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id On Linux: Bad News
Reality Master 101 writes: "Saw this on Voodoo Extreme: id Software's Todd Hollenshead made some very interesting posts on Quake 3 World about Quake 3 on Linux. Calling the sales "disappointing" and saying the support was a "nightmare" due to the "multiple versions and everchanging kernels", he said there will not be a retail version of Q3 Team Arena. One thing I found especially interesting was that he said "retailers don't want it". Not good news for the Linux shrink-wrap software movement."
Bring the mainstream to the forefront. This is what kills Linux in the mainstream. MS installs are simple. And that is exactly what MS will use to kill Linux! For f**ks sake, lets get some uniformity in distributions so that dumb barstards like me dont have to figure out which RPM needs to be installed first or whatever. P.S. I've already biffed Windows and don't give a toss about games.
Me neither. I downloaded the Q3 demo for Linux, and went so far as to go buy a Voodoo 3 card so I could actually play it (since NVidia's support of my video card sucked at the time). I discovered that the game played well, was great eye candy, and it could be a lot of fun. Until about three minutes into it when I got motion sick.
So I went back to CivCTP (which I paid for) and pretty much had to say bye-bye to the whole FPS genre.
Port Diablo II. I'll buy it. Port Baldur's Gate II. I'll but it. When Neverwinter Nights hits Linux, I'll buy it. Heck, I'd buy another copy of Dungeon Keeper II if it was ported to Linux. I'm eager to spend money on games I want to (or can) play, but I'm not going to throw my money away to make id more profitable.
SDL is a compatibility layer, and for 3D, it uses OpenGL. This person's looking for something that would replace OpenGL, too.
I recommend checking out the GGI project. It's essentially what you're looking for, short of the audio stuff. They've got input support through libGII, graphics through libGGI with specialized functions for advanced 2D in libGGI2D and 3D stuff in libGGI3D.
There's even a port of X to it, so you can run your X server "boxed off" so that X crashes don't take down the system. (Assuming you have a card that it supports; it really only supports about a half dozen chipsets--the ones the developers own.)
The GGI people had kernel-level drivers in KGI a year before the X people even started taking DRI seriously, and their monitor drivers auto-detect the hardware attached, no modelines or nothin'.
It's a shame, imo, that they never were more popular, but they were shunned at every turn. GGI never seems to make it into any of the commercial distros, and Linus apparently flipped over the idea of putting graphics logic in the kernel. (How quickly times change..)
In any event, the project link is http://www.ggi-project.org. Good luck..
The whole Not Available on The Same Day argument is full of shit.
First of all, people who waited in line to buy it right away probably wanted to play it right away, not go home and fuck with driver installation for a few hours first.
Second, Q3A sold well on the first day, but it is still to this day a big retail seller. Maybe you bought it right away, but the vast majority of purchasers waited long enough that they could have gotten the Linux version.
Excellent point. All game development on the PC should cease and we should all be buying games for the consoles (and ONLY for the consoles). The N64, PS2, and Dreamcast are optimally designed for just such a purpose, therefore we should use nothing else. Anything else is a waste of hardware ($2000 for a gaming machine when you can get your work done on a $600 PC and your gaming done on a $200 console? Are we crazy?).
I used to actually believe this line of thought back when I sold computers retail (a disheartening experience to say the least). Then there was the one argument that changed it all for me: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Without games on our PCs, many of us would get disinterested in computers altogether, and there would be little pushing the demand for faster systems anymore. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure, but I'm not going to quit wishing for a Linux port of everything possible.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Let's review:
- id releases Windows version, which you can get at Best Buy for $30 or so, depending on the retail rat race
- Loki, with its relatively minuscule distributor clout, releases the Linux tin a month later, which you (still) can't find for less than $50
- Linux executables hit the web at about the same time
Tell me again why Todd is surprised the Linux version didn't sell well?If Loki's profit was supposed to come from sales of the Linux tin, they got screwed. At least with UT, they got cash up front. That's why none of Loki's subsequent titles allow you to swap executables with the Windows version.
The problem with Loki is that they target a very price-sensitive market, but charge full retail for a port of an old game. Let's say the game is good, so it's worth, like $40. I submit that Loki's porting effort adds about $10 to the retail value. That is, a box with the Windows and Linux version should retail for $50. But to make it worse, the Windows version is already in the bargain bin by the time the Linux version hits the shelves (Q3A excepted).
heh.. well I'm damn glad it's "losing momentum", in that it's not making every Windows idiot (If it doesn't apply don't apply it)
:)
;)
go out and pay $70USD for a copy of (buggy) RedHat, which then plops them down into something
entirely unfamiliar.. which of course leads to them erasing it, never touching Linux as a whole again, and furthermore badmouthing
it as "garbage" or "hard to use".
I *LIKE* it a bit difficult. I *LIKE* being able to change the very heart of my computer's operating system.
I feel that this shift is unavoidable, and in fact is better for everything. Business use would be unaffected (how many people would pay someone $10 an hour to play against them in some online game?? Ok, how many _sane_ people?
Linux went from low-key to Media baby very quickly, it only follows that it would (and should!) return to it's former state, or at least close to it.
