Well, to be fair to Phoronix, they have not mentioned Steam in months now, and their gaming coverage has improved somewhat.

And with regards to Bumbadar, at the very least the Humble Bundle has been getting some more games ported. Many of the games in the past few bundles have been Ryan Gordon's ports, they did not have Linux versions before.

As to the Indie Royal Bundle, I stand by what I said when I first heard of it: a crass attempt to cash in on someone else's good idea. It does not change how I view Desura, but I am dissaptointed in the company behind them somewhat for it. Especially when I feel the HIB is overstretching it in terms of bundle amounts anyway.

But DesuraNET is doing great things with Desura, and the Linux attention has definitely been good for them. I was just working on improving their Wikipedia article, and it is hard to find media coverage of it that is not related to the Linux release anymore, so much so I had a hell of a time finding a source for the date of its original Windows launch. That bodes well for us, I think.

And Liam, I think the biggest thing to look forward to when it comes to the Doom 3 source code releases is for iodoom3 to continue progressing and see some of the Doom 3 Mods (The Dark Mod, Hexen: Edge of Chaos, etc) go stand-alone. There is not actually that much the Doom 3 source can really teach us otherwise. You brought up Xonotic, which is already on DarkPlaces, which has basically the same feature set of id Tech 4 already.

Still, I can not actually argue with the claim that 2011 was Linux Gamings best year; we have a momentum again that we have not really had since the days of Loki and the heady start-ups and derivatives it original inspired, before it all burned out. Only this time it is built on a wide network of developers and not the cash flow of one software licensing attorney and his wife, and the casual interest of others. With efforts like Humble Bundle, Gameolith, Desura, Unigine, and every single other Linux friendly developer pushing in the right direction, the future does seem bright.

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Should really play more than just the demo for Descent one of these days...

Based on that trailer, my only real comment is that while it does seem evident that you are going for the "Grey Imperial Star Wars" look, a little bit more colour would not go a miss. Of course, early development, not the final look, blah blah blah... ;)

Still, based on that comment, when will Helena be on Gameolith? :)

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Libraries to remove if the games don't launch

If the games don't run, you can try removing the following libraries (this may be the case for e.g. Fedora 16). Please note that all games also require the PhysX libraries (i.e. libNxCooking.so, libNxCharacter.so in the lib32 directory) - if the PhysX libraries are missing the game may start but you may experience odd physics-based behavior.

Libraries:

Trine
libvorbis.so.0
libstdc++.so.6
libGLEW.so.1
libm.so.6
libz.so.1

Shadowgrounds
libvorbis.so.0
libstdc++.so.6
libGLEW.so.1
libm.so.6
libz.so.1l
libxml2.so.2

Shadowgrounds Survivor
libvorbis.so.0
libstdc++.so.6
libGLEW.so.1
libm.so.6
libz.so.1l l
libxml2.so.2

http://frozenbyte.com/help_humble/linuxfaq.html [External Link]

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Well, it looks like I got my problems solved on my own. Here is my message to Frozenbyte:

Hello,

Well, I have made progress and found out why the lever did nothing, as well as solving some other problems I was experiencing such as the jerky and overpowering winds and why certain objects were not solid (or non-existent).

Like with Shadowgrounds, I had to remove libraries to get the game to start. Unfortunately, I removed both libNxCooking.so and libNxCharacter.so from the lib32 directory, and these libraries are needed by the game to perform certain functions, even though it will start without them.

In doing so, I also isolated which libraries specifically impaired my Frozenbyte games from launching on my Fedora 16 system:

Trine:
libvorbis.so.0
libstdc++.so.6
libGLEW.so.1
libm.so.6
libz.so.1

Shadowgrounds and Survivor:
libvorbis.so.0
libstdc++.so.6
libGLEW.so.1
libm.so.6
libz.so.1
libxml2.so.2

If you could make this information public somewhere I would be pleased; it took a lot of tedious effort to isolate which particular ones caused the problem. I understand you are busy with the release of Trine 2, which looks to be doing very well I am glad to say, but if someone could add this information to the Linux FAQ or something I would be grateful.

Thank you,
Hamish Paul Wilson

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Okay... right.

Hi,

Sorry to hear. This sounds a little odd, it's probably a temporary bug of sorts that just happens on your system more often that it should. Not sure why, and at this point we'll probably not look into it too much...

However, we can get past this with some tricks. I've used these with the Windows version but I am hopeful they work with the Linux one as well.

Open the ingame console terminal with the F8 key (could be F6 as well). Then write:

d_warp_up;d_warp_forward;

and press enter. This will warp the character up and forward a bit. So basically, go where you are supposed to go in the level, and then use this to get past the obstacle. _up, _forward, _back, and _down work, adn they can be chained with semicolon.

This should help, even if it's a bit unorthodox - let me know!

Best,
Joel
Frozenbyte team

Well, it got me past the obstruction at least.:rolleyes:

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Well, as I shared in the talk box, I finished Shadowgrounds: Survivor and moved on to Trine, where I am currently stuck because I can not figure out how to move forward in the Forsaken Dungeons level. After three days of banging my head against the wall, I am finally downloading a video play-through.

I also gave Dungeons of Dredmor a whirl and had some fun, but I am waiting for the upcoming Linux/Mac hot-fix to correct the problem with the save games. That is expected tomorrow.

Plus I am very close to winning Deus Ex through WINE, I am already deep into Area 51 and everyone is trying to be my friend. I think Helios is making the best offer at the moment...

EDIT: Hmm.... it seems I have a show-stopper bug with Trine. At least I know it is not me being thick...

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Sure, same to you all. :D

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Well, one things for certain: Shockwave has just been made obsolete. And since Adobe never made a native port, good riddance then. :P

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The feeling I get from this is it is basically a standardized implementation for games that want to be like Quake Live rather than your standard Flash or Java creation, e.g actually run from the users system rather than on-server.

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Thanks for the informative post Tim, added some perspective.

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