Slashdot Mirror

First, read this: http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-...
That is an analysis of the coding style used in the Doom 3 source code

Next, read this: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstu...
It is linked within the first article, but it is important enough to directly reference. It is id Software's official programming guidelines. Seriously, just having clean, clear, consistent guidelines for source code makes a world of difference in quality.

The very first thing to teach young'ns is this:
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

I was expecting Quake 3 Arena's railgun type. :/

You are talking about a single sentence in an entire article of things Carmack said. The submitted decided it was the most interesting thing, and the Slashdot editor decided it was also interesting, and as a result... here we are.

I can't imagine anyone seriously thinking Carmack saying "computers are going to get faster" is particularly insightful. However, we live in an age of soundbites; this one appears to only be on Slashdot because it's just an utterance of someone that is held - for excellent reasons, in my opinion - in extremely high esteem. I agree this statement is not very interesting or noteworthy, but to berate Carmack for it like he was getting up and making a bold Kurzweil-esque prediction when it was merely a sentence in a stream of consciousness-dumping about the topic of mobile gaming seems somewhat unfair.

I think a better question is why they were asking such banal, boring questions. "Mr Carmack, do you think mobile gaming will be a big deal one day?!@"

Maybe they don't realise Carmack thought it was such a big deal back in 2005 that he made DoomRPG and has written extensively about his experiences working on other mobile games - including their next generation title Rage. Carmack and id have invested pretty heavily in mobile gaming, which is pretty obvious with even cursory research.

...if this thing has even halfway decent graphics it WILL pull the juice, so why in the name of all that is good would you want the ability to make a call tied to whether or not you had been gaming?

People are currently playing demanding games on their iPhones, and it's not the end of the world.

RAGE Mobile, as id call it, is not a port of RAGE to iOS. It is a much smaller game using the same technology and the same setting. These distinctions matter ...

ET is still played extensively. I pretty much play ET everyday. If you wanna add bling to RTCW or ET just grab the source and go crazy. :)

As a former DOOMaholic, I remember that old school map from DOOM's Episode 1 Map 6 (E1M6) [Central Processing]. :D

All this fight is doing is depriving iOS users of a helpful piece of software that they really need. It's not helping VideoLAN, it's not helping the developer, it's not helping Apple, and it certainly is not helping the users.

Look at what iD did: they've got DOOM on the App Store (and AFAIK it's still there). Carmack based his port on a GPLed mod of the engine to speed development time. Instead of asking Apple to remove the DRM (which they won't do), he gives out the code and instructions on how to build it.

All this fight is doing is depriving iOS users of a helpful piece of software that they really need. It's not helping VideoLAN, it's not helping the developer, it's not helping Apple, and it certainly is not helping the users.

Look at what iD did: they've got DOOM on the App Store (and AFAIK it's still there). Carmack based his port on a GPLed mod of the engine to speed development time. Instead of asking Apple to remove the DRM (which they won't do), he gives out the code and instructions on how to build it.

All this fight is doing is depriving iOS users of a helpful piece of software that they really need. It's not helping VideoLAN, it's not helping the developer, it's not helping Apple, and it certainly is not helping the users.

Look at what iD did: they've got DOOM on the App Store (and AFAIK it's still there). Carmack based his port on a GPLed mod of the engine to speed development time. Instead of asking Apple to remove the DRM (which they won't do), he gives out the code and instructions on how to build it.

Is wolfsrc.zip not the source of Castle Wolfenstein?

GtkRadiant-GPL.zip Feb 17 2006

Which seems a bit old. As I look through each of these files, none seem to be related to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein single-player or Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. A few directories up I see Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone but all I'm seeing are older games that have been open sourced with notes from John Carmack. There are a lot of Doom and Quake utilities and Wolfenstein 3D but ... I cannot find these other engines. Am I missing something? Is the Quake code the same engine?

