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Loki And BSDi Team Up For BSD Games
Loki and BSDI Partner for FreeBSD Games
Loki to Certify Games for Use with Linux Compatibility Features
San Jose, California -- August 15, 2000 -- Loki Software, Inc., the leading publisher of best-selling games for the Linux operating system, today announces a strategic alliance with Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI), the foremost supporter of the FreeBSD Project.
Loki introduced fully-supported, shrink-wrapped commercial games to the Linux community in 1999. While Loki has released Alpha and PPC versions of their games whenever technically feasible, FreeBSD users had been left to their own devices to make the games function on their open-source operating system of choice.
Through this new partnership, Loki and BSDI will work together to ensure Loki's gaming titles are compatible with FreeBSD using the Linux-compatibility features. Certified games on this configuration will be fully-supported by Loki.
"Many people do not take games seriously, and this is a mistake," said Jordan Hubbard, Vice President, Open Source Solutions. "Availability of Loki's industry leading line up of Linux games is a huge win for us, as we realize full well that games drive a large part of the overall acceptance of any operating system, even a serious operating system like BSD."
"We are excited to be announcing our official support of FreeBSD's Linux compatibility libraries," said Scott Draeker, president of Loki Software. "FreeBSD users have been enjoying their Open Source operating system for years, and many of them have been playing our games."
Loki is now preparing several A-one titles for certification, including the highly-anticipated SimCity 3000 Unlimited and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri with the Alien Crossfire expansion pack. Other popular programs to be certified soon include Quake III Arena, Soldier of Fortune, and Descent3.
Specially-marked certified games will be available from The FreeBSD Mall in addition to Loki's Web site store.
If it's simple to support an existing Linux port of a game using the compatibility libraries, then this is a can't lose for either Loki or BSDi. It raises the BSD profile a little further, and helps Loki sell a few more games with no real effort (they aren't repackaging or recoding).
I'm not sure either Linux or BSD is mature enough to be a viable gaming platform yet, but that is an issue best covered in this thread from Sunday.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The BSD_GAMES.TGZ in the Slackware distro is enough games for anybody. Aren't all those humdingers already available on BSD? I thought the ones on Slack were just ports from BSD.
I mean, come on.
Generally the the less popular OS will seek to run the binaries from a more popular OS. Support goes up (like gripes to management), not down.
Justen Stepka
I am not a user of FreeBSD, but I am really glad to see Loki expanding their porting of games. Games have helped to drive hardware progress and I can see that they could also help popularize an operating system as well. Kudos to Loki and BSDI for knowing that it isn't just Windows users that want to play games!
A behaviorist is someone who pulls habits out of rats.
It's not any harder to program for Linux. In fact, due to a greater number of freeware shared libraries, it might be easier depending on what you're doing.
My experiences with programming games under Linux has gone quite well. It is true that full screen graphics don't seem to move as fast under X11 as they do under Win9x, but the actual coding is very intuitive (using GGI to target X and SVGAlib).
Programming for Macs is also easier than programming for Windows. Have you tried all of them? Macintosh has hands down the best programming interface for graphics. Windows can not match its ease of use (unless you program in Visual Basic... i guess...)
I was just wondering if you had ever actually written any code or whether you were just speculating...
Unfortunately for your idealism, there are certain times when closed source is a good thing. I will provide two certified Karma Whoring examples:
1)distributed.net/SETI@Home These systems would be of any use (in the real world) if any schmuck could come along and start sending in fraudulent/random data, just to get a higher score.
2)Windows 2000 Just imagine the results if Microsoft were to opensource windows, we'd have an epidemic of programmer suicides...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I assume that they'll be released under the BSD license, so that means I can repackage and resell.
Just what I needed to start my own gaming company! Thanks BSD!
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Linux "emulation" really just causes the dynamic linker to use a different set of shared libraries when loading Linux binaries. FreeBSD and Linux system calls are more or less the same. There is no performance loss due to emulation in most cases.
The real problem is that some programs make Linux-specific assumptions; for instance, the (open source) Loki Setup program used to use Linux-specific CD-ROM detection code, meaning that FreeBSD users had to hack the setup configuration file.
I'm not speaking for Loki here; this is just based on my own experience.
-John
And a big medal for Courage. 8^)
Loki is a big reason for that, and everybody to chip in and buy their stuff. Because they deserve our support.
