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Re: Best Single Player Shoot Em Game

 

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 11:52 AM, D.J.J. Ring, Jr. <n1ea@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Are there any single player arcade / shoot 'em games for Ubuntu that would
> allow me to show someone the graphics and play quality of linux?

If actual gameplay is less important to you than showing off sheer
graphical prowess, get a Radeon HD5000 series graphics card, or an
Nvidia GT400 series graphics card, and run the Unigine Heaven 2.0
Benchmark. Beware that you may have to play with it a little to get it
to render correctly and efficiently.

If good graphics are nice but deep gameplay is better, try Savage 2 or
Heroes of Newerth, from S2Games.

All of the above are non-free; if you require a demonstration of Free
Software, in-production games with good graphics, check out Ryzom
(which was just recently released under the AGPL3!) or the older
PlaneShift. Both are solid MMOs with existing fan bases.

Keep in mind that almost all games on Linux will perform very badly
(or may not run at all) unless you have a recent (Radeon HD2xxx or
later, Nvidia 8800 or later) GPU with proprietary drivers. The open
source drivers work for things like Quake 3, but for top-tier titles
developed within the last 5 years, you'll want proprietary drivers
that _fully_ support OpenGL 2.1 (or later), and optimize extensively
for the hardware. Don't bother with Intel IGPs.

Finally, and this is from someone who has played 80%+ of all native
Linux games released since 2003, you are very likely to have issues
with getting sound working on most games. If they use SDL, OpenAL or
(heaven forbid) OSS, as many games do, you will need to delve under
the hood to get it working. Depending on the game, you may have to
install Tejun Heo's OSSProxy; an updated version of OpenAL; edit
/etc/asound.conf; or any number of other things.

Good luck,

Sean

> There are old freedoom games - but graphics has improved since then and I
> want to show some people at a computer club what Ubuntu is capable of when
> playing games.
> Single Player
> Demo mode is a plus
> Great graphics is a must
> great sound or music is preferred.
> I hope that isn't too tall an order.
> Best wishes,
> David
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