Slashdot Mirror

jg21 writes "Following on from yesterday's Slashdot coverage of the idea to launch a games-based Linux distro, LinuxWorld Magazine has held a Gaming Round Table involving Chris DiBona, Ryan Gordon, Timothee Besset, Gavriel State, and Joe Valenzuela about where Linux currently stands and how it will one day become a premier gaming platform. 'It became perfectly clear to me that most of the technological issues are already solved, and that the others won't take too long to fix once the game publishers really get into the mix,' reports Dee-Ann LeBlanc, Gaming Industry Editor for LinuxWorld, who coordinated the round table. Well worth reading."

delYsid asks: "About a year ago, Slashdot had a story about the OpenAL project by Loki and Creative. There was much hype around it. But if you check their website now, the last changelog entry appears to be from December of 1999! Does anyone know of a good (preferable platform independent) library for 3D audio? The only answer I get when I ask professionals in this field is DirectX. I'd love to have my app under Linux instead of having to move to Win again. Any pointer or hints about the current status of OpenAL? Are there any alternatives?" Update: 09/18 15:33 PM GMT by C :Corrected the link which referred to Slashdot's previous story on OpenAL.

I forwarded this question on to Loki, and here's the response from Scott Draeker, president of Loki Games:

As you can imagine, everyone is pretty busy right now, especially as we had some folks out on vacation the last couple of weeks. So I'm sorry about the slow response.

In answer to your question, work on OpenAL continues. Creative has already added EAX and hardware acceleration to the Mac and Windows versions, and are working on adding both to the Linux implementation as well. Work is also continuing on an OS X port as well as other OSes. OpenAL continues to be the sound API which Loki uses in all of its products, and many other companies are either using or evaluating OpenAL for their products as well.

Hope that helps.

So there you have it, straight from the source. Development is progressing, although it's likely to be a bit slow at present. Here's hoping we'll hear more updates on the progress of OpenAL, over the next 6 months. Thanks a bunch for taking the time to answer, Scott!

Last week you asked Sam Lantinga , developer of the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) about SDL and other issues related to gaming. He's responded with answers about the SL port to Sony Playstation, game audio, DirectX, his new job at Blizzard, and more. He even drops some hints about some interesting gaming developments to watch out for.

Out-of-the-box Linux 3D support?
by phutureboy

This may be more of a question for everyone else than for Sam (but Sam can feel free to answer also :) I'm not a big gamer, but I would play some if it weren't such a bitch to get the proper libraries working under Linux. Last time I tried was about 6 months ago... After following some really complicated directions and compiling umpteen obscure drivers I finally got SDL and hardware-accelerated OpenGL working. I had to disable it and revert to my previous versions, though, because it locked up my system a lot during games and made X pretty unstable. Anyway, my question is this: is multimedia support for Linux getting any easier to install? Is it possible that someday I will be able to install a distribution and have it automagically configure hardware 3D support, install SDL, etc.? Or is Linux multimedia still too much in the toddler stages?

I'm just a lowly PHP coder. I don't understand all this low-level mumbo jumbo. I just want to fire up a game every now and then and blow shit up. Is there hope for me?

Sam Lantinga: Yes, more and more distributions are starting to set up 3D out of the box. 3D on Linux is always a moving target however, so the best bet is for distribution to both include 3D detection and setup, and also to include information on how to upgrade the drivers to the latest versions.

As anecdotal evidence, Mike "Heimdall" Phillips, who up until recently worked as Q/A and technical support at Loki Software, Inc., installed Mandrake 8 on a box containing a Rage 128 video card, and the installation detected and set up 3D acceleration out of the box. He was up and running with most of Loki's 3D titles immediately.

Graphics Hardware Drivers
by m2

My question is a bit tainted by my personal opinion in this matter, but I'm sure Sam will be able to provide a different (and surely interesting) point of view.

