German SDL Book

I just discovered a new German book about game development with SDL will be released soon (08/07/2008) : Spieleprogrammierung mit dem SDL. Erstellen von 2D-Spielen mit dem Simple DirectMedia Layer (ISBN 978-3446412118) by Johannes P.-M. Kühn & Matthias Schlemm.

Game Developer's Open Source Handbook

Can't help, I just like books and by crawling on Amazon I found yet another interesting book - the Game Developer's Open Source Handbook by Steven Goodwin, Charles River Media (2006) - which is covering game development around Open Source - it's tools, strategies, the philosophy behind. This book seems to be a good introduction for game developer's to get an overview of the modern world of Open Source.

GIMP 2.4 User Manual

Recently, the GIMP reached the next milestone with version 2.4, and now the new GIMP 2.4 User Manual is also finished.

UNIXGAMEDEV Update

Another quarter is over and time for me to write the next status report about the Unix Game Development project.

Indeed, a lot has changed. Most notably is the fusion of the UNIXGAMEDEV board, wiki, and IRC with the Free Game Development project. To the benefit of everybody we came to the conclusion both projects have similar aims and better work together, instead of having almost two identical project with a heavy focus on improving the FOSS gaming situation. Though we have slight differences in our vision - UGD is only Unix and open for every business model, FGD is OS agnostic and only FOSS - both are mainly about Unix & FOSS. In the end, the original idea of the UNIXGAMEDEV project to establish a Unix & FOSS game development community has been an experiment only. Somehow it failed, but in general lives on in the FreeGameDev project. This may sound a little sad, at least to me, but actually it is a very good thing pulling together when it's about improving the small and stagnating situation of the Unix & FOSS gamedev scene, and hopefully you share my mind on that point and will use & support the new infrastructure.

• FreeGameDev Forum
• FreeGameDev Wiki
  
• Search Engine for free Content
• Media Pack Community Effort
• Syndicate of Multiple Blogs Related to FOSS GameDev
• IRC - #freegamer (at) irc.freenode.net

You may question what's about the UNIXGAMEDEV blog. Well, as far as I know there does not exist a FreeGameDev blog, only the Free Gamer blog about open source games, but maybe the FreeGameDev community someday will start one. Personally I want to keep this UNIXGAMEDEV blog to focus myself on Unix game development & the scene, but put any FOSS gaming effort into the FreeGameDev project.

Nevertheless, I am thinking about how to make use of the domain UNIXGAMEDEV.ORG now, at least I still owe it, 'cause for simple blogging I don't really need a top level domain. Maybe I start another experiment and redefine the vision - who knows, perhaps I'll use it as site for my devteam or something else. Anyway, unixgamedev.blogspot.com will remain in the case I have no plans.

Unix Gaming History

Some time ago I have written a text about the origins of Unix gaming, and think it would be nice to publish it here, too:

While the roots of the Unix family lays back in 1969, and meantime has become a mature and widespread platform in the hacker culture, Unix-like systems never have been a traditional video gaming platform. Nevertheless, gaming also exist among hackers, and the BSD Games Collection (/usr/games) is a contemporary witness of traditional Unix games, a collection of classic text-based games. Due to Unix's strength in networking, it also has been used as MUD/MUSH server often. Probably the most popular traditional Unix game ever written is Nethack, from which even some graphical clones have been developed nowadays. Indeed, even graphical X11 games usually have a cheesy look.

As the gaming scene evolved in the late 1980's, because of new commodity hardware like VGA with lots of potential for gaming, Unix was rather used for expensive high-quality workstation-oriented graphics, but unsuited for arcade games. That's when the development of Linux started in 1991, which is the epitome of Unix today. Those days Unix's graphic capabilities were limited to an ugly implemented SVGALib with limited hardware support, or the network-friendly and flexible Xlib, which was slow. Some few attempts to establish the upcoming Linux as a gaming platform in the mid 1990's, by porting games like Doom or Abuse (both use SVGALib and X) didn't really break into a new market. Especially Dave D. Tayler did some pioneer work then.

In the mid 1990's the 3D revolution began with the introduction of commodity 3D accelerators, though it took some time to bring the new technology to Unix. Indeed, the new 3D technology heavily relies on the driver support of the manufactures, and due to their mulishness isn't yet supported for Unix-like systems in general. In 1993, Brian Paul started Mesa, a free implementation of the OpenGL specifications, but Daryll Strauss is known as the person who brought 3D graphics to Linux by convincing 3Dfx to let him port Glide. For the first time 3D acceleration was supported by Mesa 2.2 via Glide in 1998.

