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Gamespy on Linux Gaming
Omnifarious writes "James Hills of gamespy.com has an article that has some interesting and positive things to say about Linux gaming, and Linux on the desktop in general. He has comments about both Loki and Indrema." My copy of Descent 3 for Linux finally arrived, so it might be time to do some extensive research on the subject myself *grin*.
How can anyone be taking those Indrema guys seriously? They have exactly nothing to show for themselves (a PC with Linux running Quake 3 using a gamepad is hardly something new), they have NO actual professional development support, they don't seem to have been lobbying towards that either. Indrema is a COMPLETE noname in the game industry.
Their OpenSouce comment is just insane, what are they going to do, put consoles in the shops complete with a box of manuals, and hope that people will start writing games on them? Games that will actually get published and sell? Or games that would actually be good enough for anyone to buy the console _without_ intending to program on it?
Does anyone here seriously believe that OpenSource will lead to better and more efficient games being produced? How would 'ownership' of the platform by the development community lead to better games? Do you think Indrema will be able to provide more information on the NVidia chipset to anyone, as Microsoft will be able to provide to NDAed developers? Not likely. And will Indrema be able to provide so much more information as the stack of PS2 manuals on my desk? I don't think so.
The worst part is, I don't think Indrema even _intends_ to be succesfull in the console market, I think it's just a huge scam.
If it's not a scam, those people are incredibly stupid.
Good flamebait.
:)
Also interesting to see how the latest revision of the document by Brian Hook is 0.46, which seems to be somewhere from the pre DX5 timeframe. I'm sure 3D programming on Linux was great fun 3 years ago. (Oh, oops, there wasn't even a single 3d driver out yet
Point is just, DirectX isn't intended to be for your average programmer who wants to do games. It's intended as an extremely powerful hardware abstraction layer, to be used by profesionals to get the most out of the gamers hardware. This is why DirectX exposes a lot of functionality that is close to the hardware, and can be directly supported by the hardware, or not supported. This is why DirectX functionality is continously being updated to reflect changes in the hardware.
This means DirectX _should_ be complex. We're talking about a complex issue here, where a lot of things determine ultimate performance. And ultimate performance is what you want in the end, isn't it? Fast, lots of features, best on all different hardware.
That's why it was designed and exists.
Do you want to work to get this performance? No? Then get another job. Not smart enough to understand all the issues at play? Then get another job.
Most professional game programmers have been happy with this approach for a long time now, and adopted DirectX years ago.
For the average programmer who justs wants to get some simple stuff going DirectX might indeed not seem ideal, and perhaps it is not, but again, that's not what it was intended for, and not what makes or breaks it.
DirectX is a HAL. Not an easy of use utility library.
I actually believe that linux-only users are depriving and victimising themselves. Like the man who refused to trade in his betamax vcr for a vhs one.
There is a big difference between Linux and the Mac. Macs are aimed at people who are uninterested in computers, who don't want to learn much in order to get the work done. Linux isn't aimed, whoever wants it can pick it up.*
What does this mean for games? Think about it. On the one hand, you have a group of people who don't want much to do with computers. On the other hand, you have a group of people that actively go out of their way to learn new things about computers. Which group do you think will be the most passionate about computer games?
* Yes, I'm aware these are stereotypes, and not all people fall into these categories.
Of course this didn't get on Slashdot. There is an article on 3D Action Planet regarding BeOS as a gaming platform. You can find it here
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What? Windows has a command prompt?
Talking about playing games on your Linux box will usually drive them away.
If not, mention Star Wars a few times.
If only Linux could get behind some of the Java developments in gaming (Java 3D w/ acceleration, midi and sound mixing, etc) then it would be easier and less expensive for people like us to write some games in our spare time.
"Gaming" under Linux doesn't have to mean commercial games.
(For an example, check out the realtime strategy link in the
you've got a really well written post; but i question the amount of time you've spent programming DirectX. you seem to know a lot about it... but when you say "...DirectX is a little complex to program...", that's much like saying "the sun is a little bigger than the earth".
DirectX is a nightmare. I've only been programming for seven years, so maybe I'm too young/new to really be experienced enough to program it - but I doubt it. The brief/important list of languages I know include C, C++, Perl, Java, and LISP. I've done work with OpenGL on Linux stations, and DirectX on Windows95. By FAR the easiest to use was OpenGL. DirectX wasn't what you'd call an easy-to-use environment; frankly, I'm amazed that any programmer can get through the MS BS and get anything accomplished.
Don't want to take my word for it? Ask David Joffe - "However, DirectX is (in my opinion) the most horribly designed API I've ever seen, and I would hate for any newbie game programmers, whose first API might be DirectX,to walk away thinking that it is in any way an example of how a games API should look. DirectX is bulky, poorly documented, unnecessarily overcomplicated, proprietary, and there was never any technical for the existence of large portions of it, such as Direct3D (Microsoft ignored the existing industry standard OpenGL simply because it wasn't theirs and it wasn't tied to the Windows platform, not because they thought they could offer a better solution.)"
