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UT3 Delays

Phoronix has another story up on the continued delay of the UT3 Linux client, ported by Ryan Gordon, aka icculus.

One sentenced in the story rubbed me the wrong way:

Ryan Gordon, the one responsible for the Unreal Tournament Linux ports, has yet to provide the Linux gaming community with any status update or respond to our inquiries.

I don’t understand how it is Ryan’s responsibility to provide an update. It has already been covered multiple times that the Linux client is hung up due to a legal issue with some offending code in the game. We should be grateful Ryan clued us in originally to what the delay was. However, Ryan works for Epic as a contractor – he’s not an official employee, and he shouldn’t be the one responsible for updating the community. As it’s a legal issue, of course he’s not going to comment. The constant speculation and conspiracy theories have grown old quickly.

If someone wants an official quote, they should be talking to someone at Epic’s office, maybe Mark Rein. I subscribe to the UT3 mailing list, and the number of questions, comments and rampant speculation on this issue, as well as the the constant badgering of Ryan are counter-productive. If he could say something, he would.

I absolutely agree that it’s disappointing we don’t have an official statement from Epic one way or another if a Linux client will ever be released. As someone who’s an avid gamer on Linux, I’m disappointed I can’t play one of my favorite franchises. But leave Ryan out of it, he’s done everything he can.

Lawyers, Guns & Money

Unreal Tournament 3 was released Monday. But the Linux client demo never appeared, and the Linux retail server and client haven’t appeared yet either.

The UT3 mailing list has also been quiet recently, but last night Icculus sent a tweet out and the news hit the mailing list soon after: UT3’s Linux bits are hung up in legal. Somewhere along the way Epic licensed some middleware that can’t be included in the Linux version. Hopefully we’ll get some more news soon.

In related news, no Gears of War for Linux, only Mac. Something about the publisher who is based in Redmond squashing that idea. Damn them.

Rock Band

I more than enjoy the Guitar Hero franchise, having got my PS2 out of the closet a year and a half ago after buying all the Guitar Hero games, including this last one on the 360 for the first time.

Tomorrow marks the release of Rock Band, and Ars Technica takes a look at it and approves.

I’m pretty excited to get it, even with the high price point, as a few of us have been known to get together and rock out to Guitar Hero. Now we just need to find a 4th… And I can play with Alex, who I am sure will get a kick out of banging the drums. I’m happy the Guitar Hero guitar works with Rock Band, but very disappointed the Rock Band guitar doesn’t work with Guitar Hero as I don’t want to buy another guitar, but really want to unlock the co-op songs in GHIII. Hopefully they will patch the 360 version so the Rock Band guitar will work with GHIII sometime in the future.

Thankfully, I have the room in my basement for the setup, although if I do pick it up, I won’t be able to play it until next week since we’re going home for the holiday.

Quake Wars on Foresight Linux

The Enemy Territory:Quake Wars Linux client was released Friday by id. The 17mb client and installer is using Icculus‘ Mojo Setup for installation. This is a welcome change from the Doom3 and Quake IV installers which required you to manually copy the .pak files from the CD or DVDs over to your hard drive. With Mojo Setup, you just run the executable file you download from id, pop the DVD in and it installs the client, Punkbuster and copies the necessary files over from the DVD.

With both the demo and the client, I was running in to keyboard lockups when playing. It didn’t matter if I was playing in full screen or windowed, the game would continue, but my keyboard was totally non-responsive. I tested Compiz enabled and disabled, windowed and non-windowed, and dual monitor and single monitor. It turns out that Pidgin, X-Chat and Mugshot would cause it to lock up. Basically, if anything appeared in the notification section Quake Wars would free the keyboard. Alt-tabbing to different applications and coming back to Quake Wars didn’t help. Disabling those applications before running Quake Wars has stopped the keyboard lockups.

Playing in full screen mode is definitely more immersive, and Quake Wars supports a native 1920×1200 resolution. Playing windowed in dual monitors I was playing in 1680×1250. It’s a pain though to switch xorg.conf and restart GNOME just to play a game, so I haven’t made up my mind.

