So it's a little more than a year since my last post, but I'm sure you'll forgive me. What's happened in the world of Linux gaming!?
Well, nothing revoutionary. But there have been some important and exciting steps forward. On my ATI 4670 card, I can now play some modern games, such as Doom 3 and UT2004, using the open source driver. I am using the r600g driver provided in the xorg-edgers ppa. While it's disappointing to have to use an unstable, unsupported external repository just to get basic functionality out of my hardware (yes, I just called speedy 3d acceleration "basic functionality", welcome to the world of the User) this is an unprecedented event in Linux for me. I'll be excited to see if this driver makes it into the 11.10 release of Ubuntu.
Hot on the heels of my fresh driver adoption, I gave 0 A.D. another whirl. I was excited to finally be able to get my hands dirty with this forthcoming open source game project, and it did not disappoint. While the game is still in early alpha, and only very basic gameplay is implemented, I had a grand time goofing around with it. This project is very promising, keep your eye on it.
A few more things: I've also been following the OpenMW project very closely. Unfortunately, development has been a slow trickle, though a constant one. My fingers are always crossed that development speeds up, but given the track record of projects like this, it's not likely. XFCE also finally implemented the freedesktop.org menu specification, which is awesome, but it just means that now I'm in the market for a good menu editor. Lastly, I got nQuake and Skulltag (a Doom port) working on my machine, which is tons of fun.
Slowly but steadily we are moving forward, which is great. Things could be better all around, but for now I'll enjoy what I can!
