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It would be great if Michael was able to port citadel to SDL and hence a Linux port, ive not tried the game yet but it looks good. I like lgeneral, but it has its shortfalls, but still a great game nonetheless.
keep up the great work Michael

falvious
www.linuxgaming.co.uk

Good point about Suse, I also haven't used it since iso's stopped being freely available - and i don't know if it's any good these days, so i wouldn't buy it or recommend it to anyone. I would guess Suse are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.

I'm glad the moderators on osnews are more accepting and intelligent than those on slashdot. Thanks!

Well, if you dowbloaded it then SuSE never made any money from you in the first place.

Way back when, I bought SuSE 5.1-5.3 then 6.1. I hadn't looked at it again until version 8.0. I have to say, it's improved a lot over the years. After trying Mdk 8.2, SuSE 8 and RH 7.3 (and Limbo2) I'd have to recommend SuSE 8.0 for desktop use. It is seriosuly slick. It felt as together as BeOS did for me. I urge you to try it. There's now a 16MB ISO that does an FTP install if you can't afford to buy the boxed set. It's relly great. Yast2 has pretty much everything you'd need in a system management tool, and YOU (the online update tool) seemed almost as slick as Debian's apt-get. It won't be replacing Debian on my laptop yet, but it was a very strong distribution. It seemed very professional.

As for the free ISOs, I like what Libranet does. They sell the newest version but offer the previous version free to download. This way a user can get a feel for the system and decide if they want to purchase the shipping version. Maybe SuSE should give away 7.4 ISO files. Seems a good comprimise between making money and keeping people happy.

As for the article, good interview. I'd never played any of the lgames, but Debian had most of them packaged. They seem quite good.

Did someone ever thought about doing a game distro?

CD-ROMS included in magazines sell very well here in Brazil and, at least in my case, I found installing SDL (and other things a F/X-enriched file manager demanded) way too difficult (in fact, I gave up).

Maybe we could go to next level: standardize on some principal Linux distros and go for game distros, office-software distros, multimedia distros etc. which would be added onto those main Linux distros.

Of course, RedHat, Mandrake or Suse could do this, but I think we'd have more competition with independent distributors of an specific class of software.

Check out Mandrake Linux gaming edition
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/81/gaming-edition

That is *so* true about distros needing to put 3D hardware suppport in there from the very start. As things stand, 3D gaming on Linux will never take off big-time!

In my opinion, LBreakout2 rocks! (especially the BeOS version!) Nice interview, i'd like to see a map/scenerio editor for LGeneral... and the network version sounds fun. When that one comes out can you port it to BeOS Eugneia?

*If* his network code plays nice with BeOS, yes.
He does not use SDL_net for the network code of LB2 (which anyway its BeOS version is currently broken and it does not work well with BeOS' net_server), while by not using something as cross platform as SDL_net it gets tricky to port it to BeOS easily, especially if he is using sockets a lot.

With BONE that would not have been a major issue, but with net_server, it is really difficult to port real networking apps on BeOS...

Michael Speck: Windows and Linux are the only ones. My first Linux distribution was SuSE 6.0 but as its updates became too expensive I switched to Mandrake 8.x.

So, I wonder, how could you play Turrican which was your all time favourite on the Commodore 64, if you only use Windows and Linux before....?

Anonymous: Good point about Suse, I also haven't used it since iso's stopped being freely available - and i don't know if it's any good these days, so i wouldn't buy it or recommend it to anyone. I would guess Suse are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.

On one hand, they can provide ISOs so freeloaders can download - not only they don't get any money from it, they waste bandwidth. On the other hand, you loose market share. There is an FTP install, use it, see if you like it, and buy the package. This is the sole reason why Linux businesses are dropping dead one after another...

So in the first place, how do they shoot their own foot when they don't make a single cent out of you?

Ben: Maybe SuSE should give away 7.4 ISO files.

IIRC, they didn't have a 7.4.....

Besides, I wish they can have ISOs for download. For a fee of course. Why? There isn't one, not even one, reseller in south east asia selling SuSE 8.0. I could buy over the Net, but shipping would cost more than the product itself...

I'm mostly using Windows as my game development platform, and using the ClanLib SDK. I tried first SDL, but found actually ClanLib *ALOT* easier to compile under Windows than SDL. After I had coded on my game for a while, and wanted it ported to Linux, I tried ClanLib under Linux, and it was a simple ./configure, make install. It uses libpng, libjpeg as dependencies, but who hasnt got those installed?

Anyway, its all about taste, but I find ClanLib providing such ultimately more than SDL, and lets me concentrate on developing my game. If you compare ClanNetwork and SDL_Net, you'll see how much easier it is to use, while not loosing any controls since its high-level.

But I guess after developing 3-4 games, you have coded much of your gameengine needs (its just that I saved much of that work).

