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I wanna play games on Linux

C

cjr22

Member
I use linux at work all the time, and I generally prefer it to windows - the desktop, the internet apps, the OS, the whole thing. Both my computers at home are dual boot windows-and-linux machines, but I never boot either of them into linux. And why not? Well, because I spend about 90 per cent of my time on my home PCs playing games, and that's one area where windows is just better. Mozilla and cygwin mean I can put up with windows when I'm not playing games on it, so therefore Linux just sits there and gathers dust.
So, the question is, what should I do about it? What can I do about it? I know the chicken and egg problem with games on linux, but I'm reasonably technically literate and willing to put in some money and effort. I also feel like it's time I put something back into the linux community. So, what projects can I get involved in? Are there any communities to join? I suppose WineX is a reasonable place to start, but it seems to me that the idea of trying to force something as windows-centric as DirectX onto linux just isn't the right way to go.

What do you guys think?
 
Buy games that work on linux.

Right now I have ut2004, Never Winter Nights + expansion packs, and Quake3 + mods, and then Wolfenstien (based on the Quake3 engine).

Doom3 will have a linux version, so will Quake4, I beleive.

Legends is a game based on the Tribes2 engine and is freely (no $ needed) aviable. The tribes games work but they are a bit dated.

ut2003 works in linux, a installer is aviable thru the normal windows cdroms, but people sometimes have trouble with it.

There are lots of little free games, mostly retro old favorites of some programmer that they recreated. Some decent, one people seem to like is frozenbubble. A simple arcade bubble buster-type thing. Strange thing is written in perl.

There are quite a few low-key commercial games aviable.

Thru WineX compatablity ($5 dollar subscription) I've personally run Black & White, the old Diablo 2 game, Warcraft 3 and a couple others. The battlefeild games work thru WineX, but your going to need a very fast computer to handle the overhead of translating DirectX to OpenGL and then rendering it. Some games work well, others don't work well at all.

The Sims works in Linux.

I heard somewere that 7 out of the 10 most popular games work in Linux one way or another... Either thru WineX psuedo-emulation or they have a native port.


Quite a few indie game makers have games that are native to Linux.

One good company is Garage Games and they are the ones that ended up owning the Tribes engine and have quiet a few fun games based on it. Nice little low-stress games that are actually very fun and addictive. They even gave the tribes networking code a GPL liscence for the community. Marble Blast, and Orbz are cool, and they have demo'd versions.

Lots of other indie game makers, too.

They have a few websites dedicated to Linux gaming. The Linux Game Tome is a good one, lists of the hundreds of games aviable, some shareware, some free software, some commercial.

Tuxgames sells linux-compatable games

Linux Games.com. more of a commercial windows-style bent.

Good free games other then frozenbubble (so simple, but so addictive for some odd reason), are:

Flight Gear Flight Sim, free software, not on the same graphical level as MS's flight sims, but suppose to be very good physics/simulation wise.

FreeCiv, a civilization clone.

Nethack, and variations, too. All the way from text based clones to simple 3-D sprites and stuff.

Cube, a clean FPS game. About the same leage graphicly as Quake1-2, but with prettier textures.

A couple tron motorcycle clones, 3d of course.

LBreakout and bunches and bunches of them.

Actually much to many to bother listing. Check out the linux game tome.

None of them are realy up to par graphic-wise with commercial offerings, but they are fun non-the-less. You know, they lack the "sex appeal" of new games you see in magazines and stuff.

For me personally, most my gaming with new games is console-based. GameCube specificly, and sometimes I borrow my roomate's playstation to see if I can steal a tank and get "national crisis" media level in GTA3 Vice City without cheating.

Older console games can be bought for dirt cheap compared to most computer titles.

Actually I have a TV card for my computer, so I play consoles in a window, so I can surf around or listen to music thru any boring parts.

Linux gaming isnt' up to Windows par by a long shot, but I think it's gotten to the point were most people can keep themselves occupied pleasently without spending a whole lot of money on their system.
 
Originally posted by: oLLie
Are certain distro's better for gaming?
Click to expand...

As is with everything Linux, one distro can do anything and everything any other distro can do, since they all use Open source software. Of course the setup is going to be a little different.


I use Debian, and that works great for gaming, but I am a power user and do extra things that would be frustrating for newbies to deal with. Not that I am bragging or anything, its just that going from Windows to Linux is a culture shock and Debian doesn't jump thru hoops like other's do.


What I like in a distro is the ability to easily install software thru a good package manager.

For instance with a lot of these games you have to have support for SDL, which is a programming API designed to make making games and such easier. Well unless your using a good package manager you may have to end up running around looking for RPM files to download, or compiling and installing your own version from scratch.

This isn't a big deal, but it gets old. Especially if you end up having a conflict over version numbers.

With Debian I can go "apt-get install whatever" and it will take care of all the details. Such as logging onto the ftp server, downloading it, downloading all of it's dependances, installing the program and all of it's dependances, and then giving a initial configuration setup for the program and all it's dependances.

Also going "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" will download all the newest software, patches, and upgrades automaticly and make sure that I am using the latest versions of everything aviable.

The other distro that does this very good is Gentoo. Portage system is very advanced.

Fedora can do this too. It has support for Yum out of the box, and it can support a modified version of Debian's Apt.

