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Is OpenAl solving anything? Linux audio is still a mess!

Because they already know direct x and probably don't know opengl.

Most game developers work directly with the engine which most often has multiple rendering backends to target OpenGL (desktop and sometimes ES), DirectX (predominantly a 9, 10/11 and now 12 path), GCM, GNMX, GX and now some with Metal support too. This has the effect of both abstracting them from the low level API and enabling them to target different platforms with the same codebase. Moreover GCM, GNMX, GX are all very similar to OpenGL, targeting iOS has up until recently been only OpenGL as has Android and it is also an option for Windows. The only DirectX-exclusive platforms among all of these are XBox and Windows Phone.

Because direct x is what is primarily targeted and optimized by graphics card drivers with opengl a secondary consideration.

No, not really.

And lastly because sound is then organized into the same library whereas with opengl they would then need to pick a secondary sound library.

Easy choice, OpenAL. Not really a barrier.

OpenGL is an api, it has no performance characteristics, those all come down to the implementation.

This is the same as any graphics API but the specification most definitely has performance characteristics that impact the implementation no matter who produces it. Resource and state management for example.

Microsoft has no interest in opengl performing well on windows therefore they don't expend any effort to make it perform well and thereby cripple it relative to their own library.

Microsoft doesn't cripple OpenGL, the OpenGL implementation is provided by the hardware vendors, not Microsoft. But I would be interested to see why/how you think they cripple performance of OpenGL, here is some evidence to the contrary.

The same things are profitable for all of them, if they all pursue what is most profitable for themselves the result will be all of them engaging in the same practice and screwing the consumer.

Well yes a for-profit company is supposed to act in the interest of maximizing profits for shareholders. I'm not sure what "screwing the consumer" means in this instance - you'll have to be more specific - but if it's that bad and there is a path that doesn't screw the user then as long as it can still create at least some profit then consumers will flock to it and the company will benefit. But if your view is that "screwing the consumer" == "not free of charge" then obviously this isn't compatible with for-profit companies.

That may be accurate in some cases, but it appears that it has more to do with the REQUIREMENT from Microsoft to only use their SOFTWARE mixer in Vista, thus breaking nearly all Hardware audio effects (my read is: for *DRM* requirements):

"...DirectSound3D on Windows Vista
With Microsoft's decision to remove the audio hardware layer in Windows Vista, legacy DirectSound 3D games will no longer use hardware 3D algorithms for audio spatialization. Instead they will have to rely upon the new Microsoft software mixer that is built into Windows Vista. This new software mixer will give the users basic audio support for their old Direct Sound games but since it has no hardware layer, all EAX® effects will be lost, and no individual per-voice processing can be performed using dedicated hardware processing.

EAX has become the de facto standard for real-time effects processing. It has been incorporated in hundreds of games and has become the method of choice for game developers wanting to add interactive environment effects to their titles. Some of the best selling games of all time use the EAX extensions to DirectSound 5.0 and beyond, including Warcraft3, Diablo2, World of Warcraft, Half Life, Ghost Recon, F.E.A.R. and many others. Under Windows Vista, these games will be losing the hardware support that came as standard under the previous Windows Operating Systems, and will no longer provide real-time interactive effects, making them sound empty and lifeless by comparison to the way they sound on Windows XP.

In some cases, where a game specifically looks for a hardware audio path, it may even fall back to plain stereo output. This will be a very different landscape for 3D audio than the one that both Creative Labs and Aureal Technologies® pioneered 8 years ago. Both companies dedicated hardware power to rendering increasing numbers of 3D voices, with each voice taking full advantage of HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) technology, wave tracing and other advanced processing. With the native Windows Vista audio APIs, all this advanced, hardware-based 3D audio processing will be inaccessible. Instead, basic mapping to a generic speaker placement scheme will be employed, and all interactive processing and rendering will be dependent on the host CPU. While it is true that CPUs continue to get faster, the Vista audio architecture intentionally simplifies things, such that the potential processing load for multiple 3D voices is limited. Inevitably there is a tradeoff. This will be especially true for gamers that have come to depend on the kind of high-end 3D audio experience available from products like the SoundBlaster X-Fi, with its advanced headphone 3D audio processing and dedicated hardware DSP effects. For gamers this would be the most noticeable loss in Windows Vista, and it would be a definite step backwards for PC gaming audio if developers only had the option of using native Windows Vista audio APIs. However, they do have a legitimate, proven alternative in OpenAL..." http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

Also consider OpenAL for 3D sound support.

