Thread: Gaming on Linux

Gaming on Linux has been stuck in limbo for a long time, Publish'ers don't release games for Linux, primarily because the market is too small, and gamers don't switch to Linux because you cannot play the latest games.

Some publishers like ID and Epic, do release versions of their games that are native to Linux. This is a natural consequence of the robustness of their game engines, which easily run across operating systems. You also know that these publishers are not exploiting the intricacies of the Windows operating system for their benefit, and that they trust the gaming community. Many of the popular games like Unreal Tournament, Quake, Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights are all available natively for Linux.


There are also a number of third party porters who port games for Linux, and resell them. This means that at least for the present, Linux simply does not support the bleeding edge in gaming - it takes a while before they start appearing for Linux.
One of the biggest setbacks for gaming on Linux has been the monopoly of proprietary standards. Drivers for gaming peripherals and hardware cannot be distributed along with free distributions. The largest gap in capabilities is because of DirectX. Open GL is good, but is not as good as DirectX.

However, there are a number of emulators available that let you play games made for other platforms on Linux. PlayOnLinux, Cadega and Wine are examples. Wine, is, by far, the most widely used (the other two emulators are also based on Wine), but does not work with all the games, and works differently on different computers.
We will cover Wine in more detail later. One of the mainstays of the Linux community has been the openness of the coding, and the collaborative effort on creating software. This holds true for games as well, and a number of games for Linux have come out from the open source community. These games range from first person shooters to flight simulators, and are a completely satisf'ying experience for a casual gamer. A great resource for a somewhat comprehensive listing of games available on Linux.

There are several reasons why Linux is a better platform for PC gaming than Windows. Most importantly, the Windows as is heavy on resources. This means that the amount of memory required to just keep Windows running in the background, saps out the processing power available for gaming from a particular hardware configuration. However, even the most resource hungry Linux distro leaves a much smaller memory footprint than XP, let alone Vista. This allows for a game to throw up better graphics and better frame rates.



All Linux distros can be recompiled for use Wilh the specific hardware, making them even more economical, and the games even more faster. Indeed, in many a Lan Party, the Linux user in the crowd has enjoyed faster startup times, and an edge in the crucial first few seconds of the game. What this means is that Linux is actually a very good operating system for gaming. It's just unfortunate that good games are few and far between. Despite this, there is a formidable lineup of mature Linux games.

Sauerbraten is a good first person shooter available for Linux, a completely mapable game implemented on the Cube 2 platform. Most popular open source games like America's Army are available for Linux. Mods of propriety games that have open source codes like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Urban Terror are popular in the Linux gaming community, with a fair amount of participation for the online multi-player sessions. The Quake engine is very popular for free games, with Nexuiz, Open Arena, Warsaw and Alien Arena all based on it. Warsaw particularly, looks promising even on a low graphics system..

Racing games for Linux are nowhere close to anythmg hke Flatout or Need For Speed, in terms of graphics, but TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator) and TuxRacer are games worth checking out. With Linux having a history of being for the technically oriented, some of the best Linux games around are space combat or space simulators. These include D2X-XL, Battlestar Galactica and Vegastrike.

Multiplayer gaming for Linux also has its dedicated community. This ranges from the MMORPG Battle For Wesnoth, to the combat space shooter called Vendetta. Flight Gear is a highly technical and very accurate flight simulator for Linux.

One important aspect of getting games up and running properly is installing the drivers for your graphics card. Installing a Linux distro on a machine that has a graphic card might be sacrilegious to many, but it still can be done, and is not that difficult. NVIDIA has been supporting Linux drivers right from the beginning, with ATI joining in as little as four years ago.