n3wt0n!

So I started something yesterday.

It’s quite early, but I find motivation in sharing my progress. The goal? A retro-style space war inspired by Blendo Games’ Flotilla.

Quite a while ago I purchased Uplink (and Defcon) for Linux through the Introversion website. Uplink worked at the time (Ubuntu 8.10) but somewhere along the way Canonical removed the libgtk1.2 libraries from the Ubuntu repositories. This presents a problem when installing the game in later versions of Ubuntu.

sh uplink-complete-1.54DOWNLOAD.sh

complains

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Uplink complete 1.54DOWNLOAD............................................................................................
.setup9739: error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I found the solution at the Introversion forums, written by forum member pl3w5y.

Download the following deb files. I prefer to use the command line.

wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18.1build2_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glib1.2/libglib1.2ldbl_1.2.10-19build1_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18.1build2_all.deb

You can swap out the ‘ca’ part of the url with ‘us’ or whatever your Ubuntu repository country code might be.

Now, inside the directory you downloaded them to, run

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it. Now re-run the Uplink installer and the game should install fine.

I recently purchased the X-COM: Complete Pack during the Steam Perils of Summer sale, and of course I wanted to run the game in my Ubuntu (10.04) partition. Turns out it’s really easy. Steam runs the game in DOSBox, and DOSBox is available natively in Ubuntu.

First, I’ll assume you’ve already got access to the Steam-installed version of the game (either through Steam running in Wine or Steam on a Windows partition). I copied the XCOM game directory to a convenient location. You can find the XCOM directory at wherever your Steam install is…

Steam/steamapps/common/xcom ufo defense/XCOM

and I copied that to

/home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/XCOM

You can do the same from the command line, assuming you have a Wine-installed version of Steam, by copying the entire block below and pasting it into a console. Don’t mind if the text runs further than this window allows. The entire command should copy when selected.

cp -r \
/home/myaccount/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steamapps/common/xcom\ ufo\ defense/XCOM/ \
/home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/

Now install DOSBox. From the command line,

sudo aptitude install dosbox

When that’s done, run dosbox from the command line.

dosbox

Or from the Applications bar.

Applications > Games > DOSBox Emulator

This will open the DOSBox window. You’ll notice it mounts the ‘z’ drive by default. We want to mount the ‘c’ drive, which as you’ll recall we created in /home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/

In DOSBox type

mount c /home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/

And change the focus to the c drive by typing

c:

Now we just navigate to the XCOM directory.

cd XCOM

and run the game

XCOM.BAT

And that’s it! Just don’t ask me how to play the game because I’ve got no idea. (It drops you onto the globe and doesn’t give you any hint what you’re supposed to do next).

In a similar case, you could use the same method to run the original DOOM when purchased in Steam, or even Commander Keen.

I’m just listening to an interview at RoboAwesome with Edmund and Tommy (when their powers combine, they are Team Meat) responsible for the upcoming Super Meat Boy. It’s 1 hour 10 minutes and 10 seconds in length. Right around the 30 minute 21 second mark, Tommy says,

We're never doing Linux because that's dumb.
I don't care what anybody says, nobody plays
games on Linux.

But I do! We exist. Linux gamers exist!

This caused me to think about the state of games on Linux. I’m talking about real commercial support for games on Linux. It’s a catch-22. Simply put, I believe people don’t use Linux as their every-day desktop because there are not enough commercial games for it. Why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? And I’m talking about games that are recently released with the intent of being available for Linux on or soon after launch, not games that have been out for a year and someone decided to port it over to Linux.

Anyway, back to the question of why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? It’s because developers feel that there aren’t enough Linux gamers.

Linux gamers say: Make games for Linux, more people will use Linux.

Developers say: I’m not going to make games for Linux because no one plays games on Linux.

Hopefully a Linux-native client of Steam can fix this. Hopefully by the end of August, 2010.

Development on the Generic 2D Platformer library is slow going, but I’m still making the occasional time to work on it.

This last weekend I finally got around to adding parallax in the vertical axis. It’s something that I’d just never gotten around to doing, and all that was needed was an additional 4 or 6 lines of code.