Until there's a more standardized desktop environment such that developers can target one one platform and know that they'll have broad Linux market reach, why would any company bother?

Um... there already is. OpenGL + SDL covers basically everything DirectX does (yes, DirectInput and all that). If you need environmental audio, you can use OpenAL, or roll your own as I gather Id did for Doom3 (and not just on Linux, on Windows as well - you need a patch for hardware audio). As a bonus, SDL apps run on Windows and OSX (along with several other platforms) as well.

Games don't care about the desktop, except for installing a menu item and/or an icon to run the game. And, well, there's a standard for that, too. Once they're running, they take over the screen anyway.

The issues with Linux gaming is entirely a chicken-egg market-share problem. There is just not any kind of technical barrier. Anyone doing a PS3 version is already doing an OpenGL version anyway, so a Linux port is actually quite easy at that point.

Funny you should mention old games, I'm actually playing C&C95 right now.....under Vista! Absolutely no issues.

As for the sound issue...sound hardware isn't lost completely; OpenAL supports it fine - http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

Creative SoundBlaster Live!

Creative's problem is that after years and years of making more and more awesome soundcards that do all sorts of whizbang stuff, with Vista, Microsoft decided to move all audio processing into software, with absolutely no hardware processing beyond amplification at all. Under Microsoft's new audio processing model, a $100+ creative soundcard is no better than some $0.50 AC'97 codec chip, if onboard audio even gets its own chip in your motherboard at all.

This is why Creative is pushing OpenAL so hard as an alternative audio processing path, starting with their latest whizbang cards with OpenAL capable drivers. It's possible that they'll eventually get drivers out for their their run-of-the-mill cards.

http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

That's correct-ish. DX10 does abandon support for DirectSound, the previous hardware acceleration standard for Windows sound. However they are doing so to embrace a more open standard OpenAL.

But I guess we'll put that aside and bash Microsoft anyway because that's what we do here. Never mind the fact that that the slashdot community as a whole crys for open source and bashes MS for keeping their software closed source.

Sometimes you have to abandon legacy to move on (not doing so is what is usually refered to as "code bloat". Perhaps you've heard of it?). This is just a bit more... abrupt than usual.

http://www.openal.org/

OpenAL was used in the recently released port of Prey for OS X.

SDL is a good shot at providing the equivalent of cross platform DirectX, but it certainly doesn't have all the features you'd want, because who has as much money and resources as MS? The sound stuff is particularly limited, ...

For serious games, you'll usually refrain from using the sound features of SDL at all, and simply use OpenAL instead (so does for instance Quake IV). It gives access to virtually the same 3D audio features as DirectX, and even allows games to use fancy EAX hardware features of Creative's soundcards.

For me, SDL is just an excellent cross-platform way of setting up an OpenGL window, which as a bonus provides other nice features as system event handling, timing, threads, input, etc.

Agree and good comparison! Making games for Linux now is like what making games for DOS was years ago.

Obviously you have not tried developing games for Linux. If you had (and actually given it a good go), you would have come across the wonderful world of SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, etc.

Do you *NEED* .NET? Can you learn something else? Something cross platform, maybe? Surely there's something out there that will do the job?

Probably going to be modded down as a troll, but...

Alternatives does exist. Besides Direct3D and DirectInput, which realisticly speaking are the ONLY pieces of DirectX that actually work well (the rest being just too much bother to be worth it), DirectX sucks ass. And yes, IAAGD (I Am A Game Developer).

Right now, you'll get the great graphics, but game devs have to do ALOT more work for input, audio and networking.

(Disclaimer: I don't work in the games industry. This is speculation.)

So what is the solution, besides scaling back the size of games?

Doing games reminds me of doing graphic artwork. A lot of people want to be involved, because they can try out their ideas and the end result is entertaining. However, in graphics, one guy can try out his own ideas. If you want to make a full-blown game, you need more than one person to perform all the implementation work to try out the set of that one person's ideas. That means that there's no way for that one person to be as creative as he wants.

The solution is better game-building tools and toolkits. Game development companies all seem to reimplement their own graphics engines, for example. That may be cool if you're a programmer with an interest in seeing new, pretty things, but frankly...writing code to cleverly do level-of-detail -- the same thing that's been done four hundred times before -- drives up the cost in human labor to produce a game.

