More Details On Unigine's OilRush Game

A few days ago Unigine Corp announced OilRush, their first in-house game that's coming from the creators of one of the most advanced multi-platform engines. Unigine developers are also fond of Linux and properly support it with the OilRush game receiving the same level of support and there will be a Linux client on launch-day.

Judging from the dozens of responses in our forums, many Linux gamers are ecstatic for this game that's to be released in the fourth quarter of this year. Denis Shergin, the CEO of Unigine Corp and a Phoronix Forums member, has also been answering some questions relating to their game within that thread. Below are a few more bits of information about the Linux version of OilRush.

- Linux hardware requirements are moderate. OilRush can run "smoothly" on a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics card, but of course the better the graphics card the greater the experience and that's likely without the highest quality settings. Here are some Unigine Heaven test results that show even the latest and greatest graphics cards can get clobbered by this 3D engine. You can also install the Phoronix Test Suite and simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark unigine-heaven to see how your system should roughly perform with OilRush.

- For the foreseeable future you will more than likely need to use the proprietary graphics drivers from AMD or NVIDIA to run OilRush. The open-source drivers aren't simply fast enough or support the latest OpenGL 3.x/4.0 extensions, so Denis rightfully says. "Frankly speaking I can't guarantee that we will support open source drivers."

- Unigine Corp also hopes to release a demo of OilRush, but they aren't certain right now.

- OilRush / Unigine Engine supports AI (Artificial Intelligence) and they should be "pretty smart players" in the game.

- There are no plans for a Mac OS X version of OilRush, just Windows, Linux, and PlayStation.

- It depends upon the distributors as to whether the Linux version of OilRush will incorporate any DRM, as in Digital Rights Management.

- The Linux game distributor has not yet been determined.

We have also talked with Denis in private and aside from a possible demo of the game, much to our pleasure, there may also be a released technology demo / benchmark of OilRush, like Unigine Sanctuary, Tropics, and Heaven. Last year we talked about another game Unigine was developing internally and it was more of a shooter-type game. Denis has confirmed to us that development on this unannounced title is currently frozen until OilRush is released.

For those that haven't yet seen the Unigine OilRush trailer, watch it below.