Unigine OilRush Pre-Order For Linux Now Open

On Monday I reported that pre-ordering for Unigine's OilRush Linux game would be imminent. This morning, you can now pre-order this impressive game built atop the demanding but beautiful Unigine Engine.

OilRush is Unigine's first in-house game and we have been testing it since December while the February build is quite nice with the game being just weeks away from release.

By pre-ordering the game, Linux gamers are now able to get beta access to the game too. How much does the full version of this game cost? Just $20 USD! (Under 15 EUR) This is quite a bargain. Pre-ordering is available from Unigine's new web store. Payments are accepted via credit card, PayPal, Webmoney, or wire transfer.

Beyond getting beta access to the game, all funds go directly to Unigine Corp, "exclusive game-related materials" will be provided, etc.

While it's great to see OilRush pre-ordering is now available, Unigine Corp has decided to push back the official release date to June. This push back was done to allow the Russian developers more time on the complete the balanced and polished single player campaign. At least though there is now public beta access to pre-order customers.

Pre-order here. We can't wait to see the statistics from Unigine about sales of OilRush and the breakdown of Windows vs. Linux sales.

At the same time, Unigine Corp has also updated its Unigine Heaven benchmark to version 2.5. Version 2.5 of this demanding OpenGL / DirectX benchmark improves the GPU support, adds support for indirect occlusion, improved stability, improved the quality of ambient occlusion, and other fixes. For Windows users, Unigine has also released "Heaven Professional" at a cost of just under $500 USD. This version of the DirectX 11.0 benchmark adds command-line automation, CSV reporting, stress testing mode, technical support, and license for commercial use. However, if you use the Phoronix Test Suite on Linux and other platforms, you already have command line automation, reporting just not to CSV but XML, Text, and PDF, and result sharing on the just-launched OpenBenchmarking.org. The Phoronix Test Suite does this not only for Unigine Heaven, but also Unigine Sanctuary and Unigine Tropics.

Lastly, for those wondering about the recently talked about Flash support in the Unigine Engine, Denis Shergin (Unigine Corp CEO) has told Phoronix this morning that the engine has its own Flash implementation that is written completely from scratch without any dependence on external Flash/SWF libraries.