This is interesting. I've been wondering if there were existing console-like interface projects out there. Recently I've been working on, and playing with, my own solution, using Zenity for starters. It simply maps list items to commands. Since it is so general, it has the benefit of allowing me to map to a command that runs the interface again with sublists, or even a completely different interface. For gamepad control, I use rejoystick. My stuff certainly doesn't look this nice.

One thing I like about my solution is that it is minimal. It runs in its own session and the program simply returns the command corresponding to the selected item (or nothing if the user canceled out). This allows me to kill the window manager (matchbox) and the command handles everything the game needs. So if the game doesn't need a window manager or compositor, those things are not run. On my laptop, being able to have a dedicated session like that makes Little Inferno, for example, much more playable. Otherwise, with the full desktop environment and compositor running, the game rubberbands. Of course, this means you can only run one thing at a time, but an uninterruptable gaming experience can be desirable. Right now I've got it working with all my native and emulated games. I would gladly replace it with something nicer looking, if I could get it to work the same.

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Quoting: princecAfter all the whole reason we exist is because we made that crossplatform graphics library LWJGL so we could have Linux games. Y'know, the one we gave away and open sourced and that Minecraft is built on :)

That is an interesting connection. I've played with the LWJGL in a game engine of mine before.

Quoting: CheesenessI get a kick out of Ultratron and RoTT is a super cool game.

Nice to see someone else liked Ultratron. Many people seem to only mention Revenge of the Titans. RotT has excellent music and art, but, of the four, Ultratron is my favorite, at least gameplay-wise. Avenging humanity is pretty fun :).

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Well that's odd. Gunpoint was named as a tar.bz2 but it was actually gzip compressed. File Roller complained, so I tried renaming it to tar.gz and it worked.

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That bundle was a quick buy for me. The only game I already had was Papers, Please. I've been wanting Gunpoint and Prison Architect. Hammerwatch looked interesting. I don't have many hack and slash games.

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Oh, Puppy Games, I'm disappointed. This is why I don't actively try to learn more about the chef, so to speak. I regret taking a look at that blog after reading the post.

I, too, acquired the games in the bundle, and, as usual, I payed more than I needed to. I haven't bought recent Humble bundles, but when I do, I always try to give what I feel is fair price (after all, some of the money goes to charity).

I found their games to be overall ok. They use an arcade-style and implement it quite well. Though, between the games, the mechanics do seem a bit too similar at times. The thing they really could use is better user difficulty controls. I have some trouble enjoying the games because of their difficulty curves. For example, in Revenge of the Titans I would have loved options for increasing the time you get before aliens arrive, or an option for making the economy a bit less constraining. Also the registration prompts with in-game rewards feels a bit off (makes me think of web games).

Looking at the technical side of things, their games, so far, have been written in Java and make use of cross-platform libraries. This makes it rather trivial to port to Linux or even a more exotic platform like BSD. They have fixed it in later releases, but it is still worth mentioning that their earlier Humble Bundle releases had broken shell scripts that just exited immediately ( "if [ false ] then (do the wrong thing) elif ..." << why?). It may also be worth mention that they decided to leave the highly compressible assets uncompressed. I will say that the start time is slightly better uncompressed (I tested it), but it can make a big difference in space usage. All four games compressed take up less space than Ultratron uncompressed and just slightly more space than an uncompressed Revenge of the Titans. (On a side note, these games are what prompted me to think about on-demand decompression for games, similar to what emulators do with ROMs in zip files.)

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I must say I love that photoshopped image of Linus. I think I'll play some more Jedi Outcast today. And perhaps work on a game decompression cache.

Quoting: BomyneAccording to Wikipedia, linux was released 5th of October 1991... So i'm a little confused.

I believe he is going by the announcement date:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_of_Linux [External Link]

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