I happen to enjoy it more knowing that 1/2 the desktops in the world are NOT using it.. that way I can still say "So, when was your last crash..."
mm.. rambling. Anyway, I like it quiet, and Linux is quieting down (as far as media hype is concerned) which is damn good in my opinion.
Now things seemed to have reversed. Linux is used by geeks, good for 'serious stuff', and Windows has the upper hand with games.
I could care less if I had to buy a Windows version and download a Linux client.
I bought the Linux shrink wrap version and would buy team arena. But, if there isn't a Linux version at all. I will make sure to hit a warez site to get it. Don't bitch at me for not buying it. I have a new personal policy. No Linux version, no money, and thats that.
Same thing goes for future games. I am big time into games, and won't put up with it.
Lets face it, this was a big gaming companys first attempt at Linux. Linux is still young on the market place. Give it time ....
Linux as a number of issues, we can all see that.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Why not just put the Linux version on the Team Arena CD's along with the windows/mac binaries?
I can't believe that it could take up that much space, and quite frankly, it'd stop a lot of the bickering i've been seeing about this subject. I don't know, Maybe it's not my place to say or whatever, but honestly, wouldn't that make sense?
Come on, why would they? I guess a console maker would create an OS for games, but who else? Sounds like Carmackiansim to me.
It might be impressive to you, but to me it tells a long tale of stagnant code and design, which has never been a goal of Linux. Also, if you link statically you can use pretty darn anything you like as long as it doesn't break the various POSIX/X/whatever else metaphors of the OS.
Yes, it would be nice to standardize more but to what cost? I believe standards should be as dynamic as possible, not standardize by limiting your choices.
JMHOT,
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Why hasn't anybody come up with an easy way to manage all this crap? Gosh, even Windows does it better! And I say this as a Linux supporter who wishes he had the time and expertise to do it himself...
Wait, wait, wait. Almost every time id have released a game it was a primer. Wolfenstein was the first pseudo-3d-fps, Followed by Doom with even better pseudo-3d, followed by Quake 1 (now with real 3d). Quake 3 is not really an exception to this rule... so far I haven't any seen any other game (not using the Q3 engine) with an engine that comes close to what id have developed; and NO, please do NOT mention Unreal (Tournament) now: Its engine sucks big time, as it doesn't really use any 3d hardware (Geforce 2 GTS bores itself to death, and it has bugs I've never seen in Q3 (or other engines). Sure, the kind of game (first person shooter) is getting old; but the Quake series still outperforms all other games, and I think id will always have the cutting edge when it comes to the appearance... (checked q3ta already? whoa...)
(In desperate search for a cool
But having said that, I think Q3 also was not well packaged for Linux. If you accidentally ran Q3 with software emulated 3D, it could take you minutes to get out of it because you just couldn't really talk to the UI, and if you tried to shortcut out of it, it would leave the video card in a bad state. Id should have provided a simple test program (rotating cube) and simple code to try different configurations. They could also have provided some additional software to help the user configure their X server; it's not that hard to figure out what to do even if the script doesn't know what distribution it's running on. Autoconf solves much harder configuration problems every day.
Also keep in mind that the beginnings of 3D hardware accelerated graphics on Windows were considerably more awful than what has been happening on Linux. On Windows, it was customary that games would conflict or trash the whole system.
So, yes, Linux 3D and game support in the year 2000 isn't as good yet as Windows. But for its brief existence, it is doing a whole lot better than Windows did in its beginnings. For the initial Windows releases of 3D accelerated games, vendors had a "can do" attitude. The variety of hardware and installation they had to deal with was much more complex than anything in the Linux world today. But it seems like they are losing their touch.
Depends on how you look at it. Texas is the only state in the union that would be legally allowed to leave, because it (we ;p) voluntarily entered, having been a sovereign nation.. :)
I'm not too surprised, with the 20 or so distributions of LINUX kicking around.
If a retail version of a game for LINUX is attempted again, it should be for one major distribution only (i.e. RedHat) which is a good distribution for a desktop gaming OS (i.e. not Debian), and that distribution only. And it should be mail order only.
Texas is a country now? Wow...I've really got to pay more attention!
Why pay twice when you can download?
-- veni vidi nuclei deceri --- I came, I saw, I dumped core.
Isn't linux the anti-marketing OS? Isn't marketing the antithesis of what linux is about? Correct me if I'm wrong, but linux is supposed to be the word-of-mouth, antiestablishment OS. Q3A is not OSS. If it doesn't sell, it won't be made.
To be honest, here in Denmark, I have not seen a single shop selling Linux games. This may be because the demand is not so high so it's not feasable to sell?. Support being a pain (as they say), because of every changing version - what do they do when Windows 2003 come out etc? that's going to be a support nightmare too. The good thing about linux is the ever changing versions, and in a way, also a bad thing, as it may take long to upgrade entire networks
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
It's about time that UT starts getting the respect and attention it deserves. Unreal Tournament is one of the best games out there, but almost every benchmark site I see uses a variant of a Quake demo to compare frame rates. Loki has done an incredible job of porting UT- there won't be too many tears shed over Q3A's linux demise if that means more UT servers in the long run.
