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*.

Comments

Several Points.

[be-fan]

There are several reasons why Linux is very far away from the gaming/consumer arena.

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 /. 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.

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.

If Mac gaming can't get traction, how can Linux?

[zlite]

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?