Check out his Game programming with DirectX guide.
But he's not the only one; Brian Hook (of wksoftware.com) litterally thinks DirectX is Hell. From the introduction to his Guide: "Microsoft designed and released game development library called DirectX. Part of this library is a 3D graphics immediate mode rendering API called Direct3D. Everyone said it was going to be The Standard for 3D Graphics. I decided to learn it. It sucked. It was difficult. It was poorly documented. It was error prone. Since I've subjected myself to this pain, I figure that others may want to learn a bit from my own experiences, so I'm writing this document."
Read the rest of his Guide if you want to know more about DirectX and pain.
Of course, not everyone agrees with me; there's a couple other resources on the web that gives DirectX a better-than-average glance, and (appears) to like it. Check out Andre' LaMothe's DirectX-tasy guide at loriak.com. His conclusion? "...DirectX isn't as bad as we thought it was, and it really does work and allows accelerators and other hardware to be supported very easily."
So I guess it depends on who you talk to, but in my opinion, DirectX is pure pain. If you're only going to read one, look at Brian Hook's; it is by far the most complete.
But we all knew it was better to be programming on Linux, anyway, right?
The state of Linux gaming comes right down to the big companies not wanting to write modular code; look at Terminus. Terminus was released at the same time for Win, Mac, and Linux. This proves accomodating Linux gamers can be done. Most just don't want to bother with it; which is sad. But if Linux continues this upward trend it's on... I'm willing to bet Blizzard will start porting its newest hit games over, like they did with the Mac. I believe Linux gaming will catch on, if only because of the hordes of people that Microsoft continues to alienate.
just my thoughts.
-lw
Mods: Disagreeing with me != my post Offtopic / Flamebait.
World without hate or war, invaded. Tragic?
Um, well, to start with....
To have your own OS on a disc causes problems with updates. If you want to patch it, but it boots from, a CD, how do you do it?
Hardware support. The only way that that can work is if either hardware is known and fixed. Like a console. Or if it can autodetect and drve any current hardware. Linux can't do the latter (yet), particularly when it comes to sound and video cards. Not only that, there's the patching problem, on how do you issue updates for new hardware. Customoeters are not going to be happy if they upgrade to the latest and greatest hardwar, and then they find that thioer olders games don't work.
I will admit that these problems are not insumountable, but I don't believe that the games designers want to spend the time and effort solving them. And, as they would involve utilisng hard drive space, for the patching info, why bother with the separate OS?
Indeed, I can see a case for a designed for games, ground up, OS. Designed to be thin, nativly graphical, that lets games really bang on the hardware. Linux is a bit fat for gaming, really. (Do games need inetd [0]? Didn't think so)
Just wait 5 years and you should be able to play Homeworld.
There are several reasons why Linux is very far away from the gaming/consumer arena.
/. crowd. The base their opinion of it on it's closed nature, it's speed in version 3, it's difficulty of programming in version 1. I'm here to tell you that DirectX is fast, stable, easy, and incredibly flexible. Given the flexibility of UNIX, a technology like DirectX should be a shoe-in for something to implement on Linux. Besides Direct3D (btw, which has several advantages over OpenGL, read my rant on OSOpinion.com entited "Is OpenGL in trouble?") there are many cool things in DirectX. Take DirectInput. It is a very flexible mechanism that supports everything from 4 button joypads to cybersex body suits. The whole point behind it is to support controllers of all types in a uniform and easy manner. Or take DirectPlay. It's a mechanism that allows games to communicate without paying attention to the underlying protocol. For someone who has been often frustrated by games that support only IPX and your network is TCP, or vice versa, it is a very cool technology. This is the kind of thinking behind UNIX that is should be as flexible and useful as possible. That's the whole reason UNIX treats everything as a file or why pipes and I/O redirection works so well. Take DirectSound and DSound3D. Currently, not even ALSA offers as much control over the sound process as these two APIs. Then take Direct Music. For a big fan of MIDI (my midi collection is in the hundreds of megs) it's very cool. It allows you to dynamically compose musical scores depending on the situation in the game. Pipe that through DirectSound3D and you've got aureal heaven. Sure DirectX is a little complex to program (not any more so than X, the paradigm is just different), and you can get yourself in trouble if you don't know what your doing (as you can in UNIX as well) but used correctly it really improves the gaming experiance. Linux nor any other OS as anything like it. BeOS and UNIX come close in the graphics department, and BeOS has something similar in the network deparment (though it only supports TCP/IP at the moment) but nothing (without specialized libraries of course) comes close in the input and sound department. Those who think SDL cuts it totally don't get it.
