Skunks For Linux

Skunks is an open source, multiplatform and completely free 3D video game implemented in C/SDL and designed from the offset to act as a car driving simulation that features several electric cars, multiple tracks, as well as stunts.

The game’s software rendering is based on the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). It uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library for displaying the objects in the game, which means that no hardware acceleration is required to provide its 3D realistic driving simulation.

Players will be able to easily modify and create new tracks, as well as new cars, thanks to Skunks’ engineering team. At the moment, Skunks includes 7 electric cars that you can drive on 11 tracks.

If you’re wondering how to install the Skunks game on your GNU/Linux distribution, we can tell you that it is not that difficult, but first open the Software Center app and see if the isn’t already available on the official software repositories of your operating system.

If you can’t find Skunks there, grab the latest release from either Softpedia or the program’s official homepage (see link at the end of the review), save the archive on your Home directory, and extract it using an archive manager utility.

Open the Terminal app, go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/skunks-4.2.0 - replace ‘softpedia’ with your username), install ODE by running the ‘./inst-ode’ command, then run either of the ‘./comp’ or ‘./comp2’ commands (depending on the SDL library you have installed) to compile the game. Run the game by executing the './skunks' command after the compilation process.

The game has been designed to run on all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as on the Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD operating systems. It has been successfully tested only with 32-bit computer platforms. Besides the standard C library, the game requires SDL 1.2 or SDL 2.