seriously addictive for me.

Now, it's no poker3d, but I always had problems with that, and at least freshmeat suggests that one is not really being maintained. But with pokerth there are at a minimum half a dozen full table games running 24/7, and I expect that to pick up...

The state of Linux gaming

mjthayer — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:58:45 +0000

> 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

Velmont — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:37:09 +0000

Of course, it's cool to hang around game sites also.

http://penguspy.com/ is a new one.

The Linux Game Tome is down right now, but they say it will be up again the 13th. http://happypenguin.org/.

0 A.D. looks like it can become quite nice.

Also, Widelands is an old favourite of mine. Only not so pretty, but very playable and nice.

GL-117

eru — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:19:57 +0000

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

pabs — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 02:52:01 +0000

Anyone who is interested in helping improve FLOSS games might like to join the FreeDesktop games group, or one of the distro games groups:

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Games
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/games
http://wiki.debian.org/Games
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Games
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/games/index.xml

The state of Linux gaming

nix — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 22:20:02 +0000

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

juhah — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:36:04 +0000

You should also checkout The Spring Project: http://springrts.com/.

The state of Linux gaming

jondkent — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:56:41 +0000

Although the games list previously are intersting, it is nevertheless the case that these are quite, well, old. We are also using contributed gaming engines which are very dated.

There is little escaping from the fact the gaming on Linux, by which I mean gaming in the light of World of Warcraft, Modern Warfare and alike, has no equilivants on Linux (please, do not say 'but what about Doom/Quake').

'World of Goo' was amazing, and I wish there would be more like that, but at present this does not seem to be happening.

Then and again, I never play games on my Windows (sinner) box anymore either, I just use a console, as do a large portion of people I know, so if this market for Windows games is shrinking (assumption based on small survey), can we expect these type of games for Linux which is an even smaller market? The number of games for MACOS is only just starting to pick up.

My 2c worth

- Jon

The state of Linux gaming

Kamilion — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:02:26 +0000

I've been spending a lot of time in Minecraft lately.
Not too much of a java fan normally, but it runs in ubuntu fine.
http://minecraft.net

The state of Linux gaming

amit — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 09:49:49 +0000

I currently find the open source Warzone2100 pretty engaging. It's a strategy game where you start with a very resources on the map, explore the map and defeat enemies. You find power sources and try keeping them while producing weapons and ammo and moving up the research ladder to conquer the map. Nice 3D real-time strategy game.

http://wz2100.net/

The state of Linux gaming

rahulsundaram — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:24:46 +0000

It won't. DirectX games need a lot more than just Direct 3D.

The state of Linux gaming

Np237 — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 07:57:08 +0000

Lets hope the Direct3D port to Linux will bring more interest from game developers. If porting is trivial, there is hope to see the huge amounts of good amateur games available on Linux.

The state of Linux gaming

bronson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:25:38 +0000

Speaking of Loki, I lament that the source code to Myth II: Soulblighter was lost. That was one of the more addictive and enjoyable games I've ever played. Myth continues to have a strong presence on Windows (pretty amazing considering it was released in 1998) but the only way to play it on Linux is through Wine.

http://projectmagma.net/what/

Ah well. At least it -- along with Loki's other games -- gave us the SDL. :)

The state of Linux gaming

xanni — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:10:59 +0000

I ran the Gaming Miniconf at LCA 2009 and will be giving talks on this topic at OSDC 2010 and the December meeting of Linux Users Victoria. See http://games.sericyb.com.au/ for more, feedback welcome.

No indie games?

nicooo — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 23:42:30 +0000

And Yet It Moves is another great indie game.

The state of Linux gaming

mjthayer — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:11:56 +0000

> 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

iabervon — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:50:01 +0000

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

mjthayer — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:20:47 +0000

> 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

mjthayer — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:17:19 +0000

> 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

iabervon — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:56:34 +0000

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

sorpigal — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:40:15 +0000

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.

Osmos FTW

dmarti — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:26:31 +0000

Osmos has a worthwhile demo, great gameplay, and a beautiful look. They make it really easy to try by offering RPM and deb packages. Full version is $10 and worth it.

The state of Linux gaming

Trelane — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:05:55 +0000

PS3 runs GameOS, and *used* to be able to boot another OS ("OtherOS") on the fat PS3s until update 3.21 came out.

Additionally, the PS3 Cell processor is very very different from x86, and thus games would be very non-trivial to port to x86 (or the from a more traditional multicore cpu to the Cell, as was a big concern back when it started).

No indie games?

Trelane — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:03:41 +0000

It seems like the best options for buying non-FOSS games like you do with Windows is going with indie game developers. The Humble Bundle and World of Goo made a very good showing for Linux users, both in the quantity downloaded as well as the generosity of its users.

Dunno why this wasn't mentioned, unless I just missed it.

The state of Linux gaming

dgm — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:04:34 +0000

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

rvfh — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:27:27 +0000

Doesn't the Sony PS3 run some kind of Linux? In which case, they could potentially be recompile for x86 (potentially after endianness corrections)?

The state of Linux gaming

mjthayer — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:44:07 +0000

I remember a while back reading one or several pieces suggesting that FLOSS games would never take off because the process of creating a game doesn't follow the same dynamics as that of creating some other pieces of software - once you have finished your game you already know all there is to find out and you have little incentive to actually play it to work out all the glitches; and similarly other people have a limited interest in hacking on your game to improve it as it will spoil their gameplay fun.

I don't know how true that is, but assuming it is, I would have thought that FLOSS game development processes could be adjusted to take it into account. There are so many independent components in a game, many of which do repay time invested into improving them. For instance, the world that a game takes place in doesn't have to have been created for the game, but can be one that someone else created for other purposes, possibly adjusted a bit to add elements of surprise (but I am sure there are enough virtual worlds going around that the average player won't know most of them anyway). There are people who enjoy creating animated creatures outside of games, but which could be reused inside of games. Libraries of worlds and characters could be also redone and reused for other games.

There are virtual world engines which can be used for games. And I could imaging competitions between people creating gaming levels to produce those that will be used in a game, with those contributing being those allowed to vote on which will get into the final product, which gives a special incentive for each contributor to polish their piece as much as they can.

Freeciv

cesarb — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:23:58 +0000

It seems neither the article nor any of the comments so far has mentioned Freeciv.

The state of Linux gaming

nix — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:48:49 +0000

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).

OpenTTD

jordi — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:09:19 +0000

I can't resist pimping OpenTTD, in the business simulation category. While it started as a rewrite for the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe game engine, which required the original game data, it has grown a community which has managed to recreate original new graphics, soundsets and game music. The game has been improved and expanded in lots of ways, and annoying bugs in the original engine have been fixed.

The state of Linux gaming

nhippi — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:23:54 +0000

What is forgotten to mention that there are thousands of android games. Kernel developers need to stop playing elitists with android developers, and get at least binder, ashmem and pmem to mainline.

With those, it should be manageable exercise to get the android userland to work withing X11, and thus access android market games.

Don't forget FrictionalGames

Cyberax — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:21:50 +0000

Don't forget about FrictionalGame, they produce wonderful games.

"Amnesia: Dark Descent" was the scariest game I've ever played. Go out and buy it :)

The state of Linux gaming

josh — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:08:25 +0000

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.