14 DAY TRIAL // X³: Reunion, one the most complex and action-oriented space simulations ever created, was officially launched on Steam for Linux, in its Beta form.
X³: Reunion is developed by EGOSOFT and as the name implies, this is not the first release for the developers. They are actually doing this for a long time and X²: The Threat, their previous enterprise, was also ported on Linux.
The game was actually ported a few years back by Linux Game Publishing, but they lacked the proper distributing channels and X³ had a limited impact in the Linux community.
With the impending rise of Steam for Linux, EGOSOFT has taken the obvious step and has released a beta for Linux, for their 2.5 version. Given the fact that the game is already ported, most of the work has already been done.
In any case, X³: Reunion is now live on Steam for Linux and the developers have already fixed a number of problems:
• A bug which causes the mouse scroll wheel to bleed into other mouse buttons has been fixed; • The joystick selection/disabling in input config dialog has been fixed and some obsolete options (those are configurable in-game) have been removed; • Redirected stderr to stdout to hopefully avoid huge logs. All the players should check their ~/.xsession-errors files and delete them if they are huge; • The input printfs has been removed; • A crash which occurred when meeting Tony Marani in Farnhams Legend has been fixed; • The config dialog has received some improvements.
Also, EGOSOFT warned user about users running open-source drivers without support for texture compression (red, green, and blue stripes).
“If you have an AMD/ATI or NVIDIA graphics card you can install the proprietary drivers which should also result in improved performance. If you are running Intel graphics or wish to use open-source drivers you will have to install libtxc-dxtn,” stated the official announcement.
More details about X³: Reunion can be found on the official forum thread. You can also check out the Steam website, if you're interested in game.