;j
peace, love, understanding, and a big stick to smite your enemies
Agreed, I have spent more than $200 on Linux games and have only been disapointed with one (nothing technical, I just didn't enjoy it much)
:-(.
I HAVE been spending money on the games. I've just been outvoted by everyone who wants to buy the windows version and download binaries for Linux later
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Aye, this is starting to piss me off, i just spend over CND$250 for QI+QII Boxed sets and Q3A Tin can, a couple of months ago. (all linux versions)
:).
And i don't even play Q3A that much, except maybe a few times with the guys at work... i prefer the Half-life: Counter-Strike scene (where you actually do need skill, unlike Q3A, imho, where you need a brand new box and be an LPB
I also picking up the Q3A Tin Can/Linux version for the project leader of LFS as a present, i'm not about to blame the users nor the communite, perhaps the distrobutions and ID themselves, getting a nice working setup in Q3A, ins't always easy these days, much harder then most OS's.
I've done my part in trying to support Id, if that isn't enough, i don't know what is.
Stop blaming each other and fix the damn problem, which is easy enough to really figure out.
Not good news for the Linux shrink-wrap software movement.
That's a load. This is great news for the Linux shrink-wrap software movement. The problem is that people in the community see this as "Oh, now, people aren't going to support Linux." What they should be seeing is that groups like id are giving very good feedback on why Linux isn't viable. The plethora of distros and kernel versions might give the people in charge of those distros the idea that maybe they should get together and standardize some of the basic parts of a Linux install, like the kernel or system configuration files or UI frontends. Obviously, Linux users will always have the choice and will maintain difference systems, but the people changing those things (and thus potentially causing headaches for support reps and developers) are not the people contacting id for tech support.
It's only a setback if you refuse to address it. Otherwise it's constructive criticism. id wants to market games to Linux users. They just want a more profitable experience doing it and they're letting the community know how to help them.
More eye candy and impressive rendering technique is not what makes a great game and the very soon, the PC game reviewers will stop liking id's boots and begin to talk about how much fun their games really are.
Some people here have been posting that we should buy all the games that come out for Linux even if some suck. Well excuse me but I pay 70$ for a game to be entertained, not to make some company's CEO happy about how much money he made. I've bought Quake 3 for Linux because I beleived the good reviews but now I won't be buying anything from id again until I see a major revolution in the way the make games.
I'll be sure to buy Tribes 2 though!! I just bought a 1000Mhz, 256Mb RAM, Geforce2 GTS, Reh Hat 7 monster for the express purpose of playing this game on Linux! :-D
Regarding the idea of buying a windows binary and downloading a patch to run on linux:
/strong work?
Call me a Luddite, but I don't think being dependent on a commercial company keeping patches available online is a good idea. Companies come and go, and their websites turn over even more rapidly. Link archives are notoriously undependable. If I buy software, I want it on a medium that will last for years and be complete and runable in and of itself.
I don't even want to trust my own backups, given the necessary upgrades of that hardware over time. Hey, I've still got lots of stuff on 5.25 floppies! Almost none of that stuff is available anywhere! The mutability of the network cloud is much worse.
Hey why didn't my
Oracle and unix guy.
Store shelves, you mean.. Unsold. Heh.
I was wondering if something like a set of API's that are common to all Linux platforms just for gaming might help? So that kernel changes and hardware differeces wouldn't matter so much to the game programmers. Maybe even a VM for gaming type deal? I'm no programmer, just a linux user :)
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
I think you missed the point the original writer ( an anonymous poster on Nerdperect) was trying to make.
How long has the bttv driver been in beta ? have you ever tried to get ATI All-In-Wonder card to show TV ? Have you ever tried to get any of the recent Turtle Beach sound cards to work ? How long have we had to wait for USB support, now that we have it, how long will we have to wait for it to support anything beyond keyboards and mice ? How far away is Firewire support ? How long did we have to wait for 3D support for cards other than Voodoo, now that we have some, when will these drives be out of beta (when will they stop sucking).
I personally love Linux and wouldn't use anything else, however, if you think Linux is "Ready for the Desktop" or "As easy as Windows", you are fooling yourself.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
To those that complain that Quake's disappointing sales and tough support issues are a result of multiple distributions, you only have yourselves to blame. Had the Linux community adopted a less extreme stance that allowed for the concept of people being paid for their labors, you'd see a lot of commercial software (beyond the Tower of Babel set of distros out there).
As it stands now, the vast majority of the Linux community would never consider paying a single penny for something as non-mission critical as Quake 3. Sure, there are plenty of corporations using Linux that pay big bucks for enterprise software based on Linux. But these are companies in the business of business, not a bunch of hobbyists and hackers who are doing it for fun.
So don't pout when yet another commercial company wakes up to the failed promise of Linux as a viable market. If you care to correct this problem, then go BUY some software. If not, then you get what you pay for. In the meantime, don't expect Linux to mature as a viable, consumer-oriented operating system. The software will never materialize given the current market realities.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, I don't want to say they have other reasons than technical ones.