At the risk of being a tad Linux centric, does the availability or unavailability of hardware specifications and technical documentation on graphics hardware affect a Linux game developer and why? With two concrete cases in mind, on one hand NVIDIA who provides binary drivers and "high level" documentation about their cards, and on the other hand, ATI for which there's source code for the drivers with support for half of the features the hardware offers, but neither openly accessible hardware documentation nor much "high level" docs, how do you think this can affect the future development of games for Linux (proprietary or otherwise)?

SL: From my perspective as a cross-platform game developer, the objective is to write a great game, not to have to read technical documentation on particular graphics hardware. With the improvement of the OpenGL API implementations on the Linux platform, the need for game developers to get their hands dirty with the technical details of the graphics drivers is slowly going away. IMHO, this is a good thing. :)

Now, in reality there is always a need to look at the way the driver interacts with the hardware, either to fix bugs, or to improve graphics performance. For this reason, it's a great thing to have the source code and full graphics hardware specifications available - it allows the developer to make smarter choices about graphic implementation, and results in a better game. This is true of Linux as well as Windows, and interestingly Linux is a richer field than Windows when trying to find out how hardware and drivers really interact.

In the specific case of NVidia, I've been impressed with both the quality of their drivers, and the responsiveness and commitment of the company towards Linux as a whole. While it's true that there is no guarantee that this will continue, it's very refreshing now.

What's your status with Loki?
by Mr T

Was your departure good? Daniel Vogel also left. Is Loki in a good position or did you leave because of some problem. What's the deal?

SL: My departure was good. I left because I was very interested in the opportunity to work on original game content at Blizzard Entertainment.

Loki owes me money like all the other employees, but they have stated that they will pay me back, and I am very hopeful that they will do so.

Blizzard Entertainment
by j7953

What are you working on at Blizzard? Do you get paid for continuing your work on SDL, or do you have to do that in your spare time?

SL: I am working on an upcoming unannounced title. It's great fun and I can't wait for it to be announced so I can tell people what it is that I'm working on. As for SDL, I'm still working on it in my spare time. There's a rumor of a super-elite crack team of developers working on the next generation SDL API, but I can't substantiate it. :)

Directx 8 and SDL
by drenehtsral

From playing with it, and noticing what has been conveniently removed from the documentation (but is still in the libraries), it looks like DirectX 8 is trying very hard to do away with directdraw and work purely through the 3d engine. Sprites are just 2d textured polys, etc ...

This leads me to believe that any future enhancements/optimizations/support/testing/etc ... that will happen with directx will be only on the direct3d part, and directdraw is probably going to be unsupported. Do y'all have any plans to deal with that?

SL: The next generation SDL API is leaning towards the concept of a texture manager and a plug-in architecture for operations on those textures. This should for the most part be a natural improvement upon the current design, and will lend itself well to 3D hardware acceleration. This design is for the 2D surface API though. At this point, the plan is to continue to support real 3D through the OpenGL API.

SDL and OpenAL (among others)
by Eugenia Loli

So, I was always wondering if there is going to be a 'real' integration between OpenAL and SDL. Currently, a lot of people are just using SDL_mixer which does a pretty good job for little shareware/oss games, but when it comes to commercial sound, 3D positioning and all these buzzwords, SDL needs OpenAL to break through against the goodies of DirectX has to offer.

Also, what about a wrapper against D3D? There is currently a nice integration with OpenGL, when SDL needs to use 3D acceleration, but under Windows (where a lot of SDL games already exist) most of the coders are using D3D. Also, based on the fact that D3D 8 is not as bloated as previous versions, a wrapper for other OSes could be easily achieved (IMHO).

Last question, again on the spirit of 'SDL Vs DirectX', are there any plans for more support for more input devices, like force feedback wheels etc.

Take care and thank you for all the hard work you have put on SDL the last few years. (and also greatly thank you for the BeOS port! :)

SL: Okay, there are several questions here. First, thanks for the appreciation! It should go to all the developers who have contributed to SDL and to products using it, because without them, it would not have become the great API that it is.

