3d Gaming in DSL

Forum: myDSL Extensions (deprecated)
Topic: 3d Gaming in DSL
started by: ke4nt1

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 26 2004,21:34

As of 12/26/2004..

I felt the need to start this thread, as the SCREENSHOTS thread is becoming
somewhat bogged with all the loading of screenies in there..
( I can only imagine what a dialup-er must think when they hit THAT thread )

I plan to "link" my screenies to my server, rather than loadup images. ( that should help )

I'll also move my 3d screenies over to this new thread, in an attempt to keep
"games" and "gaming" in here, and desktops in there...

With the new extensions that hit the site here around Christmastime,
the possibility for using DSL as a real 3d Gaming platform is coming to fruition.
I have been working with a "wine.dsl" for some time now, and other games.
Henk's XFree86.dsl was the impetus that put several of us into action.
With that came the NVidia.dsl , kernelsources.dsl, binutils.dsl, XF86Config's ..
Now many games that require 3D or accelerated graphics will soon arrive here.

I have personally tested and run the following successfully..

Quake 3 Arena ( yea! ) ( linux version )
Soldier of Fortune II ( under wine )
TuxRacer ( it's now in "testing" area of the repository )
Frozen Bubble ( another yea! )
Foobillard ( suggested by Henk )
Vega Strike

just added - UT2003 ( linux demo )

I had these running in DSL already, but the XFree and NVidia just makes them better..
StarCraft ( under wine )
Heroes III of Might & Magic ( for Linux )
Railroad Tycoon II ( for Linux )
Myth II - the Soulblighter ( for Linux )
Civilization II - ( under wine - needs further work )
Isn't there a Civ II - Call to Power for Linux out back inthe loki days?

Several others as I get my hands on them..

I'm certain many more will hit the repository shortly.

Obviously, the non-gpl stuff ( Q3, SoF2, StarCraft, etc.. ) will never be
"extensions" , but the environment to run them in is already in place.

This also suggest further work needs to be done to create the
accelerated drivers for ATI, Matrox, etc.. I won't be much help here,
since I don't own any of these, but I expect they will show up soon..

What about servers? Quake 3 server ? SoF2 server ?
Wouldn't it just be the bees knees to have a DSL LiveCD bootup up,
and have a q3 server loaded and awaiting incoming players,
configured however you like, and playable from your DSL box ??

What about other games and their servers? ( half-life , halo2 , etc ?)
What other games do you know have linux patches or servers for download?

I'm guessing that this thread will explode here shortly, as more features
become available, and DSL is not considered just an
"office and web" endowed distro, but a true lightweight gaming platform.

For many folks, running these games on their boxes is a priority when selecting
a distro to work with. Now DSL is firmly in position to have this ability "on call" ,
without having to alter the base .iso for the uses of running on older or slower equipment.
This only adds to DSL's appeal...

Your thoughts?

73
ke4nt

Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on Dec. 26 2004,23:04

UT2004 demo is available for linux, I've been playing the demo on windoze for the past six months, it's awesome, only limits are the maps you can play on and the characters available. Even if I could afford the full install, I simply don't have the space fot it, as it takes up something like 5.5GIG!! Demo is about 500MB, so could easily fit a 3D DSL plus UT2004demo onto a standard CD!

As I said somewhere else, < License to Kill: the Borg Matrix > is being developed for linux, it's a STANDALONE version of ActionQuake2 that doesn't require any pak files, is compatible with AQ2 servers, and includes bots for single player gaming.

But yeah, definitely UT2004, that would be a HUGE boon for DSL!

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 26 2004,23:50

Cube!

I'm gonna try it out in DSL soon...downloading the xfree and nvidia extensions now.
Cube isn't GPL, but it is open source and distributable, so it can be an extension. It's also not dependent on installation location, so it can be stuck wherever you want it (as long as you modify the cube_unix script so it knows where to look).

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Dec. 27 2004,01:35

Don't hold your breath for ATI linux drivers in DSL.

I went through a lot of trouble to build them, and they suck.

I'm talking unplayalby bad framerate and artifacts out the wazoo.

Did some looking, and this is the norm for ATI's linux drivers. They suck.

They aren't worth the trouble of building, and I can't repackage them, from what I understand. And they aren't worth the trouble to repackage anyways.

Sorry. Nvidia is still the only choice for 3D gaming in Linux.

-J.P.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Dec. 27 2004,01:41

Also, we need a new Gaming forum, to keep Xfree and games question out of the way of other DSl business.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 27 2004,01:44

Here is yet another 3D gaming favorite in DSL

Unreal Tournament 2003 ( I simply downloaded the demo )

The UT2004 demo is just under 300MB's , which is why I picked the 2003.
Also this is only a 1GHz box, but gameplay in DSL and UT2003 is VERY acceptable...

73
ke4nt

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 27 2004,03:37

Hmmm...I've got ut2003 installed in suse. I wonder...with properly edited configs I could probably run that same install without having it all loaded into the ramdisk.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 27 2004,04:07

Yes..
On most of these tests I've done,
the "game" (ut2003, Q3, StarCraft, etc.. )
has been loaded on a HD somewhere..

