Gaming on Haiku

[aarroyoc]

Hi everybody,

Recently I was thinking on how to attract more users to Haiku when I came up with an idea. A blog about gaming on Haiku, of course there aren't many games in Haiku but there's still some interesting games. I set up the blog and I've written four posts (SuperFreeCell, BeMines, BShisen and Pipepanic). Now I want to know your opinion about the blog, suggestions, warnings, recommendations and so on in order to make the blog better.

Gaming on Haiku: http://gamingonhaiku.cf/

[lelldorin]

There is something like this already exists, but ok to have a Blog about game.

http://besly.de/menu/search/archiv/game/games.html

Will be funny to have some one to translate the game descriptions for us.

Official BShisen Website: http://www.xbar.org/BShisen/
Tutorial how to use: http://besly.de/menu/search/archiv/game/bshisen_eng.html
Tutorial how to make own tile sets: http://besly.de/menu/search/archiv/game/bshisen_tilesets_eng.html

[dcatt]

I wish we had Space Girl for Haiku.

[prOSy]

Hi,

first of all thanks for your work!
I think it is a little bit hard to combine gaming and Haiku-OS now at the current state of the OS because of the supported GFX cards and OpenGL and so on, BUT ...

...of course there aren't many games in Haiku but there's still some interesting games

You are right, but that is changeble to a little better situation.
IIRC there has been a lot of small games back in the BeOS R4/R4.5/R5-days. And a couple of them should be working on Haiku-OS, Rocks'n'Diamonds for example. But we are now in a situation where next release (maybe even beta 1) is recogniseable at the horizon.

And that's a point where Haiku-OS users could step in to help the developers. They could:
- try to get as much games (with it's sources if possible) back from the BeOS days
- try to write receipes to create HPKGs of them
- testing, testing, testing (which is fun, because it means to play a lot ... )
- try to get a software repository that fits OR provide an own (games-)repository

Oh yes, i remember also the FPS shooters i.e. Quake2@BeOS and QuakeIII-Arena, even Doom and that Duke Nukem port (named "Dave Gnukem" on BeOS). Also a FreeCiv clone and OpenRaider (free Tomb Raider clone from a russian developer iirc) and so on.

You will find a lot of them on BeShare networks and anywhere on the net on personal homepages of BeOS/Haiku enthusiats.

There has also been 1 or 2 Game CDs for Zeta back in the days, but i never got one of them and so i am not sure if that things has been "native" Zeta games or if them have to be played by an emulator.

I'm not a pro-gamer or so, but the man/woman getting QuakeIII-TeamArena running (with netcode!), playable and hpkg-packaged on Haiku's upcoming beta version will get 100,00 EUR donated by me. (Just for the memories of my youth being back on my loved OS ) I think it should be doable, even with SoftwareGL, the current CPUs are more then strong enough therefore.

EDIT: Readers, don't get me wrong, first of all we (the users) sould be the strong arm of the Haiku-OS community that helps the developers by installing, testing and reporting bugs.
So, everything at the proper time. Step by step.

greets,
prOSy

[topolinik]

Well done man!
Further I say, if you add a line for ScummVM (www.scummvm.org) you will get a single entry... and dozens of games in a row!
And the same is true for ResidualVM (www.residualvm.org), which I have already tested some time ago: http://forums.residualvm.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239#p2380

[Akuji]

PulkoMandy ported Homeworld to Haiku not long ago (here is his screenshot: http://take.ms/BXibS) but I don't know where the file is and whether it's still possible to run it on current nighties.

[miqlas]

Hi,

actually i made the HomeWorld port with help of PulkoMandy. He solved a big-big problem, so hut-off bevore him.

You can get the sources here: https://bitbucket.org/extrowerk/homeworld-sdl-haiku

Best Regards,
miqlas

[PulkoMandy]

I don't think I wrote much code for the Homeworld port, congratulations to miqlas for taking the time to investigate and fix 99.9% of the problems there.

I did port some other games but nothing of that scale.

Maybe worth mentionning is the Haiku port of Caesaria, done by the game original developer with some support from the Haiku community: https://bitbucket.org/dalerank/caesaria/wiki/Home

One of my many side projects is porting things from the list at http://osgameclones.com/ . There are a lot of them so I'd enjoy some help there.