Gamasutra ran a similar story back in August but there's no press release on id's site about such a commitment to the GPL. One would think that if this did happen at QuakeCon it would be on QuakeCon's news site. Did someone make an announcement and confuse Wolfenstein 3D with the later games or is there a legit place you can get the source with a GPL license alongside it?

GtkRadiant-GPL.zip Feb 17 2006

Which seems a bit old. As I look through each of these files, none seem to be related to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein single-player or Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. A few directories up I see Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone but all I'm seeing are older games that have been open sourced with notes from John Carmack. There are a lot of Doom and Quake utilities and Wolfenstein 3D but ... I cannot find these other engines. Am I missing something? Is the Quake code the same engine?

Gamasutra ran a similar story back in August but there's no press release on id's site about such a commitment to the GPL. One would think that if this did happen at QuakeCon it would be on QuakeCon's news site. Did someone make an announcement and confuse Wolfenstein 3D with the later games or is there a legit place you can get the source with a GPL license alongside it?

"I think the problem with Linux is that those who develop it push their philosophy too much and refuse to give room for other philosophies..."

That's an entirely bizarre statement given that the open philosophy that is the backbone of the Linux movement. Which philosophies have been snuffed out by the OSS community? There's only one reason Valve or EA or any big players won't produce games for Linux, $$$. User base is not large enough. There's no technical or philosophical reason to not produce games for Linux, none at all. If you can put Quake Arena on Linux, you can put any other game on it.

... the article and I found it interesting. But it would be more interesting if the code was open source and could see all these changes with our eyes, just for educational purposes. A nice article that I came across lately just review the code of Doom which ported to iPhone by iD.

Uh... id has been doing this for years. And id doesn't wait 27 years to do it, either.

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/

You could give it to me, for one :P

I've spent the last few days playing Quake (the first, no number after it!). Now, id's released the sourcecode for Quake and there are some good native Linux implementations, but for full nostalgia effect I downloaded the shareware Dos version and have been playing it through Dosbox.

Well, it seems that emulating Dos to play a CPU-intensive game like Quake over really slows things down, to the point that only the 320x240 resolution is playable on my Core Duo 1.6ghz. Doing the 640x480 slows things down to a crawl, and that only makes my nostalgia stronger ;-) It's like I'm really playing on a 486!

Oh wait, your card wouldn't help me because it was only the later GLQuake that got 3d acceleration support :( And I only have a laptop anyway :(

id still hosts the shareware at ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake/quake106.zip
if anyone else wants some gibs.

Someone better tell John Carmack

Nope, id is happy to provide commercial licenses to replace the GPL in their open source offerings: http://www.idsoftware.com/business/idtech3/

So, is the circled location labeled "N" supposed to denote the location of the Leather Goddesses' base? Or is this where they've found the first signs of Denizens from Hell?

By what measure of success? Effectiveness, sure. But what is the market share of all the Linux distros put together? What is the ratio of Windows to Linux boxes globally or in the US?

How do you define success? Apparently for you, at least in this context, it's market share. That's a bit spurious considering the fact that Linux is Free. What is the market share of Linux anyway? Probably a lot higher than you realize. Oh, you thought only desktop computers ran operating systems? Ever heard of Tivo? Android? Routers? Embedded systems? Servers? I'll bet if you put every device that runs Linux vs. every device that runs Windows you might be surprised about the "ratio of Windows to Linux boxes globally". Besides, Ferrari has low market share. They're a success right?

Says you. You're omitting how many devices don't work on Linux due to a lack of drivers or simple inoperability with Linux. It's improving, but there's a long way to go.