Dern straight. I bought a copy of every Linux game they released, and look forward to the ones they are about to release.
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
windows
In which case I see your point. Your initial posting sounded like you were encouraging people who wouldn't normally buy the game to do so.
BTW - is it generally possible to buy the Linux version and then download the Windows executable? (I know it's technically possible - my question is is this current practice?) So I could support Linux developments, but let non-linux savy people (e.g. younger siblings) use the game under Windows when I'm not about the help them?
-- Michael
I just saw Scott walking by the Compaq booth at LWCE. I'll have to run stop him and shake his hand. Sometimes I doing development in BSD and I don't have to have to reboot to Linux to do some catching up on my Civilization.
It's open source, it's unix, so there's no reason it can't be running on every free unix platform.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
BTW - is it generally possible to buy the Linux version and then download the Windows executable?
I think in pricniple yes. But probably not in current practice : (a) the window version is so much more accessible (b) I don't know about the legality of it (I don't think there are "free" window executables).
Look, somebody just mod my previous comment Flamebait. Hehe.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
http://artists.mp3s.com/artist s/34/303_infinity.html
--
303infinity Rocks, buy their CD's.
...which misses the point the person to whom you were replying was making. He said:
which should perhaps have been stated as "I just can't see serious demand for FreeBSD/Linux games" to make it clear that it's not Linux vs. BSD he's talking about, it's Windows vs. everything else lumped together.
I.e., he's saying that releasing games for non-Windows platforms - regardless of which platforms those are, and regardless of whether the version for FreeBSD is native or just the Linux version made to install and run on the Linuxator - later than the Windows version could lead to lower sales for the non-Windows versions, leading to less incentive for developers to make games run on those platforms.
Most people have found that Linux applications run a bit faster under FreeBSD.
That's ReBirth, isn't it?
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Lack of native apps killed OS/2. ISVs said "use Windoze version". Emulation killed OS/2. It could kill FreeBSD too. I don't think this is a good idea. No incentive to write for FreeBSD, then no native apps. My 2 cents, based on experience.
Uhm they do, try researching a bit before you post. BSDi's LAPand Sun'S lxrun solution. Now go and do some research on your own.
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Unfortunately, life is not easy when it comes to install scripts. 99% of it is due to extremely small stoopid things, that are easy to fix if the Linux developer has a FreeBSD or BSD/OS box available to just test and fix it. To fix it as an end user, the bar is raised much higher.
Two infamous examples that everyone seems to run into:
Harder stuff to port is code that uses threads or advanced system stuff, but games tend not to use those. The fact that Xfree86 drivers are binary compatible between Linux and FreeBSD these days will surely ease portability!
Is this a great time or what<sm> :-)
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
utah-glx does support FreeBSD, I used it to get Linux Q3A working on my machine (AMD300 w/ RIVA TNT) its not as fast as the Nvidia drivers but it works
-daniel
Was just thinking that Linux seems to be heading off into the gaming market, making it more and more popular. BSD seems to be taking a similar road, just taking longer to get there. :)
Maybe we are seeing the early beginnings of gradually phasing out Windows in general? Or maybe a more balanced differece between users using certain OSs (IE: Each OS holds a good portion of the market)
If this is done well, we'll definately see a market shift, just hope not too many Linux users head for BSD.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Especially considering this article. A lot of Linuxers have said that if people like Lokis start selling games, they'd buy them, but it looks like not enough people are that.
Would Slashdot make an article out of that?
Like, for example, this? Or this? Or this?
My other
BSD seems to be mainly used for servers. While it might be cool to have a quake server or unreal tournament server, or for some other type of game, I don't really see why someone would want to play games on BSD. I'm not a big expert on BSD, but from what I see, linux has support for more hardware than bsd as far as graphics cards, soundcards, etc.
Linux seems to be mainly used for servers. While it might be cool to have a quake server or unreal tournament server, or for some other type of game, I don't really see why someone would want to play games on Linux. I'm not a big expert on Linux, but from what I see, Windows has support for more hardware than Linux as far as graphics cards, soundcards, etc.
---
I'm using a Voodoo3 under the DRI support in FreeBSD. It works OK - q3a, quakeforge and quake2 work. I've tried SOF, but it's rather slow, and Descent3, which really needs joystick support of a decent level. I've been meaning to finish the port of the Linux joystick driver to FreeBSD for sometime. This ought to get me off my rear.
