The Humble Indie Bundle 9

http://www.humblebundle.com

The time has come, for a brand new Humble Indie Bundle (the original one!), the 9th bundle!
As always, pay what you want, help charity, and get some awesome games and their soundtracks!
At the time i'm writing this post, the bundle contains 10 games (if you pay more than the average price) for all the operating systems, included of course Ubuntu!



Let's take a look to all the amazing indie games included in this bundle!

- Trine 2 Complete Story: Immerse yourself in brilliantly rich graphics and a wondrous magical world in this side-scrolling action-puzzle platformer. You’ll need to make use of a wizard, a thief, and a knight and their unique abilities in order to complete puzzles and defeat nasty-looking goblins and frightening dragons in Trine 2: Complete Story. Play by yourself and toggle between all 3 characters or play with up to 2 other friends in co-op mode. Trine 2: Complete Story includes the Goblin Menace expansion campaign and the Dwarven Caverns level.



- Mark of the Ninja: Test your ninja stealth skills in Mark of the Ninja, a side-scrolling stealth game where the possibilities are endless. Learn new techniques and arm yourself with distraction and attack items, like darts, noise makers, and grappling hooks, that will help you distract and sneak by the guards. Choose how you want to play - will you slay all the guards or use your stealth to just sneak by undetected?



- Eets Munchies (beta): A fantastic puzzle game for the whole family, Eets Munchies is a beautiful reimagining of the game that started Klei Entertainment. Featuring gorgeous animation, ridiculous creatures, and an amazing level editor, players help an adorable hungry creature devour cake in increasingly devious puzzles.



- Brutal Legend: In Brütal Legend, play as roadie Eddie Riggs (Jack Black) as you rock out and lead a band of head-banging minions to defeat some nasty-looking demons. Featuring a cast of characters voiced and inspired by heavy metal musicians including Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne, and Lita Ford, the game is soaked to the bone with metal.



...And if you beat the average price (now $4.76) you will also get:

- FTL: Faster Than Light: Captain a spaceship delivering critical intelligence to the Federation while being chased down by rebels in the top-down space strategy game FTL: Faster Than Light. Manage your crew through one-on-one ship combat and life or death situations, while making sure they don’t die from lack of oxygen, fires, or shots from one of an arsenal of weapons. Random scenarios make each trip through the galaxy one full of surprises and challenges.



- FEZ: Explore new dimensions (starting with the third), and see the world from a different perspective in the colorfully detailed puzzle platformer FEZ. Explore the world as Gomez, an adorable white little dude, who finds himself wearing a magical fez that grants him the power to rotate his world, effectively turning 2-D into 3-D. The universe is collapsing and restoring it has fallen entirely on your tiny little shoulders.



- Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken: It's chicken versus penguins in Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken. This side-scrolling action-platformer features clever characters and even cleverer gameplay. Play as a gun-toting chicken with the mission of taking down the tyrannical penguin faction. Besides some quick shooting action and stealthy duck and covers, you can also control a penguin with brain bugs and jet through the sky with rockets.



- A Virus Named TOM: Created by a scientist seeking revenge, you’re a virus with a three-letter name in the fast-paced action-puzzler A Virus Named TOM that’ll have your reflexes twitching. Feel your reflexes twitch as you rotate pieces to complete the circuit and spread the infection, but avoid the drones that’ll drain your energy upon contact. Infect with up to 3 friends in co-op mode and if you hate your friends, there’s also a battle mode where you can duke it out.



- Bastion: The action-RPG Bastion won over the gaming public with its incredible attention to every detail—from the tight combat controls, to the inspired, narrator-driven storytelling in a novel, post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Players take on the role of the Kid, entrusted with the thankless task of restoring the world after a disastrous calamity. With a none-too-small arsenal of stylized weapons, jaw-dropping art, and amazing music, Bastion truly deserves its reputation as a must-play indie game by Supergiant Games.



- LIMBO: The captivating puzzle-platformer LIMBO is a modern classic, putting players in control of a boy's journey through a tense and hostile world. The protagonist is as fragile and hardy as you'd expect of a young kid, making for a novel and sometimes surprisingly intense adventure. With incredibly tight platforming, detailed 2D graphics, and well-designed puzzles, LIMBO has rightfully earned critical and popular acclaim for the Danish indie studio, Playdead.



And remember, you will also get all the soundtracks!
This is a great bundle, don't miss it!
What are you waiting for? You still have 6 days! Don't be stupid and be quick!

Wine 1.7.2 released

The Wine development release 1.7.2 is now available.

What's new in this release (see below for details):
  - Right-to-left text layout improvements.
  - NTLM and Negotiate authentication for RPC over HTTP.
  - More glyphs in the built-in Wingdings font.
  - Better system tray support in the Mac driver.
  - Activation context improvements.
  - Various bug fixes.

The source is available from the following locations:

  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.7.2.tar.bz2
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.7/wine-1.7.2.tar.bz2

For the complete list of bug fixes follow this link:

http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.7.2 

Wine 1.7.1 released!

The Wine development release 1.7.1 is now available.

