Showing headlines posted by Dart

Bastion an action RPG game by Supergiant Games, is easily one of the best indie games to come out this year. The game has received numerous accolades all over the web and has been rated very high by popular game critics. Bastion can now be played using Google's new Native Client (Nacl) Technology. Native Client is an open-source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly execute native compiled C and C++ code code inside the browser.

Outerra 3D Plenatary Engine is capable of seamlessly rendering full 3D world right from Planets in the space to surface down at the earth. You will be able to go on a Himalayas Trip or can fly an Apache Helicopter over the terrain. The 3D graphics are very realistic and high quality. Outerra Engine uses open source technologies including OpenGL and OpenAL. It will be made available to Linux users in the future.

This is good news for all fans of Bisigi themes. I know some people think they're outdated but I think they are really nice and 'easy on the eyes' themes with focus on simplicity and getting the work done. When the project's end was announced, I took up the task of recreating/porting the themes to gtk3. Since I'm free from all my projects and practical report files now, I can work on those. I see a bright future for these themes. I hope this turns out to be good.

Popular Linux game SpaceChem is now free for Schools encouraging use of games for educational purposes. Interested schools can now request free license of the game before the end of January 2012. SpaceChem is an intriguing, "problem-solving centric" puzzle game by Zachtronics Industries that combines the logic of computer programming with the scientific domain of chemistry, set in an original science fiction universe. Players build machines using mechanics similar to visual programming that assemble and transform chemical compounds. Players later connect those machines together to form complex pipelines, and ultimately construct special pipelines to fight back against space-monsters that threaten humanity

The incredible people who brought ioquake3 engine have already started working on a new project - iodoom3. Many popular Linux games like Open Arena and Urban Terror are based on ioquake3 engine. With starting of iodoom3 project we will see more games coming to Linux in future that will be able to utilize high end features of id Tech 4 engine. Just like what was done with Quake 3's source code, Doom 3 source code will be polished and new features and fixes will be introduced.

Marathon is a first-person shooter video game with a science fiction theme, developed and published by Bungie and was released in December 1994 for the Apple Macintosh. Marathon features action-heavy, first-person shooter gameplay similar to Doom. The game is renowned for having an intricate story line which is an essential element of its gameplay whereas most similar games devote minimal attention to plot for the sake of faster, simpler, more action-oriented gameplay. Aleph One is the open source continuation of Bungie's Marathon 2 game engine, available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

The Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of the indie video game industry. Linux games Minecraft, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Cobalt and Tiny and Big were finalist in last IGF with Minecraft being the grand prize winner. Amnesia and Minecraft together won 5 out of total 10 awards. Next Independent Games Festival will be held in March 2012 at San Francisco's Game Developers Conference. As many as 570 games have been submitted and many of them are our favorite Linux games. Lets have a look at these Linux games one by one.

A new Linux based gaming handheld GameGadget has been announced today by Blaze Europe that will allow you to install your favorite games from iTunes style app store called GameGadgetGames. Developers will be able to publish games easily via this service and they will be distributed using proprietary DRM .

Not many people know that Kernel releases have their codenames. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository. They are not publicized as such but some of them are really hilarious.

It is always a delight to see native Linux games running on different types of machines/ hardware. Last week I stumbled on this article by Pat Regan showing native Linux games from latest Humble Indie Bundle running on a self made Arcade Cabinet. The machine sports a 24 inch LCD Monitor, an Athlon X2 3800+ with 1 GB of RAM, a 320 GB SATA disk, an I-PAC 4 board and a 64MB NVIDIA 6200 LE PCIe video card. The system runs 32 bit Ubuntu 10.10. Many native Linux games are playable on this machine including VVVVVV, Gish, Cave Story, Voxatron and Blocks That Matter.

