Tag: Beta

More of this please, thanks

So if you haven’t heard, S2 Games, the company behind the Savage series, have a new game coming out, and what’s more is they’ve been doing Linux Closed Beta testing with the guys over at Phoronix, and the Linux Gaming community has responded, in a big way.

Phoronix posts on the subject so far;
Come Play This New Linux-Native Game With Us!
Linux Gamers Are Excited For New Games
Okay, Linux Gamers Are REALLY Excited!

Game studios, pay attention. Linux gamer’s exist, and there are many of them, and they move with surprising force, (and buying power).

So what is Heroes of Newerth all about? Well, we can’t exactly tell you. S2 Games has all media under an embargo covering this game. Basically it’s an online, multi-player strategy game that is based upon DoTA (Defense of the Ancients).

–Phoronix

Weechat’ing it up

So I’ve been meaning to do it for some time, find an CLI IRC client for my linux box, so I can OS hop on the main box.

The main drawback of the ‘usual suspects’ were I never found them all that intuitive, or configurable. I finally stumbled across Weechat, the dev version (now 0.3.0-RC2) is both easy-to-pickup and customise. The only thing it was missing for me was something like HydraIRC’s “Channel Monitor”, but with the wide array of scripting languages, I figured why not? and wrote it from scratch, with a little guidance and ideas from #weechat.

So now, my IRC looks like this:
(Before)

Weechat

UT3 and me

Okay, since the UT3 Titan pack expansion came out a couple weeks ago, interest has risen in UT3 once more, and so has my desire to carry on mapping in it. Hopefully, sometime soon, my interest will peak, and CTF-Orbital will see a flurry of activity and maybe even a release.
Below are a few shots of how the map look currently. As it stands the layout is done, but the lighting is very basic ‘working’ lights.

Red Base 01Blue Base 01center

As it stands the map is bot playable, so I’m looking for feedback. Some feedback has already been made here and you can find the downloads there as well.
(This is most definitely still Alpha quality work, so don’t expect too much)

Windows 7

So like every other techie pleb out there, I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta the other day. While I reserve final judgement over whether this is a decent release or not, there are a few nice things in 7 that are going elevate it to possible ‘XP killer’

  • Much smaller footprint, when up and running, and with ‘Aero’ turned off, Win7 only takes up ~488Mb of memory
  • Mouse gestures, we’ve had them for years on *nix / Mac, now Windows has caught on
  • The redesigned taskbar MS has been bragging about; it takes a little while to get accustamed to. They seem to have tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible, which it pulls off. The previews even have progress bars built into some of them, which is nice.
  • More accessible / customisable backup manager. About time too.

There is probably more merits, but I haven’t messed about it Win7 to say much else. Since the footprint of 7 has been reduced, it should be better for running games on, all that remains is that 7 gets some better drivers than Vista did.