New Ubuntu and new indie games, a great combination

Where to start...
It's been far too long since my last blog entry and a lot has been going on in the FLOSS / Indie Gaming since I posted. So while I can't talk about everything, here are a couple of the latest happenings.

First off, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx is out and after waiting a week or two to make sure that it wasn't going to torch my system, I upgraded. Frankly, besides the new Mac^H^H^H purple theme, an improvement over the brown one, the biggest change has been adapting to the shift of the buttons to the upper left instead of the upper right of windows. Debate on this topic has been heated. Some people like the change, while others are less happy. In the end, I'm not finding it as hard to adjust to as I had imagined, but it still feels like an unnecessary change that will hamper adoption by Windows refugees. While my system has never been unstable under Linux, Lucid hasn't crashed yet, surviving several of my battles with PulseAudio without faltering. I've glanced at some of the packaged software changes, but since I only upgraded an existing install of 9.10 instead of installing fresh, I already have most of my standard programs installed. Overall, it seems like a step up, definitely a cleaner and better upgrade than from 9.04 to 9.10.

Next, the Humble Indie Bundle has come and gone. I offer my condolences to anyone that missed out on this awesome deal. In case you missed it, a group of indie game developers each put a game in and the bundle was sold as "Pay what you want" with the proceeds being split between the developers, the EFF and Child's Play. Once they hit a million dollars, the sale was extended and 4 of the 5 developers committed to releasing their games (or at least their engines) as open source. In the end they brought in a little over a million and a quarter, with over $200k going to each of the charities.

In addition to raising a ton of money, the Humble Indie Bundle made some remarkable discoveries. One feature of the bundle is interoperability. All the games run natively on Windows, Mac and Linux. During the sale, the page displayed the average amount paid and the total collect broken down by operating system. While Windows users accounted for around half of the money collected, Linux users accounted for 25% of the money collected despite making up less than 5% of the desktop market. Further, on average, Linux users paid around 80% more than Windows users and 40% more than Mac users per purchase. Linux users are usually seen as cheap since they are using a "free" operating system, but we are clearly willing to open our wallets for a decent product, and when we do, we are more generous.

The other observation, made on Wolfire, was that despite the bundle being available for as little as a penny, there was still a significant amount of piracy via posting of download links. While some folks are just pirates-4-life and will pirate everything regardless of price, john, the author of the post, opines that most of the pirates in this case where potential customers that simply did not have access to the tools needed to pay, namely a PayPal account or a credit card. In the end, the programs are DRM free, so the organizer's response was to just ask those that needed to pirate the games to use Bittorent instead to save on their bandwidth.

I hope to post some reviews of the bundle games over the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Like a Roguelike

In the family of video game genres, Roguelikes are the crazy uncle that no one really talks about and most everyone agrees that is way past him prime. Everyone knows that without him the Diablo family wouldn't be around, but over the years he's refused to stay with the times and stodgily clings to his ASCII and tile-based graphics and midi-quality sound. In recent years he's started to let himself go, spawning a whole genre of Roguelike-likes and a mess of games with acronyms like 7DRLs and <1KBRLs. Though despite his lack of flashy graphics and sounds, he still manages to gather an audience.

Wikipedia explains that Roguelikes are "a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement", which is probably a bit narrow for a definition, but not too bad, for Wikipedia at least. The Temple of the Roguelike provides a more in-depth take on what it means to be a Roguelike adding concepts like "Single command set", "Free form" and "Discovery mechcanics". Now you can probably count the number of games that claim to be Roguelikes and meet all of those criteria on one hand and have fingers left over. In fact, even the game that spawned the genre, Rogue itself, isn't what most people would consider free form. On top of that, none of these definitions mention the Roguelike-likes.

So, you ask, what do I consider the defining characteristics of a roguelike to be? Well, there is really only one trait I associate with Roguelikes and if any game exhibits this, I tend to think Roguelike, or at least Roguelikelike. The pace of play must fall between real time strategy and turn based strategy. To me, the rest are just conventions of the genre that can be ignored or changed, which separate Rougelikes from the Roguelike-likes. Games like Angband and Shiren the Wanderer: Mysterious Dungeon 2 that follow all the rules are considered roguelikes while games with only the pacing and a convention or two like Dwarf Fortress or Decker are considered roguelike-likes.

Today, the roguelike genre is still being developed by both amateurs and independent game designers, and while commercial releases are few and far between, companies like Bay 12 Games do reasonably well on donations. In addition, coming up next week is the yearly Seven Day Roguelike competition or 7DRL where developers attempt to code a roguelike from scratch in only 7 days. The 7DRL contest has grown over the years with more games being successfully completed each year.