Linux supports more peripherals than OSX; I don't see you bringing that up? You wouldn't happen to have an agenda would you? Besides, I've installed quite a few Linux boxes in my day. It's the very rare exception that I find a device that doesn't just work out of the box. Contrast this with literally every other operating system ever made. And everytime that has happened, I waited a few months for the next kernel update and it did work. A lot of hardware actually works better in Linux. For example, my Verizon USB aircard. In Windows, you have to wait over 30 seconds for it to do its thing and connect and it disconnects requiring pulling it out and reinserting it about once an hour. On Linux, it connects in about 5 seconds and works perfectly for as long as you want. Funny story, I was at my brother's house a couple of weeks back and his Windows 7 box bluescreened so many times, I lost count. Finally, I was like, dude, what does the error say when it crashes? Come to find out the problem was the USB network adapter he had was crashing his box. Plugged it into my netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 and it worked perfectly.

The main flaw i find in Linux is the opposite. It's small because it's small. Developers don't want to double their efforts to sell to a handful of neck beards.

I don't see Linux's smallness as a flaw. Actually, that tends to increase the signal to noise ratio quite a bit. There are quite a few quality software projects that only develop for Linux and/or OSX and refuse to port to Windows because of the inevitable flood of clueless users that would pull in thus swamping the project in handholding. This is a good example. Very high quality software.

As for the "handful of neck beards" comment, didn't you say something about the supposed childish and condescending tone of the GP? Besides, there are quite a few commercial projects that develop for Linux. But, if you stop and think about it, why would there be large amounts of commercial Linux development in any case? One of the possible reasons developing commercial software is such a niche for Linux is that practically anything you need is in the repositories anyway. And quite a bit of Free sofware spanks the commercial alternatives. K3B smokes Nero. Pidgin smokes YIM, AIM, and MSN Messenger. Firefox and Chrome smoke IE, Opera, Safari, what-have-you. And for the stuff where the Free stuff isn't as good as the proprietary bits, it's still pretty good. OpenOffice is pretty good, GIMP is pretty good, Eclipse is pretty good. Why pay for proprietary software when my needs are already met for free?

Wine isn't there either. i use as much FOSS as i can.

That

Attempting this in a world where even an x86 binary wouldn't work on all x86-linux-pc boxes (static linking, yeah...yeah)

Laugh it up, but my Quake 4 binaries I downloaded in 2007 work absolutely flawlessly on my mid-2009 Linux distro.

You're right that I shouldn't be too impressed with something as basic as Wolf3D running properly on an iPhone, but have you seen some of the other attempts at 3D games on the iPhone? ;) Some of them have really appalling frame rates and unresponsive controls.

Case in point, according to Carmack when Electronic Arts first ported Wolf3D to the iPhone they were just using the CPU for everything. It wasn't until Carmack took it on that the GPU was utilised. If you're interested Carmack talks about the development process here.

I probably played your Quake ports back in the day, as I used to enjoy putting all the games I could find on my Pocket PC. I remember enjoying Quake on there a lot, although the d-pads on the PDAs I owned were always a bit fiddly! IIRC there was a Casio Pocket PC with a d-pad that would only accept one direction press at a time! This port of Quake 1 on the DS works very well given the hardware it's on, with the stylus/touchscreen being used for aiming and the d-pad being used for movement.

id Software did it with Wolfenstein 3D.

http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/ (link to the source code is at the bottom)

I think they mean the usual id procedure of open sourcing old engines. You can find the source, as well as the last supported release version, on id's site.

One thing I love about my quad-core Q6600 is the fact that I can be doing so many things at once. I can be streaming HD video to my TV while simultaneously playing DOOM, for example.

Doom can run on a Game Boy Advance, rendering in software on a 16.8 MHz ARM7 CPU. You could emulate the game and your quad-core wouldn't break a sweat.

if all apps start using all cores, aren't we right back where we started, just going a little faster?

That's what developers want: the ability to use all the cores for a task where the user either isn't going to be doing something else (like on a server appliance) or has another device to pass the time (like a GBA to run Doom).

All patches for id software games can be found on their anonymous ftp server: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com

Getting a decent download rate, however, is another story.

