What about gaming on FreeBSD?

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:
Creating a BSD indie game developer community might also help.
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Snurg said:
Regarding the comment A. D. Sharpe Sr. above, maybe a "Gaming" subforum of the Multimedia forum could help to make FreeBSD more popular with gamers?
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PacketMan said:
I now see this category falls under desktop.
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Thread how-about-two-news-sections-games-and-blog.314/
Can we revisit the Game category in another way: to give it, its own forum section? Everything currently under Multimedia/Gaming which is under the games/gaming category tag can go into it. Everything outside of Multimedia/Gaming which has the Games/Gaming tag can be left out.

This tag: https://forums.freebsd.org/tags/gamesgaming/ and only which is currently under the Multimedia/Gaming forum. Nothing else, which is under other forum sections, even if it has the same games/gaming tag. Almost everything for gaming is under that tag, so not much has to be sorted for it.
 
I like AGS games and I found Mordy2, download is from archiver.org. I like it.
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Old School RuneScape! (the real one :p)

Jagex Launcher wouldn't work initially until I added --single-process, and seemingly the same winetricks arial trick worked to allow typing email/pass for log-in! (couldn't tab or click the text window)

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RS3 works too! (same prefix :p)

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World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King, with localhost server (personal singleplayer) on 15.0:

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Server and Client notes; getting the scripts down for the desktop launcher was fun :p (auth/world would sometimes start if mariadbd was foreground, but both start consistently with mariadb started in background instead; unexpected but turned out to integrate nicer)

Server compiled using Clang, LibreSSL, and MariaDB (no patches; builds as-is on FreeBSD straight from latest source :D) Client notes use official patches and ISOs to go from WoW 1.0.1, TBC 2.x, all the way to WotLK 3.3.5.12340 (it was nostalgic hearing Wrath's CD install music!). WoW's performance is perfect! (60 FPS Vsync Intel UHD 630 fullscreen 1080p, no DXVK)

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Client notes has the desktop launcher, and integrates localhost server scripts:

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Age of Empires 1 and 2!

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They fullscreen fine, and I'm a little surprised I could open 3 out of 4 games from the same prefix at the same time :p (Rise of Rome had a DX error but works fine ran by itself ran once but then had consistent start-up errors seemingly because of the start-up videos; disabling with Empires.exe NoStartup solved that!)

AoE Collectors Edition has AoE 1, its xpac (RoR), 2 (AoK), and the first xpac for 2 (Conquerors); and the International version has DE, FR, SP, and UK (English) languages (I tested UK but the others look as easy as changing 2 letters for installing). All 4 installed as-is Full installs in a win95 32-bit Wine prefix!
 
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I play Cold Waters (cold war sub sim/game) and Starcraft under wine, as well as a bunch of older games from earlier in my life on DOSbox (much of which is abandonware), like Tracon II (Terminal Radar Approach CONtrol sim), some of the various incarnations of Harpoon (naval warfare sim), and the like...

Not a fan of a lot of modern gaming, for reasons I stated in a blog post.
 
VulcanRidr said:
I play Cold Waters (cold war sub sim/game) and Starcraft under wine, as well as a bunch of older games from earlier in my life on DOSbox (much of which is abandonware), like Tracon II (Terminal Radar Approach CONtrol sim), some of the various incarnations of Harpoon (naval warfare sim), and the like...
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Thank you for your post ! I played (a lot) of these games too way back in the past when we bought PC games in physical boxes at the store :cool: -- and had 5-1/4 or 3-1/2 inch floppies or CDROMs for them.

Back in the day I also had: Tracon II (box), Harpoon I (box), Harpoon 2 (box), Diablo I (box), Diablo 2 (box), Janes Apache Longbow (box), and a lot of Micropros games (simulation) -- Falcon 3.0 (box) [F16 sim]. Just reading the "manuals" for the sim games took entire days and you learned a lot -- Good times :).

Sad to see they are all "Abandonware" now - You are correct that simulation games (today) are not the same. The latest sims feel a lot more like arcade games sadly. Attention spans are... less? :cool:

In a (related) FreeBSD forum post someone was interested in bringing original DOS emulation to FreeBSD - See here: FreeBSD and DOS emulation
 
VulcanRidr said:
Not a fan of a lot of modern gaming, for reasons I stated in a blog post.
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I read your blog post (above) ... and totally I understand !

Since you are a Harpoon fan you might consider a VERY similar game made in (this century) with an excellent game database called: Command Modern Operations. I have been playing this game for years and I own all the DLC for it. ... and it just happens to be ON SALE right now for 50% off.

The (demo video) shows all the icons as "Game ICONs" but I play the game using NATO symbols like you find in Harpoon. The demo is also running the game "really fast" - and I don't play the game that fast - but I they are "marketing". You can slow time down just like in Harpoon - or speed it up to real time and beyond.

BUT .. this game has been tricky game to get working under Wine and I have not had much success - You can see the results of people trying to get this game to work under Wine -- here on the ProtonDB database: Command: Modern Operations

It works fine under Win10 and Win11 - and the game is completely multithreaded and (part of the fun) is watching everything updating on your screen in "real time" via all the hyper-threads on your PC executing all at once.

Matrix Games (ALSO) has (relatively :cool: ) updated Harpoon game editions for sale as well. I bought my updated Harpoon games from them.
 
CShell said:
Since you are a Harpoon fan you might consider a VERY similar game made in (this century) with an excellent game database called: Command Modern Operations. I have been playing this game for years and I own all the DLC for it. ... and it just happens to be ON SALE right now for 50% off.
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Yes, CMANO (or CMO nowadays) is Harpoon post Larry Bond and Chris Carlson involvement. Does it work on WINE? I looked on winehq, and it has one listing for it, and it was only bronze. And I have a dozen FreeBSD boxes, and my wife has 2 Devuan boxes. My desktop does dual-boot with Devuan, on which I play Kerbal Space Program (linux native), but I haven't booted it in over a year.

And if you enjoy CMO, have you taken a look at Sea Power : Naval Combat in the Missile Age (20% off on steam)? It is a broader scale sim like CMO and Harpoon, but it was written by the same developers that wrote Cold Waters.
CShell said:
Matrix Games (ALSO) has (relatively :cool: ) updated Harpoon game editions for sale as well. I bought my updated Harpoon games from them.
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I have the matrix versions. I still play the old school versions, because it is a sense of nostalgia for me. And Harpoon classic is still available on archive.org. Last time I checked, Matrix wasn't selling the bundle any more.

For the record, I actually have the paper/miniatures version as well.
 
When I play games I mostly play Call of Duty: World at War and Hitman 3 on Epic Games these days. I use Mizuma for Epic Games and linux-steam-utils for Steam. Other games I frequently play with my kids are Luanti and Urban Terror. Luanti is native and Urban Terror I play via Mizuma as well.
 
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