Since OpenGL doesn't handle presentation devices, it needs to be connected for a proper integration into X. This sort of glue is SGI's GLX, Open Source since 1999. It still needs a suitable driver for 3D hardware acceleration, and Utah GLX was an attempt to extend GLX with hardware acceleration. Indeed, it reached a reasonably good performance, but had intrinsic limitations in its design. Nevertheless, it was the beginning for Linux as a viable gaming platform, and the start for Loki Software (1998-2002) to port some games to Linux. Following Loki's example, Linux Game Publishing was founded in 2001 with the aim to port games to Linux.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) was another attempt to support hardware acceleration, and has overcome Utah GLX's design limitations. It consists of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel modules, which provides an interface to the hardware, and a userspace backend for Mesa, which access them. DRI reaches excellent 3D performance on supported hardware, and is supported on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris.

Only few professional game developers support Linux as gaming platform these days. Probably the best known developer still is id Software, but others like BioWare also see an opportunity. At this time, development of Unix games is mainly done for Linux by hobbyist of the Open Source culture, and is on its way to produce some very nice free titles, though they usually can't compete with modern games by the industry for several reasons. Due to this situation, over the years an alternative to playing original Unix games by machine emulation has become popular, and makes it possible to play original games for Windows, AMIGA, Super Nintendo, Neo Geo, Playstation, and many more. It is also possible to run Linux on several video game consoles like Xbox, PlayStation, GameCube, and Dreamcast.

Python Game Development Book

Apress has published a new book about game programming with Python: Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame: from Novice to Professional by Will McGugan.

New Open Soure Game Developer

Recently the new game developer Sixth Floor Labs started its business with the aim is to improve the Linux gaming scene. Their concept is to continue improving their own Open Source games when the community is willing to pay a certain amount of money.

Gaming Miniconf 2008

The next Gaming Miniconf will be at the linux.conf.au in Melbourne on Tuesday, 29th of January 2008. It aims to promote both FOSS Gaming and FOSS Game Development.

GIMP 2.4 Released

Developers, artists and user interface designers from all over the world worked together to make GIMP more powerful and easier to use than ever. The changes from version 2.2 are too numerous to list here, please check the Release Notes to get an overview.

If you want to compile GIMP 2.4 yourself, you can grab the tarball from ftp.gimp.org or one of its mirrors. Binary packages for the various supported platforms are becoming available as we speak. Our Downloads section should help you to locate the package for your system.

EA wants 'open gaming platform'

The BBC reports a cry from EA for an open gaming platform,

"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible."

Unix Game Development closes

I am sorry to announce the Unix Game Development project will close soon. Due to lack of feedback and overlapping interest with other similar projects we decided to collaborate with Freegamer and shut down the board, wiki, and Irc the next days. I may continue with this blog, because of private interest in this subject. Unless there is no good reason to revive this project I recommend you other communities.

• Freegamer
• The Linux Game Tome
• The Game Programming Wiki
  

Linux GameDev V - Marketing and Distribution

The next part of Troy Hepfner's Linux Game Development series is published at GameDev.net - his last article, but as he stated perhaps his most important, and is about how to sell games for Linux. Indeed that's a little difficult, 'cause the market is very, very small.

New Project: Search Engine For Free Media Content, Developers & Projects

I'll announce the development of a search engine for free art, and a developer/project database starts to get serious. It's work is done in collaboration with Freegamer. A more detailed description is found at Ghoulwiki, but I'll give a quick an overview of the basic ideas:

• bring artists and developers closer together
• search engine for existing free art
• a database for projects and developer
• using the CakePHP framework
• thread at freegamer
• thread at unixgamedev

At the moment we're in the planning phase and probably have three developers for this project. It seems we all have to learn how to work with CakePHP, though this shouldn't be a big problem.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, or even think about helping us, feel free to contact - we appreciate the feedback.

Btw. Ghoulsblade has collected an awesome list of free game development links. It's definitely worth to have a look at it.

