GamniX

I actually have spare time these days, even between projects like tearing apart a desktop machine, to clean and restore it. And since I occasionally pick up a game or two when I want complete distraction, I revisited Warzone 2100 yesterday, after a hiatus that approached the better part of a year.

And I was pleasantly surprised. The crowd that follows that game has been doing some great things with it, including a few small graphical improvements, better static illustrations, and the addition of some single-player game options — which I prefer.

Read more at K.Mandla’s blog of Linux experiences

Wildfire Games has decided to switch their development model for their real-time strategy title, 0 A.D., from closed-source to open-source. This 3D real-time strategy game is now having its code licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and the game content is going under the Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike license.

Read more at Phoronix

Its now 7 months after the DVD release, this is the first version of YoFrankie since being an open project at the blender institute.

Version 1.1 brings YoFrankie up to date with Blender, taking advantage of new features. There have also been improvements in the game logic and levels.

• Includes the 3 winning levels from the level design competition, with additional improvements.
• Updated Game Logic for Blender3D 2.49a
• Runs faster, from testing level 1 home: 2.48a averages 50fps, 2.49a 80fps*
• Cleaned up blend files, materials, textures, animations, unfinished levels.
• Loading screen between levels.

yofrankie_1_1b_bge.zip (120mb) – download.blender.org, graphicall mirror

Linux 32, 64bit, Windows 32bit (MacOS binary not included but is compatible with 2.49a)

full svn log of changes since 1.0

Of course contributions are still welcome and I intend to keep YoFrankie running with the latest blender, adding levels and content from the community.

* Tested with release builds on 32bit Linux, AMD3800, NVidia 8800.

* Update 1.1a*

• fixes the secondary level selector (no sign-post) bug.
• momo dancing in credits was missing.

* Update 1.1b*

• linux 64bit player was an older blender version.

These games are free. They are deep and offer many hours of play. They are lasting and will be played for a long time. In this list – playability is the real key.

They are not graphically intense or action games. These are the RPG’s and strategy games that immerse you deep into different worlds. Have a play and you will soon find out how addictive these games are.

These games are a testament to the idea that graphics is not everything in gaming.

These games are all free. They all run on Linux, and most will run on Windows and Mac OS X platforms too.

For those that dig this, they are also mostly Open Source too – which means you can view the code – to either improve the game, or if you are less scrupulous, use it to cheat.

Look the full list at http://best.freelinuxgames.ever.com/

The Unigine Engine, which is an impressive multi-platform game that hasn’t really been widely used in any games yet but does offer some very impressive tech demos (via the Phoronix Test Suite), continues to advance and pick up new features. As we have shared earlier, the company behind Unigine is working on a new game that will run on Linux, which is not too surprising when considering the fact that the company is very Linux friendly.

Read more at Phoronix

The developers behind open source shooter Open Arena have released an initial test version of the browser-based version, Arena Live. Arena Live aims to emulate Quake Live, a free to use, professionally produced version of Quake 3 Arena from id Software that’s financed by advertising. While Quake Live currently only runs on Windows-based systems (with Mac OS X and Linux support reportedly coming soon), Arena Live runs in Mozilla’s Firefox web browser on Linux platforms and will probably be ported to other operating systems in the future.

Read more at H-online

Wesnoth 1.6.4 has been released. This is a bugfix release for the stable 1.6 branch. The most important bug fixed this time is a regression that found it’s way into 1.6.3. The network code was problematic for many users when it came to large content. This should be fixed now. Some small bugs were fixed and translations were updated. Feel free to celebrate the new release with us in this forum thread.
As with the last releases, we continue to offer two versions of changelogs: a rather nice to read players changelog that only includes changes every player will probably notice and the (rather) complete changelog with (almost) all the details, which is likely to cause a serious headache…
At the moment the Windows, the MacOSX as well as the Debian, Fedora and Gentoo packages are ready. You can find them at the download page. Once the others are done you can find them at the download page, too. If you find a bug, please report it.

Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years porting various titles to Linux and has done work independently on bringing new software from Windows to Linux. Frank was overwhelmed by the response on our forums and it has even led to new Linux games with many other possible ports being looked into. To get his view as where Linux gaming is currently at, he has answered a few of our questions about Linux game porting, Linux gaming in general, and other questions that may be of interest to gamers and Linux enthusiasts.

Hi Frank, thank you for taking the time to answer some of our questions. If you would, please begin by sharing how you got started on porting games to Linux and became involved with Linux Game Publishing and freelance porting of games from Windows to Linux. Is this your full time occupation?

Read more at Phoronix

Eschalon is a turn-based RPG (role-playing game), which tries to reproduce the feeling of classic RPG games. It’s closed-source, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and it comes with a demo too. The full version is available as a download for $19.95.

The currently available version is Eschalon Book I, and you can download the demo from the official website. To start the game, uncompress the tarball and run it as ./Eschalon\ Book\ I\ Demo from a terminal or just double-click the Eschalon Book I Demo executable.

The game uses OpenGL and a native resolution of 800×600, which is also the only resolution available. It can be run in either windowed mode or fullscreen.

Read more at TuxArena