Main problem ist the library chaos. How many remaining glibc-2.0-systems are there? How many libc5?
And which version of X11 should be supported. Both?
Reinvent the wheel or use some existing toolkit. Which one?
Making it DOS-like or integrate it into the desktop. Which one?
Choice is good. And Choice is bad. Find your way.
'If the Linux and Windows versions had hit store shelves at the same time'
i think they should have been in the same box 1 quake 3 arean, 1 set of data, X applications.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I figure you must be:
a) a complete git
b) a microsoft employee
In any case,I doubt you'll be thinking the same way in a couple of years.
Out of all the games I own, the ones I like most are the ones that I get the most value out of. That means that if I can buy ONE copy of Unreal Tournament, and play it in TWO OS's, I get more value out of the price I paid compaired to having to potentially buy TWO copies of Quake III for the same OS value.
Stick a cute image of Tux on the box, with a star saying "With downloadable binaries" or just include Linux support on the Windows CD.
For the next few years at least, the gaming market will be Windows based. So, instead of making the situation worse for dual booters, make it better. Not buying Quake III Linux version, and instead petitioning id for binaries to get the Windows CD working under Linux is the better way to go.
I'm amazed anyone would be naive enough to expect Linux users to pay for software. Everyone is quick to advocate all the Good Things about open source, but let's face it, most Linux users just want something for nothing.
/insulted/ that people will try and contaminate the work of the sainted Linux by demanding money for software.
I think there's even a type of Linux zealot who feels
I applaud all the people with a mature enough attitude to have bought these games, and in doing so supported a delicate fledgling industry. To the rest however, leave Unix to the banks and the Universities and keep on trading WaReZ for the PC your parents bought you.
SKU'd. Id says that linux users will be able to use the windows version to play Q3TA. Id said they'll release a binary about 30 days from the release of the windows version. No need to get your panties in a bunch.
But I agree that it does hurt inside after reading they aren't going to release a linux SKU.
-- $email =~ s/\bat\b/@/;
I had to order online after giving up on stores (after New Year's), and still had to wait a couple weeks.
1. the Q3A for linux wasn't available for nearly two weeks after the windows version. This made the difference between 'before XMas' and 'after XMas' sales, as far as I know.
2. I had to *hunt* hard to find the linux version. I finally found it in the fifth store I looked. They had one copy, and I have never, ever seen another copy in any computer store I've been to since.
3. Linux didn't have 3d support when they released a 3d-only game for it. No NVidia drivers, no ATi drivers, pre-beta G400 drivers (A year later there still hasn't been a release of these drivers), and voodoo drivers that required upgrading XFree to version 4, manually. Why would I buy a game for Linux when it doesn't work in Linux? Why would I risk wasting my money when I can just dual-boot and play in windows like normal?
Sure, sales were disappointing. But of course - being weeks late with the release, not having any hardware support whatsoever and not actually selling the software publically just *may* have attributed to this.
The basic line? I would have preferred to have never had a linux retail version. I had to wait until the point release due to a bug in the utah-glx G400 drivers. At least if they hadn't done this 'experiment' I would have been able to play in Windows before the point release. And we wouldn't have people taking iD's totally half-assed effort and thinking it applies to all shrink-wrapped software that exists or ever could exist for Linux.
How 'bout this: Distribute the .PAK files on CD and make the executables download-only for every platform?
And yes, I only use MacOS and redhat, no WinX here.
The discussion was about Microsoft using Linux code. I think he makes some good points about Linux.
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<b>I'm Tired</b>
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This is a little off topic, but I have to say it, because it shows that I agree, we should cut Microsoft some slack, because for the forseeable future, they are who will be providing our Operating Systems and Office Suites and if lifting a few lines of code from Open Source projects gives us a better Operating System, then so be it. Besides Linux has improved because of Windows, Samba and Wine being good examples, so why can't Windows improve because of Linux.
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I just finished my vacation and the most important thing I did was pull Linux off my Desktop and Portable system. I first installed Linux way back when kernel
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What changed was I got tired, I got tired of recompiling my kernel and jumping through hoops to get my hardware working. I got tired if beta software, half-finished utilities and device drivers written on alien space crafts. I don't want to check the "Hardware Compatibility List" before I buy new hardware, I want my new hardware to ship with the drives and software I need to use it. I don't want to wait around for six months or a year for someone to get around to writing drivers and or software for new hardware. I want to use USB and Firewire and I 'am tired of support for such things being "Right around the corner" or "In the next kernel release". I want a Web Browser that does everything, Java, ActiveX, VB Script, ShockWave and I want it to be reasonably fast and stable. I want to be able to install a new software package and know before hand that I have everything necessary to install it and I will not have to go out and search for an obscure C library. I want something as easy as burning a CD, or ripping MP3's, to in fact be easy. I want to watch DvD and Quicktime movies. I short I 'am tired.
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All is not lost, I still use Linux for my server and router, but for my day to day desktop needs I have moved to Windows ME and will probably use it for the foreseeable future. I 'am aware that I have sacrificed stability and versatility for usability, but I have entered the world of "Point, Click and Drool" with my eyes and my mind wide openn.
