Steel Storm 2 Game Coming For Linux

[liamdawe]

No thanks for games from shady company. Even for linux.

Trollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

I am sorry I am not gonna elaborate more. There is an interview with me on Gaming on Linux and there are some details about the issue. Btw, thanks for loving Steel Storm

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?threads/kot-in-action-interview.590/

For those who want to read up.

[Hamish Wilson]

In constrast, 15 years later there are still Quake Singleplayer maps being released and I guess Half Life (1) isn't quite dead either. This of course has something to do with those games having been exceptionally popular, but the fact that those games *do* support just "making maps" to create new singleplayer campaigns does help, too.

That is actually an understatement. Many older games have new maps being built for them. Quite a few are actually far from dead. Does not diminish your point though.

[SavageX]

@SavageX:
The main issue with games being independent from commercial content is simply the fact that someone else would have to design / build any assets. I doubt we would see more (free or non-free) FPS available even if a free SDK with free content exists. Take Alien Arena for example: One could grab the content, make new maps and build a SP / Coop shooter from scratch.

The mayor point is more that we do not see a lot open coop shooters may be simply because there seems no big dev interest. Funny enough since many mayor shooter were coop and had big success (L4D / L4D2 / Bulletstorm / Killing Floor).

While I agree that the lack of single-player games is mostly to the much higher design requirements, I'm pretty sure the lack of a promising and modable free base game has something to do with it as well. I consider Nexuiz/Xonotic/Alien Arena/Warsow *not* to be suitable games to easily base a single-player campaign on, as you need to invest quite heavily beforehand: No monsters, no monster AI, no goals/keys/bosses, no means for storytelling etc.. All those would have to be tacked onto game code structured with multiplayer in mind, so it's not just a matter of "grabbing content", "making maps" etc. to have a SP/Coop game - the games just don't support that properly.

In constrast, 15 years later there are still Quake Singleplayer maps being released and I guess Half Life (1) isn't quite dead either. This of course has something to do with those games having been exceptionally popular, but the fact that those games *do* support just "making maps" to create new singleplayer campaigns does help, too.

Of course, I absolutely agree that the availability of a singleplayer SDK (with code AND basic content) won't automatically spawn a flood of singleplayer campaigns either.

[Darksoul]

@who_me:
Not to sound too cheap / destructive but given the fact that you can buy older (read 9-12 month) AAA games for half the price from the software pyramid 20$ / 20? is still a lot of money. I grabbed both Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 for 10? each. They still give me a lot of fun. That is what Indy developers have to face: Beat the fun older software titles provide for the same amount of money.

I am somewhat with Kano:
In order to make this funding thing work, motorsep needs to provide some more details on the game. What he imagines it to be, some design details and so on. May be using pledgie to rise money in the first place is a smart idea ? (http://pledgie.com)

@SavageX:
The main issue with games being independent from commercial content is simply the fact that someone else would have to design / build any assets. I doubt we would see more (free or non-free) FPS available even if a free SDK with free content exists. Take Alien Arena for example: One could grab the content, make new maps and build a SP / Coop shooter from scratch.

The mayor point is more that we do not see a lot open coop shooters may be simply because there seems no big dev interest. Funny enough since many mayor shooter were coop and had big success (L4D / L4D2 / Bulletstorm / Killing Floor).

@motorsep:
Oldschool should not mean "no cutscenes". Even very old titles had cut scenes in order to tell a history. Oldschool should not be an excuse for missing features.

I know..."This is not a "community is making the game and one dev is implementing it" project" yadda..yadda...but personally I see only two directions a SP / Coop FPs can move and both are described by the two mods I mentioned: SDQuake and Kleshik.

Either you go the fun-2-be-had line as in SDQuake (huge amounts of ammo, hilarious strong weapons and masses of enemies) or the dark / scary line similar to Kleshik. IMO the darker, more scary setting gives you more options to extend the game by simply modifying the map a bit. L4D gives great examples here. Day and night cycles similar to those in Kleshik for examples. Parts of the game where you have waves of enemies attacking the players (L4D / UT2k4 Invasion). Add longer pauses between the waves plus defining special points the player has to defend plus stuff to fortify (e.g. MG turrets, mines, barricades) and you have a tower defense FPS. And so on.....

Coop / SP means much more than (re)building Doom / Quake in a different settings. The Darkplaces Engine has perfectly proven being capable to render great environments. The rest for building a great game are good ideas, fresh environments, a nice game history and a well working game logic.

Redesigning a Quake- or Doom-alike without fresh stuff is a dead end prior having really started.

Just my 2 cents,
D$

[SavageX]

I'd love to see some examples of good singleplayer FPS games, free, for Linux. Mind you, Nexuiz, Xonotic and AA are not good examples. Warsow looks good, but still, mp-only game.

I second that.

Obviously we have good free multiplayer arena-style shooters (all those mentioned games *are* good examples for that genre), but I still wait for something free and mod-friendly coming remotely close to something like single-player Quake, Half-Life or Unreal. I'll even take the dated late-90ies graphics.

