Commercial games

Thanks almost single handedly to JohnCarmack and his support of OpenGL, a number of commercial games come out natively for Unix.

• Anything ID makes (including Quake 1/2/3, Doom 1/2)
• Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003
• NeverWinter Nights

There was a company called Loki that ported many games to Linux. Unfortunately they've gone out of business, so you can't buy their games from them any more. They were responsible for the UT port, as well as Civilization: Call to Power, Myth II: Soulblighter, Railroad Tycoon II, Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, Heretic II, Heroes III, Heavy Gear II, SimCity 3000, Soldier of Fortune, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Descent3, MindRover, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Tribes 2, Rune, Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2 and Postal Plus.

There's also a company called TransGaming who are working on a version of Wine called Cedega, especially for gaming, which runs a whole heap of cool new games:

• Warcraft III
• Grand Theft Auto 3
• Civilization III (Season for 3's, isn't it?)
• Black and White
• The Sims
• Everquest
• Jedi Knight II and other Quake 3 engine games
• Half-life/Counter-strike (I got this to run, but it stops being 3D accelerated beyond 800x600 for some reason --GianPerrone)

You can download the source code for Cedega under the AFPL, but to download binaries from them you have to subscribe. Subscribing gives you the benefit of supporting them and a say in what games they work on supporting next, so it's highly recommended.

Servers for any commercial game worth their salt come out for Linux.

Free and free games

There are a number of cool GPL/free games for Linux:

• TuxRacer (which has a non-GPL windows versions as well)
• BzFlag - a multi-player tank game
• FreeCiv (originally a clone of Civilization)
• XBill! (This is a good game if you want to get OOS)
• VegaStrike - a space craft fighter/trading game a. la. Elite, Frontier, etc. Still in heavy development but playable.
• FrozenBubble
• TetriNet
• Neverball - tilt the floor to roll the ball through the obstacle course before time runs out.
• Tremulous

Game programming

Have a look at SDL.

Alternatively

Go out and buy a console. Computers are for business. :)

Networking optimizations

Do you have a user who is complaining about high pings when you're browsing the Web or downloading on the same connection?

ifconfig(8) offers the following advice

txqueuelen length

Set the length of the transmit queue of the device. It is useful to set this to small values for slower devices with a high latency (modem links, ISDN) to prevent fast bulk transfers from disturbing interactive traffic like telnet too much.

So ifconfig eth0 txqueuelen 0 will make your interactive traffic (read: Quake, Doom3) much more bearable for your pet gamer.

See Also

LinuxAndGames (should probably merge this page and that one)