Fedora just doesn't have the vast number of packages aviable to it that Gentoo or Debian has. Debian has much more then anybody else, but Gentoo has the most cutting edge software aviable. Fedora/Redhat has the largest userbase, though.

I think the most generic answer is Fedora, for best gaming OS. Gentoo close behind.

But use whatever your most familar with, Suse/Mandrake/Slackware/Debian, whatever. It's a more of a matter of personal taste and familarity then anything else.

(always use the latest versions of OSes you can get, BTW. Linux is free and it's advantagous just to use the newest)
 
Thanks drag, that's incredibly useful. I'll go and check out the websites you mentioned.
And speaking of frozenbubble, that illustrates one of the things I like about linux, and OSS in general - I played this with my wife a few times, but I got annoyed at the fact that each player didn't get the same sequence of bubbles in two player mode. So, I discovered it was written in Perl, looked at the source. I'd never written perl before, so I did "man perl" and then a couple of hours work later, I had a new version that did what I wanted it to. Now I have a game that plays better for me (although now I've got no one to blame but myself when she thrashes me...) and I know a bit about perl. That just wouldn't be possible for, say, windows minesweeper.
 
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: oLLie
Are certain distro's better for gaming?
Click to expand...

As is with everything Linux, one distro can do anything and everything any other distro can do, since they all use Open source software. Of course the setup is going to be a little different.


I use Debian, and that works great for gaming, but I am a power user and do extra things that would be frustrating for newbies to deal with. Not that I am bragging or anything, its just that going from Windows to Linux is a culture shock and Debian doesn't jump thru hoops like other's do.


What I like in a distro is the ability to easily install software thru a good package manager.

For instance with a lot of these games you have to have support for SDL, which is a programming API designed to make making games and such easier. Well unless your using a good package manager you may have to end up running around looking for RPM files to download, or compiling and installing your own version from scratch.

This isn't a big deal, but it gets old. Especially if you end up having a conflict over version numbers.

With Debian I can go "apt-get install whatever" and it will take care of all the details. Such as logging onto the ftp server, downloading it, downloading all of it's dependances, installing the program and all of it's dependances, and then giving a initial configuration setup for the program and all it's dependances.

Also going "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" will download all the newest software, patches, and upgrades automaticly and make sure that I am using the latest versions of everything aviable.

The other distro that does this very good is Gentoo. Portage system is very advanced.

Fedora can do this too. It has support for Yum out of the box, and it can support a modified version of Debian's Apt.

Fedora just doesn't have the vast number of packages aviable to it that Gentoo or Debian has. Debian has much more then anybody else, but Gentoo has the most cutting edge software aviable. Fedora/Redhat has the largest userbase, though.

I think the most generic answer is Fedora, for best gaming OS. Gentoo close behind.

But use whatever your most familar with, Suse/Mandrake/Slackware/Debian, whatever. It's a more of a matter of personal taste and familarity then anything else.

(always use the latest versions of OSes you can get, BTW. Linux is free and it's advantagous just to use the newest)
Click to expand...

Slackware has gotten a lot better lately with the additions of swaret and ability to upgrade from linuxpackages, it usually only takes a day or to for a new package to make it into linuxpackages.net.

There is also efforts being made to move towards a ports based system (like in xBSD) and the ports system for NetBSD already has a Slack version.

I prefer the package based systems though, compiling isn't all that fun and usually doesn't produce much better results compared to ready made packages.

However, if you are not used to working with linux, Slackware is not for you, it is probably the WORST distro when it comes to user friendliness.
 
Well, I just thought I'd let you know how I got on. I decided to give Gentoo a try, and set myself the goal of getting UT2k4 working on it. (So Atari, if you're listening, that's one sale that you got purely because of the linux version - I'd have never have bought it if it was windows only). Installing Gentoo took a while, but the documentation was fantastic and I had no problems I couldn't solve. As a side benefit I now know a lot more about how linux works, and in fact I've installed Gentoo on some machines at work, 'cos some bloke was trying to get some ATM cards workign and couldn't do it under windows or redhat.

Well, after getting Gentoo and X up and running, installing UT was almost too easy - I just ran the installer and it worked. Huh? Where's the fun in that? How am I supposed to learn about the system if things just run out of the box with no problems?? ;-) Unfortunately it's ahd the side effect that now I've stopped fiddling with / learning about the install 'cos every time I start it up I think, "just a quick game of UT first...."

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. I've learnt a lot, and had tons of fun, which I wouldn't have if it hadn't been for the replies I had on this forum. Thanks guys, especially you, drag.

Cheers,

Chris
 
You can also run Wine + WineX. It'll cost you ~$5, but you can then run a large portion of Windows-only games under Linux.
 
Originally posted by: S4M33R
If linux was just as good for gaming I for one would never use windows.
Click to expand...

Now you know why DirectX was created. (well maybe not for it's creation, but at least the reason for it's continued developement and hype)

Don't worry, though, since DirectX is useless unless you pay MS for the pleasure of using it (thru your windows liscence) it it's only used for unimportant stuff like games.

Serious stuff pretty much uses OpenGL, so the that cross platform (actually it's originally based from Unix stuff, BTW. Iris GL from SGI) library isn't going anywere. 😉

Personally I am looking forward to Doom3.
 
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