What's new in this release (see below for details):
  - Support for keyed event objects.
  - Support for the "init once" synchronization mechanism.
  - Activation context support for DLLs, typelibs, and COM classes.
  - Support for loading 32-bit typelibs on 64-bit.
  - Various Mac driver fixes.
  - Some fixes for serial port devices.
  - Various bug fixes.

The source is available from the following locations:

  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.7.1.tar.bz2
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.7/wine-1.7.1.tar.bz2

For the complete list of bug fixes follow this link:

http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.7.1 

5 different ways to track frames-per-second

Hi guys! This is a tutorial about tracking some frames-per-second when running your favourite games. This tutorial will cover tracking FPS on native Linux games (2 ways to do that), on Crossover, on Wine and on PlayOnLinux!
On Windows, there's an easy way to do that, and that's using Fraps, which is an amazing program. Unfortunately, on Linux there's no program like Fraps, but don't desperate, i have the solution for you!
Why do you have to track FPS? The answer is pretty simple, sometimes you want to check the performances of the game on your OS, maybe changing some options to improve those performances and make the game run better than before.
So, let's begin with...

Crossover:

First of all, launch the program and go into the "manage bottles" section.
Now, select a bottle and click on "run command..."



In this section, select the right command (the main executable of the game), click on "debug options", then "create log file", and write "+fps" inside the "other:" blank line.



Then, click on "run". At this moment, the program will ask you where to put the log file you're about to create, so choose the folder you prefer and give a name to the file (for example: NBA 2K13.log).
Play the game as usual. The more you play it, the more it will be accurate.
When you go back to the desktop, double-click on the log you've created.



This is the only way to do that. You can't track FPS in-game, but you can get informations about the lowest and the highest FPS you get inside the game, and an average value of them (the average value is the number which is repeated more times).

PlayOnLinux:

Launch the program, click on a shortcut and then on "configure".
As you can see, there's a "debug flags" line. Write "fps" inside that, and close the window.



Now, instead of running the game with the "run" command, click on "run debug".
It will open a window, the debug window, where FPS are tracked.
Play the game as usual. The more you play it, the more it will be accurate.
When you go back to the desktop, the window is still opened.



You can choose to check your FPS inside the window, or open the log file. If you want to do that, click on "find this log file", it will open a folder (/home/yourusername/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/nameoftheshortcut/), and it will tell you that the log file is called "playonlinux.log". Open that file, and you've done it!



This is the only way to do that. You can't track FPS in-game, but you can get informations about the lowest and the highest FPS you get inside the game, and an average value of them (the average value is the number which is repeated more times).

Wine:

Open the terminal inside the main directory of the game.
Then, run this command "WINEDEBUG=fps wine ./mainexecutableofthegame.exe 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep --line-buffered "^trace:fps:" | osd_cat".



The game will open, and you will see in the left-upper part of the screen, the FPS you're getting while playing.



This is an easy way to track your FPS, but nothing will be saved inside a file.
If you want to save your performances inside a file, you have to run this command instead of the previous one: "WINEDEBUG=fps wine ./mainexecutableofthegame.exe &> /home/yourusername/Desktop/nameofthelog.log | tee /dev/stderr | grep --line-buffered "^trace:fps:" | osd_cat"



The game will run, you will NOT see the FPS while playing the game, but they will be saved inside a file. Close the game, go to the desktop, open the file and...



Native Linux client (debug console method):

This method works only if the game you're running provides a debug console.
In general, you can search "nameofthegame show fps" on Google to find out if you can track FPS in your game without external tricks.
For example, Half-Life provides a debug console which can be shown with the "\" button.
The command to show FPS inside the game is "cl_showfps 1"



Close the console, and this is the result..



Nothing will be saved inside a file and there's no way to do that.

Native Linux client (Mumble method):

If your game does not provide a console or any way to show FPS, Mumble is what you wish for.
Mumble is a teamspeak-like program, which provides some overlay options, including FPS tracking.
First of all, install it with the command "sudo apt-get install mumble".



Now, if you use a 32-bit version of Ubuntu, you can easily skip the next 3 steps.
But, if you use a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, you may have some library issues. Here's the way to solve those problems.
Open this link: "rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libmumble.so.1".
Download the file "mumble-plugins-1.2.4-0.20120422.1.i586.rpm".



Extract it with the archive manager to your desktop folder.



Now, open a terminal inside the extracted /home/yourusername/Desktop/usr/lib/mumble/ folder.
Run the command "sudo cp .* /usr/lib32"



Then, finally open the program. Open "settings -> overlay". Click on "show FPS counter" and check if "enable overlay" is ON.



DO NOT CLOSE MUMBLE. This is very important, do not close it. Leave it open (you can reduce it if you want).
Open a terminal inside the folder of the game you want to play.
Type this command "mumble-overlay ./executableofthegame"



The game will run.



And then, you will see your FPS counter in the left-upper part of the screen (yeah, just like FRAPS).
Nothing will be saved inside a file and there's no way to do that.

So, if you enjoyed this tutorial, or you have some other tips, or you want to ask me anything, feel free to send me an email or just answer this post, i will always answer you!