You know, I'm still kind of new to these alternative operating systems, but I'm becoming a BIG fan of BSD (FreeBSD in particular).
Aside from a little bit of "REAL Unix" snobbishness, I'm finding that the BSD communities are very friendly and eager to help out. I had some questions about setting up an old 486 as a firewall and I found documentation right away. When I got stuck, the experts on the newsgroups helped me out right away. Now, my home network is connected to @Home through a FreeBSD firewall that also does NAT. As long as I don't call in a tech, they'll never know how many machines I'm running.
I think that's the important thing for new operating systems to remember -- a kind and helpful community goes a long way. When you provide instant help to newbies, you can take over the world. Look, for example, at how well Perl is doing. Were it not for the help available in the #Perl IRC, I'm sure the language would have never gotten off the ground.
I'm still a Linux fan, of course. Right now, it's a little easier to use and there's still more software for it. Nevertheless, I think the BSDs are up and coming with tremendous potential.
If the lameness filter actually worked, would you even be reading this?
(Note: that was sarcastic)
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
I think one big problem for (GNU/)Linux games is that game ports like those Loki has made are harder to get your hands on than the MS Windows versions.
I may be wrong, but I've never seen any Loki stuff anywhere over here (in Sweden)...
Then of course I'm hardly buying any games at all (I'm simply hardly playing any games at all)... but when I was looking at the shelves filled with games together with a friend not too long ago I extra looked for (GNU/)Linux ports... and there were none!
--
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
There will be soon enough, although I'm guessing most games for this system will not be fully compatible with FreeBSD due to differences in kernel architecture, the whole PPC vs. x86 thing, and the graphic libraries available. Still, BSD is about to get a huge (in relative terms) boost in marketshare.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Everyone and their dog is mis-quoting John Carmack, who clarified his statement that he made at QuakeCON (twice) on /.
QIII didn't do quite as well as they'd hoped.
I think the other titles are doing pretty good (otherwise Loki'd not be in as good a business position as they are right now...). However, if I were Scott D., I'd be a little miffed at Macmillan- they're not doing them any favors...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I love Loki, because to me, they're the perfect business model to follow for an Open Source/Free Software company.
The games are themselves closed. Whats cool is how they open up every other piece of tech and have a great support system in place - I've had usenet conversations with their developers about installation problems, Mesa compilation/optimization, and so forth. Thats sure worth my $, as opposed to "Well, did you download the latest drivers? It still doesn't work? Sorry, wait for the patch".
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
This step means that Loki believes there can be a return on investment for BSD, which has - no offense - a lot smaller user base than Linux, especially on the desktop.
There is no way Loki would believe in a BSD market if the Linux market wasn't already working out for them.
It seems like desktop UNIX is no longer in its infancy.
FreeBSD 3.x has them too (although I think at that point they were under a restrictive license, and weren't compiled into the kernel by default. I remember recompiling, rebooting into single user mode, and enabling soft updates on most of my partitions).
There are JDKs native to FreeBSD, and you can always use the Linux JDK on FreeBSD with little fuss.
Yeah, 1.1.8 is the latest FreeBSD native JDK I've heard of. Have you tried any of the Linux Java VMs under FreeBSD's linux emulation? I never got around to it. I'm particularly interested in IBM's JDK 1.3.0 for Linux - if that runs fine, I'll have to reconsider BSD :-)
Yes, it is possible and quite easy (at least with quake 3). In fact, if you look at lokisoft's quake3 page under the FAQ, it tells you how to do it. All you need to do is download the point release for your particular platform that you intend to run it on (whether it me MAC, linux, or windows), and copy the pak0.pak (I think that's the name of the file) to your pak directory in your quake3 directory (I'm not positive all the directory and file names are correct, but it tells you how to do either in the point release or loki's site, I don't seem to recall which.
Perception is reality
Anyone feel this is a practice run for them, to help getting a feel for coding under the Mac OSX architecture? Not that I know enough about Mac OSX to say anything...
... and not that I care, it's all good. I'm happy not having to hope that binary runs under the LINUX emulation as well as acrobat does ( no sarcasm, it actually runs surprising well considering the fits I've seen under windows... )...
kudos, boys, Loki just went to the top of my gaming companies, you can rest assured when the ports come out I will buy them...
I remember when Terminus LINUX demo came out I downloaded it, wrestled with it all night, but it just kept exiting... that was a real low point for me...