UNIXGAMEDEV.ORG - Our New Domain

You may have noticed our stealthy process in establishing a new domain for our project:

UNIXGAMDEV.ORG

This is our new home, and hopefully it won't change for a long time. This blog and the board have a new address, though you can still access by the old blog address. The wiki remains at the same place, 'cause we like to continue using wikispaces, but unfortunately using own domains costs money there. I quickly created an butt ugly and temporary front page for this project and the domain, to have a unification of all major elements [1, 2]. Anyway, here's the list of all UNIXGAMEDEV addresses:

• unixgamedev.org
• www.unixgamedev.org
  
• blog.unixgamedev.org
  
• board.unixgamedev.org
• unixgamedev.wikispaces.com

Actually we would like to give UNIXGAMEDEV a facelift soon, and already started a discussion about that at the forums, though it may need its time.

I'd also like to thank Tuxfamily for providing free hosting of the Unix Game Development project. They offer a very nice service for the Open Source community, and also plan a gaming server.

Ryzom is rising for a second time...

Yes, it seems that the Open Sourcing initiative for the MMORPG game "The Saga of Ryzom" is getting into the next round. Developers have started a new fund for it. More information can be found here. The fund has a new page, too.

Teh Dogz

Hey everyone!

This was a week with lots of interesting events in the world of Linux gaming and game development! Developers, reaching for the stars, have awakened in masses, hungry for code, writing designs like lunatics... and of course, like very often in the Open Source world, searching for artists.

The Challenge Promode, a gameplay mod for Quake 3 (works only partially with Open Arena), is assembling an open Art Division. The CPMA project is searching [1] for artists to replace the stock Quake 3 media, thus making it possible to play CPMA without Quake 3. Said media will be released under a Creative Commons license to support other mod, indie and open source developers. I hope they mean the CC-by-SA, otherwise I'll get really mad =P

By the way, do you remember 'Saga of Ryzom'? That innovative MMORPG project had financial problems last year. Whereas the owners of the project searched for a buyer in the gaming industry, Nevrax' members, the guys behind the game, took the initiative by raising a fund and sent a help call to the community. They wanted to make 'Saga of Ryzom' open source and they needed to buy the rights off the owning company first.

Before they finally collected around 300'000 dollars, with around 25'000 donated from the Free Software Foundation, the owners had found another buyer ,Gameforge, a company that develops browser games,
who could naturally pay even more money.

A year after the deal, 'Saga of Ryzom' seems to be a burden for its owner... again. [2] And it's rather unlikely, that the Open Sourcing scenario will repeat.

In the other news, LordHavoc released a new version of his Quake engine modification, Darkplaces. [3] This time's addition: Reflective Water \o/

And the FIFE 2D isometrics engine has made some serious progress. [4]

By the way, we're moving our stuff to our new domain, unixgamedev.org. We still have problems though. So the Forum is currently unavailable. Will be fixed as soon as Micheal has some time to set up our DNS correctly.

[1] http://www.promode.org/?p=537
[2] http://www.golem.de/0710/55117.html
http://www.ryzom.com/ - The official game site
[3] http://linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identiferID=9600&action=flatview
[4] http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/index.php?t=msg&th=114&start=20&S=b5b15fd9c2897a29221209c118d5d0fb

Extreme Tuxracer released

I'd like to announce that the Extreme Tuxracer project, which is trying to reanimate a innovative gem in the open source treasury, has published their initial release 0.35. Extreme Tuxracer is a fork of the abandoned projects Planet Penguin Racer respectively Tux Racer. Have fun!

Extreme Tuxracer Homepage

User Interface Brainstorm for the next generation of GIMP

Everyone knows the GNU Image Manipulation Program. And everyone has most likely some experience with GIMP. Either lots of experience - or bad experiences. The GIMP-Team is inviting you to participate in the GIMP UI Brainstorm. Everyone with some GIMP/PS skills can create a mockup or two which describe your idea.

http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/

New Blender book is comming

A new Blender book is in production - Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D by Blender guru Tony Mullen - and presumably will be published in February 2008. As the title announce, it'll be about Blender's physics and dynamic tools.

And I just found out, yet another Blender book is available - The Official Blender 2.3 Guide: Free 3D Creation Suite for Modeling, Animation, and Rendering (2005) by Ton Roosendaal and Stefano Selleri.

Linux GameDev Part IV - Testing

Troy Hepfner's next tutorial about Linux game development was published at gamedev.net. This time it's about testing games on Linux, and how to treat problems: testing on multiple distributions, hardware accelerated video drivers, SELinux & 64 bit.