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Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Exactly, Plus, when Q3 came out for linux, there weren't any good 3d drivers for Nvidia cards and others (this was pre XFree4.0) which I think is probably the BIGGEST reason for Q3 not doing well on linux (I bought the windows version because I knew that it wouldn't run well on my TNT2).
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
Um... Linux is built as a server OS. It makes sense to run the servers on that.
That said, I have no problems running the server on my NT machine either... but the client runs much slower than on, say, 98. Why? Because NT wasn't built with those standard libraries for sound, some graphics (yeah, GL is there, but other than that), networking, or any of that.
Leave Linux to run the server and either get those standards in place or find a client OS that does.
It took more than sixteen years? Oh yes, how quick am I to forget: DirectX has been in development since the early 80s!
On to other topics: a Linux framework would be an interesting sight to see, but I do wonder of the plausibility. While there is quite a few tons of technical genius out there, is there a 'need' for such a thing?
--xxk
- SDL, or Simple Direct-media Layer - this is low-level games api
- Clan-Lib - this provides a higher-level API
What would be nice is if Clan-Lib could share a common code base with SDL and if they could get backing from commericial sources to help boost their functionality and performance - currently they are evolving a little slower that I would have hoped and the Mac implementation needs a lot of work!!Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well, this is saaad!
But, I understand them. One cannot expect Linux consumer Linux products to thrive in business, YET. And, from what I understand, Hollenshead is business oriented. Not uninterested in Linux per se, but a realist.
Give them 30% on the desktop, 30% better performance than any Windows OS, 30% more marketing, 30% faster releases of kernels, 30% less fighting between Gnomes and KDEs, 30% more blue screens in Windows, and, THEN...
Sorry, today the office products are here, but really they need not only some maturing but ALSO people start using them.
For an average office of, let us say, 100 employees, there are some 5-20 seriously integrated Windows products besides MS products which work well. The inertia in moving to Linux is formidable.
For the average home there are perhaps 5-20 games, and 5-20 other programs which also work well. The only chance to change that into a Linuxoid world is, is, is... err... Wine?! Emulation?
Never mind... Give Linux another 10-15 years in building up a STRONG consumer base at the corporates, and then let it slowly penetrate the homes. Go for the third world, where Linux' price cannot be beat.
DO NOT BASH ID SOFTWARE
It is not their fault. And they have really given Linux a chance, albeit perhaps a bit early. But I hope they do not give in.
Let Linux Live!
Because that would delay Doom3 by another year while they built an OS and all the drivers for all our hardware from scratch.
It took Microsoft eight years to get Windows right. Do you really think one man, even a man whose work I highly respect, could finish such an undertaking in time for the release of Doom3 and still develop a renderer and net code?
To be honset I stil by my games at the local stores and THERE I have not yet seen ONE signle Linux game. As long as one have to look for where to find the games, no sells. It's easyer to dual boot. (That is also why Macgames sell more, there are some space in the store for the mac games).
I guess Loki has to work on there retailers arounf the world to get them display ALL Linux games i at least large store in every major city.
/ Balp
Linux as it stands today is mainly a server oriented OS, despite KDE and Gnome attempts to turn it into a cutesy WinClone.
Want to see Linux games? Want to see them succeed? Create a working group to create a Linux distro that game developers can target. One that is streamlined and tuned specifically for kickass graphics, sound and efficiency. Think NetMax for gamers.
Hmm... did I just give away a billion dollar idea? Oh well....
I fully expect a royalty check.
I have several friends who are "serious" gamers, many of them dualboot between Linux and Windows (and always use Linux for Quake 1 because of stability, connection quality etc.). They could just as well have bought the Linux versions of Quake 3 but didn't.....why?
1) Timing...Q3Win was in the stores in Sweden for a long time before Q3Lin appeared in the few stores that do carry Linux products
2) They knew that they would later on be able to download a Linux binary, thus "it didn't matter" which version they bought
3) Price! When Q3Lin actually did make it to the stores it costed about 2 times as much as Q3Win (Yeah, I know that you should "vote with your wallet", but students dont have the luxury to spend 20$ extra on "voting").
I have the Windows version myself.....If I had seen Q3Lin next to Q3Win at the same price and time, I would definately pick Q3Win since I play mostly under Linux.
Finally, when it comes to distro differences etc, won't the widespread use of XFree86 4.X (with it's own os-independence layers and continously updated drivers) help "solve" the problem in the future? (provided that accelerated open-source drivers becomes available for most video cards).
The illusion of multiple distributions having a future. Even when the differences are only small, for commercial software (binary, off the shelf software) the slightest difference mean a support nightmare. It is unacceptable for mainstream software (not for niche software meant only for power users).
:)
As some people on quake3world already commented: It really is a shame that FreeBSD (the *BSD with by far the largest user base; though OS X might change that in the future; luckily, the OS X core *is* FreeBSD) doesn't get more attention.
Obviously, at the moment FreeBSD sales would be even less, given the fact that Linux has 10x more users.
