Chapter 7: Gaming in Fedora and RHEL

Overview

In This Chapter

• Gaming in Linux

• Playing open source games in Fedora

• Finding commercial Linux games

• Running Windows Games in Linux

As Linux has grown in popularity, the availability of Linux-based entertainment options has increased. From simple parlor games to fast-paced OpenGL first-person shooters (FPS), there have been great strides recently in Linux gaming opportunities. In fact, the advance of processor-devouring 3D games has helped drive improvements in computer technology in general.

Availability of gaming software that you can use directly in Linux is a mixed bag of sorts. Many free and open source board games, card games, and clones of old popular game console games are either packaged with Fedora or available from other Fedora repositories. Some older commercial games have been either released as open source (such as Doom) or become freely distributable (though only as binaries or with licensing restrictions on how they can be used).

Some experts predict that gaming will be the software category that brings Linux into homes . The unfortunate truth is that many of the current "hot" titles still need to be coaxed onto Linux with some kind of Win32 emulation (such as Cedega). But even this is getting easier and more dependable. While the number of popular game applications is fairly limited at the moment, like everything else in Linux, more games are becoming available each day.

One area where gaming- related software has grown in Linux is in tools for producing high-quality 3D animations. For example, Blender ( www.blender.org ) is an open source project for doing animations, 3D models, post-production, and rendering that is being used today to produce commercial games and movie animations. Blender's features are beginning to rival those of commercial 3D animation software such as 3D Studio Max ( www. autodesk .com/3dsmax ), Maya ( www.autodesk.com/maya ) and SoftImage SXI ( www.softimage.com ).

Note 

An off-shoot of the Blender project is Game Blender ( www.gameblender.org ). Game Blender is working to develop and share technology needed to use Blender for gaming.

This chapter examines the current state of gaming in Linux, including the basics on getting your gaming environment going, and hardware considerations for gaming. It describes the free games (mostly fairly simple X Window games) that come with Fedora and RHEL, are part of Fedora Extras, or that can be found elsewhere on the Web. For running games that were created for other platforms, this chapter describes game emulators such as Cedega.

This chapter also discusses some popular commercial games that have demo versions available for Linux. If you like the demos, you can purchase these games, which run natively in Linux.