Overall, Roguelikes are an interesting genre with a wide range of options to choose from when it comes time to choose a title to play. In a couple of weeks, there will be even more, and hopefully, if I can pull my act together, one of them will be my own 7DRL entry.

Gaming in Linux

Today I want to introduce you to a handful of products that make gaming on Linux possible. While there are plenty of great games new and old for Linux like Nethack and Yo Frankie, one of the biggest concerns I had when I made the jump from Windows XP to Ubuntu was my ability to play my rather extensive collect of PC games on the new operating system. To accommodate the switch, I set my system to dual boot to WinXP and Ubuntu, assuming I would just boot to WinXP if I wanted to play one of my games. To my surprise, I went almost 4 months without booting to Windows. With enough tinkering and the right programs, almost every game I wanted to play could be run in Ubuntu. In the end, the one game that drove me to Windows was La Mulana, an old school Metroid-like platformer originally written in Japanese, but translated, made with MSX-style graphics. Until I ran into problems with La Mulana, this was all made possible by two programs, Wine and DOSBox.

As Wikipedia will tell you about Wine, “Wine is an alcoholic beverage typically made of fermented grape juice.” Which my enhance your gaming experience, but will be until to assist in running much of anything when applied to a computer. Navigating around a few pages, Wikipedia admits that “Wine is [also] a free software application that aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems to execute programs written for Microsoft Windows.” The term “aims” doesn't really do justice to the broad range of applications that the Wine developers and users have managed to get running. The list of compatible titles is conveniently listed on the project's website as the Wine AppDB. Not every title works flawlessly and not every title works without tweaks. At the moment, I am still struggling with a couple games to get past the main menu, but by and large all of my Windows games work well enough to play. But, you say, Mr. Niche Tech Guy, since Wine is emulating Windows, there must be some serious slowdown from all that overhead, right? Well, as its name would imply, Wine Is Not an Emulator, to the best of my understanding, Wine only translates the Windows function calls into something Linux can understand. For example, all the Directx calls are translated into OpenGL calls. This means that all the heavy processing operations are still happening on the processor and not in some abstraction, allowing applications to run with minimal overhead consumed by Wine.

But, you might ask, what about my DOS games? Some of those really rocked back in the day! Well, Wine only handles Windows applications, so for DOS games I used the above mentioned DOSBox. Going back to Wikipedia, “DOSBox is an emulator which emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running MS-DOS.” Which is a polite way of saying that DOSBox allows you to have a virtual DOS machine that kicks the pants off of any machine you might have had when DOS was in, and you never have to worry about messing with EMM386 and HIMEM.sys to get games to run. From my observations, DOSBox uses a lot more overhead than Wine, but if you are running a DOS era game on a modern PC, the game isn't likely to weighed down by overhead. In my experience, DOSBox is a lot more reliable than Wine when it comes to games, I've managed to get ever game I've tried to run working on DOSBox with minimal tweaking. But, I'm sure this has more to do with the relative complexities of the operating systems than the skill of the developers. While I've never needed to refer to it, the DOSBox project also maintains a database of compatible application.

There are two more applications that I wanted to mention for the place in Linux and old school gaming, Mono and ScummVM.

Plumbing Wikipedia once again, “Mono is a free and open source project led by Novell (formerly by Ximian) to create an Ecma standard compliant, .NET-compatible set of tools, including among others a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime.” Which, besides being a mouthful, is the reason why people make fun of Wikipedia. In simple terms, Mono allows .NET applications to run on non-Windows machines. .NET is a set of programming languages that meet a specification set up by Microsoft. I haven't had a lot of experience running games under Mono, but from my experience, Mono does allow applications to run smoother and with less hiccups than Wine does, when the application is compatible. To the best of my knowledge there isn't an application database for programs compatible with Mono, and Mono has a number of “pieces” than can be optionally installed. In practice, I tend to only use Mono when I can't get a program running in Wine.

And, heading to the well one last time, Wikipedia reports that “ScummVM is a collection of game engine recreations.” Short and sweet this time, basically ScummVM allows you to older adventure games on a modern systems. I tried this on Windows a few years ago and it worked perfectly. The only drawback to this software is that it has a fairly limited selection of titles supported at least compared to Wine and DOSBox.

Well, those are the applications I keep handy for gaming in Linux. If I've missed any obvious application let me know.