Last week a group of people came together to launch a website 'Occupy Flash' and started a campaign against Adobe Flash plugin.Identities of these people are not known and they have no corporate backing but they have said the Goal of this campaign is to see Flash plugin dead on desktop browsers and they want everyone to uninstall it. There is another group of Flash developers that is not happy with this campaign and as a counterattack launched Occupy HTML campaign. As far as Linux is concerned, Flash support is not as good as other platforms but it has certainly improved greatly over the years and 64bit support was added recently as well. Still there are lots of problems like frequent crashes and CPU hogging. Ironically, the Occupy Flash campaign does not even list Linux as a platform for Flash and provide uninstallation instructions for Windows and Mac only.

Desura Linux client is now out of beta after being in testing for more than 2 months. The final build can now be downloaded from Desura website. The Linux game catalogue includes more than 65 titles across different genres. Desura supports multiple Linux distributions and allows automatic installation, updating and patching of games. Projects that are currently actively under development are also supported under Alpha Funding initiative.

Unknown Horizons is a city building/real time strategy game inspired by classic strategy games Anno and Settlers. In the game you have to expand your small settlement to a strong and wealthy colony, collect taxes and supply your inhabitants with valuable goods and have to increase your power with a well balanced economy with strategic trade and diplomacy. The developers are always hard at work. They have released third major update in the year bringing in lots of new features and improvements.

SuperTuxKart 0.7.3 final has been released after being in development for 4 months. This release features numerous new features and improvements and a surprise new 'Minigolf' track that was included at the last moment.

Presented in a third-person isometric perspective, Hostile Takeover will be a throwback to classics like Fallout, X-COM and Syndicate. You will control your character in a real-time environment, sneaking around corporate buildings and avoiding security guards before dealing a final deadly blow to your target. As you progress through the game, new equipment will be purchasable for the money you make. Hostile Takeover is currently in development. It will be available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Desura client for Linux may go open source. At the moment, there is only one developer who is working on the client and he shared his thoughts on making Desura Linux client open source in a recent forum post. No decision has been taken yet but he has invited comments from the community and there has been a hugely positive reaction. If all goes well Desura client for Linux can be open sourced eventually.

In September last year, uTorrent Server was released for Linux and BitTorrent Inc promised that soon a desktop client will be made available for Linux. There has not been any news about desktop client since then. Now it has been explained that other priorities at the moment more important then Linux desktop client. One of the developers further explained that Linux desktop client will now need lots of work as uTorrent client for other platforms has evolved considerably since the original plans for Linux client were laid down.

MonoGame 2.0 was released on October 27 bringing support for 2D XNA APIs for Linux. MonoGame was previously known as XNATouch and is an open source implementation of the XNA tools in OpenGL. MonoGame can bring a large number of popular games to Linux, which were until now only working on XBox and Windows. Game developers will now be easily able to port their 2D games to Linux. In fact developers of Indie game Wizorb, which is rising fast in popularity are porting their game to Linux using MonoGame 2.0. Just within a week of MonoGame adding support for Linux, we have our first game (there may be more) and I am sure more developers will follow. Next major release of MonoGame, 3.x series will bring 3D API support that will bring even more games to Linux.

Linux Mint 12 'Lisa' will come with its own customized desktop and it will be based on Gnome 3. The core desktop will be based on a series of Gnome Shell extensions called “MGSE” (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) that will provide a layer on top of Gnome 3. MGSE also includes additional extensions such as a media player indicator, and multiple enhancements to Gnome 3. Thus Linux Mint 12 will be more like a hybrid desktop balancing traditional desktop and new modern technologies. Also Gnome 2 fork MATE can make it to the live Linux Mint DVD if all the remaining integration issues are ironed out in time, thus providing users a side by side experience of both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3.

Blender project, in collaboration with iTechnologie is developing a web browser plugin, Burster which will allow playing games made in Blender in a web browser. It is especially dedicated to Blender users, who creates interactive 3D demonstrations of various processes or products. However, it can be used by web developers or companies creating interactive web content. Many contributors of other open source projects (Inkscape, Gimp, Netbeans, Joomla, Apache+php+Mysql) have contributed in developing Burster.