But at least there is only 1 "distribution", development is very orderly, one consistent operating system (not only a kernel) is produced. Also great care for backwards compatability is taken (5 year old binaries still run on FreeBSD-current), and progress was slower, but is so steady and well structured that FreeBSD's speed of progress has surpassed Linux's some time ago.
Linux userland and kernel must be united, that is only 1 distribution can remain. Only, I wonder how to reconcile that with todays (chaotic) development model. Other alternative is all Linux users switching to FreeBSD of course
My Problem was that the retail stores never had it so I could never get a copy. Plus I have a ATI Rage Fury and the demo works for shit under linux.
Don't buy bad games; they'll just make more: Frogger 2, Deer Hunter, Panty Raider, etc. Buying something to "support the company" is like voting for Nader, only less effective. Fans of Falcon, Grand Prix Legends, and Looking Glass Studios (System Shock 2, Thief, Flight Unlimited) have been through this. I'm not going to buy CompUSA's remaining inventory of Falcon in the desperate hope that InfoGrames--which bought Hasbro Interactive, which canned the Falcon team after buying Microprose, which bought Spectrum Holobyte (I think)--will notice.
What you Linux-types need to do to solve this is simple: STANDARDIZE. Linux is going through what the Ye Olde Sages of MS-DOS had to put up with at the beginning of the PC era -- all computers were different. You always had to go through some level of configuration schema to tell the game or whatever type of program what sound hardware you had, what graphics hardware you had, et al. Now, however, Windows detects most things automaticly, and provides a compatability layer for the devices to interface with the programs through. The current situation with Linux is a bit more complex -- Linux has the aforementioned compatability layer, yet all the operating system variants are different in some way, requiring the software publisher to either cater to the most popular distributions or ignore Linux totally. These guys don't have tons of time just to get it running on a platform that represents less than 10% marketshare. If you wish Linux to become a primo gaming platform, you must standardize at least everything in the system that applies to gaming.
-----------
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POiT!
That was probably the most insightful thing I've ever read on /. - thanks, you've made my day.
--
True enough. I cant tell you how many centrist message's ive posting questioning some aspects of linux that just some seem to hold common sense, only to get them modded down by the zealots. Yet another reason why linux will never take off..many people can't accept enough ideas to standardize..indeed, calling standards something for sheep.
-
Yes, I oversimplified the Mindcraft incident for the purposes of illustration. Microsoft, of course, did set up the test so that they knew they would win it. I'm sure they have their own benchmarking and polling facilities and whenever you see a Microsoft sponsored benchmark or poll that they won, you can be sure that they just paid to have some "independent" do the same thing that Microsoft already made sure they could win.
Nonetheless, the kernel developers (and of course, all the linux zealots) did at first believe that the problems were entirely due to the fact that the contest was rigged. It perhaps wasn't weeks of denial, but IIRC there were a few days.. until the Mindcraft retest, where the Linux machine was optimized as well.
IIRC, Linux 2.2.x would have had a difficult time beating NT on any similar 4-way SMP system with 4 ethernet cards, and the details of the hand optimization, RAID controllers and memory that people made a big deal about at the time turned out to be largely irrelevant.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
You *can* use the Linux version of QuakeIII on other platforms.
I found a copy (at Media Play, of all places...) and tried to get it working under Linux, but
because of my poorly-supported nVidia card, I could never actually *play* it under Linux.
So, I installed the demo under windoze, replaced the data files with the ones from the CD, and
installed the point release. Works perfectly fine.
It also can be installed in a similar way on MacOS9/X.
The only thing you really *need* on the install CD is the data files...The client is freely available for all supported platforms.
--K
---
ID says the MAC versions are selling pretty well, way better than the linux versions
When I first discovered that there were games for Linux available, I was very excited. I'm not an avid game player, but I like the occasional RPG or strategy romp.
I promptly went down to my local EB and asked if they had a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic III. They told me that they did not, and that they had no intentions of receiving one in the near future. *sigh*.
So I went to EB's online website and ordered it from there. The order went through, no problem. I patiently waited... and waited... and waited... and then forgot altogether that I had placed the order.
Three months later, I received an e-mail from EB online saying that they had discontinued sales of this product.
Now, you might ask why I just didn't order directly from Loki. Well, I'm a Canadian, and last I checked, when you factor shipping and USD to CD into the mix, the price becomes fairly outrageous.
BTW, the only game I've ever seen in stores for Linux was Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, which I immediately snatched up. But I only saw that game once, and was lucky to get it when I did, because by the next week, the other two copies were gone and they never recieved any more.
Since it's so damned inconvenient to buy Linux games, no wonder no one buys them.
v
I have purchased every game available commercially for Linux except for three:
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire (please, people).
Simcity 3000 (simcity has always been a big yawn to me. Now, if they would either port The Sims or bring back SimEarth, I would dig it).
and, Quake III. For the simple reason that Quake III Arena sucks. Big time.
UT - awesome.
Quake and Quake II - awesome.
Kingpin - awesome (except for their code. I'm writing a mod to fix coop, and my god! the horror!)
Myth II - awesome.
Heroes of M&M 3 - awesome
Heavy Gear II - awesome
Hell, I even bought Terminus! And that Aztec RTS!
