Hi there
Hello, everyone reading this blog and the Arch Hurd planet.
I’m Matt Windsor, or (captain)hayashi, and I’m a new Arch Hurd developer (or, at the moment, package maintainer). Over the forseeable future I’ll be handling more or less trivial ports of mostly game and multimedia-related packages from Arch Linux.
I feel that, with enough love and attention, the GNU system can be a gaming platform too. I’ve already had some degree of success with my port of scummvm [extra] which, using sdl [extra] and when coupled with old adventure games such as the now freeware Beneath a Steel Sky (bass [AUR]), provides a very playable (if silent) experience.
Beneath a Steel Sky on GNU
From Wikipedia,
Beneath a Steel Sky is a British 1994 science-fiction point-and-click adventure game in the cyberpunk genre… [it] takes place at an unknown point in a dystopian future in Australia, where the Earth has been significantly damaged by pollution or nuclear fallout. The game’s backstory is introduced via a comic book (shown on-screen in the introduction sequence of the CD release), drawn by well-known comic artist Dave Gibbons, that tells the story of a young boy called Robert who is the sole survivor of a plane crash in “the Gap” (the name applied to the Australian Outback at the time of the game). Too young to fend for himself, Robert is adopted by a local group of Indigenous Australians, who teach him the skills he needs to survive in this harsh new environment; they name him Robert Foster, partly due to him being fostered by them and also because of the discovery of an empty can of Foster’s Lager, an Australian beer, found near him at the crash site. Foster even learns engineering and technology and builds a talking, sentient robot called Joey.
After Foster has reached adulthood, he is kidnapped and his tribe annihilated by storm-troopers sent from Union City by its all-powerful computer LINC. Interestingly, Union City mentions prominent suburbs and train stations found within Australia’s largest city, Sydney, leading some to speculate that Union City was once Sydney. This was confirmed in a 2005 interview with the Australian gaming magazine, PC PowerPlay.
Foster manages to escape from his captors as the helicopter transporting him back to Union City crashes just after entering the dome, leaving him and his robot friend, Joey, to find out why they were brought there and where to go next, while security continues to search for him.
tl; dr it’s an old-school point-and-click game that I personally am quite fond of. Due to Revolution making the game resources freeware (though possibly not strictly free software – one of the reasons the game files are in the AUR) and contributing code to ScummVM, a free software meta-engine for adventure games, the game (originally for DOS and Amiga OCS) is playable on such platforms as modern Windows, GNU/Linux, the PSP (ick)… and now, thanks to a trivial PKGBUILD port, Arch Hurd.
I don’t have any screenshots (yet!) but, using ScummVM with scaling turned off, Beneath a Steel Sky runs on the Hurd at a quite playable framerate. The main problem (which seems to stand for all SDL programs at the moment) is that the longer the system has been running, the less likely SDL programs are to work. Plus, SDL seems to be singularly slow.
Other game experiments
So far, I’ve also built openttd [extra], a free software clone of the simulation game Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and meritous, a 2D action game with a somewhat Japanese atmosphere. Both run but, being based on SDL, are almost unplayably slow. Hopefully this will be resolved eventually.
In testing GTK1, I ported corewars [extra], but do not know how to play it and have thus not properly tested it. Let me know if it works for you!
In closing
Hopefully, meritous should be in the repos this week. For now, I’m going to experiment with building SDL with nasm support, though I’m sceptical of the benefits.