Gaming under Linux has always been an interesting challenge. There are some really decent games out there (Quake4, Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Enemy Territory), but many games don’t get released for Linux.

Open Source Gaming is even trickier - all the games I mentioned above are proprietary, although id software do release their older engines under the GPL when they’re out of date. For instance, the Quake 3 source was released about 12 months ago, which has led to a number of free standing FPS games for Linux (Tremulous is one of my favourites, but Urban Terror has just been released, and looks pretty good too.)

However, the other day a new game came on my radar. A game that had previously been released commercially by Eidos, but which was open sourced under the GPL a few years ago, and is now available on all platforms, and with some upgraded graphics now. The game is called WarZone2100, and it’s a top quality RTS (real-time strategy) game. Unlike many of this type of game, there isn’t an overabundance of resource management - it’s mostly about fighting the enemy, and battle strategy, but there is a goodly amount of researching artifacts, and designing new vehicles, and the suchlike.

The documentation is a bit lacking on the website - it took me a bit of hunting to find the keyboard shortcuts, but the game is still great fun. Plus, and this is often what separates commercial games from open source, there is a single-player campaign mode, which I’m playing at the moment.

One thing to note - the only thing they couldn’t open source was the video codec library, meaning that there are none of the cut-scene videos, which have been replaced with text transcripts instead. But you really don’t miss anything

Go and try it out, and maybe we’ll have a fight on-line sometime

mrBen

Yeah, I’ve been playing that too. My friend had it for Windows years back. It’s a cool game, though sadly I’m a bit crap to play online against a real person…

Sad thing is the GPL version has much nicer graphics and the orignal game, which I have has the movies, but there does not seem any way to have the great graphics AND the movies even though I have the original game! Surely they could have written to allow original owners to copy the movies into the directory or something and then change an ini file or something to tweak so the movies are ’seen’ by the game?

Sadly, John, it’s not the movies that are the problem, it’s the codec (AIUI). What they would need to do is get the movies re-encoded into an alternative format, and then include that into the game format. From what I can tell, even though the game is GPL, there hasn’t been much work on the code, only things like graphics.