Posts Tagged ‘PenguinPlay’

Which community events do you want?

Monday, April 5th, 2010

We have been hard at work on our unannounced ports the last couple of months, and I know some of you get rather impatient waiting for news. So, to help pass the time we’d like to see if there are any particular community events that you’d like to see. If you have other good ideas, feel free to suggest them in a comment. Please vote only for events that you’d be likely to attend, you may select up to three.

Which community events would you attend?

  • More identi.ca/twitter giveaways (65.0%, 43 Votes)
  • LGP trivia contest on IRC (26.0%, 17 Votes)
  • LGP trivia contest on identi.ca/twitter that is spread out over a week (23.0%, 15 Votes)
  • Play Majesty on PenguinPlay with LGP staff (18.0%, 12 Votes)
  • Play Ballistics on PenguinPlay with LGP staff (15.0%, 10 Votes)
  • Play Knights & Merchants on PenguinPlay with LGP staff (9.0%, 6 Votes)

Total Voters: 66

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If you have any input, suggestions or questions for me, feel free to ask them here in the comments, on IRC (Zero_Dogg in #lgp on irc.freenode.net), via identi.ca/twitter or via e-mail (to eskild at the domain linuxgamepublishing dot com).

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Posted in Community | 19 Comments »

Intermittant downtime over the last two days

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Once more LGP has been hit by outages affecting companies we work with. This time, the hosting company, RapidSwitch, who own the datacenter where we host our webservers.

We would like to apologise to all customers who had their downloads affected, or who had their ability to play rental games affected. We are immediately extending the rental period of all rental games that are active now, or would have been active during the downtime, by four days to make up for the intermittant downtime.This affects rentals purchased from any LGP reseller.

We are pleased to report that players with non-rental versions of the game, both download and boxed copy, experienced no lockout. As designed, the LGP protection system coped perfectly with the outage.

The outage also affected PenguinPlay, meaning that ingame multiplayer functionality via PenguinPlay would have been unavailable.

This will also have affected our resellers who sell downloadable copies of games, and request download keys dynamically. If any of your customers received blank keys, please contact us at support@linuxgamepublishing.com, and we will fix the problem.

Finally, on a lighter note, we would like to briefly laugh at RapidSwitch. Who as compensation for the downtime, have offered to upgrade our servers for free. Beside the fact that our servers are fully loaded and not upgradeable any further, I am still waiting for their reply to my question of why on earth did they think that appropriate compensation for extended downtime is – effectively – more downtime. I’ll summarise their response in a comment as and when it is received.

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Posted in Official Announcements | 2 Comments »

The case of the missing Majesty

Friday, July 17th, 2009

A few people are asking where is Majesty, howcome everywhere is running out of stock?

Well, Majesty is actually out of stock. We ran out during the May sales, and it is still not reprinted yet.

We have been holding off on the reprint, as we are working heavily on updating it. The first version of Majesty is a little dated now, it uses some old libraries (we were using SDL 1.2.5, which is just a little out of date!), and it uses some systems we have since stopped using (such as the old static/dynamic release system to satisfy the LGPL).

We are also removing the old OpenPlay library used for multiplayer games up to now, and replacing it with Grapple, and integrating it with the PenguinPlay server for lobby and scoring systems (as you can see below).

majesty

This does mean network compatibility between versions will be lost, but it means that you now get all the advantages of PenguinPlay, and Grapple, which is a more advanced networking system than OpenPlay. Saved game compatibility will not be lost, luckily!

Unfortunately this all takes time, and we were not expecting to sell out so soon. We sold more Majesty than we were expecting to in the sale, and so we were out in our time estimates by a few months, as to how long the remaining stock would last. The updates were about half way through when the stock finally ran out, and not in any position where we could simply release a new version.

Luckily the changes are almost finished…maj_manual

So, in a few more weeks, you can expect that new Majesty will be coming your way! If you don’t have it already, you probably should get it. If you already have it, well, the new version also has a colour manual instead of the old black and white one, uses the new setup tool, and the disc looks better.

I know some people may ask, why didn’t we make the colour manual and better layouts before? Well back when Majesty was first printed back in 2003, the cost of colour manuals was so high that it was just not possible. Now, colour manuals are much more affordable. As for the rest, well, LGP was just learning its trade back then, and now, we know what we are doing and can do a better job!

So, new player or old, whether you buy the new version, or just patch your existing disc, I hope you enjoy the new version of Majesty. All in all, it is a new lease of life for one of our most popular games!

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Posted in Official Announcements | 20 Comments »

Sacred Gold is now, well, gold!

Friday, March 6th, 2009

sacredIt took a little longer than we had expected, but we can finally announce that Sacred Gold has been sent to the production company, and we expect it to be ready to ship in 2-3 weeks.

We expected to have had it ready weeks ago, but some last minute issues caused some unexpected delays. The network layer, Grapple, had an error in how it communicated through certain types of firewalls and NAT routers, which meant that only around 30% of players would be able to access the multiplayer features of the game on the PenguinPlay servers.

But that is all past us now, and the game is in production! The game also has a nice new large map insert being produced with the game, just as a small bonus extra! We are also working on the finalising of the demo, which we hope to have available before stock of the game arrives, so you can try it out before buying.

