3D Realms Gone, Took Duke Nukem Forever with them: http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1127

Not that i like to repost, but if you are like me, this story would have come as a shock to you.  Now before I go to cry under my sheets I would like to reminisce all the fun I had with the Duke Nukem series all this years.

Yes, DN 3D is the most fun game I knew back in the days. The sidescrooler also gave me some hours of play but its the idea of the game that stuck.  A character that knows no limits and a crew of developers that gave the censors something to do. Finding a game to match up to DN 3D however, is hard. No wonder they took a full 12 years, sadly giving up at the end. I hope this game will be revived. Like i was hoping for it to come out for the past 12 years.

A man can dream.

Creating a kiosk environment.
The tools:

• Touchscreen Monitor

The requierments:

• Firefox 3
• Linux
• Non-exit-able
• Onscreen Keyboard

As you might expect, I tried everything.

R-Kiosk. Perfect.

A inline javascript Keyboard. While it did what was needed, it fails on forms that are on the bottom of the screen and in Iframes. Good side: Language was dependant on the page’s language. But Fail.

xvkbd. While I did manage to place it on top of Firefox and lock it so people cant close or edit it, and change their language.. it was annoying to do so. Moving it around the screen more so. Porting it to win32 impossible. Fail.

Ok, lets try a different aproach.
http://stlouis-shopper.com/~jtjsoftware/software/vkeyboard.xpi is a firefox Addon I found. A simple tweak made it work on Fx3. Here is what I made. The first step in porting the app, is thus in bad shape. ~Win.

If there is enough interest in such a plugin for Fx3, I myself and the original author will continue to work on it. A lot of things are already on my mind that I want to do with this project. Suggestions ?

Image via CrunchBase

Spore, the multi-genre “massively single-player online game” by Maxis was succesfully tested on Linux trough WINE. The actual video after the jump.

Both the PC and Mac versions of the game will feature the full experience of cell through to space with editors for designing creatures, buildings, and vehicles. Spore for the Mac will be made possible through TransGaming‘s Cider Portability Engine, with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles.

Also, a side affect of the Cider port, its cousin project WINE has all the benefits. That also brings up the question why didn’t Maxis go and release the title under Linux.   

Image via Wikipedia

Just wanted to say how i LOVE my new Head-Crab plush toy i bought from the Valve Store.

Well, actually: Since Valve doesn’t include Slovenia in its shipping destinations, it wasn’t as easy to get one of these..
But thanks to a really good friend ( that means you Tami ;D ) i got it delivered from the USofA  today =)

Picks after the jump.

http://picasaweb.google.com/rawdevelopement/HeadCrab

Since I am a big fan of the Half-Life series, I went and picked up Half-Life 1 Anthology ( Team Fortress Classic, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life, Half-Life: Blue Shift ) yesterday to play the original just like I did about 8 years ago.  Or so I thought.

My Inspiron 1525 is where I installed the game. A quite modern piece of equipment, thus more than capable of running HL1. But alas, under Vista, the resolution is limited to only 1024*768 (or smaller.) The game doesn’t go into fullscreen and it runs terribly slow. Changing settings is futile.

But I didn’t give up so fast. I was quick to boot my workstation and just missing the boot screen to go into WinXP, I decided to try my luck under my favorite OS openSUSE GNU/Linux. So the first thing to do was to install Steam onto wine: wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi etc.. then installing HL1 trough steam. Steam itself is slow on my P4 1.6GHz 512mb GF2MX, but it gets the job done.

I have to note how little trouble it was to get HL1 running under Wine. Besides the .msi installer trick I had to once again google to figure out, it was straightfoward.

Running HL1: Right away it went into full screen mode and unlike under Vista, it let me set resolutions to match my hardware (22′). Speed was no issue here.

Just goes to show the level of quality and dedication in Wine. Im off to play some HL =D