Don't whine to me because Quake 3 sales suck - look at the product. If my friends who run Windows hadn't gotten the chance to buy it first and show me how much it sucked, I would have been tempted to blow $50 on it. Unfortunately for id, everybody running Linux got to see exactly how much Q3 blew before they decided whether or not to waste their money on it.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
Linux needs a "game box" with a fixed, but virtual, environment. The game runs in the fixed environment and the box translates anything that needs translating to real world APIs. As Linux games will not be accessing native hardware interfaces (a'la Microsoft) this should not be a hugely difficult job. This could also simplify game design as you can factor out many common game services and provide them as part of the box API.
Just like people keeping around windows for the sole purpose of playing DVD's, I know people who keep it around for the sole purpose of playing games.
And lets face the fact that your non-hardcore linux users are going to be the ones with a seperate machine (or a dual boot) for Linux because they're just not comfortable enough with it use it exclusively, and when you have the option of a 15 minute install compared to getting and installing the correct version of X, mesa, and so on, windows is more appealing.
At least from what I've seen.
------------------------
Isn't LSB all about providing Linux Standards?
:)
So, the solutions would be support and implement LSB ideas on all distros.
Or, more easily, make people move to Debian
Why not have completely open source free hardware? I bet i can make LCD panels in my kitchen!
-
Your MP3 image is stolen from Modern Humorist, with the credits zapped.
Gaming on Linux makes about as much sense as running a web server on windows 98. Especially since there are such easy alternatives available, such as dual booting. We all got a windows 9x licence with our PC when we bought it after all, even if we didn't want it, and all new games worth playing (afaik) have a w9x version.
Linux needs a lot of work to even come close to the support both for older and for the latest bleeding edge graphics and sound hardware. All this work isn't going to be done unless it becomes commercially viable, and it can't become commercially viable until all that work has been done.
Shrink-wrapped software that could have a chance on the linux platform would be scientific packages, professional compilers, perhaps server software if someone doesn't trust apache. And even in those cases, shrink-wrapper CD-roms don't make sense. With a T1 line or better, downloading a CD-image and documentation in PDF format is a so much more efficient distribution method.
Admit it. Q3 on Linux is only decent for running a server. At this point, Mesa sucks so much that having a client just isn't worth it.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
actually that was what I could get from Brak talking to his teacher while brushig his teeth
Linux (or BSD or whatever - even though I've never needed to recompile my OBSD kernel to get all the functionality of Linux, now that I think about it) is never going to go truly mainstream until we get some sort of uber-kernel out there that has everything in it ready to go. Helix is on the right track with UI, but can you imagine some computer-illiterate user who only wants to use email and games and whatnot recompile the kernel? Hells no. Flame me or moderate me down if you realy feel the need, but its true.
On another note - - I saw some games shipping with both Windows and Linux version on the same CD, perhaps that is a good thing for id to check out.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
...remember that the next DOOM will be developed on Windows 2000 using NVidia hardware. Sorry, Linux Quake fanatics, but this is the truth. Id wanted to develop their next game on a stable, standardized platform, and Windows 2000 was the one that fit the bill. However, they'll still port it to Linux, but be ready for the usual drill (copy the files from the CD or smbclient from a Windows machine, then install the binaries).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Yes, in the sense that its market share has been increasing hugely for every one of those years. No, in the sense that it's only in the last 2 years that it's started making serious inroads into the market share of other OSes.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Unreal Tournament released had just the windows (and possibly mac, i dunno), and just released patches for the linux version. Saves space on shelves, and solves most of the problems I saw above. Just my 2 cents, wigg
If he's talking about drivers in the kernel, then this is fair enough. However, if he's talking about things like the differences in filesystem layouts between distros then it's their own fault. There is a system designed for dealing with this: autoconf. No, you don't need to distribute the source - "make" could just be making a configuration script and a suitable type of package (rpm|deb|slp|tgz) for the architecture, and then installing it. No, the user doesn't have to type "./configure &&
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
We are going to continue to support linux in future products, but unfortunately it doesn't look like a strong business case can be made for it. The mac version outsold the linux version by quite a bit, and even that didn't hit 5% of the windows sales. Mac versions are still valid business cases, because the support is way easier than on either windows or linux platforms, and the sales numbers amount to something noticeable.
There is no way that a linux box will hit the shelf at the same time and have the same price as a windows box, assuming the publisher is making a maximum effort for the windows box. If this is truly a gating factor, linux boxed games just won't succeed.
Loki wants to get away from making games "convertable" between platforms, to force linux players to buy the linux boxes. I have issues with this. Not making executable binaries available online sucks. I hate binary patches, and requiring either patches from different versions, or the installation of all previous patches. Just releasing a new executable is so much easier.
Our options from here are to move towards a hybrid CD and pay Loki for official support (which makes linux support look like an expense, rather than a benefit), make a hybrid CD but leave the linux version in an "unsupported" directory, or just make unsupported linux executables available online like we used to.
It is going to be quite some time before DOOM ships, so we can't say anything definitive at this point.