So my first guess would be to use existing libraries as much as possible. If you want to do game design, see if you can avoid doing low-level work as much as possible. Use Crystal Space or some other pre-existing graphics engine. There are *plenty* of libre and gratis graphics engines out there, and frankly, the player's experience is simply not improved that much more by a 10% improvement in how many polygons you can put on the screen with a given number of CPU cycles. Sure, if you're making a content-laden game, you want your game to look unique -- but you can do that by writing a small amount of high-level code to spit out particles flying out along a differently-shaped path, rather than building yet another particle engine.

Same thing goes for sound. I doubt that OpenAL in and of itself can be used as a full-blown game sound engine, but it's probably a pretty worthwhile foundation at least. I would assume that there are some gratis and libre game sound engines built on OpenAL, but a quick search of freshmeat didn't seem to turn anything up.

If your game fits into one of a certain set of games, there is already a game framework with all this done for you already. If you're writing a shooter, there are scads of Quake-type engines available (and game developers *have* been using these). I'm unaware of any major adventure game or RPG engines that are freely available and support all the features that current games are being released with.

As for content -- artwork and audio -- this I'm totally in the dark about. I would assume that there is some sort of archive of intended-for-game-use content that someone sells (and probably even good-quality gratis stuff out there somewhere), but I'm not aware of any such. I should ideally be able to, if I add a cat to my game, be able to search for "meow", get back a bunch of audio files, try them out rapidly, and then simply add the one I want into my game.

Modelling -- again, I'm not familiar with what resources are out there, though I have seen gratis archives of models. I think that rapid modelling is one of the areas that software developers could vastly improve. Right now, when I think of a "building", I need to sit down and start modelling, and even if I'm good, it takes a while to build such a thing. "Buildings" are common things to make. Really, modelling software should have vast amounts of templates such that they can easily build a stock building with nothing more than a "create templates.skycraper" command or a menu choice, and then allow high-level changes to various parameters -- window shapes, water stains, grime, etc. Terrain modellers exist -- I was quite impressed with how much Bryce sped up terrain modelling, and I'm sure that there are probably better terrain modelers available (though a search on Freshmeat was disappointing). Modellers that allow rapid modelling of an area, that can cut

Technical reason.

Developers just not targetting it is not it. It isn't like multimedia libraries don't exist for many platforms including Linux.

It's FUD spreading people like you who give OSS projects bad press. Go stand in the corner and think of what you did.

Tom

Why do you think we don't have that?

SDL - http://www.libsdl.org/index.php
OpenAL - http://www.openal.org/
OpenGL - http://www.opengl.org/

These are - specially SDL - very matured things and lot of games are coded in them.

Perhaps someone can suggest some other libraries/frameworks for input/sound/networking.

Well, you can try OpenAL for sound, and OpenTNL or RakNet for networking. You can use SDL for platform independent main(), window management (well, one window), and input (keyboard, mouse, joysticks).

I beg to differ:

• Direct3D - OpenGL, cross platform.
• DirectSound - OpenAL, cross platform.
• DirectShow - QuickTime, Windows and Mac. I don't know of any truly cross platform (Windows, Mac and *NIX) alternatives.
• DirectPlay - OpenPlay, cross platform.
• DirectInput - SDL, cross platform.

There is one - OpenAL. Although I've seen it used it Unreal Tournament 200x, it's not as widely known as it should be.

How about
OpenGL,
SDL and OpenAL?

OpenAL for one is something few people seem to know about. I've developed sound systems using both DirectSound/DirectMusic directly as well as OpenAL - and there are worlds of difference between MS's obfuscated crAPI and OpenAL - It's actually a pleasure to write a capable 3D sound system on top of OpenAL.

We have the open standards. What I think we really need is more information for developers starting Linux development. More tutorials, more books, and more publically available (read: web) articles on how to get certain things to work under Linux, to make it easier for software engineers to make the transition and/or port of their software to Linux.

Finding good, clear sources of information on how to get certain things done is what I've found to be the biggest hurdle to start developing software for Linux. Maybe I just didn't know where and how to look, but I imagine I'm not the only one involved in programming, who has had that problem.

I think the article would be a lot more accurate if it replaced all instances of "open source" with "hobbyist", as they're not totally interchangeable terms. Any project being done in the developers' spare time is going to hit this problem of time constraints on content creation (it was *the* major issue that was discussed at the QuakeCon mod roundtable), and although the vast majority of game projects using the open source model are indeed hobbyist, a commercial developer creating a game full-time isn't going to magically see their content creation timeline get longer if they use open source (such as Saga of Ryzom, whose developers open-sourced the game's engine before the game has even shipped). Moreover, a lot of modern commercial game projects use open source projects such as OpenAL or Ogg Vorbis without seeing their dev cycles balloon (id's Robert Duffy even mentioned Ogg as saving them time on DOOM 3).