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Posted in Official Announcements | 31 Comments »

Enabling online gaming

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

We recently released PenguinPlay, a multi player matchmaking service for Linux. Part of our motivation to do this was the fact that it could, at times, be very hard to actually find someone to play online Linux games with, our community not being as large as the gaming communities on other platforms, as well as the fact that none of the other matchmaking services had proper Linux support. One of the main reasons for this, of course, is the fact that most games aren’t compatible across platforms, usually because they use a proprietary network layer that only works on one platform. PenguinPlay on the other hand is built around the LGP networking library, Grapple, which both makes support for PenguinPlay quite easy to implement, as well as giving support for platform-independent multiplayer. The service itself had been in the making for quite some time before its recent release.

Although it still is relatively new, there’s already quite a few nifty features available, such as in-game lobby, live information about ongoing games on the web site, as well as highscores for all games. Sadly though it can still at times be somewhat hard to find someone to play with, which is why we added a new feature to PenguinPlay this week, namely e-mail notifications. This lets you subscribe to notifications for games, then PenguinPlay sends you an e-mail when a multiplayer game that you can join is started. In order to enable this feature you need only log in to your PenguinPlay account, edit your account settings and then select that you wish to edit notification settings. From there you can subscribe and unsubscribe to new game notifications for the various games available on PenguinPlay.

To compliment the notification service and the on-site forums we have also started an IRC channel where PenguinPlay games can chat and schedule games in. Join #PenguinPlay on the irc.freenode.net IRC network.

One of the primary things that separates PenguinPlay from the many others similar services out there (apart from the obvious support for Linux) is that it is available, very cheaply, for developers of Free/Open source games. The Grapple library is already open, so they need only pay a (nominal) fee for hosting services, and then we take care of the rest (no proprietary code needed). The library itself is multi-platform and runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Windows. Our goal is that a multi-platform online gaming community is built up around it, in particular, one where Linux gamers are real full-time members of the community and treated at least as well as gamers from other platforms.

As of this writing, the games that are available are only Linux versions, and only commercial games. There is no technical reason why the developers of the games for other platforms shouldn’t be able to patch their games to work with PenguinPlay. The games that are available are currently available for online play are Ballistics and Knights & Merchants both of which needs to be patched to the latest version, as well as high score support for Jets’n'Guns, which was the first LGP game to ship with PenguinPlay support out-of-the-box, and Candy Cruncher (which also requires a patch). The upcoming LGP game Sacred: Gold will also ship with PenguinPlay support out-of-the-box, enabling Linux gamers to adventure together, and our beta team has already done so. I for one can’t wait to quest along with fellow Linux gamers.

We are hoping that the service improves the multiplayer experience for Linux gamers, making it easier for the gamers to find people to play with, and games developers to have full multi-platform multiplayer support in their games. Keep checking this blog and the PenguinPlay website for news about more upcoming PenguinPlay features and games.

If you have any input, suggestions or questions for me, feel free to ask them here in the comments, on IRC, or via e-mail (to eskild at the domain linuxgamepublishing dot com).

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Posted in Community | 2 Comments »

The LGP community

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Greetings! My name is Eskild Hustvedt (aka. Zero_Dogg), and I’m a junior developer and community manager at Linux Game Publishing. This is the first of hopefully many (community-related or otherwise) blog posts from me. This time I’ll be writing a bit about the LGP community.

One of the great strengths of Linux in general is the strong communites that has been built up around it. Linux gaming is no exception, and we at LGP are very proud of the community that surrounds us, not merely because it is the community that pays our bills, but also because it is very friendly and helpful, and as such a great motivation while we are working on bringing great commercial games to Linux.

One of our most active community communication channels is IRC. We have one rather active IRC channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC network, namely #LGP, our general chat channel. Recently we have also started a channel for our new PenguinPlay games matchmaking service on the same network called (quite obviously) #PenguinPlay. The latter is still in its infancy, and as such not as active as the primary #LGP channel. In both of them you will be able to communicate with other members of the community, as well as numerous LGP employees. You will find our beloved dictator CEO Michael Simms (as lgp-michael), and yours truly (as Zero_Dogg) idling there pretty much 24/7, and most other LGP employees regulary (pretty much daily) stopping by, not to mention the large croud of friendly regulars that are usually more than happy to help, or just chat (about Linux games of course, though we *cough* some times tend to drift somewhat off topic). IRC is also a great way to quickly get support concerning our games (although it should be noted that it is not an official support channel). Not only is our IRC community helpful in answering questions about our games, but it also deserves our gratitude for assisting us. Just this week we recieved numerous reports about our recent Candy Cruncher patch breaking sound for many players, as a result of this we were quickly able to diagnose and subsequently issue another patch that fixed the issue.

Another good example as to how our community can affect our decisions is how we treated the community reactions to our announcement of the addition of DRM to our new games. The community had strong feelings and opinions concerning the subject (and rightfully so), but we felt that at this point adding a form of DRM was something we had to do. What followed was a storm of feedback from our community, which we greatly appreciated. Because of you we made large changes to the DRM scheme, in order to ensure that the rightful owners of our games would not be blocked from using their own game, even during very long periods of no internet connection. The input was received primarily via e-mail and on our public IRC channels (but also partly through comments on articles concerning the subject).

In the end, the community and our love for gaming in general, and on Linux in particular, is the reason we keep doing what we do. Without all of you, there would not be any LGP.

If you have any input, suggestions or questions for me, feel free to ask them here in the comments, on IRC, or via e-mail (to eskild at the domain linuxgamepublishing dot com).

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Posted in Community | 12 Comments »