openSUSE situation

openSUSE 12.3 or 13.1 doesn’t have SDL2 from basic installation. openSUSE 13.2 and tubleweed are ok . So how to solve this without some ugly static compile hacks? One solutions is to make user fetch it from OBS and Games repository that have SDL2 for openSUSE 12.3 and 13.1.

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_12.3/games.repo
zypper ref
zypper install libSDL2

Or make them do it YaST. It’s rather easy and most of the people can do (if they have skills to install openSUSE).

Ubuntu situation

There is SDL2 for Ubuntu 13.10 and above. Problem is that Ubuntu policy is that two LTS should be supported. So in this time they are 12.04 and 14.04. Last one is no problem. SDL2 is installable with no hustle but Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 or 13.04 are more problematic. Again problem solve by asking people to fetch stuff from other place that normal repository. Michael Imamura packs debs for 12.04 till 14.04 so you can make them get them there.

Debian situation

In Upcoming Debian 8 there is SDL2 packages but with Debian stable 7 you must use Wheezy-backports to achieve these.

Fedora situation

Fedora should be ok.

Arch situation

Arch is up-to-date distribution so you just start using.

I’m still wondering this static linking stuff. It has some good points. Time will tell when new release forms up!

UnReal World RPG

What makes UnReal World RPG so unique? Game is huge, difficult level is infernal and it’s all about survival in north (Iron-Age Finland actually). As said UnReal World RPG tries to be as quite realistic. You won’t find goblins nor elves around but UnReal World RPG gives you elks, mooses, bears, wolves, lynxes and really long dark cold winter. If you want to survive the arctic winter you have to try little bit harder (and you probably die). If you like to get into fight you probably die or you get serious wounds and you probably die soon because you can’t make fire.
Many times this game feels a bit sadistic in modeling how hard it have been in Iron-Age Finland but developer Sami Maaranen (and co-designer Erkka Lehmus) have spent lots of time studying about old ways crafting things, building traps and living off the land in general. As said before learning curve in this game is bit steep but there are plenty of ‘Let’s play‘-videos floating in Internet to help you out and you can’t find many games that gives you so much fun. So if you like survival games this is for you.

This sounds good

And it is. UnReal World RPG is not Open Source nor it’s Free Software but it’s free to play and download (no strings attached). Developer is only asking donations and if you like the game you should really consider to donate small amount to support the development.

Little bit deeper look

UnReal World, or shortly UrW, was first released in 1992 as more traditional fantasy roguelike game. Then it evolved and evolved steadily. URW started as MS DOS ascii based game after that was VGA/SVGA DOS upper memory semi graphics version. Third generation took URW to Windows world with SDL-library. At that point notorious rewrite of graphics, sounds and user interface was proceeded, but it was heavily tied to MS Windows world.

porting UnReal World RPG

In some point people started to tell in URW forums that they are playing URW in Wine (both Mac OS X and Linux). They were happy because it worked. Playing in Wine ain’t pleasant all the time as it’s with native game.
Porting SDL 1.2 game to another platform is really nice. It only does what it states. You don’t have to worry about internals and differences between platforms you just figure out differences and make sure everything is working smooth. Although MSVC is very different compiler C than GCC’s one. There is even huge difference between Mac OS X libc and Linux libc. Even little bit bumpy ride everything went well at the end and version 3.13 was first Linux and Mac OS X native version released.
Developing multiplatfrom has its’ pains but now Linux and Mac OS X are released in same time as Windows version. I used openSUSE system as base Linux system for the port to Linux. Currently there is openSUSE RPM-version (Which is for Fedora also), Ubuntu/Debian DEB-version/Tar-ball and Mac OS X. Statistics show there is steadily growing phase of people coming from those platform to play URW. Only Ubuntu have currently 64-bit version because there is no demand on openSUSE or Fedora (people with Ubuntu just plays more games!).

Game ON!

If you don’t have anything else to do on your Christmas vacation: Go and grab UnReal World RPG new 3.18beta3 version when it’s hot hot hot. Find yourself building a cottage and swimming in lake or try to survive the arctic winter.

“I remember playing DreamChess on Ubuntu, but the one is not available for Suse 11.4 KDE.”

I’ve taken a look around, gathered the stuff required and made a quick package of this game, thus pushing it forward to the games repository. Within a few minutes of the submission, the package was approved and it’s ready to be served to the masses.

We can’t leave transitioning users from Ubuntu unhappy can we ?! Once more thanks to Dimstar and Prusnak for the quick answer in getting this package into the games repository.

DreamChess 0.2.0 on openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME3

In addition to this, it was officially announced that Steam will be available for Linux at the end of this summer, which means lots of games and lots of fun is coming to gnu/linux and the breach in gaming between gnu/linux and other OSs is getting smaller.

Here some trailers of the games that will be released as FLOSS  from the Humble Indie Bundle

Aquaria |  Gish |  Lugaru HD |   Penumbra Overture

Linux gamers it is time to have even more fun

jaom7