As for integration between SDL and OpenAL... SDL audio is fairly lightweight and designed to have mixer implementations be built on top of it. OpenAL is a heavy-weight 3D audio API. Different applications have different needs, and one audio API may suit a particular use better than another. You can always choose to use SDL for video and OpenAL for audio, or SDL for audio and another API for video, etc., you have many choices in the design of your game.

As an aside, there is support in the Linux implementation of OpenAL for using SDL as a back-end, and in fact this was used at one point to get the Linux implementation working on Windows. However, this isn't generally needed because of great native audio support.

There are no plans for a Direct3D wrapper for SDL. OpenGL works well on Linux, Windows, MacOS, and many other platforms.

Finally, yes, the device support and event model in SDL 1.3 will handle a much wider range of devices. Whether or not force feedback support will be included will depend on the state of the drivers for these devices across the range of platforms that SDL supports.

Gamecube, Xbox?
by evilMoogle

With SDL for PS2, are there any plans to do the same for the other next-gen platforms, the Gamecube and the Xbox?

SL: I don't know of any plans, but I'm sure somebody will do something as an exercise at some point. That's one of the great things about open source software. I'm constantly surprised at what people are doing with SDL.

higher level?
by magic

With X-Box supporting DirectX only (and a special version at that) and PS2 not supporting OpenGL in general, some of the utility of SDL is lost. For example, I can write a SDL & OpenGL game that compiles and runs on OSX, Linux, and Win32. But window, input, thread and audio management are the least of my problems when moving to X-Box or PS2... I have to rewrite my whole graphics pipeline!

There are, of course, some very good commercial 3D API's that will abstract over this problem. One of the strengths of SDL has been that you have abstracted over the low level and have avoided getting into the sticky business of fighting OpenGL and Direct3D for the 3D API. This also limits the utility of SDL, however, because of the lack of a solid, free API for abstracting the 3D API.

Do you see SDL moving higher up the graphics pipeline in the future, or is it your intent to continue to avoid higher level 3D calls?

SL: I like side-stepping the 3D API issue. :)

I don't plan on adding a 3D API abstraction at this point, however I'm open to the idea of getting a single working 3D API that would cover the platforms you mention. My suspicion, with my limited experience with the PS2 hardware, is that it would take longer to write a functional API that could cover the differences in platforms than it would to get a working subset of OpenGL implemented. There's a reason that many PS2 developers write directly to the hardware.

Sony Development Costs
by debrain

Sony charges stiff fees for Playstation (2) development licenses. Was one of the primary focuses of SDL a way to circumvent these fees, broaden the PS2 platform, broaden the SDL platform, or broaden Linux as a viable game platform?

SL: Mostly the port was done as a fun toy. The intention was to broaden the SDL platform, and possibly allow the average person to write games that would run on the Sony Playstation.

End-user availability?
by DeadMeat (TM)

I brought this up before when the port was announced, but nobody knew the exact answer, so maybe I can get it straight from the horse's mouth ...

From what I understand, the PS2 Linux distro uses a proprietary, binary-only driver/library/program to allow programmers to access the PS2's graphics chip. My question is, how will this hinder end users' ability to get their hands on SDL-based PS2 games?

Does this mean they'll have to buy a copy of the $200 Linux development kit? Or are developers allowed to freely redistribute the graphics runtimes? (Or have you found some other way around this, perhaps by accessing the PS2 hardware without the binary runtime?)

I'm just afraid that most PS2 gamers (read: non-geeks) won't find SDL games too attractive if they have to buy a $200 Linux kit to play them.

SL: The SDL port runs on Sony's Public Beta of Linux on the Playstation 2. This public beta is loosely based on a derivative of RedHat Linux, and works just like any other Linux system. It boots from a memory card, but once booted, it can access the network and hard drive like a UNIX workstation. You can download software RPM archives that were built on Linux for the PS2 and install them normally. This is the way I distribute the SDL runtime packages and Maelstrom for the PlayStation 2.