The Quake Wars FAQ recommends a low latency kernel configured with CONFIG_HZ_1000=y. Foresight’s kernel does not include that setting, and using the Nvidia drivers currently in the repo, 100.14.03, performance has been smooth as silk. I’m running a Core 2 Duo E6300, 2 gigs of RAM and a Nvidia (BFG) 7950GT.

I’m enjoying the full game much more than the early beta client I played in Windows. While the game is definitely faster than Battelfield 2, it’s not as fast as I first thought. I still have a ton to learn (like joining a squad or learning to fly the air vehicles), but it’s fun. 2 out of 3 maps played this afternoon, and I was top Soldier, top kills, and close in top EXP. The promotions and unlocks by campaign is better than I expected, as I wasn’t sure how tempoary unlocks would be, but they work well. I thought I had played on a ranked server today, but searching for my stats, I can’t find them. Guess I need to play some more!

Kudos again to id for releasing a Linux client. It’s nice to have a state of the art game to play on Linux. The next month or two should be great for the state of gaming on Linux, with the rumored Gears of War release, and the definite release of Unreal Tournament 3.

More on the waiting game aka Quake Wars

I, like Phoronix, thought the Linux client was days away, but it’s weeks according to a post I saw on Linux-Gaming.net this morning:

I’ve also been making steady progress with the Linux Client, and it’s coming along really well. We’ve been running a closed-beta test for ‘friends and family’ for a little while, and for the past couple of weeks have had a fully functional version of the demo running. The closed-beta testers are now able to play alongside Windows players on the same version, with full Punkbuster support. The major systems including the renderer and audio are working great, and performance has been good on both the NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards.

Alongside my other responsibilities at id, my focus now is on optimization for the Linux Client. If everything goes to plan, we should have the Linux Client ready for release in just a few weeks.

Read TTimo’s full post here.

Darn. Well, I have tons of stuff to do with Foresight right now anyway, but it would have been fun to have some time to play before my new job starts in a couple weeks!

Waiting Game: Quake Wars

I picked up a copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Now I’m just playing the waiting game for the Linux binary so I can play it.

I think the actual game is more fun.

But I wanted to make a statement by picking up the game during release week – it’s important to me to support commercial game companies who make Linux compatible games.

Say it ain't so Mr. Carmack!

With all the good news coming out of QuakeCon this weekend (Enemy Territory, Rage, Q3 in a browser!), there was one point of disappointing news for me as a fan if id Software: id has partnered with Valve to deploy their titles on Steam.

Valve has already publicly stated it has no plans for Steam on Linux. Being former Microsoft developers, who is surprised? But id has always been a cross-platform development company and it’s disappointing to see them partner with Valve on this. But I can’t really blame them, as they deserve kudos for monetizing their catalog titles, and the price point is amazing – $70 for all id titles up to and including Doom3 and it’s expansion. That’s amazing – play all their games from Commander Keen to Quake to Doom3. (Yes, I know I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth.)

Now the bad news – it appears that Valve is using DOSBox to make id’s older games playable, which is GPL, without including specific files, such as COPYING.TXT which makes this violate the GPL.

I saw the original story on Slashdot, and it’s an interesting tale of two communities. The HalfLife2.net forums quickly degenerate into mudslinging, especially on pages 4-7, with one user going so far as to, well, read for yourself:

****ing ridiculous. I don’t know how some of you can brush this off as a mere ‘molehill’ or misunderstanding. You Valve and ID apologists sicken me.

The GPL is essentially the word of God, look at it as the 13th commandment: Thou Shalt Distribute The Source And Any Chamges Made Unto It To All Those Who Ask. When God created Adam and Eve he made it such that when they procreate, each of them combine to make the new item and the source modification is passed on down the generations. It is no co-incidence that Richard Stallman appears as we envisage God to appear for he is a true prophet of our time, a visionary who is putting Gods voice into the digital age.

The fact that these heathens dared ignore Gods word and packaged the games without copying.txt is absolutely unforgivable. They will surely rot for eternity in hell as no doubt you who support them will too.

…Which is an interesting take on the GPL that I haven’t necessary seen before. I’ve heard of GNU zealots, but this might take the cake.

