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Gearbox wins Homeworld Auction

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Photo by Johnny Wallker under a CC-NC-ND 2.0 license

I’m cleaning up some open tabs and a story of interest to me is related to the 1999 game Homeworld from Relic Entertainment.

Relic Entertainment was bought by THQ in 2004 and THQ went bankrupt this year, auctioning off a lot of old assets, Homeworld included.  Six months ago TeamPixel, a small studio, started a Kickstarter campaign to gather support to try and win the rights to Homeworld from the bankruptcy court.  TeamPixel had a goal to bring Homeworld to iOS and Android as well as creating Homeworld 3 for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Homeworld was extremely innovative for its time.  Featuring large space battles in three dimensions (and ships you lost didn’t go with you to the next mission), a great storyline and an active mod community, there was nothing else like it.

The auction and Kickstarter had some buzz – after I tweeted that I supported the Kickstarter, I was surprised how many replies I received with other people showing interest in it as well.

TeamPixel did not win the auction for the rights in bankruptcy court.  It was later revealed that Gearbox, a studio known more for first person shooters including Borderlands, Brothers in Arms, finishing Duke Nukem Forever and Counter-Strike did.

Back in August, Gearbox shared their plans for Homeworld in their developer blog, Inside the Box.  They plan to re-release Homeworld and Homeworld 2 for digital release (I’m guessing Steam) updating it to use the latest PC hardware.

The blog post is great – Brian Burleson shares his excitement in winning the auction and some of the challenges ahead in bringing Homeworld to modern technology:

When all the paperwork cleared and the source code was delivered we finally were able to unwrap what had eluded us for so long only to find that… the bike had one pedal, needed a new chain and overall was just missing parts. Granted, we knew this bike was 10-15 years old and hadn’t been touched by the original owner in quite some time, but still!

That’s when the real work started, and boy howdy, did all of those people who reached out to us at the beginning come in handy!

Over the course of a couple of months we were able to find the missing pieces and started to get the bike, erm, game, working again. (I’ll drop the bike metaphor now.)

As Martel mentioned during our panel at PAX Australia, it’s been a struggle to get all of the original tools working again. Just for comparison, the source drop we got from the purchase of the Homeworld property was 16.8 gigs. The sum of all the additional missing source we got from friends who had worked on the games originally was about 39 gigs. The two have almost zero overlap!

For example, Homeworld 2 was largely developed in a heavily customized version Maya 3. (Something we still haven’t located.) This means that if we wanted to update Homeworld 2 content for an HD version, we needed to turn to different tools.

Give the whole thing a read.  Here’s to hoping Gearbox is successful and can bring this back cross-platform as well – I’d love to play Homeworld again on my Mac!

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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.

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.