BioWare Porting to Linux?

infodragon wrote to us with the news that BioWare is going to be porting games to Linux. Linuxpower has an interview with them talking about porting Neverwinter Nights, and /possibly/ Baldur's Gate 2. I promise I'll be good if they port BG2. I promise.

Comments

The Guys at BIOWARE Rule!

[Gothland]

This goes out to Dave, Carl, Andrew, and all the coders, designers and QA guys at Bioware in my home town.

I have lunch with them occasionally at the Billiards Club across the street from their studios in Edmonton, and these guys are great. They put a tonne of work in. My favorite QA guy Carl came to lunch one day after a 30 hour shift, and he had been doing that all week. And you should have seen the grin of relief on the face of David when he came in last week (after MDK went gold).

You guys all know the drill. If you buy games for Linux, they will keep making games for Linux. And if you need additional motivation, I consider BioWare to be a personal friend of mine, in addition to being a Kick-Ass games shop.

And they're Canadian, and proud of it!

Start of end user viability

[john_many_jars]

Let's face it, the measure of viability of an OS as an end-user client is the games it can play. Since the dawn of IBM PC-compatibles (measured by how well they could run MS Flight Simulator), games have measured the success of the PC. Even before that, Commodore and Atari won the early markets for home PCs by offering games. Apple and TRS never had a chance with their monochrome monitors.

People (as in, most people who purchase home PCs from electronic superstores), do so not to have security, 99.9% reliability, high speed, cheap computers but to have one to that does extremely simple things (word processing, web surfing, _SIMPLE_ spreadsheets, etc.) and plays games. Lot's of games. The sheer size of games sections vs other sections of software at these superstores is a testament to that fact.

Picture your typical uninformed sales clerk at B*st B*y conversing with a typical computer purchaser at that store:
sales clerk: This is 600 MHz, with yada yada..
customer: (stupified) Can I download the internet with it
sales clerk: Yep.. 56k guarateed connection.. (insert more incorrect information..) AOL, MSN, your choice! The latest technology with Win2k.
customer: (hesitant) So, this will get me on the internet?
clerk: of course
customer: Does this have financial software? (*NOTE: Linux needs to make headway here. Been working on a package for myself, but have a long way to go to get anything useable by anyone else)
clerk: Free with this is MS M*ney, Qu*cken, etc.
customer: How fast is the computer (xlate: can it handle games, since the last several tasks can be performed by a 386SX with 2mb of RAM, need a 486DX & 20MB if you want Java* stuff. ActiveX is a way to let the M$-Intel Cartel control obsolescence of hardware WRT the internet.)
clerk: (continues spiel..)

So.. more games == more acceptance. Maybe a game-oriented distro needs to be put together. Small foot-print, no ports open under 1k without knowing how to turn them on, a 100% WM like KDE, plus OSS added in the purchased version.

Of course, there is a chicken-egg paradox here. Need install base to support games. Need more competent programmers to port successfully (xlates to more expensive in some cases), to handle security issues. etc.. In other words, need a large enough market to support a game that costs tens (hundreds?, thousands?) of thousands of dollars to produce that sells at US$50.

Simple DirectMedia Layer

[Dhericean]

Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer for Loki Entertainment Software has created a toolkit called the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL). This is open source (available under GNU LGPL) and provides an increasing amount of the functionality for DirectX style work.

As well as Linux it is currently on BeOS and Win32, with the potential for MacOS, IRIX, Solarix and FreeBSD (unofficial or in progress).

It's a plot!

[mOdQuArK!]

Folks, we have a problem. The companies which are porting their games to Linux are NOT your friends! They are working for MICROSOFT!

See, the REAL reason that Linux developers write so much code and find bugs so fast, is because they don't have any GAMES to hamper productivity!

By secretly financing the porting of these Windows-only games, with well-known addictive qualities, to Linux, Microsoft is hoping to destroy the productivity of all Linux developers.

No longer will the diehard Linux developer be able to boast that they commonly do the work of 10 Windows developers - between lack of focus & sleep, they'll be lucky if they can TALK intelligibly, much less write good code.

Save yourself, before it's too late!

Bioware is smart

[Majix]

Bioware has planned a Linux port of Neverwinter Nights right from day 1. NWN being primarily a client/server multiplayer game (and apparently a really interesting one too) I think it wasn't really an option not to support Linux. Why you ask? Because the platform statistics for FPS servers is currently something along the lines of 70% Linux, 30% Windows, the difference being even bigger in Europe (Can't remember an exact reference, but check the Bluesnews archives). All the big known dedicated servers run on Linux. As an example, the server availability for Half-Life was abysmal until Sierra finally got the server port out, and now it's the most popular game online (mainly because of the Counterstrike mod).

Re:Hemos being Good OR Major RPG porting to Linux

[IO ERROR]

I've known for some time, and I suspect most people reading this have as well, that Linux won't gain major acceptance in the home until there are some games for it.

So news like this is always welcome.

However, Linux as a gaming platform is only one piece of the pie. We also need to work on usability for new users. The GNOME and KDE projects are a very good start for this.

After many years of working with "clueless newbies," it's become my opinion that most of them are willing to learn only what they need to know to get done whatever it is they want to do. Sometimes even less.

What needs to happen is this: New users should be able to learn what they need to know as they go. For instance, you have to update a whole bunch of things to get Quake III Arena installed. It's my opinion that all these drivers should have been included on the CD and the installation process included them, and these presented in a manner that users would learn what a shared library is, what X is, what X toolkits are, what the kernel is, what kernel modules are, how all this ties together, and why they are all important, in a quick, easy to follow format.

If the collective knowledge of all of us UNIX people can be placed in the hands of newbies at just the point where they're most receptive to it (e.g. the installation process of a game they really want to play) then I believe the number of "clueless" newbies will drop.

Anybody who wants to work on systems to make this sort of thing possible, or knows of any in progress, can feel free to contact me.
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