Creative hasn't done anything substantial with their soundcards since the Live series was released

I would have to disagree with you. I don't know much about Creative's business practices but every sound card i've ever owned was a SoundBlaster and it was great.

The SoundBlaster Audigy2 cards are awesome. Nothing like playing mp3s or games at 5.1 or greater.

There is no "OpenGL" of 3D audio

Ever heard of OpenAL?

OpenAL is a cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications. For more information about what products and programming tools currently use OpenAL, go to the Titles and Links pages. Check it out.

Besides, for the REALLLY huge games(i.e. GTA3, Halo) money seems to be the most important factor.

The submitter apparently wants to be in good company...

Subscribe to the mailing list . Try #openal on irc.freenode.net. You can read a brief introduction to it in Game Programming Gems 4 as well, but as always the most up to date references are online.

Off the top of my head OpenAL, I know it's used by NWN and some of the old Loki games. Whether that makes it a standard or not is a whole other question.

The reason DirectX dominates so thoroughly is because it's the complete package, but at the very least we (you, they, whatever) can start catching up in the sound arena w/ OpenAL.

Gamedev.net has a TON of resources relating to game development, including a giant reference section which points to a lot of information about anything game-related.

Related to your question, a good compromise between low-level OpenGL and a full game engine (or even a commercial one here) would be GLUT. Instead of giving a piss-poor explanation of what the GLUT library is all about, I'll just point you to their FAQ. For sound there is OpenAL or the ubiquitous FMOD.

Depending on what you're looking for, a library probably is out there just waiting for you to find it. Instead of asking very general questions like this, I highly recommend you check out a little search engine called Google to find libraries or engines that suit your specific needs. Cheers!

Now we have OpenGL and OpenML. It seems nobody picked up OpenAL when Loki left the building.

Do Linux game developers (or anyone at all) use OpenAL nowadays for environmental sound effects? Is it any good in its present state? It seems the website www.openal.org hasn't been updated since 2002. Well, most of the stuff seems to be from 2001...

Well, there's OpenAL, which is sort of equivalent, like OpenGL vs. Direct3D.

What about OpenAL?

Cheers,

Ethelred

The only way to get game developers to come to Linux is to develop a Direct-X like API that makes it easy to develop Linux-native games.

What's wrong with SDL / OpenGL? It is stable, featureful, and cross-platform. The API is full featured, and the implementation is rock-solid. Throw in OpenAL, and you have got everything that DirectX does (except stupid patented crap like force-feedback input) in a standards-based package.
That is about as "linux-native" as it gets. I can't think of a single desktop-targetted distro that doesn't include the SDL libraries. If more windows developers used SDL for their games, then the Linux and MacOSX ports would be almost effortless.

Here's a sound engine [libsdl.org].

Actually, for sound you'd want OpenAL. This works together with SDL but isn't tied to it.

OpenGL does not provide any other of DirectX's functionality...

Sure, but that why there's OpenAL, not to mention OpenNL (now called HawkNL) and its extensions, and OpenIL (now called DevIL). Wasn't there an open input layer too? They've gotten hard to find now that so many of them changed their names (due to pressure from SGI? See the OpenIL site!)

Anyway, there's also SDL, and for that matter OpenML. Both are far more functional than OpenGL alone.

In summary, if you want a cross-platform DirectX alternative, there are options. You just have to know about them or search them out.

Why does linux make everything so damn hard. I use linux, but only because I believe in free software and right now its the only real provider capable of doing what I want to do. But it is so outdated it just bugs me. Somebody needs to take these suggestions, and actually think for a second about how much better linux would be if they were just implemented (also I have running about 4 linux desktops and 2 linux servers, so I'm not a super mega linux geek, correct me if I have an off point here):

1) Why does everything have to be compiled into the kernel. What? Can the kernel not map shared objects into its memory space? And if it can't, why not?

2) Why don't they establish only standard APIs that device drivers have to implement (seperate of the kernel and not built into some stupid x-windowing system or something irrelevant to what it does example: sound drivers for KDE), i.e.:
OpenGL - graphics library
OpenAL - audio library
insert appropriate nic standard
insert appropriate printer standard, etc. and make the stupid x-windowing system just another interface that runs on top of OpenGL, jeez.

