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Lithtech 3D Engine Coming to Linux
Phinn writes "Gamecenter is reporting that Monolith Productions is going to be bringing its Lithtech 3D graphics engine to Linux. Lithtech was closely developed with Microsoft and at one time was thought to become Microsoft's DirectEngine. You can get the complete story here."
"The LithTech engine was, at one time, developed "by Monolith under the supervision of Microsoft." According to Monolith CEO Jason Hall, Monolith is no longer officially associated with Microsoft, and the former alliance does not pose any potential problems now that LithTech is expanding to another operating system."
Funny that a company has to clarify that their former association with Microsoft will not post a threat. Big Brother Microsoft in action!
"As part of our business strategy, it is important for Monolith to make the LithTech development system available to as many developers and platforms as possible--so in that vein, we opted to support Linux. It is an interesting platform. We are excited about its future possibilities, with LithTech available as a development system for it."
The article also states that the Mac port is coming out after they complete the Linux support. This is great news, not being an "Oh yeah, we'll port to Linux also". I really liked the fact that they state clearly that the project was developed under supervision of MS but the ties with Redmond have been severed. I wonder if Ms contracted Monolith to do this, then for whatever reason fell out of favor and not Monolith is using Ms paid for development to support the Linux community. Ironic 'eh?
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
1. The "open source" phenomenon has been going on longer than three years. Thanks for tuning in.
2. OpenGL is more of an industry standard than DirectX, which is a MS-Only technology. OpenGL is used on MS and EVERYWHERE else (mac, linux, beos, etc)
3. DirectX IS Proprietary, being designed and implemented ONLY by Microsoft.
4. It's obvious you're a marketing person and have NO technical experience with Linux.
5. Linux already surpasses MS in stability. Yes, it has work to go on ease of use.
6. "Support" for wizards? These are simply dialogs. Linux has "support" for these in any UI.
7. There is NO Registry on Linux and IMHO this is a GOOD thing.
8. A Registry (and a utility to edit it) is NOT where a "platform stands or falls". The registry only exists on Win32 platforms. A platform's success rides on many things, none of which is the registry or a regedit facility.
9. Without DirectX support, Linux is going everywhere because it uses OPEN and NON-PROPRIETARY graphics standards which are being supported more and more every day by the gaming community. See Loki's website for the expanding list of titles. Also, id software, epic games, etc.
10. You're free advice is blatantly wrong and full of unresearched and non-defendable positions.
I don't have a login to Slashdot (thus the AC), but my name is Mark Zuber and my email address is mark@nospam.zube.com.
Heya, my name's Chris Hedberg, and I work at Monolith. Yes, I'm an anonymous coward. I have too many %#$@ing passwords already; sue me. :) 1) I bought the game--Windows version--last year, and am still awaiting their AMD 3dNow! enhancements patch. -Ugh, sorry. Yeah, we know. We had a lot of trouble with, around, over and under that 3DNow renderer. The simple upshot: We only have so many coders to go around, and they are *always* overworked. Being a small company, we can't just throw more money at the problem, or more people. As a result, AMD tried to write a renderer for us. Naturally, since they were rewriting a very sensitive glob of code without experience (and a glob of code outsiders ain't s'posed to have to much with) it came out as buggy as a compost heap. Since they couldn't fix things and we didn't have the developer to spare to clean it up, we had to let it go by the wayside. We still have a good relationship with AMD, and we still WANT to add support, but it would take a lot of work. Note that there's no SSI optimization for Shogo/Blood 2 either. :( Believe me, if you bring up the subject of 3DNow with anyone from the Lithtech engine team, they're appropriately red-faced. All we can do is try to keep it from happening again. 2) But Monolith chopped up the bgm into little eencie weencie .wav files, and named them randomly to keep people from enjoying it outside of the game. -Er, blame Microsoft IMA for that. That's how Interactive Music Architechture demanded that you lay out your sound clips in order to make interactive music from 'em. You may not notice, but our music plays back in different, changing sequences depending on the action taking place. The "random" names are actually common in Lith engine games for dialog sound clips, string files and other resources. Believe it or not it makes them easier to track 'n' use. :) -Chris H.
OpenGL's time has come. Originally, it was intended for expensive high-end graphics machines with exotic hardware like fast FPUs, 24-bit color, Z-buffers, and matrix multipliers. Now, everybody has that stuff. Direct-X started life as a scheme to export low-level hardware capabilities like page-flipping to Windows apps.
Other than as part of a compatibility package for Windows apps, why would you want something similar to Direct-X on Linux?