IncaGold GmbH and Hyperion Entertainment VOF announced that they entered into a comprehensive license agreement which will see many of IncaGold’s current and future entertainment software titles converted for the Amiga, Linux and Macintosh platforms.
After the demise of Loki Games, Hyperion is probably the most important commercial Linux game developing company left on the market today. They now have a really impressive list of licenses and released titles (Heretic2, Descent Freespace, Shogo, SiN, Soldier of Fortune, Majesty, Worms Armageddon, etc, etc!), but have been pretty quiet lately due to their top programmers leading the AmigaOS4 project, as well as being hired by Mai Logic for developing the AmigaOne/Teron firmware ROM.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=278
Considering their expertise in many different fields the “Entertainment” part of Hyperion’s name is a bit misleading though. For instance they also have a AmigaOS4 license for porting Real3D, a great professional 3D Raytracer. They changed their name from Hyperion Software to Hyperion Entertainment simply because there was another company with the same name already.
Keep up the excellent work Hyperion!
I’m a linux user longing for seeing linux become a viable gaming platform.
I admire the company diving into linux gaming market where we have been failing to see any single company staying in healthy business condition by selling linux games. But I really hope seeing this brave company succeed in this not-so-easily-foreseeable arena.
Informed by Mike Bouma’s post, I guess the company has very efficient software engineers. Because, IMHO supporting several different platforms are not so easy task.
Having such efficient engineers in the field of linux software development is a good news. Because I expect to see these developers help improving linux as a gaming platform where 3D graphics, high-quality sound systems and variety of input(and even feedback) devices are required to work properly. Currently, most of such devices are not supported in linux.
The term “Multimedia PC” sounds a bit old to me but, IMHO, LSB needs to include something like multimedia specifications so that it can help a brave company like hyperion and many of linux home users.
Thanks
Please support BeOS !
> Please support BeOS !
Considering there is no solid commercial company developing BeOS anymore, there is not much chance for this to happen anytime soon.
The Amiga platform is a passion amongst the company’s developers and that’s why they invest so much effort, time and money into this huge AmigaOS4 project.
Some of the developers are so passionate that they continue to develop in their spare time. For instance Steffen ported Quake2 to AmigaOS soon after ID Software released the source code. And he did a most excellent job, as despite the bottlenecked decade old classic architecture. The game flies on 150 MHz PPC equiped Amigas.
http://www.knight-industries.de/q2/
> Considering there is no solid commercial company
> developing BeOS anymore,
Nor is one required. GNU/Linux was doing quite well before IBM decided to tag along. What’s important is the number of people actually using an OS. However, this criterion for supporting an OS probably also rules out BeOS. 🙂
What’s needed to bring more games to alternative platforms is for developers to design for platform independence from the get-go. Solutions have existed for years.
http://www.libsdl.org
http://www.opengl.org
>Considering there is no solid commercial company developing BeOS anymore, there is not much chance for this to
happen anytime soon.
http://www.yellowtab.com/
I Think people need to read more! ..and Im playing Quake2 and Worms right know on a BeOS machine… }:p
I know I should probably be thankful for this, and to some extent I really am, but looking on the IncaGold website’s product list, I didn’t see a single game, with the exception perhaps of “deer hunter 3d” (and then only because a friend had it on his computer), that I have heard of before.
And that midnight racing’s “cutting edge 3d engine” looks a bit dated to say the least..
But, I’m glad this is happening
@ Anonymous
> Nor is one required. GNU/Linux was doing quite well
> before IBM decided to tag along. What’s important is the
> number of people actually using an OS.
Much more important is the actual amount of people prepared to buy your product. For instance the Amiga user base is much smaller than the Linux userbase, however Hyperion sells more commercial games for the Amiga platform than for Linux, even despite having more competition from other Amiga games developers.
@ etabolic
> Think people need to read more!
I know about Zeta and yellowTAB, but they do not yet have the momentum Be Inc once had. (i.e. during the BeNews high times)
and of any new computer in genereal, but i think the BeOS market with zeta and other osbos in the futur will be bigger than the amiga one. First because of the biggest popularity of the x86 platform and because a PPC port will probably arise that will even play on those PPC amiga board also.
As long that OS4 have a good emulation compatability of ECS/AGA machine the pure nostalgia of playing old amiga game should be enough for many anyway.
Commercial games company are not a mendatory thing for an OS to succeed. If we take linux, the biggest problem it that the open project concept is only used by coder and not artist. If those artist could contact many project leader and offer music track, texture set handdrawn art etc… the open project games would look just like professional one. This is what i hope will happen for BeOS, linux and amiga.
Source forge need to expend to incorporate games, perhaps a spinoff. So let say an artist that just draw and can’t compose music and can’t code can already do lot of dialogue, story board 3d modeling etc… Then a coder could come in and do some SFX and give some benchmark on what need to be toned down to fit on most machine.
I personally almost gave up on the “commercial” games concept. Most company can’t take risk anymore so i became fed up with their offering most of the time, tomb raider 15 wow
@ Mike Bouma
> Much more important is the actual amount of people
> prepared to buy your product.
I thought that was implied… 🙂
> For instance the Amiga user base is much smaller than
> the Linux userbase, however Hyperion sells more
> commercial games for the Amiga platform than for Linux,
> even despite having more competition from other Amiga
> games developers.
It is my experience that 1) GNU/Linux users are generally not gamers and 2) GNU/Linux users are generally distrustful of proprietary software. If Hyperion were to sell (boxed copies of) free software instead, they may have more success.
OS4 hasn’t got any (announced) particular AGA/ECS compatibility. And those who buy OS4 don’t particularly fit the “nostalgia” niche. The nostalgiacs crowd mainly onto the Windows platform.
I once heard, i think it was ben, talking about why that dont port a lot of games to linux anymore. It was because basicly anyone who runs linux for home use (I.e not programing) prolly runs windows. And if those people want games, they’ll run themon their window machines.
Ben, or who ever said it, said that the Amiga gaming market is much larger
. And i totlay understand what he’s saying. Theres not many linux gamers, and those who are keen, would buy the real thing, that came out for windows, far before the linux version! The linux market is a hardmarket, because of the dual boot thing!