1) It's still hard. No matter what people try to tell you, nothing in Linux is yet easier than doing nothing while BeOS automatically configures your hardware, or putting in a disk when Windows queries your hardware. Sure there are special cases when everything "just works," but Linux plug & play is easily years behind Windows. Case in point: Mandrake (a quite standard newbie Linux distro) doesn't detect my graphics card correctly (a RivaTNT, a quite common card), and makes me supply irq's and DMAs for my AWE64 (again a quite common card.) Then there is installation of new hardware. One point everyone seems to miss is that most new hardware is not supported by the stock kernel. Right now, USB is poorly supported as is Firewire, and for devices that ARE supported, the driver installation is ridiculous. For good modular driver installation, take a cue from BeOS. Drag the driver into the appropriate directory, and it's used automatically. In Linux, the same process is significantly harder. Wheras my ALSA driver install should simply consist of dragging driver to the appropriate place, it instead consists of editing modules.conf with a dozen (poorly documented) commands and supplying IRQs and DMAs. Not acceptable. Then there is the issue of binary drivers. As long as there is no standard driver API, you'll never get driver disks that you can just plug in and have work. Sure OSS is great, but encouraging binary driver is a GOOD thing. The thing most people forget is that OSS drivers have to be COMPILED. A lack of a binary API does more than encourage OSS driver, it makes it impossible to distribute binary drivers (with available source to make you OSS-zealots happy.) Again, unnacceptable.
2) The desktop still isn't up to par. It isn't yet as easy to use as Windows, much less MacOS. People say, "well, GNOME is CLOSE to Windows!" Since when does being as good as Windows count for anything?
3) It isn't as cutting edge. Think about this one. The entire Linux community as an annoying habit of staying with old technologies. Take XFree 4.0. You can't say that Linux has an easy to install graphical system and good 3D hardware acceelration in the same breath. It has the former (XFree86 3.3.6) and it has the latter (XFree86 4.0) but the two are mutually exclusive. Any new and cool technology (DVD, 3D, ALSA, journaling fs) is most often NOT in the standard distro. Thus, you can say that Linux has these technologies, and you can say it's easy to install, but not in the same sentence. By the time the standard distros get on the ball, newer technologies are out.
4) It is light on the gaming features deparment. Face it, people rarely use Linux just for the hell of using a non-MS OS. People use it because it's better. In the gaming arena, it is not better. It's still slower, it's still harder to use (installing Quake is nowhere near as easy on Linux as it is on Windows) and it still doesn't have all the features that have been standard for awhile on Windows. It doesn't have 3D sound, it doesn't have force feedback, it has limited support for 3D cards, and it doesn't have many of the nifty features present in DirectX. It doesn't even have autoplay!
5) It doesn't have DirectX. DirectX is often underestimated by the
Linux will undoubtedly improve. However, from a pragmatic standpoint, Windows is a better gaming OS. Gamers reboot their machines every thing, and don't need the raw stability of Linux. For those who have used Windows NT or Win2K, stability isn't even an issue. A ten or twenty day uptime may be ridiculous for a sever, but for a workstation or desktop use it's fine. Windows will continue to be a better gaming OS for quite some time as well. So far, OpenAL is nowhere near completion. OpenGL doesn't have a new version in sight, and D3D 8 already beats it in features. There are no planned overhauls of the X input API. Undoubtedly they will come, but I've got a feeling it will be years until I can set up a Linux partition and get a better gaming experiance that I do in Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Once I get D3 for Linux, it's bye-bye Windows partition for me! D3 is the last piece of software I've been keeping Windoze around for. This will give me enough space to start playing around with BeOS...
I'm pretty fed up with Windows gaming. Games which worked last year are already rendered useless by DLL Hell killing or transmuting essential libraries - Myth II is the most serious victim of this and no longer works period, despite attempts to roll back to earlier DirectX incarnations and the original card drivers. Deus Ex almost tempted me into buying the Windows version, and then Loki announced that they were porting Deus to Linux and my wallet awaits the release date... Having installed XFree86 4.0.1 on my machine and got the NVidia drivers up and running, 3D zips along on my machine, I get better ping rates under Linux than Windows for some reason and my Q3demo playing has reached new heights of fragging, so I really ought to buy the full game :-)
I wonder is the level editor ported too...
Err... hello? Did you notice that Loki ported this one? If so, you might also have noticed that nothing is safe once Loki gets on a project and so yes the Descent 3 SDK for Linux is available here. Actually major kudos to Loki for bug fixing the releases for Linux over and above the Windows final releases, and for keeping the patches coming as issues arise.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
At the risk of getting modded as flamebait, I just don't see how the Linux game market is going to reach the critical mass to make it attractive for developers. Mac gaming, despite Jobs' strenuous efforts, remains an ill-served niche. PC gaming, while a sucessful *market* (albeit far smaller than console gaming) is still an extraordinarily tough place for developers to make money due to everything from hardware complexity and diversity to the hard-to-penetrate and expensive retail channel.
Linux seems to have both the Mac and the PC's problems multiplied: niche market, hardware uncertainty, complexity and (let's be honest) consumer unfriendliness, and poor access to the retail channel.
A Linux console might bridge some of the technical and consumer hurdles, but as anyone who knows the history of consoles knows, it takes incredible financial backing, industry clout and marketing prowess to succeed. If even Sega's Dreamcast's future is in doubt, what chance does Indrema, coming from a company that is not a global consumer gaming giant, have?