Hello,

Tonight, we have a new scripter for our staff: Toumeno.

He is a member of the community for a while, you maybe met him on the forum or on the IRC channel. He is also yet the author of the following scripts: Caesar III, GTA 2, GTA 3, Pharaoh, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and Microsoft Office 2000.

Let's wish him a warm welcome and good luck for the future.

Hello everyone,

It's been a long time I was thinking that PlayOnLinux had to have a native capture system, like the famous FRAPS for Windows. It's now done with Capture, a plugin which will allow you to record your exploits in your favorite game!!!

You can see the result HERE
Note: This video spoils the final boss of Portal (French version), if you want to keep the surprise, don't watch it

Here is how to proceed:

1-Once the plugin is installed and activated, run it


2-Select the game you want to Capture and a personalized launcher will be added to your menu




3-When you will use this launcher, the following message, indicating that the capture will start or will stop with <SHIFT>+F8, will be prompted.


Note: You MUST stop the capture before leaving the game else the capture's file will risk to be corrupted!!

4-Once your capture finished, you can either visualize it, or convert it to avi (Video x264 - Audio mp3), the capture and the converted video are stored in the POL_Capture folder, situated in your home directory.

5-To finish, if you want to, you can remove the special launcher

You will find this plugin HERE and in the website's download section, of course

Have a good capture


By GNU_Raziel

PlayOnLinux 2.7.2 is available today.

Here are the new features:

A new function: message_one

The command:
message_one "Your message" "Your title" A_Unique_ID"

And you get:


If the user tick the box, PlayOnLinux will remember "A_Unique_ID" and won't display any message for this ID
So I used it for the 3D acceleration

Improved IRC

- A little message indicating the allowed languages on the channel.
- More commands are supported
- nick-pol replace nick-playonlinux as default nickname.

Wine version manager fixed

- It supports now versions >= 0.9.60. Indeed, since this version, the packages' algorithm has changed to lzma.
So PlayOnLinux now needs one more dependency: lzma which allows to extract the last .deb packages (because the Wine version manager uses the Ubuntu's packages)

The manque function

(means lack in French, the function will be translated later) It is designed to be used after check_depend. It displays the error message if check_depend didn't succeed.
Example:
check_depend "dosbox" "dosbox"
check_depend "playonlinux" "playonlinux"
manque

Tools menu improved

To prevent non-wine launchers (dosbox, cedega) from accessng to the wine functions

A new plugin: TransgamingCedega

This plugin allows to import your cedega launchers in PlayOnLinux and to use the cedega engines. Cedega's scripts aren't yet supported.


By Tinou

It's been several months that we don't know anymore if we can hope or not. In September 2007, the Valve editor was publishing a « Senior Software Engineer » job offer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the GNU/Linux platform. But once this offer announcement done, we never heard about it anymore and it wouldn't have been the first disappointment about a game's port to GNU/Linux.

It's the excellent Phoronix.com website which just went back over that story. In an article by Michael Larabel, the website's administrators claim they have informations from Valve, confirming that the Source engine's port was effectively started. Knowing this site's serious, we can trust in those words. But can we do the same with Valve's word?

But what is this « Source engine »?
It's simply a software rendering layer created by Valve for their games. The Source's particularity is to used by numerous and sometimes famous games! Nothing less than Half Life², Counter Strike : Source, Team Fortress and Portal! To put it plainty, all Valve's great games (Source is also used by other editors' games but they are less famous).
Source originally used DirectX, the 3D library from Microsoft, so this port requires a big modification to use OpenGL too (such as Quake's engines).
Source is a little bit old (2004) but it is regularly updated to sensibly limit the obsolescence of the technology.

Thus, the Source's port would be strategic, it would give access to a number of games -and by the way, excellent games- made in Steam.

Info? Intox? Nothing isn't yet done. When reading this, we can feel either totally overexcited as well as totally septic.
But Phoronix used to finish their articles with a positive note. So they remind us that they predicted, one year ago, a new AMD/ATI driver generation and their video cards' specs release.

Before leaving, a message of Linux users from Ravenholm:


Translation:
"Fear me! I want games!
Else I'll eat you!"

Links:
- Phoronix.com article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=source_linux&num=1
- The Valve's job offer: http://www.valvesoftware.com/job-SenSoftEngineer.html


By Asimov

Hello everybody,

What's on tonight at PlayOnLinux? We have new games available!!

DosBox games:

-Cervii
-Redneck Rampage
-Tunneler
-Wolfenstein 3D

Wine games:

-Grand Theft Auto : Vice City
-Hitman 2
-Sam and Max Season1

Thanks to puk007, parox, The_Mystery_Machine, djabal and THAiSi for their contributions


By GNU_Raziel

Hello everybody,

An urgent desire to massacre naughty and ugly E.Ts with an arsenal worthy of a Rambo from the future? So fell on Halo Combat Evolved

You incarnate the humanity's last hope against the Covenants, an interplanetary sect which gathers together several alien races that are game for anything to defend Halo, a huge ring wandering in the space and containing an horrible secret that will endanger the whole universe ... it's your turn to take up the challenge!!



For more details, see the forum HERE

Good game


By GNU_Raziel

Hello everybody,

Bored of Half-Life 2's old graphics? Want to rediscover an incredible trilogy, enriched by the unused game's content? So this mod is for you!!



Plunge back into a game with a darker and more oppressive atmosphere as well as increased textures and models.

For more details, see the forum HERE

Good game all


By GNU_Raziel

Hello everybody,

Since last versions, we included in "Install" a scripted games' list with icons.



But since we don't own every game, we need you, our POLian friends, to extract the games' icons in order to complete the list and make PlayOnLinux more convivial.

If you want to help us, get icons from the CDs only (you can extract them from the .exe files). Once it's done, follow these instructions (which will save a lot of our time) :

- Seize 22x22 (reduce the icon if necessary)
- The format doesn't matter
- The icon's name must be exactly the same as the script's (example: Age Of Empires 2 : The Age of kings)

Once done, host them as you can and send us the link (to Tinou or Zoloom) .

Thank you to send icons of yet scripted games only

Thanks all for your help!

PS: We are also seeking screenshots of your favorite games (yet scripted of course) of seize 200x150, as well as a small description of the game (in English).

Thanks once again,

Have a good day with PlayOnLinux


By Zoloom

Hello,

Here is a news to announce the creation of a new plugin for PlayOnLinux: Wine Import.

It allows you to import the Wine's prefix into PlayOnLinux in order to add (in PlayOnLinux) your applications previously installed.

To test it, go to the download page :-)


By Tinou

Today, we are very happy to announce the first year of existence of the project.
In order to celebrate it, I made a little summary of the PlayOnLinux's improvements for those who weren't here since the beginning :)

Look at the following table:

Version	Lines	Files	Screenshot	Descritpion
0.1	Unknown	Unknown		Charming, isn't it?
0.5	Unknown	Unknown		Yet more pleasant
1.2	241	1		A little interface had never hurted anyone Thank you zenity
1.4	373	8		First version of the PlayOnLinux's "language". The first non-official scripts appear
1.5	417	8		Still more improvements
1.6.2	966	14		Appearance of the expert menu
1.7	1507	16		We migrate at OVH
1.8	2584	31		Most outstanding 1.x version :-)
2.0.1	4447	42		A nice interface
2.7.1	7405 + 6296 (Languages)	64 + 12 (Languages)		The latest version, released the same day that this news.

As you can note, the project evolved a lot since the beginning.

Happy Birthday PlayOnLinux!