If anyone suggests I should dual boot to LINUX, they will be fired upon. That's not a solution, that's a strategy for coping with a problem.
and I do run Linux at home, but on other boxes ( without decent graphics cards in 'em. )
plus it cuts into my uptime... which is precious to me...
Ummm, Roblimo? Come in, Roblimo! Ground control to Roblimo...
Wait a minute - if you're the real roblimo, why are you user #196470? I smell a rat...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Life will be very happy on FreeBSD when some of the Xfree 4.0 DRI drivers are complete. In the meantime: A binary package of Utah-GLX for FreeBSD can be found here: http://www.matroxusers.com/Driver/FreeBSD.html A port also exists: http://people.freebsd.org/~3d/distfiles/glx/linux/
Take a peek at Loki's newsgroups for some other useful information.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Can BSDi use the Linux binary emulation wizardry and play existing Linux games from Loki?
Now, with games like Quake III Arena being produced for Linux, we have pretty decent 3d acceleration support from 3dfx and (shudder) nVidia. But what about the *BSDs? I don't think that I've seen anyone (including utah-glx, which is what I use) claim to support *BSD. I wonder who will step forward first to add 3d acceleration support (I'm imagining that the hardware vendors will have to at least help out a bit...).
Anyone know (or care to guess)?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
If the editors thought that their readers might find it interesting, YES.
I have to admit, however, the "Code Dungeon" looks kinda cool... fight flaming perl zealots and FUD-wielding slashdotters. Can't wait for the playable demo!
That would fscking rock! I've still got my GEOS disks from the mid-80's!
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Games...ha...hope they can outdo ASCII Quake.
--
303infinity Rocks, buy their CD's.
I hope this turns out better than the attempts at making linux games....according to an earlier article, the Linux games didn't do so well....I still use MS for gaming and such....I think it will probably end up that way with the majority of the gaming population using Windows....for everything else...Linux.
The anti-salmon
Well...the same could almost go for linux but it's a done deal that there are games and such on linux, but it's still not even as good as games on M$ Windows. I really think the home appliance that does the job of a PC, video player, stereo, and game system all in one is the ticket. Someone needs to design the hardware first, and then the OS will follow. It just needs to be easy to use like a mac, and not as powerful as something like bsd or linux. That is why linux doesn't make a good desktop platform for anything right now. It's too complex for the average user. I like linux myself and use it, but it won't work with my TB2000 sound card, which sounds beautiful in windows, and thus my game controller doesn't work, and various other things.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
This is definately good news for BSD, although it would be even better to see Loki producing BSD native binaries, or even Linux binaries 'certified' to run under the Linux emulation of other BSDs. Then again, are there really that many people gaming under BSD? I personally really like BSD, butI tend to use it 90% of the time as a server (which is what the BSD people want, anyways).
It's also good to see BSDi (and thus, FreeBSD and Walnut Creek) becoming more 'commercially' acceptable. This attention is long overdue, IMHO.
When is Loki gonna release this one?
And will is work on the 486 that I'm running FreeBSD on.
Hear Hear. I love Lokisoft. I think they have their hearts in the right place, with a lot of brains too. I used to keep a WinDoz partition to play games, but now I've deleted that away.
Loki is a big reason for that, and everybody to chip in and buy their stuff. Because they deserve our support.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Now, this is basicaly a support announcement. They aren't doing a native FreeBSD port. Now, I haven't used FreeBSD (yet ^_^), but have heard about this Linux compatability feature.
My question is: How does this feature compare to running native code? Would FreeBSD users benefit a lot from a native port, or will the Linux binaries run with similar performance?
Second Q: Why doesn't linux have a FreeBSD compatability feature?
Oh wait, it does... it's called "make". ^_^
The enemies of Democracy are
I hope that never happens. With one software manufacturer, they can change thier marketing to whatever they like. (its called a monopoly)
Like $75 for Internet Explorer.
Like $25 addon for Outlook Express.
How about $89 for Fat32 support as an addon.
Or $3000 for the operating system.
Lars -
siri
It's nice to see games being ported to linux, but it would be even better if they opened up their source. If every company (AOL, RealNetworks, Corel, etc.) releases commercial software for linux without opening the source, then true freedom of operating system won't arrive.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
linux has support for more hardware than bsd as far as graphics cards, soundcards, etc.