[Akuji]

Maybe worth mentionning is the Haiku port of Caesaria, done by the game original developer with some support from the Haiku community: https://bitbucket.org/dalerank/caesaria/wiki/Home

Unfortunately Haiku version seems to be not available for download any more. Latest version for Haiku is 0.3 while the most current one is 0.5.

[lorezan]

There has also been 1 or 2 Game CDs for Zeta back in the days, but i never got one of them and so i am not sure if that things has been "native" Zeta games or if them have to be played by an emulator.

The 2 games for Zeta were "Robin Hood The Legend of Sherwood" and "Airline Tycoon Deluxe"
https://web.archive.org/web/20120118035549/http://www.rune-soft.com/product.php?product_id=20
https://web.archive.org/web/20120118104216/http://www.rune-soft.com/product.php?product_id=29
They require libzeta.so and other libraries from Zeta 1.21 to run.

[lelldorin]

robin hood is running on haiku 4.1 without libzeta.so. but i does not know if is running on current haiku builds, never test this.

http://besly.de/menu/search/archiv/game/robinhood_haiku_eng.html

[skarmiglione]

You could speak about Godot Engine, it can be compiled for haiku os and have a lot of open games and to the future can be a infinite source of videogames for haiku os.

[lelldorin]

You could speak about Godot Engine, it can be compiled for haiku os and have a lot of open games and to the future can be a infinite source of videogames for haiku os.

the same for egsl - easy game scripting with lua -. egsl was build for haiku alpha 4.1 and brake with adding package management into haiku. will be fine to found one to build it again an current haiku builds.

a very big package you can find on our repo site, but not all funktions does work correctly. the source is there too: software.besly.de

[PulkoMandy]

Is your website already offline?

Another interesting game to mention is "Future Boy", last time I tried it it worked fine, and the engine used to run it, Hugo, is free software. There are a few other games using this engine which we could add recipes for, as well.

[aarroyoc]

Ok, thanks for your advice. I added more games to my TODO list so soon the games you have mentioned will appear on Gaming On Haiku. At first I will check games that are currently available on HaikuPorts, because they're easier to install.

It helps me to improve my English also so I'm going to write more posts.

PulkoMandy, yes yesterday was down. DigitalOcean forced me to do a reboot and I thought that everything will be OK. It turns out that the PHP socket didn't started, only Nginx.

[spinach]

I think it is a little bit hard to combine gaming and Haiku-OS now at the current state of the OS because of the supported GFX cards and OpenGL and so on, BUT ...

there's lots of games that don't use any of that, and we also totally have opengl support.

[prOSy]

there's lots of games that don't use any of that, and we also totally have opengl support.

That being said ... i assume it should not that much work (TM) to have an OpenArena Haiku port for example?
Aside from GPLv2 license; the essentials (i.e. for compiling on debian) (after a quick look) are:
- build-essential
- libsdl-1.2.15-dev
- libopenal-dev
- libvorbis-dev
- libcurl-dev (there are different versions, they should all work)
(http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/DeveloperFAQ)
Afaik we have no OpenAL, could it be doable porting that game? Any developer could mention sth to this?
I'm just curious about...

greets

[PulkoMandy]

Porting should not be too much problems. I think we have OpenAL but maybe no native sound output yet, so the game will be silent. On OpenGL side, the question is wether you can reach an acceptable framerate with software rendering. Maybe with a powerful modern Core i7 CPU, the llvm softpipe renderer, and an old enough game engine, it would be possible. Only way to know is to try it.

Also, having the game already ported would be an incentive and a way to test for accelerated graphics drivers

[armanx64]

It's so sad that good only-CPU game Outcast has no Haiku port.
How you think, will guys from GOG have any interest to port it?
This game is not free but too damn good.

[bbjimmy]

New game on haiku ... https://depot.haiku-os.org/#/pkg/loopdloop/fatelk/1/1/0/-/1/x86_gcc2?bcguid=bc84-TEUP on the FatElk repo.

This is a re-make of a game I used to play on the TRS80 color computer called Doubleback. This one is programmed in yab for Haiku.