GamniX

PixelLight is a free source, cross platform 3D engine and framework released under LGPL3 and GPL3 licenses.

About
PixelLight is a cross-platform application framework for any kind of 3D applications like games, interactive simulations or visualizations. It’s based on a highly flexible scene graph system that allows you to compose and visualize any type of 3D scene for your application.
PixelLight is written in C++ and has been designed with flexibility and extensibility as one of it’s main goals. Therefore, it’s not only a 3D engine, but a consistent framework that allows you to combine all the components that you need for your application without having to care about the differences of the actual libraries, APIs or operating systems that you are using. The underlying systems and libraries are abstracted by a powerful reflection and component system, which makes it easier and more effective to create applications for different platforms and target components such as rendering, sound, physics, network, scripting and so on.

Read more at Linux Gaming News

Ok, quick update before too much dust gathers around here Just yesterday I stumbled upon this gem of a strategy game over at LGDB:

Its name is Quantum, as some of you might have guessed it is a clone of Dyson/Eufloria. But the game is quite mesmerizing with the strange background noise and your armies of small space tree spores conquering new worlds. But try it yourself!

Now normally clones are not as good as the original, right? Not is this case: Full multiplayer (with master-server and lobby), singleplayer skirmishes, in-game editor etc. are just a small part of the long feature list! Furthermore it’s all available under the LGPL (written in Java). Me = happy puppy

Read more at Free Gamer

Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses. Steam also has community features, automated game updates, and in-game voice and chat functionality.

You’ve probably read lots of rumors about Steam coming to Linux but there was no official word about it. GamesIndustry.biz interviewed Valve’s marketing VP Doug Lombardi. The last question was if Valve is working on a Steam version for Linux. Here are the exact question and answer:

Read more at WebUpd8

Wesnoth 1.9.0 has been released. This is the first release of the brand new 1.9.x development series. It include huge, groundbreaking changes. Please have a look this forum thread to get a rough idea about those big changes (and some known problems). To show how the graphics changed, Eleazar created some brand new screenshots that are available on the screenshots wiki page.
We 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, please report it to help us fix them in following releases.

Nine years after it was first conceived and designed on paper, WIldfire Games has announced the arrival of a first alpha version of its free cross-platform, real-time strategy game 0 A.D. The historically-based game is similar to Microsoft’s Age of Empires, in that users create and build civilisations and must defend them against their enemies. The game focuses on the years 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and includes six unique civilisations and several multi-player modes.

According to the developers, the alpha 1 release, code named “Argonaut”, is “a close approximation of a playable game” and it includes aggressive units that automatically attack enemies on sight.

Read more at H-online

For serious gamer folks in Linux, there is more good news. “Amnesia”, which many reviewed as one that is going to be among the scariest game ever and “And Yet It Moves”, a physics-based platform game, are going to have native Linux clients. Meanwhile, you may also want to check our listing of games for non-gamers in Linux.

Read more at Tech Drive-in

At the beginning of this month we published workstation benchmarks comparing Windows 7 to Ubuntu Linux. In those tests, which were a continuation of tests from earlier this year when looking to see whether Windows 7 is faster than Ubuntu 10.04 and how fast is Windows compared to Mac OS X and Linux, the two operating systems performed quite closely in our workstation tests with only a few exceptions. Today, however, we are back to looking at the Linux vs. Windows performance of the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 and this time we are looking at the OpenGL gaming performance between Windows 7 Professional and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Read more at Phoronix

If you like games–especially free ones–you’re guaranteed to like LinuxLinks’ three part collection of “addictive” Linux games. You can find the third installation of the collection here, and the first and second parts are linked there. The folks at LinuxLinks used “addictive” as their keyword in selecting the games, and they range from well-known titles such as Atomic Worm to lesser known ones, such as Epiar. We’ve done quite a bit of our own coverage on free, open source games at OStatic. Here are some can’t-miss examples.

Read more at OSTATIC

id Software has announced from their annual QuakeCon event that they have open-sourced their Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein games under the GNU GPL. id Software is known for open-sourcing their games and engines after some years of use and this day has finally come for these two very popular Wolfenstein titles.

Those interested in obtaining the source-code to Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein can find the source in this FTP directory. The new source releases are the ET-GPL.zip, RTCW-MP-GPL.zip, and RTCW-SP-GPL.zip files.

Read more at Phoronix

There are literally thousands of free games that run natively under Linux. This huge selection makes sifting through all of these games a mammoth task for any sane person.

However, this has not stopped the gaming faction at LinuxLinks Towers trawling through the popular archives looking for games that players will keep coming back to. Sure, games are a matter of taste. However, what makes a game enjoyable does not simply depend on personal preferences.

In this third and final segment, we recommend a further 8 free Linux games that are great fun to play, highly playable and above all have a special addictive quality. We suspect that there will be a few games here that even the ardent Linux gamer will not have tried before.

Read more at LinuxLinks