The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

Although I already have some of the games I'll definitely contribute more.

And I've been told by the developers that the "Windows" game in the bundle is being ported to Linux and Mac.

O, and they fixed a lot of bugs in the SG games (which made the game unstable and crashed it very often).

I'll probably get this! 'we we we so excited!' :D

Yeah i will probably buy it as well.

Not just to have a better download link for shadowground since i already own it, but it's a good cause.

Although I already have some of the games I'll definitely contribute more.

And I've been told by the developers that the "Windows" game in the bundle is being ported to Linux and Mac.

O, and they fixed a lot of bugs in the SG games (which made the game unstable and crashed it very often).

Can you point us to where the developers said they are porting the game?

Also where is a link to what has changed/been fixed in the HB shadowgrounds?

I love the humble indie bundles. I've been thinking about getting Shadowgrounds, so naturally I had to get this bundle. But, this bundle doesn't have as much variety as previous ones and all the games are from the same developer. Also, I was kind of hoping to get preview/early access builds of Splot, but it sounds like we just get it when it is officially released.

Jack Claw is just an abandoned incomplete prototype for a game that they stopped working on - I suppose if people like it enough, they could extend the code and make it a complete game.

I haven't played any of these yet; looks like they wouldn't be able to run on my netbook, so I'll probably play them when I get home.

*drool*

I missed out on the first bundle, and was going to participate in the second but everyone's credit cards were spent so I ran out of time. So I really hope that they do as they did before and give out the games in the old bundle if you pay more than average again (makes sense actually, as that would probably up the average for each bundle). I already have Osmos of course thanks to Maxim (thank you very much ;)), but I would not mind trying Braid just to see what everyone goes on about (probably the only indie game with more hype surrounding it would be Minecraft).

So, with these download links, do you get to keep the link forever or is it a limited time span? With my internet I would prefer to have them around for a long time. If not I suppose we could download them at either my fathers or my brothers work... damn bandwidth capping! :mad:

It says the download links will stay for "the foreseeable future." I still have access to my download links from the first bundle, so I wouldn't be worried about it too much. Also, they give you the option of using torrents, which last as long as there is at least one person seeding them - potentially a long time.

The download links will stay for a long time, they usuall give out torrents, steam and desura access as well - so potentially you can have them forever. If they ever went down no doubt someone would mirror them - i can't ever see them going down though to be honest.

Heh, torrents are definitely out if you have bandwidth capping. Still, sounds good. :)

Some good news, even if they do not allow access to the previous bundles Braid will be available independently for Linux:

Hey guys, we will have a public release for Linux available probably at some point this year, but we are waiting on something else to happen to make that work well. More news as it happens.

http://braid-game.com/news/?p=696#comment-9428

liamdawe :
I've spoken to one of the FrozenByte developers via the chat option in the Bundle and asked him about the bugs as they really made the game almost unplayable.
He said that the ports have been improved (by the same people who made the original ports, now named Alternative games) and that the Windows game will also get a Linux port soon.

And Trine2 will be ported to Linux.

I'll post about it on LGN (we are not dead....yet).
;)

I'll post about it on LGN (we are not dead....yet).

Hey, channelling a bit of the old Caleb there are we? :p

Definitely worth getting for a fixed up DRM free port of Shadowgrounds. I just wonder if it is working on R300g and R600g yet. Considering they both have S3TC available now and Quake 4 and Amnesia are now supposed to be working... :D

EDIT: Damn, does not look like it, at least for Trine:

Crash location is not inside the game binary but possibly your graphics driver. Mesa driver is not officially supported and has not been tested. Can you install proprietary ATI driver?

Please provide your opengl extensions string from glxinfo.

Turo Lamminen
Alternative Games

Well i found info on their blog about things so i have updated the first post for Jack Claw.

I don't know any "high profile" game that works right on open source drivers.

Tested Shadowgrounds Survivor and Trine, both work great for me :D, gives me more things to do on my time off in the weather is cack! This bundle came at just the right time for me!

I have actually done most of my gaming on free drivers, and these were on classic Mesa and not the new Gallium ones. Granted, my taste for older titles helps, but I am quite looking forward to playing Quake 4, Amnesia, and the like on the free drivers when Fedora 15 comes out defaulting to R600g. When they work they generally work better than the blobs in my experience.