I checked their homepage and didn't find a hint so maybe they changed it but back when I tried to install it ClanLib relied on two underlying libraries. I think libhermes was one and I can't remember the other. It was horribly broken and took me quite the time to get it to run. If they got rid of it, good but as you said I already coded most of the algortithms I need so I'll surely stay with SDL.

Actually, you're right, ClanLib does depend on Hermes. I didnt notice, since it was already installed in my distro. I talked to the authors in irc, and they plan to move Hermes into the sourcetree, so the only dependencies will be libjpeg, libpng and zlib (which all distroes come with, I think).

I've got to tell you that I downloaded Ltris and Lbreakout
and instaled on my computer at home. And what's really funny
my parents play those great games everyday! So, thanx for the L games.

Whomever complains about dependencies is still in RPM dark ages and have never seen the dpkg lights as witnessed thru apt-get and dselect.

Seriously, it's one of those cases of half-baked "industry standards" (RPM) carrying far too long over and beyond its capabilities, thus affecting and slowing down the whole industry.

It's finally nice to read about somebody in linux development community that's concerned about the end users install experience. Lbreakout2 is great and my 4yr old daughter loves lpairs and I can install them both in 10 minuets.

Suse is a great distribution, great documentation, support and updates. For those too cheap for Suse, try Gentoo Linux. Very good distribution but a lot of work to maintain. Makes you appricate what you paid for.

urpmi for Mandrake is much better than apt-get. e.g... I installed debian on my sparcstation the other day. I needed the development headers for PAM to compile and install OpenSSH (yes I know there's a .deb, but that's one of the packages I like to maintain myself).

Anyway, I tried "apt-get install pam", "apt-get install pam-dev", "apt-get install pam-devel". Nothing worked. I finally searched google for "pam" and "debian", and found what I was looking for - libpam-dev.

urpmi for Mandrake does pattern recognition on whatever you tell it to install, so if I say "urpmi pam", urpmi will say "Here are the packages containing the string 'pam':"... then I figure out which one I want to install and do it.. i.e. "urpmi libpam-dev".

Also, rpmdrake is a really nice graphical tool to look through available and installed packages. Much better than dselect.

" I found installing SDL (and other things a F/X-enriched file manager demanded) way too difficult (in fact, I gave up)."

What?! Are you using windows? If so all you do is drop the .dlls in the windows/system directory, come on that isnt that hard! I can give you step by step instructions if you need them. Seems pretty simple to me..


"I tried first SDL, but found actually ClanLib *ALOT* easier to compile under Windows than SDL."

Well SDL has precompiled .dlls, unlike clanlib. I tried clanlib and gave up.. why should we be _required_ to compile ANY DLL?! First off its not compatible with every compiler, second its a pointless step.
When you distribute the game/demo are you going to make the home users compile your clanlib DLL before playing?! hehehe
Compiling the DLL shouldnt even be an issue, USING it is the real issue here, and to me clanlib seems much more complicated than SDL, you might as well just use DirectX!
SDL is great, now I dont even look at ClanLib or DirectX..
(Except for porting to SDL) ;D


"As things stand, 3D gaming on Linux will never take off big-time!"
Why not? Linux users cant go out and buy a 3D card like everyone else?! Wont SDL and opengl code run on Linux if they have a card installed? Is it really THAT complicated to install a 3d card on a linux machine?... if so, thats sad, and its no wonder why there are so many(too many) windows users..(hmm, should I pick plug and play, or 50 pages of complicated instructions, yea..)

Hello everyone,

Perhaps you might be interested in the ongoing LBreakout2 Theming Contest on happypenguin.org:
http://happypenguin.org/newsitem?id=2786

Cheers,
Ruediger

I've been happy with Slackware for a long time. I just like its simplicity and I've hardly ever had a problem with it. It seems very stable.

As for the Allegro/SDL/ClanLib thing, I think they all have their pros and cons. Allegro is very easy to learn and it has a great community, ClanLib is just a completely different concept with its C++-ness, and SDL is so simple. IMO, SDL shouldn't add any of these addon packages into its base. That's what makes SDL great--it's simple, fast, and small. If you need something, you get the module. For Windows, it's not like it's hard to package all the required deps. For Linux, I'm hoping that SDL and most of its major packages start being included in distros. But SDL is very easy to install (in Linux).

Something else I've been experimenting with lately is pygame, which is based on SDL. It has some really amazing features, installation is a snap (you don't have to compile in Windows), and it is python! Gotta love python, heh.

Maybe someday Linux can have some cool games, but I'm putting my money on WineX. They're really doing a great job, and I think soon it will be a very legitable idea to play DirectX-based games under Linux (it already is for a lot of people). Now if only there was support for my blastest cheap WinModem chipset, heh.

Why would you want to do that? DirectX is so confusing and seems badly put together. And this will also require the user to buy the WineX product just to play your game, when you could have saved yourself and him the trouble simply by using SDL! Also what can possibly be the benefit of using a 3rd party application to run a game which is created with DirectX, a product that is not designed to run on your linux machine?!