3) The everything is a file mechanism is really getting outdated. Why are there not object oriented shells yet? Come on, just pop a javascript shell in there, make ObjectInstantiators/ObjectSerializers that detect file types and convert to the appropriate object instance, so javascript can instantiate it, use it, serialize it back to disk, and then move on.

4) Why do we still use program based architectures? Programs are way too linear. We need objects and an object handling mechanism (like javascript or something similar to it, like a Delphi UI or something) not programs. Once you make a program things get hard coded in that make it too specialized to be used in anything other than what it is designed for, if everything was just an interactive object, you could chain them together and do all sorts of neat tricks, that you could never dream of with standard file based shells/programs. And then you could serialize these object webs you create to disk for use as kind of a template(I'd say program but you could easily modify these to fit your needs). Sounds way better than standard file based scripts to me. Although javascript scripts sound nice too.

5) If we are going to be using a program/file based OS, lets make the program names intelligible. Lets see: vi, emacs, joe (joe??? what the hell man), yast, lilo, initrd, sh, etc., etc.. Come on guys name your programs something intelligible, and leave the credits in the fscking readme file. At least if dos had something it had convenient keywords (copy, rename, delete, deltree, EDIT). I realize I could make symlinks to my hearts delight, but that is only assuming you know what the program your looking for is called.

6) Why did anybody think it would be a good idea to integrate the inetd with the x-windowing system (xinetd). Yippee, all the speed of NT servers on a linux system. Of course thats assuming you use inetd to begin with.

7) This one is for the distros: quit using the damn graphical installers. Graphical installers don't make installing any faster (quite to the contrary in a lot of cases), and in installing on older hardware a lot of times it makes it nearly impossible. I'm all for straightforward installers, but you don't have to be in a graphics mode to do it (fine standard VGA modes will work)

8) Hey I got a fun idea, lets put all those binaries in one directory, with no real index as to what each of these programs with obfuscated names do, and then lets give no easy way to find out what it does short of running it. Woo! And don't say, "One word, man" or "info" those systems are pretty fucked up as it is.

9) Standardize the damn locations, follow the LSB biatches.

10) This may sound contradictory to the above, but... abolish the Unix file system layout. I can't stress enough how a simple object persistence/serialization mechanism would be way better than a file system any day. Anyways, those are just my rants/suggestions as to what needs to be changed or layered on top of the linux filesystem if they wanted it to actually be a BETTER OS than windows or MacOS.

I port video games to Linux for a living, so I am probably qualified to comment on this.

Do NOT optimize for Wine. You probably can't anyhow, since both Win32 (at least, DirectX) and Winelib are moving targets to varying degrees, what works and works well in one version of Wine will not necessarily do so in another.

I think Wine is an excellent piece of work, but I'd imagine even the Wine developers would rather have native Linux applications than emulated win32 apps (and if they don't, they should).

This is doubly true for game development, where you need every CPU cycle you can reasonably get.

Wine, Winelib, and WineX are really meant to be bridges to make Linux more feasible in the short term by letting Win32 programs run in some form, even if they just limp along. They are afterthought solutions to running software that we have no real ability to use, but think we can't do without.

The ideal solution is to write portable code in the first place. Be mindful of what you write, and follow some basic principles:

1) Don't tie yourself to a compiler. If you build on Visual C, take time to build on a different compiler (specifically, GCC) every now and then. Getting code to compile on various platforms is half the battle.

2) Don't tie yourself to a platform's API. Use cross-platform libraries and toolkits where you can, use abstraction layers in your own code where you can't. If you do this right, a good chunk of the porting work is just filling in stubs for a new platform. For game development, you should be looking at Simple Directmedia Layer for most of your needs. Other libraries like my own PhysicsFS can abstract file handling for you. OpenAL can give you 3D positional audio if SDL's stereo output is insufficient, and OpenGL gives you 3D accelerated graphics if SDL's 2D linear framebuffer is insufficient.

3) If PowerPC (MacOS, specifically) is of interest to you, be conscious of byte ordering. Always be conscious of structure packing regardless of platform. If 64-bit platforms (Alpha, Itanium, Hammer) are of interest to you in the future, don't do silly things like cast pointers to ints and such.

4) Don't use assembly code. Ever. If you _must_ use it, you better have a C fallback. Be smart and use NASM on win32 and Linux, so you don't have to deal with the massive differences in inline syntax between Visual Studio and GCC.

If you are more than one developer, the easiest way to do this is to have a devcrew made up of at least one person for each targeted platform. This makes it easy to make sure that things aren't silently breaking on MacOS while you write code for Win32, since that developer will catch it in his next code sync (you _are_ using source revision tools, right?).