That said I do not blame them for not testing on the free drivers, and considering their progress recently I would not be surprised if Trine is working on them by the end of the year. Last time I tried Shadowgrounds it did not work because lack of S3TC, it should at least go further than that now. :)

Also worth noting is that there's work on making some of these Humble Indie Bundle games work under the open-source Mesa / Gallium3D drivers. There's already been [URL='http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=a9a02c8a39620515ec9fd0d774ce329cf67ecb4e']this commit[/URL] for exposing GL_ATI_draw_buffers so that Trine will function, assuming your drivers/hardware are fast enough, etc. These driver issues have been discussed at length in our forums.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTMyNw

Apparently the games are now working with the addition of some new Mesa patches, which should be included with Mesa 7.11 if I am correct. So the game should be able to run on a stock Fedora 15 now.

Yeah i read that, another good reason if more games come to Linux, people who like the games want to improve drivers, we all win!

Frozenbyte has also said they may open-source the Shadowgrounds games if some undefined milestone is hit (likely somewhere above $1M USD), but unless the rate of sales increase, they may have a hard time topping the [URL='http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODk1NA']$1.8M in sales[/URL] achieved by the bundle last December.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTM1Mg

I am still waiting on getting my copy until I can get some cash in hand, but I will certainly make sure I get it in time. This is just one more incentive. :D

I just got my copy last Sunday, will not bother to download it until I get my machine fixed up a bit, and even then it will have to be done at either my father's or brother's work as it is WAY to huge to download with our (should be illegal) bandwidth limit.

At any rate, here are some interesting comments by Joel from Frozenbyte that he posted on the Phoronix forums:

Hi guys,

Yeah we're happy about the sales, no question about it. There's a lot of ifs one can throw around but at the end of the day we have got enough to cover the remainder of Trine 2 development. So that's good.

Just to set some facts straight:

- Jack Claw can be played on keyboard & mouse now (v2, F1 toggles between kb/mouse and the gamepad)

- Jack Claw Linux/Mac ports are coming very soon - Mac is already up and running but has some crash issues and doesn't look as good, and Linux isn't far behind

- There's a playable teaser flash of Splot available from the bundle download page (but of course not the same thing as an actual game)

The source codes use a custom license, as these are our first source code releases ever and we weren't quite sure about how to do it, so we went the route we thought was safest for now. We may move Jack Claw to GPL later (SGs maybe not, but who knows).

I hope this helps. Also a big thanks to everyone who's supported this.

- Joel, Frozenbyte

Yes I think we'll get the games to the Ubuntu Software Center soon after the bundle. There's a gazillion things to take of first, but hopefully in a month or two we'll have them up there.

From our side I can say that we will deliver on our promises - the Mac/Linux of Jack Claw will be out soon and Splot should be out in 2-3 months. Of course schedules can always get messed up and we don't want to sacrifice quality for deadlines, but in any case we are not talking about too many months here. We've been doing this for a while (10 years actually) and I think we're professional enough to make it happen - and that was probably one problem for many purchasers. Some could say we're not as indie as the other companies/teams in the previous bundles, and maybe they're right - but I like to think that we very much have that same spirit here, despite being bigger and perhaps focusing on more "traditional" story-driven games.

The Intel situation is also a factor and has indeed prevented many people from enjoying the games (you can always get a refund from the Humble guys btw). This is something we most likely will never be able to fix unfortunately.

I think we'll be posting our "postmortem" on the bundle sometime this week on our blog, will be interesting.

allquixotic, thanks. I see your point (and read it earlier on our forums - thanks for all your insight there btw!). However the problem at the moment is that we have not yet familiarized ourselves with the GPL license or others, so it would be a much bigger risk at this point to go with that than with our custom one (at least we think we know what it allows, but yes I do see the point you make). I'd also say that if there's any license confusion, we are just an email away. Anyhow I hope to be able to talk more about this near the end of the week.

MaxToTheMax, yeah the code is messy, I've been listening to our programmers go off about it for years. It's hack upon hack, and all goes back to 2000/2001 and our RTS strategy game concept ("we don't need multiplayer right? Let's save a few months of work and write singleplayer only code.").

Let's see how the license evolves - hopefully I'll have some news on that later this week or early next week.