:-)
In terms of graphic cards, *BSD has *exactly* the same hardware support (excepting a few beta SuSE drivers). That's because *BSD and Linux use exactly the same XFree86
Sound card support is still kind of shoddy under FreeBSD though.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
- /proc, Imagine how silly it is to access your command line string using
/proc/self/cmdline.
- scripts executed by
/bin/sh but uses special BASH oddities. (bash != sh on FreeBSD and most other systems)
It's not much extra work(sometimes it's less work) to make a program portable once you know how to.Regards, Tommy - FreeBSD enthusiast
Great, now Loki is going to help those poor BSD guys fix the 'issues' that crop up when BSD does it's Linux twist. (I hesitate to call it emulation, BSD just twists the linux calls to something BSD can deal with, rather than actually 'emulating' a linux system. This is why there are NO performance hits running linux binaries on a BSD system)
What does this change? Now BSDers can get support for those linux games. Does it change anything for Loki? Probably not. Maybe a few more FAQs, but honestly, probably zero recode.
Good marketing, though
But that has been months. SC3K unlimited has been available from Maxis for a considerable amount of time, and Loki made their announcement of the addition on May 18th; the core game was in beta in mid-April.
A posting on 20 May claimed the additions would delay the game "by a couple of weeks"...
I want to play games under BSD. A number of my coworkers also want to play games under BSD.
What's the point of having an Open Source operating system if you're going to restrict what's developed for it?
"keep BSD clean?" It's not like Loki announced they were going to start contributing to the source tree. They said they were going to ensure that their software was compatible with the linux emulation libraries in FreeBSD. That is to say, they would change their stuff, not the other way around.
Go away, troll.Please. The guy has some points. Linux will never have the game developers priorities that Windows has. Linux is basically for Geeks who like to tinker and should be kept that way: a hobby. All serious work is done on a PC (Intel compatible running Windows95/95/NT/2000/ME).
You want choice? Here's choice:
Windows95 on Intel
Windows98 on Intel
WindowsNT on Intel
WindowsME on Intel
Windows2000 on Intel
Windows95 on AMD
Windows98 on AMD
WindowsNT on AMD
WindowsME on AMD
Windows2000 on AMD
Thats all the world needs.
This is great news indeed!
With games being ported on more and more different platforms, the whole gaming industry should learn to make games portable. It doesn't really matter if it's an in-house group of external company who does the porting. It benefits all consumers since ports mean less product lock-in and exclusives. Let's hope this continues and gets expected instead of special.
By the way, this shows very well how Linux is the foremost open source OS, but not the only one. While Linux/X86 is getting the goodies first, once they are there, they can be easily made available to the other systems as well. Even if the other markets are smaller, the smaller the effort, the easier and faster it will happen. Standardization is good.
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
Just imagine if Blizzard had announced last Christmas that they've thrown away the Windoze code for Diablo2 and if you want to play it, you'll need Linux/BSD.
Of course, while some may see this as commercially unviable, it could work. But it would mean taking chances which Blizzard, etc aren't likely to do. But what is likely to happen is for some new company to do it.
Someone will. Just wait, you'll see.
BSDi has merged with/bought into/assimilated/what-have-you FreeBSD, which, if I'm remembering aright, has the largest user base of the *BSDs. Also, really, it's not going to take much money at all to do this - making sure their install scripts speak both FreeBSD and Linux and like that.
What's next? Amiga ports? Quake for Plan9? Soldier of Fortune for CP/M? Railroad Tycoon for GEOS?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Is another Mac-like cycle of game development. Game comes out for Windows, everyone buys it. 6 months to 2 years later they release it for Mac/Linux/FreeBSD, and most who wanted it already had it.
I just can't see serious demand for FreeBSD games if they are released so much later than the Windows counterparts. Then when we find out that Linux software games have light sales it won't help the cause to create Linux/BSD versions of these games at the same time as the Windows version. I wish Loki good luck at selling their FreeBSD games.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
But, as several people have pointed out, porting to FreeBSD is essentially a trivial task. They are both ELF binaries, and with the "emulation" (it isn't really emulating at all) Linux binaries run as well as native. They just need to tweak a few things to insure that it _will_ work, not probably works.
Also, I think rather than trying to get our server software to be on the desktop, we need to make a new OS and interface for the desktop. I see further into the future that desktops will probably be replaced with something more low key, more like a cross between a game console and a PC. Anyways, with that in mind...we should work more towards developing that, and improving our servers to do their job better.
