GamniX

While gaming on Linux has suffered some recent setbacks with id Software and Atari seemingly having abandoned the Linux platform, there are some bright spots on the horizon. (See Commercial Gaming, Coming Soon to Linux?.)

Many believe that Wine and other Windows emulation solutions may be their only recourse for high-quality gaming enjoyment. That, however, it not entirely true. There are plenty of smaller, independent gaming houses developing and releasing premium commercial games for Linux alongside Mac and Windows offerings. Search hard enough and you’ll find games ranging from low-resource puzzle solvers to 3D first-person shooters.

Read more at LinuxMagazine

The first piece of news is that console Nexuiz will be re-written from scratch, because some coders decided against giving permission for a proprietary port (Slashdot , interview). This means no code contributions to Nexuiz.

Secondly, Nexuiz has been forked under the name Xonotic. Because philosophy, because management, because change.

I can’t complain! Git repository instead of Subversion, no more tikiwiki (I hope) finally a feed for news (has been added to our Planet)! Open management and content enhancements are on the list of plans and promises, perhaps a little too much even, which led to the creation of a critical thread on our forums.

Read more at Free Gamer

Nexuiz is sort of a poster child open source project, an example of a high-quality game that’s developed by the open source community. Unfortunately, it may also be a poster child of how things can quickly go wrong once commercial interests are involved and when it’s unclear who controls a project.

Phoronix is reporting that Nexuiz has forked into Xonotic because the founder of the project has entered a deal to allow proprietary use of the game name and code for a proprietary project. The folks forking the project claim that Nexuiz founder Lee Vermeulen is an “absentee” founder, and that use of the code by IllFonic (the company working with Vermeulen) may constitute a GPL violation because the rights haven’t been assigned to Vermeulen.

Read more at OSTATIC

It hasn’t been that long ago that we brought you news of 2d boy World of Goo and the Frictional Games trilogy Penumbra. Since then, things have been pretty quiet on the Linux Game Front…at least to my ear, but then again, I’m not much of a gamer.

Sure, I’ve played all the repository shooters…bloody chunks flying and monsters galore. I have a short attention span…mostly because I suck at shooter games. I just don’t play them often.

Read more at The Blog of Helios

If you like gaming or you are looking for a nice free game for your children, then try one of the games listed bellow. These games are opensource and free for use.
1- Maze of Galious – Massive, free roaming platform game

Read more at Unixmen

Our friends over at Unigine Corp love to push the bounds of graphics realism in their Unigine Engine, which continues to be one of the most advanced commercial game engines, and right now is certainly the most advanced game engine for Linux. While there are not many game studios actually shipping products based on Unigine’s technology right now, Unigine Corp is known for producing a couple technology demos and working with us on the Phoronix Test Suite. Their Unigine Sanctuary benchmark was phenomenal, their Unigine Tropics benchmark was even better yet and set a new Linux OpenGL precedent, and now Unigine Heaven takes it unbelievably further. Today Unigine Corp is finally unveiling the Linux version of Unigine Heaven with its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. We have had our hands on a pre-release copy of Unigine Heaven and so now we are able to share our thoughts on this impressive benchmark / tech demo along with performance numbers for an assortment of ATI / NVIDIA graphics cards.

Read more at Phoronix

Nexuiz, an open-source first person shooter that we have been covering since its first release in 2005 and has turned into a game that offers impressive graphics and raises the bar for open-source gaming, has been forked by many of its core community developers. This is coming after the Nexuiz founder and others ended up agreeing to an Xbox 360 re-make deal whereby a company known as Illfonic will take the code and re-make it within a closed-source game using their own artwork, etc. With Illfonic not looking to contribute back to the GPL-licensed Nexuiz and some community members not liking this capitalist move, they have parted ways and started work on a new project.

Read more at Phoronix

LordsAWar! version 0.1.7, a clone of the turn-based strategy game Warlords II, has been released with the following changes:

* New terrain artwork.
* Users can now manage many stacks on a tile.
* Added a cityset editor and a shieldset editor.
* Improved AI.
* Improved the scenario editor.
* Save file format is now a tarball that contains the artwork for the game.
* Added new “enemy head start” game option.
* Army units now have a one-time cost to be created.
* Added new ruin history report.
* Fixed a few more crashing bugs.
Read more at LinuxGames

Now I realize this isn’t news about Project Vega/Last Bastion, but I think that given the magnitude of this announcement… maybe you’ll let this slide

After years of standing in the way of this, I have finally decided to allow for the release of the Skulltag source code. After all, let’s be honest: No longer running Skulltag has given me a different perspective on this issue.

The release of the source code is something that Torr has wanted to do for awhile now. For security reasons, we’re releasing the source to the older 97c2 first. I have given him permission to release any subsequent versions that he desires. After all, who am I now to stand in his way?

Some benefits to this are:

• Being open-source will eventually allow Skulltag to update the GZDoom renderer (provided Graf doesn’t modify the license again)
• Someone might fix Botscript
• Someone might implement a more centralized handling of the client/server code

It will be interesting to see what happens with this. Will a community of people all pitch it and help make Skulltag a better product? Or will other ports use this to bolster their products and erode Skulltag’s multiplayer Doom success? Time will tell!

Anyway, that’s enough from me. Here it is! Enjoy!

http://www.skulltag.com/download/97c2source.zip

Finally the first release candidate for 1.8 is ready. We are confident that we are really close to the start of the stable 1.8 series now. For more some details about this release candidate and celebrating the new it please visit 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.