Rarely will someone have enough "ramspace" to run a game of this size.
Forget running the full versions in ramspace..

All of these are being run from a "liveCD" ,
with extra partitions mounted after bootup to access file storage areas.

My SoF2 test was actually run from the same installed version in Windows..
Same with StarCraft .. I also did a pure StarCraft install under wine to my
"fake windows" directory.. It works as well..

Many of the "demos" were for linux, and were simply installed to a
partition somewhere outside the ramspace/filesystem..

I always run from LiveCD or Poorman's
Hard Drives are for storage, not OS installs

73
ke4nt

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 27 2004,14:13

Cube works great! It takes a lot longer to start up, but once it gets going I can't tell the difference between its performance in my DSL system and my Suse system.
No screenshot because cube apparently won't run windowed...any shots would be the same as those found at cubeengine.com. Also I probably won't bother making an extension, since the compiled release is a simple extract-and-run setup.

I forgot to try ut2003...got excited about cube and came here right after playing.

EDIT: I also forgot that cube requires libSDL_image-1.2.so.0, libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0, and libpng.so.3.
Maybe an extension wouldn't be a bad idea.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 27 2004,17:08

Try this....

start up the gimp
( I use the 2.0 version )

Select from menu to acquire screenshot..
Choose to acquire the whole desktop..
set the delay for 90-120 seconds..

Then go play ...

Eventually, you'll get a screenshot pop-up ..
It will probably be windowed.. no problem..

Alt-Tab will usually rotate you thru your windows ,
and alt-F / save will get your screenshot stored to your
/home/dsl directory...

Works for me..

73
ke4nt

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 27 2004,18:58

Good plan....I hadn't thought of that.
Cube/UT takes full control over my mouse and keyboard, so I couldn't figure out a way to open or switch to anything else.

Posted by AwPhuch on Dec. 29 2004,17:46

Has anyone seen this site?

< http://www.transgaming.com/ >

It supports over 300 of the latest M$ games with 100% compatibility with linux? < Games Database >

Let me know what ya think!

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 29 2004,18:18

I have looked over the site from time to time..

Cedega is the latest version of their package..
A tweaked "wine" for use in linux, etc..

But at a never-ending $5.00 per month subscription fee, no thanks.

Fortunately, they do release some info and updates
back into the wine-winehq-opensource public as their
"contributions" to the open source community.

73
ke4nt

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 29 2004,19:06

Here is a small collage of games working on my system in DSL.
Relocated from the SCREENSHOT threads

73
ke4nt

Posted by AwPhuch on Dec. 29 2004,20:12

Quote (ke4nt1 @ Dec. 29 2004,13:18)

So how hard is it to get wine to run these games?

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 29 2004,22:28

The only 2 games I had to use with wine were
Soldier of Fortune II and StarCraft. ( more to come )

The rest of the games in this group were natively for linux.

I expect we'll soon see more patches for running games
natively in linux..
Gaming software companies are realizing that the game servers run better with linux,
and the patches used to make the games play in linux typically use the same data and game files as the windows versions.

Downloading wine from apt-get is easy.
Configuring it is easy as well. I usually choose windowed mode.
You need some drive space off-CD to save setups and installs.
My home/dsl/.wine is in my backup, and my "fake windows" area
is on my hda7 drive.

There have been some attempts to make wine.dsl's , but it needs to write to drivespace and areas unique to every PC.
( some folks have hda2 , some have hdb1, etc.. )
They get screwy when run in other boxes after the install..

I may throw one into testing just to have some other eyeballs in on it.

73
ke4nt

Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 30 2004,05:27

Unreal Tournament 2004 - on a 1000MHz machine and 64MB NVidia card.

20-25 FPS avg.

73
ke4nt

Posted by PhrozenFear on Dec. 31 2004,20:15

Damn... this is a dream come true for me. I've been trying to get these games to work with Linux for a while. I even went and got myself a large storage drive for that very reason...

Now, the only thing I'm going to need to make myself fully competent is the how on your Wine install (so I can get that piece of junk Visual Studio.NET installed) so I don't need Winbl0wz anymore. But rather than clutter your lovely thread with stuff that everyone but me can do, you could just either message it to me, or e-mail it to me (Marc.StPierre@mail.cal.devry.ca).

Thanks a lot for your hard work, man. You're a HUGE help to this project, and it seems sometimes you don't get enough recognition for it.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Jan. 03 2005,08:51

This one was requested by my boys..

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Runs great in DSL !

73
ke4nt

Posted by ke4nt1 on Jan. 08 2005,23:23

Another FUN game running in DSL..

High Heat Baseball 2003 !

73
ke4nt

Posted by jshaw on Jan. 10 2005,18:59

Ok, this is tooo figgin' cool. Just got XFree86.dsl and NVidia.dsl working in under 30 minutes and played TuxRacer on my 300 MHZ Celeron from LiveCD. WAY TOO COOL. Major kudos to everyone here. I love DSL. Keep up the great work.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Jan. 12 2005,17:15

end thread..

please continue to post your gaming comments
in the "games" section of the forum.
There are threads available for numerous titles.

73
ke4nt