Since the Linux beta is publicly available only in Japan, I'm not sure what would be included in a commercial product that would be released in the U.S..

One of the things I try to focus on with Ask Slashdot questions are issues involving trademarks and the big guy trying to rob the little guy out of a name, or a domain that they may have had for years. Although this was necessary to stop the domain squatters out to make a quick buck, it seems to have turned into a corporate right to harass everyone. Long before the internet was a household name, people registered domains or created project names that they didn't think would cause problems and now, years later, they are finding out how wrong they were, and how the laws can rob their project's identity. What follows is a question regarding SGI their quest to go after anyone with any name starting with "Open" or containing "GL". How long is it, before corporations begin to carve up the English dictionary and we won't be able to use a single word without following it with "(tm)"?

DooMWiz asks: "I am the author of the Open Image Library (OpenIL), an image library under the LGPL license at openil.org. Several weeks ago, I was shocked by the appearance of an e-mail from a Silicon Graphics, Inc representative. Apparently, they are "concerned" that 'OpenIL' may infringe on their 'OpenGL' trademark. I am not a trademark lawyer, nor do I have any real knowledge of trademarks. Even if I had some kind of justifiable way of proving that 'OpenIL' could not possibly be confused with 'OpenGL', I probably would not pursue it, since a college student with very limited resources against giant SGI would be messy for me. I'm really not *too* upset about being asked to change the name, but during the course of this, I sent several e-mails to the SGI rep, and his replies indicated some disturbing news. He claims that he has already talked to OpenCL about changing their name and that he plans to pursue the ever-popular OpenAL, which isn't just a one man operation like OpenIL. OpenAL may have the resources to fight something like this, since it has nothing to do with SGI's business model but is backed by large companies. Lastly, SGI has a trademark on 'GL', and the rep also claims to plan to pursue projects with 'GL' in their names. Projects like GLScene and DemoGL come to mind and may be in trouble. Anyone with trademark experience have any advice on what course of action to take? Dropping the 'OpenIL' name seems like the easiest way out."

Sam "Criswell" Hart writes "Just checked out the Indrema Developer's Network website and saw they have a lot of new content. You can now get the IESDK here (which is of course a bunch of things already available like OpenAL and Mesa3D, and includes the Linux kernel 2.4-pre10). You can check out what's "Under The Hood" of the L600 (which is really just information that's been available for a little while now). While it does look very kewl, and I am stoked to try my hand at coding for the thing, I am wondering why the IESDK doesn't include any 2D graphic libraries (such as SDL)... since not all games are 3D ;)"

Straker Skunk writes, "Loki, in conjunction with Creative Labs, has announced OpenAL, an LGPL'ed audio library for 3D sound generation. It's aimed for use in games as a cross-platform, nonproprietary means of accessing the 3D sound features on many newer sound cards. What's especially cool about it is that the API is designed with the same style, philosophy, and polish as OpenGL. Given enough time, it might very well become just as popular. " I've always been a fan of Loki and it's great to see them supporting the community - someone also sent an interview with Michael Vance, one of the developers behind OpenAL, who talks about the development of OpenAL and how it compares to other sound offerings.

Straker Skunk writes, "Loki, in conjunction with Creative Labs, has announced OpenAL, an LGPL'ed audio library for 3D sound generation. It's aimed for use in games as a cross-platform, nonproprietary means of accessing the 3D sound features on many newer sound cards. What's especially cool about it is that the API is designed with the same style, philosophy, and polish as OpenGL. Given enough time, it might very well become just as popular. " I've always been a fan of Loki and it's great to see them supporting the community - someone also sent an interview with Michael Vance, one of the developers behind OpenAL, who talks about the development of OpenAL and how it compares to other sound offerings.