From the linked article:

I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone's hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy -- when I did the second generation mobile renderer (written originally in java) it was layered on top of a class I named TinyGL that did the transform / clip / rasterize operations fairly close to OpenGL semantics, but in fixed point and with both horizontal and vertical rasterization options for perspective correction. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself.

Carmack is such a bad ass. "You guys are morons. I'll code this myself."

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.

Not only that, but what the dev team estimated would take them at least 2 months, Carmack did in four days.

From the linked article:

I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone's hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy -- when I did the second generation mobile renderer (written originally in java) it was layered on top of a class I named TinyGL that did the transform / clip / rasterize operations fairly close to OpenGL semantics, but in fixed point and with both horizontal and vertical rasterization options for perspective correction. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself.

Carmack is such a bad ass. "You guys are morons. I'll code this myself."

Indeed, 3D on mobile devices is nothing new. E.g., a quick Google finds http://www.foshopro.com/download_Wolfenstein_3D_for_Windows_Mobile_PocketPC_Smartphone_cheap.html , http://symbianv3.com/wolfenstein-3d-for-your-mobile/ , http://dibosmobile.blogspot.com/2007/11/wolfenstein-3d-pocket-pc-game.html .

And what about Wolfenstein RPG? It's a new game rather than just a port, but it's still 3D, and runs on any bog standard Java phone (which means that the Iphone presumably isn't good enough to run it).

I would have been interested to hear some of these things, but unfortunately it seems that Iphonedot, er I mean, Slashdot only covers the Iphone. And I guess a story solely for the Iphone is inevitable, if even "Website now viewable on Iphone" is newsworthy (as was the story we got a few weeks ago). And so we'll have more people mistakenly believing that this is yet another "Apple first".

Yes, because research on mars is perfectly safe.

Mid to Big companies are not likely to do so. They do not need another competitor :p

I guess Id Software (76 people work in it, according to their teamlist) is a small company worried about competitors then ;)

Quake Live.
http://quakelive.idsoftware.com/beta/

It's a Latin term from the English translations of Freud's work.

that's exactly what they do.

http://www.idsoftware.com/business/technology/

Where's Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

When Doom 4 was announced, I looked at the id Software job postings. Several of the jobs are for mobile game development, including iPhone. It seems many game makers are hopping on the mobile market. Whether that market really takes off remains to be seen.

For those who enjoyed DOOM 3, did you also enjoy its expansion?

For all DOOM games, I only enjoyed the non-hell levels (e.g., DOOM's episode 1). I always loved the space base theme. I also played people's mods and maps based on it.

$ wget -S http://www.idsoftware.com/
--08:57:08-- http://www.idsoftware.com/
                      => `index.html'
Resolving www.idsoftware.com... 192.246.40.185
Connecting to www.idsoftware.com|192.246.40.185|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
    HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
    Content-Type: text/html
    Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 12:57:20 GMT
    Connection: close
    Content-Length: 28
08:57:08 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable.

I recently gave my DOOM 3 box to a friend who bought a new laptop... after several years the game should be playable now on a medium-powered laptop. That's the way to do it - buy the "3.years.ago" game of the year and play it with all the dials turned up.

$ wget -S http://www.idsoftware.com/
--08:57:08-- http://www.idsoftware.com/
                      => `index.html'
Resolving www.idsoftware.com... 192.246.40.185
Connecting to www.idsoftware.com|192.246.40.185|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
    HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
    Content-Type: text/html
    Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 12:57:20 GMT
    Connection: close
    Content-Length: 28
08:57:08 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable.

I recently gave my DOOM 3 box to a friend who bought a new laptop... after several years the game should be playable now on a medium-powered laptop. That's the way to do it - buy the "3.years.ago" game of the year and play it with all the dials turned up.

The only fucking games on communist linsux are lamr puzzles and a yahtzee clone thatcan't fucking randomize properly.

Maybe you've heard of a little game studio called Id Software? Or Epic Games? I'm not even going to mention what works on Wine.