The DOSBox forums are a contrast in civility and logic. Instead of Valve bashing and zealotry, DOSBox developers call out the exceptions, and update the thread when Valve does something good, such as adding back the COPYING.TXT file via Steam. The developers seem understanding of the situation so far, and while major questions remain around distributing the source of Valve’s changes, the DOSBox team seem to be taking a wait an see approach.

John Carmack, id’s lead developer and co-owner, has always been a friend of the GPL – he has led the open sourcing of most prior games once the licensees are done using them, resulting in successes such as ioquake3. I’m hopeful this will all be resolved in a good way. And I still wish Valve would put a Steam client on Linux (and OSX) too.

ET: Quake Wars First Impressions

I stopped by my buddy’s place last night and put my ET: Quake Wars beta key to use on one of his Windows boxes. After downloading the client, I hopped in to a random ET:QW running about 8 on 8.

One word sums it up: Fast. It’s Quake3 / Quake4 fast. I’ve always thought and heard that Q3 was considered faster than UT2k4, and if that’s true, than Battlefield 2 is molasses.

There is only one map for the beta, and it feels a lot like the Assault mode on UT2k4 with timed objectives. I played human (GDF), and we were the attacking force. Once you met your objective, your spawn point became that forward way point, and the Strogg’s objective was to keep us from moving forward.

I played almost all of the classes, and in the 90 minutes I played, it was hard to form an opinion, but due to the speed of the game and the respawn, I was mostly assault, playing all 3 classes with the assault rifle, heavy machine gun and rocket launcher.

I tried Medic out briefly, and due to the speed and chaos, it was pretty easy to rack up some experience bringing back soldiers from the dead.

Speaking of dying and respawn, respawn is fast. Twenty seconds tops, on average about ten seconds before all the dead soldiers are re-deployed as a group at the most recent objective / spawnpoint.

I intuitively understood the layout and the icon structure, but feedback from my friends has been they’ve struggled with that so far. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been reading the fan sites off and on over the past few months and had a clue what to expect, but I was able to navigate the map and the objectives fairly easily.

You get experience based on kills, but more based on choosing an objective out of a few available, and then completing it. I was promoted to Soldier during one run where I had the rocket launcher, and my upgrade was that the lock-on for the rocket launcher went from about 7 seconds to 2. So there is definitely an advantage in going after the objectives than just randomly kililng people.

It remains to be seen if the maps at release are bigger, which reduces the speed and chaos, as it will give you and your fireteam (squad) a chance to get organized and go in together. The game also needs voicechat, you can’t keep up with the text on the screen with the speed of the game.

I’m going to need to play this a few more times – with UT2k7 on the horizon, I’m not sold on ET:QW as much as I was, just based on how fast the game was moving. I want my squad to move together as a team, not just keep rushing like lemmings against the objective.

Truth is, I’ll buy it to support gaming on Linux, but my first impression was cautious optimism. I may play a rounds of ET: Wolfenstein this weekend just to compare how fast the gameplay was in the orignial.

In related news, Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that ET:QW has been delayed again, this time until Sept. 3rd.

Quake Wars Update

I’m standing in Chicago last night (just after eating at a Chicago-style hot dog place, one of my favorite things to eat, but I digress) waiting for the train to take me to the airport when I get a call from a good friend informing me that Quake Wars beta keys were available.

Linux Games has an update from Timothee Besset at iD regarding the Linux client and lack of beta:

I don’t want to commit to any schedule for the ETQW Linux client at this point. Most of my time is spent working on the game itself, on the Linux dedicated server and on the network infrastructure.

Once those things wind down (in the upcoming weeks) I will start working specifically on the client. But fear not, ATI and NVidia have expressed interest in getting a Linux client early, so they can review how it performs and get their drivers adjusted. When we release, we’ll release a high quality product, just like we do on Windows.

In any case, don’t expect to find Linux binaries on the retail DVD. It’s hard enough for everyone to get gold masters done, there are enough things to check and worry about, I will not place additional strain on the procedure by trying to squeeze my additional set of files on there.

I have my key, looks like I’ll have play the beta at a buddies house for now. September can’t come fast enough for when I can play at home.