I don't mean this as a troll and I don't want to tell anyone what to do...but I think that would be more helpful in the cause of better software. I would much rather have a kickass pc/console gaming system that uses a HDTV and a dsl connection and a device to write on that works similar to the palm graffiti so I don't need a keyboard, and a game controller, which may have that built in. It also should have a dvd player/cdrom on it and an OS that is only for doing basic things and you can't crash without running it over with your car.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
FreeBSD and Linux do not have the same directory structure, although with the FreeBSD Linux compatibility layer, most of the Linux directory structure is created in a special portion of the file system.
Code libraries for FreeBSD and Linux can be compiled from the same source, but I think have different directory locations where they want to call home.
Also, a lot of the code (mostly commercial and non-open source software) for Linux are tied to the Linux hierarchy and calls, thus making them hard to port over to FreeBSD (like the Java port).
That, combined with FreeBSD's inferior SMP (for now anyways - I know FBSD 5.0 will be good), is enough to convince me to stick with GNU/Linux. I would also like to see a journalling filesystem for BSD - there are at least 5 in development for GNU/Linux (Reiser, ext3, JFS, XFS, and GFS - although GFS is of course much more and a different concept altogether, it does do journalling and you can run it as a 'local machine only' FS). Do any BSD hackers know of any similar development efforts for BSD?
Regards, Tommy
I don't have any experience with BSD, is this really exciting news? What is driver support like for BSD and how well can we expect these games to perform?
I mean, SimCity 3000 is great, and I'm sure I'll buy a copy, but I really want The Sims.
Especially since I was the person who cracked the dual byte encoding used for SimCity originally, when everyone else was just looking for the money cheat. They owe me.
Will in Seattle
there is 3d support utah-glx works fine on FreeBSD, i have been using it on riva tnt. there are now kernel drivers for AGP support (patches on utah glx site). on my riva tnt quakeforge works fine quake2 is playable i havent tried q3 but i heard that it is working too. unfrotunately for riva tnt there is no direct rendering support. Dominik Behr
Because it's the same game. You're Loki. You have game X. It runs under Linux. You sell to the Linux people. You sell 5000 copies of said game. With a little extra work, you-as-Loki can have game X run under Linux *and* FreeBSD without any need for the FreeBSD users to write their own install scripts. Now, you're selling to the Linux people and the FreeBSD people. You might then sell 5500 copies of game X. Same game. Same disc. Almost the same amount of work as before, but now you're selling an additional 500 copies. See? (Disclaimer: Personally, I doubt that the FreeBSD community is going to buy 10% of the games that the Linux community buys, but, hey, it's just an example.)
Don't get me wrong, I love Loki. But they seem to be having a hard time shipping on schedule or keeping their priorities straight.
Case in point: they have been taking pre-orders for SimCity 3000 since June or earlier, when they announced it was "almost ready". In the meantime, they suddenly announce and ship several new products; apparently dropping work on the old projects in favor of hot new titles.
I hate to be cynical, but if Loki falls into the pit of endless vaporware releases they are going to lose their customers. A local computer store that is listed as a Loki distributor tells me they don't actually stock the products as "they don't really exist". The store is in the wrong, but when a potential customer hears this and orders the product from the company website, only to find two months later it is still "in prerelease", it can be discouraging.
I think Loki should avoid taking on new projects (like BSD ports) until it can manage to finish up a few of the ones it has.
Nail me with an offtopic if you want, but I'm curious (since I've never used FreeBSD) I thought FreeBSD and Linux used all the same libraries? Don't they have the same file system structure? Won't running the install scripts built for Linux (essentially) put the files in the right place?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Of course, you have the problem that no code is truely portable if it takes full advantage of all the feature of the OS. For example, write anything to take advantage of ALSA, and you're limited to Linux. And it's not just people writing non-protable code. If you code just for POSIX, then you end up with a game that really doesn't take full advantage of the user's machine.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
So now a game company who uses the name of a pagan idol is making demonic games like Quake for an OS who uses Satan as its mascot?
Shame on them. And shame on Slashdot for promoting this filth.
...can't finish this right now. My dick's on fire.
why do we need to be able to play games on BSD ?
isn't that what we have wintendo for?
let's try and keep BSD clean!