Whie we're at it, where are the professional 3D applications?

Oh, I don't know, Maya? That's off the top of my head -- I don't do 3D professionally.

But while we're at it, why did you bring up games in what is clearly an article about professional graphic design hardware? Or do you actually buy Quadro cards and wonder why your games run like shit?

I am not talkin about the gpl3 shit

Like what? Closest I can think of is blender, which is under the GPLv2. Is that what you're not talking about?

BTW, great initals, Richard stallman=RMS Titanic

Yeah, because that was totally unique to the Titanic. Except it wasn't -- it actually stands for "Royal Mail Ship".

Then you wonder why you can't get a fucking job

I'm doing nicely, thank you.

Never suspected it was the Windows fanbois living in their mother's basements all along, though. Thanks for that, you just made my day.

You are aware that Doom III runs under Linux and FreeBSD as well as Windows?

http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/doom/

Regarding id Tech 5 and Rage, id titles are usually ported to Linux relatively late in the development process when the programmer has the time, but they've always been ported. There were also these statements from Carmack at QuakeCon last month:

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200708/N07.0803.1731.12214.htm?Page=1

GI: Will this engine support any DX10 features?

Carmack: No, not currently. We're not expecting to. We're not sure if we're going to be a Vista title or not. There will be some support benefits by being Vista only. It depends when we get the game done what the adoption has been. But it's a OpenGL title on the PC and Mac right now, obviously D3D on the 360, and the PS3 it's kind of an in between where it's Open GLES but we do a lot of direct command buffer writing there. If necessary we can move the PC version over to DX10, but there's not much strong pull for us to do that. All of the toolset is in OpenGL, I wouldn't want to convert everything over.

http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identiferID=9374&action=flatview

Q: I wanted to say thank you for open-sourcing the Quake 3 engine, it's made a huge difference to the community. I wanted to ask your opinion about the future of Linux and open source gaming.

A: I do take a great deal of personal pride and satisfaction with what I've been able to do with getting so much of the stuff out. Sometimes I think about it, and while I know it's not something I'm generally considered for, I may be one of the most prolific open source authors considering all the code that I've written over the last 15 years that I've made open source, or have made open source there. I do think it's very valuable. I'm very happy when I see both user gaming community stuff, or research universities, or people doing simulation tests, or bringing up things. Every new piece of hardware ends up having Doom or Quake titles used as an early form of test application. So I'm very happy to have done that. It's certainly going to continue. I mean I won't commit to a date, but the Doom 3 stuff will be open source. We still make those decisions even today when we're doing the Rage code when we have decisions about "do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this". And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that.

The id-produced title coming out at the end of the month, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, will have a Linux dedicated server and client as well:

http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/etqw/

Linux client?

When it's done. We have beta testers, they are doing a great job, you don't need to apply. There is still some work to be done before it matches id quality standards, and we won't commit to any dates.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

(0) make a backup of your win2000 install

consider your computer wiped empty from now on :-) If you have enough disk space (partitions) you can consider keeping your win2000 partition and especially make sure it is not selected for formatting. If you are new consider that any installation of a new operating system is "nuke-and-reinstall" as you say because to err is human and to err while formatting disks is hosing your system. Of course you can keep your /home partition -- you did make a separate /home partition didn't you? And you remembered the drive device and partition number? There is no magic reinstall command. If this is the first time you use a unix-like operating system, go slow, take the instructions literally, and make sure you verified that backup CD of your important e-mails etc. first before you even start. If you already have Debian or Ubuntu or their descendants installed then you can possibly get away with apt-get update; apt-get upgrade but that's only (practically) guaranteed to work when you upgrade from an old stable release to a new one, not from say testing to unstable :-)

(1) when you buy a new computer, and somebody has already put win2000 on it for you, then that implies that all sound, video etc. drivers work for the components in your computer work for win2000, otherwise they wouldn't sell it to you. You didn't buy especially linux-compatible hardware, did you? Thought so. So it can happen (especially on laptops) that some hardware features such as sound, sleep/hibernate, certain wireless drivers, etc. Just Don't Work at first. All this is acceptable to begin with except for the wireless and video which you'll need for installation :-) Nowadays most Linux distro's are very good at guessing how to get your hardware components to work but the only guarantee is when you buy it pre-installed. A few years ago when I had to install something I hade to buy an 8 euro network card, for example, because the nforce network card had NO DRIVERS.

