RafKill Raptor Free Software (Open Source) clone
for GNU/Linux
I've earlier blogged
on playing Apogee's Raptor Shadows of Death arcade on GNU / Linux
with dosbox
All the old school raptor addicts will be interested to hear
Kazzmir (Jon Rafkind) a free software devotee developer has
created a small game resembling many aspects of the original
Raptor arcade game.
The game is called
Rafkill and is aimed to be a sort of
Raptor like fork/clone.
Originally the game was also named
Raptor like the DOS game,
however in year 2006 it was changed to current Rafkill in order to
avoid legal issues with Apogee's Raptor.
The game is not anymore in active development, the latest
Rafkill release is from January 2007, anyhow even for the
2012 it is pretty entertaining. The sound and music are on a good
level for a
Linux / BSD shoot'em'up free software game . The
graphics are not of a top quality and are too childish, but this is
normal, since the game is just one man masterpiece.
Rafkill is developed in C/C++ programming language, the game
music engine it uses is called
DUMB (Dynamic Universal
Bibliotheque). By the way
DUMB library is used for music
engine in many Linux arcade games. DUMB allows the Linux game
developer to develop his game and play a music files within
different game levels in "tracked" formats like
mod, s3m, xm
etc.
The game is available in compiled form for almost all existent
GNU/Linux distributions, as well as one can easily port it as it is
open source.
To install
Rafkill on Debian, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Linux Mint en
other Debian based distros
root@debian:~# apt-get install rafkill
Installing on Fedora and other rpm based is with
yum
debian:~# apt-get install rafkill
...
Once
rafkill is installed, in order to start it on Debian
the only way is using the
rafkill (/usr/bin/rafkill)
command. It appears the deb package maintainer did not wrote a
gnome launcher file like for example
/usr/share/applications/rafkill.desktop
Just to explain for all the GNOME noobs, the
.desktop files
are a description file GNOME reads in order to understand where
exactly to place certain application in the (Gnome Applications,
Places, System ...) menu panel.
Even though it miss the .desktop, it is launchable via
Applications menu under the
Debian section e.g. to
open it from the GNOME menus you will have to navigate to:
Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action ->
Rafkill
This "shortcut" to launch the game is quite long and hard to
remember thus it is handy to directly launch it via
xterm:
hipo@debian:~$ rafkill
or by pressing
ALT+F2 and typing
rafkill :
Starting the game I got some really ugly choppy music / sound
issues.
My guess was the fizzling sounds were caused by some bug with the
sound portions streamed through
pulseaudio sound
system.
To test if my presume is correct, stopped pulseaudio and launched
rafkill once again:
hipo@debian:~$ pulseaudio -k
hipo@debian:~$ rafkill
This way the game was counting on
ALSA to process sound en
the sound was playing perfectly fine.
I solved this problem through small wrapper shell script. The
script did kill pulseaudio before launching rafkill and that way
solve gchoppy sound issues, once the game execution is over
the script starts pulseaudio again in order to prevent all other
applications working with pulseaudio.
Finally, I've placed the executable script in
/usr/bin/rafkill :
Here is the script:
#!/bin/bash
pulseaudio --kill
/usr/games/rafkill
pulseaudio --start
You can
download
rafkill.wrapper.sh here
Or write in root terminal:
debian:~# cd /usr/bin
debian:/usr/bin:# wget
http://pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh
debian:/usr/bin:# mv
http://pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh rafkill
debian:/usr/bin:# chmod +x rafkill
Interesting in
Ubuntu Linux, rafkill music is okay and I
suppose the bug is also solved in newer Linux distributions based
on Ubuntu. Probably the Debian Squeeze pulseaudio (0.9.21-4)
package version has a bug or smth..
After the change the game music will be playing fine and the game
experience is cooler. The game is hard to play. Its really nice the
game has game
Saves, so once you die you don't have to start
from level 1.
Enjoy ;)