Confirmed yesterday was a new version of a popular but proprietary game engine that will work on Linux with its next release.

The crew at Terathon Software yesterday working on the C4 Engine tweeted, “The next version of the C4 Engine (version 2.9) runs on Linux.”

For those not familiar with the C4 Engine, it’s a popular 3D game engine (ranked as number one among commercial game engines on DevMaster.net, an engine review web-site) and was first made available in 2005. The game engine up to this point has supported Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Sony PlayStation 3 platforms. With C4 Engine 2.9, it looks like Linux is being added to the list. Already for Windows (and under Mac OS X, obviously) the graphics library in use for its renderer has been OpenGL.

Among the games known to be using the C4 Engine include World of Subways, City Bus Simulator, Lego Wolf3D, and Quest of Persia: Lotfali Khan Zand.

The C4 Engine isn’t free and open-source, but is commercial licensed via four different license types. The engine isn’t as visually as impressive as the Unigine Engine or Source Engine, but nevertheless it’s always nice to see new (post-idTech3) game engines working their way to Linux.

For more information on the C4 Engine, visit the Terathon C4 page and there’s also the Wikipedia page. Embedded below are some videos of the C4 Engine in action.



If you were hoping this “A New Game Engine Comes To Linux” news item was going to be about Valve’s Source Engine, in hopefully a few hours I’ll be allowed to share some great Linux gaming news….

by Michael Larabel