Good luck to you.

--ryan.

I don't see standardized 3D Positional audio under linux.

OpenAL

The problem is, there are standards, but everyone is so enamored with the DirectX release of the week, they never see them.

Creative and Loki started one; it's called OpenAL. The site hasn't been updated in a while. People still work on the code and I even think some more vendors signed up. However, so far it hasn't had much media exposure. I guess not as many people care as you think..

Sorry if I took offense rather too quickly. It was more the thread I was replying to, not your post in particular.

OK. No problem.

The games are Windows only for the moment (Hence the domain name), but a tinyworkbenchgames site is in the works for Amiga fans. There are currently no plans to develop on Linux, although if anyone wants to give it a shot, be my guest ;)

I don't have much of free time right now, but I could take a look at the source of a simple game and see if I could port it. I don't know how your games are written but if it's standard C or C++ and if you have some internal frame buffer, than it shouldn't be hard to output that buffer to SDL window. Even if it had to be converted to different format with every frame, the overhead shouln't be high with small screen.

Actually, you may want to take a look at the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. Using SDL, you could write portable games working under Windows, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, QNX, OSF/True64. Here's a short summary from SDL website:

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD. SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, ML, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

I really recomend SDL. It's developed mostly by Sam Lantinga, who worked in Loki porting Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Tribes 2, Heavy Gear II, Heretic II, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Railroad Tycoon II, Civilization: Call To Power and few other titles, and is now working in Blizzard on the World of Warcraft - in other words, he knows how to code games, and it shows with the SDL. Check out the games, demos and other applications which use SDL.

For the portable sound code you can use SDL_mixer and for more advanced effects I recommend the OpenAL which takes care for you about the 3-D sound effects in a similar fashion as OpenGL with graphics.

What language and libraries do you use anyway?

If you go to the member companies page on the openal site: Here
It lists Creative Labs and Loki Entertainment Software.
My guess is that Creative Labs will maintain this.
They have been good with opensource in the past

Whoops, here's the correct link. Aparently "openal.org" takes you to the loki site, but "www.openal.org" works fine. Duh.

Does anyone know who (if anyone) is going to maintain OpenAL? This is a promising spatial audio api, and I would hate to see it go by the wayside. Already I see dead links on their site (e.g. CVS server), and have to find backup FTP servers to get access.

The screenshots look impressive. It would be cool if I could play that on my platform. And however I realize, that I belong to the minority of gamers (which is good, like Mark Twain has already said, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."), I still think that when they would wisely program this game for many different gaming platforms and few desktop ones, it'd be a piece of cake to release other version. But I'm affraid that they would prefer us to use other options, unfortunately...

Oh, well, I gues I'll just have to wait for Mason, or Warewolf, or Sands of Syllus, or Archipelago, or Catacombs, or Belchfire, or Acid Tempest, or Phoenix...

So yes, they proved that Linux is not only a toy OS for hackers. And this means a lot.

Loki has made Linux better, from technical point of view. We have SDL and OpenAL. We have a great book Programming Linux Games by Loki Software and John R. Hall. For all of these Loki deserves big thanks from all of us. We also owe them apology for not supporting them as we should. It's sad, but their economical failure is mostly our fault. We have to understand that.

Linux community is a pretty strange market. We're used to free speech and free beer. So I guess now we have to wait for WorldForge.

I wonder is creative will do anything with OpenAL....

So yes, they proved that Linux is not only a toy OS for hackers. And this means a lot.

Loki has made Linux better, from technical point of view. We have SDL and OpenAL. We have a great book Programming Linux Games by Loki Software and John R. Hall. For all of these Loki deserves big thanks from all of us. We also owe them apology for not supporting them as we should. It's sad, but their economical failure is mostly our fault. We have to understand that.

Linux community is a pretty strange market. We're used to free speech and free beer. So I guess now we have to wait for WorldForge. I'm not holding my breath for any commercial games for Linux anytime soon...

OpenGL, OpenAL, Boost++, and sometimes PLib

Julien.

The author of the post, and the person who posted the story, clearly wanted to make a comparison between OpenGL and ALL of DirectX, which as as mentioned before, is ludicrous because of all the stuff OpenGL is lacking.

DirectX does only three things: graphics, sound, and input. OpenGL handles graphics, GLUT handles input, and OpenAL can do sound. Other multimedia programming libraries include Allegro, SDL, and ClanLib, all of which can coexist peacefully with OpenGL graphics.