620 Part IV . Running Applications . 3D (How to cite a web site)
620 Part IV . Running Applications . 3D acceleration If you are a more serious gamer, you will almost certainly want a video card that provides hardware acceleration. Open source drivers for some video cards are available from the DRI project. Video cards from NVIDIA and ATI often have binary-only drivers available. Fun open source games such as PenguinPlanet Racer, BZFlag, and others that recommend hardware acceleration, will run much better if you get one of these supported cards and drivers. . Commercial games The latest commercial computer games are not all ported to run in Linux. Boxed commercial games for Linux include Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, as well as about 50 first-rate commercial games that have been ported to run in Linux. Using Cedega software from Transgaming.com, you can get hundreds more commercial games to run. To see if the game you want is running in Cedega, visit the Transgaming.Org Games Database (http://transgaming.org/gamesdb) to see its status. Commercial Linux games are described in more depth later in this chapter. . Gaming servers Many commercial computer games that don t have Linux clients available do have Linux game servers associated with them. So Linux is a great operating system for hosting a LAN party or setting up an Internet gaming server. . Linux Gaming Development Some of the most advanced tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) for developing computer games run on Linux systems. If you are interested in developing your own games to run in Linux, check out the OpenGL (http://opengl.org) and Simple Directmedia Layer (www.libsdl.org) projects. While the development tools available for developing open source games are awesome, a primary goal of this book is to get you up and using Linux as quickly as possible. To that end, I want to tell you first how to get hold of games that already run well in Linux and then how to get games working in Linux that are intended for other platforms (particularly Windows and some classic gaming consoles). Basic Linux Gaming Information There isn t much you need to know to run basic X Window based games that come with Linux. The following sections describe basic information about Linux gaming. Where to Get Information About Linux Gaming Many Web sites provide information about the latest games available for Linux, as well as links to download sites. If you re looking for information about Linux gaming, start with your distribution s home page (www.redhat.com, for example), the home page of your desktop environment (www.kde.org or www.gnome.com, for
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