Actually I'd already be glad if someone would take the Quake game code and glue some decent models for, e.g., soldiers, zombies, unspeakable horrors etc. to it - this "game construction kit" would allow story writers and mappers to work on something that doesn't have "you need a full version of game XYZ" written all over it and without the immense startup investment of going from scratch again.


So, motorsep, perhaps you can consider having a free (or at least free-to-download) set of basic game assets (basic enemies with sounds and gamecode) and non-free single-player campaigns (maps, map textures, music, boss enemies, story etc.) to seed single-player development a bit. Well, I can always dream

[Hamish Wilson]

I mean, Linux needs Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter Strike, Ubisoft's Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series.(I can mention plenty of more). This is what Linux needs in the FPS world. Because yes, Linux sucks even in the FPS world despite there being 1 thousand FPS around.

Despite all Michaels best intentions, I'm confident in saying that NOTHING has changed for Linux in the gaming area, and I'm not joking. I'm still not sure why he is convinced of the contrary. (he never said so, but his articles lead to make us think so).

I'm not sure if the story around Steam for Linux is a joke, but that is the only thing that can really change gaming under Linux. All the rest doesn't count.

This has got to be the most immature post I have ever read on this entire website.... seriously? It is not a game I like, so it is not a game at all? We have a flood of new Indie games for Linux, and yet our situation has gotten worse because we are not playing Modern Warfare on it natively?

I like old school shooters, and while some fun innovations may be nice, I am happy to hear about this project.

And no matter what you think, Linux gaming is growing. We now have a strong base of loyal developers and strong outlets for them to distribute their wares.

We are finally achieving what Scott Draeker set out to do in 1998 and failed to do, we have created a Linux gaming industry. It may not produce as flashy games as are available for other platforms, but we are getting a solid stream of solid titles like we never have before.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020202221402/http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/24/2118235

We now have a leg to stand on. Now I will get back to playing my titles which are apparently not games as they were not ordained so by you.

[Kano]

@who_me

first of all, i had the old frozen bundle before, therefore i only wanted to test that game. why should i spend so much money that i get the same bundle that i have got already again? all i wanted was to check if the game runs with kanotix. well it did not with 64 bit + snb until i wrote a litte hotfix script. now it runs, but i dont play the game. i asked if you could get the game as addon to the old bundle, that was not the case, so what would you do? i mainly verify just that the games run, thats all.

[Darksoul]

Old spirit -> new ideas ?

motorsep,

in the first place it warms my heart to hear of an FPS with focus on singleplayer for my favourite OS. Thanks for that even if nothing has been released yet. Something with the "good old spirit" can mean something good and bad at the same time. If "done right" (whatever this means) the old grunts like me will get the same fuzzy warm feeling we had when playing Doom, Unreal, Quake and so on. If "done wrong" it can feel pretty boring.

The art for you will be to make it feel "done right"

Not an easy task if you ask me.

I am sorry guys, but I know what I want in my game. This is not a "community is making the game and one dev is implementing it" project. Be patient and you shall see it And after that you can decide whether you want to play it or not.

True, no community input should take away too much attention of the developer from his project, but a dev might listen to the ideas people post and use them for his game. Personally I like some of the ideas Qaridarium posted. My core competencies are not releated to anything with game design but take my word as a FPS gamer from the very right beginning: Beside an exchangable storyline (or no story at all = Quake) any set of boring exchangable weapons, similar to found on any 3D shooter out there, will easily sign the death contract for even bigger games.

Want peoples money ? Then provide a rich feature set, a good storyline and innovative weapons plus modding options.

I'd love to see some examples of good singleplayer FPS games, free, for Linux.

That's a simple one...there are no games like that

The best SP FPS I know so far are all not running natively under Linux (beside those with Unreal Engine):
- Unreal
- Halflife
- Halflife II plus Episode 1+2
- System Shock
- Deus Ex

Coop Quake-Mods I play for fun which work well for single player as well:
- Darkplaces with SDQuake (= Serious Sam Feeling)
- Darkplaces with Kleshik (= not compareable to any game out there)

Want our money in the first place prior releasing anything ?
-> Show us new ideas / new concepts

Want us to buy your game after release ?
-> Make a great game with new ideas and new concepts as well.

Many people are fed up with the lastest XXX clone of YYY type of game. So it is more or less a good base for those game developers which provide either something completely new (thats a hard one), something which produces a warm fuzzy feeling (for those old gaming grunts) or may be a blend of both.

Sorry for the long rant,
D$

[who_me]

Frozen Synapse is a stupid game, i am glad that i only payed 1 cent for it...

So, in the end, your 1 cent purchase ended up costing the Humble Bundle folks money. Good sport.

[Znurre]

Steelstorm 1 was not really my kind of game.
I bought it to support a Linux friendly developer, but never ended up playing it much.
Steelstorm 2 sounds much more interesting to me, and I will make sure to follow its progress and also pre-order it if I like what I see
Keep up the great job.