GamniX

The fourth beta for 1.8 is ready. 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 package and the MacOSX 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. Please keep in mind that it is a development release which might include quite many bugs. If you find one, report it.

A few months back, I wrote an article looking at battery life on a couple of laptops using several different OSes. Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were the main focus, but I decided to test battery life on Linux running Ubuntu as well. Naturally, the Linux community wasn’t happy to see their OS place last in the battery life results. One of the readers actually took the time to offer his help in getting a Linux OS configured “properly”, and we started work.

Eventually, we abandoned the follow-up article as I had other pressing matters to get to and troubleshooting Linux from half a continent away is difficult (plus we started with the NV52, and ATI support under Linux is still lacking), but I offered Christopher the chance to write a couple pilot Linux articles for our site. He had shown a much better knowledge of Linux and I figured getting someone passionate about the OS was our best bet. (I’ll let Christopher tell you what he does for his “real job” if he so desires.)

Read more at AnandTech

Just in time for Christmas, Sabayon Linux founder Fabio Erculiani has announced the availability of a “Gaming” Edition of version 5.1 of his popular Linux distribution. Sabayon, named after an egg-yolk based dessert, is derived from Gentoo Linux and is intended to provide a “complete out-of-the-box experience” while being both stable and versatile.

The stable Gaming Edition release is based on Sabayon Linux 5.1 GNOME and features a number of free and open source games.

Read more at H-online

There’s a new game under development that is another first-person shooter but takes the roles of dinosaurs fighting humans and vice-versa. This game is Primal Carnage and is currently under development by a relatively unknown studio called Lukewarm Media…

Read more at Phoronix

If you’ve got some free time on your hands this holiday season, check out these open source versions of popular games you grew up playing. They’re loads of fun, but don’t blame us if they make you a little nostalgic.

Domination – If you love the game of Risk, you’ll have a blast with this. March around the map conquering territories, when you’ve gotten them all, you’ve won the game. If you get bored with the batch of maps included in the game, download more from the game’s Web site, or create your own in a few simple steps.

Read more at OSTATIC

Nexuiz is one of the most popular shooter games which emerged after the open-sourcing of the Quake 3 engine, featuring a fast-paced game style and several game modes, like the popular DM or CTF. Nexuiz is a free, GPL-licensed, first-person shooter developed online by the Internet-based team Alientrap, and it comes with ports for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Read more at TuxArena

Version 7.33 of Alien Arena has been released today for windows and linux users! Along with some major optimizations and new features, another new level has been added.

Some of the new features in this release:

• In-game IRC client
• Player rankings in server browser
• Skill level matchmaker on server info
• Vastly improved anti-lag code
• Headshots
• Optimizations and bugfixes
• Various improved graphic effects

For a complete changelog look HERE

As a little Christmas present we present the first beta for 1.0.0. With this version you can run OpenTTD without the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe data files, although you can still use them if you like them more.

We would like to thank everyone who has made this possible.

Read more at OpenTTD

NiVi Games announced that BentBend is now available for Linux.

BentBend is a new brain teaser puzzle game. Connect colored cubes two by two to get a rich bonus. Your connections must not cross. BentBend has good music and nice graphics letting you enjoy the game for hours. Go through all the 100 increasingly challenging levels, become a winner and set a new record at high scores.

Read more at linuX-gamers.net

Team Allita, Inc. is today announcing the Andromeda release of Dread Moon Linux along with a support site at http://dreadmoon.com/.  Dread Moon is a remix of Ubuntu 9.04 that provides a complete Linux development environment for game and multi-media developers.  This release is primarily intended to eliminate a major roadblock to the development of games and multimedia applications under Linux that is a consequence of the fact that many of the related software libraries are not available as installable packages.

As a result it can sometimes be almost impossible for a prospective developer to obtain versions of the various libraries that are not only mutually-compatible, but compatible with the installed standard libraries as well.

Dread Moon addresses this issue by providing a full set of compatible game and multi-media libraries pre-installed. Beyond that, Dread Moon also provides installed applications that all game and multimedia developers will find indispensable for their work, including audio editors, graphics applications, 3D modeling applications and a sprite editor.

One interesting centerpiece of the Dread Moon release is that it includes the pre-installed D language, multi-platform ArcLib game development library authored by Clay Smith.  The D language is an emerging low-level systems programming language that incorporates many of the advanced features inspired by Java and other modern programming languages, while still being compiled down to native executable code.  This is a very promising combination of technologies that may someday have a big impact on game and multimedia developers everywhere.

Team Allita is also providing the dreadmoon.com portal in support of the Dread Moon release.  This portal is intended to build a strong sense of community among Dread Moon users, allowing them to freely exchange ideas and information.