(2) write down the brand name and type number of your video card, and what resolutions you can normally display with it (1280x1024 etc.). Just in case.

(3) happy installing! What is nice about Debian and Ubuntu is that they ask most questions at the beginning of the install process so you can then go cook or something in the meantime.

(4) For some high-grade 3D video cards you need special drivers, esp. Nvidia and ATI, otherwise they won't get more than say 800x600 and games like nexuiz, tremulous and quake4 will run like shit. I have a nvidia geforce fx 5200 which is barely good enough for such games (sometimes a bit too slow and I have to turn the resolution down). For this I had to (under Debian, probably similar for Ubuntu) install the nvidia-glx-legacy package after installation was done. ID games sell only a MS Windows version of quake4 but you can download the linux game engine from their website and it will work with the boxed game.

(5) There are forums. If you are new, probably somebody else in the world has already experienced the same problems and hopefully found a working solution. If you find a real new bug, take the time to write a clear bugreport (program 'reportbug') because that's an important way to make sure the software keeps getting better. Consider it your voluntary payment as a user.

(6) If you have some kind of unusual hobby then Debian or Ubuntu are probably for you. Several of its 18000 precompiled ready-to-install packages were useful to analyze the results of my quantum chemistry calculations (on the same PC as quake4, yes, but don't run them at the same time tho). Under (K)Ubuntu do "synaptic".

That's it. I'm tired. good luck.

I notice that RTC Wolfenstein, and Medal of Honor Allied Assault both run better in Linux under Cedega

I notice that RTC Wolfenstein, and Medal of Honor Allied Assault both run better in Linux under Cedega

Bill Gates regrets that MS ignored Internet Explorer for so long that Apple wrote Safari in frustration. (See: Worst. Keynote. Ever. over at The Secret Diary of Bill Gates). He thinks that Apple is making a ploy to capture a large part of the web browser market now. It certainly is easy to imagine Microsoft buying Electronic Arts or ID Software or even two or three of the top dozen game software companies to inflict further damage on the Macintosh game market. I wonder how Apple could prevent that?

According to the article summary the cost of ESRB certification is three thousand dollars. If you can't come up with three grand are you really all that serious about making money developing computer games?

Sure. Much of the attraction of indie games development is that you can develop games for next to nothing, with the potential of earning a living and (possibly) hitting it big. It also means (again, possibly) that games that big publishers find unappealing will be made.

Most of the money required to create a game goes towards manpower, so if a group of like-minded developers gets together, you can create a studio without much seed money.

So, on the opposite side of the coin, these liberal and progressive Christian groups want to either convert the game into a bland game for youngsters, or kill -9 it.

Pot calling the kettle black?

I think war games are an important education tool. (I'm also personally a fan of private gun ownership, so maybe I'm biased.) But watching what happens in the Emergency Room is considered educational. Then why not also the events on the battlefied. So in this one it's the Christians versus the Muslims. Maybe that's not in really good taste, but is it in good taste in Battlefield 2, Americans versus Muslims or Americans versus the Chinese? Or if the religious symbolism is offensive, what would you say if I showed you a game that's blatantly Satanic? My two cents says it doesn't matter.

Now, I'm curious if it has good gameplay. I'm guessing it doesn't ("After you kill somebody you need to recharge your soul points and to do that you need to bend down in prayer." from the CNN Article). Then we have nothing to worry about.