I will probably do the initial development work for DOOM on linux, but I'm not interested in tracking every change that goes on in the linux world. The initial work will probably be with the Nvidia driver, which already has all the features I need, then I will work with the Open Source mesa drivers to bring them up to par.
John Carmack
Compassion, people. It is difficult just to stay alive in the PC game industry. The complexity of games is higher, the competition is more intense, platforms are more varied, talent gets harder and harder to find, and sales are being eroded by consoles. Not to mention that your game is being hacked, modded, tweaked, and run on dangerously overclocked hardware that was assembled by a Dr Frankenstein. Support is a nightmare -- and having to support folks with their own custom compiled operating system is just too much to handle.
"One problem with retail Linux products is customer confusion. I bought Heroes III for Linux from the return bin at MicroCenter. When I checked out, the cashier said he had returned that very copy because he didn't realize it was for Linux. An employee!"
:-)
Well, letsee now. MicroCenter segregates the software by OS- MacOS in it's corner with the Macs, all the alternates other than MacOS on one asile, and all the Windows apps grouped together. Either he wasn't paying attention when he snagged the copy off the shipping dock or he's joshing you because the sections are VERY obviously labeled. I'd think the average person would have a lightbulb go off inside their heads when they see a lot of strange software and few games on an asile and games and software you recognize on another group of them.
Either that, or I'm giving my fellow man far, far too much credit.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Exactly.
;)
Well, almost. Personally, for me the release to Windows first was an issue with me not buying it, but not for that exact reason.
I didn't buy it because my friends who run windows did, and I got to see exactly how bad the game was before it was released for Linux.
I've purchased everything else Loki has been able to throw at me (except for Simcity 3000 and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire)
And even things you haven't (like Terminus and that bizarre Aztec RTS game).
But I will never buy Q3A for the simple reason that I will never play it.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
Well, there is the philosophical advantage of "putting your money where your mouth is" ...
:)
I did that by purchasing the Linux version of Quake3, after having purchased Doom/Doom2/Quake/Quake2 in Windows format as you suggest.
I felt "better" after buying Linux Q3 (in the snazzy sardine can). And that's why we spend money on non-essentials, eh? To feel good?
Seriously, though, it does make a statement. Whether or not anyone listens to the statement is another matter altogether.
Hey John, I'm one of your customers. I bought Quake and Quake 2 (Windows versions, used with the downloaded Linux binaries) Had a great time with them, still occasionally fire them up for some fragging.
:)
;)
I didn't buy Quake 3.
Not because there was anything wrong with the game (I downloaded the demo, fired it up, and it was beautiful) but because the system requirements were higher than what I have.
The machine in question is a P233MMX, 64Mb RAM, big ol' HD, and a Matrox MillII
That system has served me in good stead since 1997, still runs just fine, and I have no pressing need to upgrade or replace it. Yes, the Q3 demo ran on it with software rendering, and looked great, but it was a little slow.
That's one of the major benefits I get from having my primary computer be a Linux box - I don't need bleeding-edge hardware for an enjoyable computing experience. This machine does everything I want it to.
The next game I buy for this computer will probably be Railroad Tycoon 2, from Loki. Fun game, low system requirements, doesn't play as nice on my Dreamcast (less features, lower resolution)
I understand that part of Id's existance is to provide a place for you to stretch your coding skills (it not like you're financially insolvent) so I don't begrudge your chasing the bleeding edge. But if you want to sell games to people like me, then you have to provide an experiance I can't get oon the consoles, and you have to do it with less hardware.
In case you're wondering, I do own a Windows machine - it's a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25 mil spec magnesium notebook. It's a P100, and it's used exclusively for programming the EFI system in the race car. I haven't tried Q3 on it.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Carmack talked about this very same thing in an interview that was linked on /. nothing new here. What he said about it though is actually more promising in my opinion. I believe he said that in the future it is likely that the Linux binary would come on the Windows CD in a subdirectory called unsupported.
I suspect this is the best way for Linux to become more commercially viable for games. As companies like Id release their unsuported Linux binaries on the same CD as th Windows version. They can do so without any great risk. And as more people start to play the Linux version . And the distros get better at supporting the games. Then it will be comercially viable to start selling a Linux specific version. And Id and all the companies that follow their lead will do so.
I didn't buy the Windows version either.
Woz
The big insurmountable problem from id's perspective is that the retailers don't want to touch a linux version.
Linux fans should be pleased with the support they're getting from id. Its unreasonable to expect more at this point.
'Nother little story:
My nVidia card has never done 3D in Linux - the only thing their 'detonator' drivers do is 'detonate' my system.
Hard freeze after about 5 seconds of video.
Sure the drivers might be great for the lucky, but I know I'll never buy an nVidia card for a Linux box.
The greatest thing is there's no chance of someone outside nVidia fixing the problem. Thanks nVidia!
--K
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So forget XFree... It still doesn't support many important cards.
If you want to set a gold standard, then make sure it supports everybody, all of the 3D cards on the market.
Todd said that there will be a linux version as a binary download soon after it is released. It will probably be unsupported though.
The problem is the Linux kernel and its libraries.
I am absolutely fascinated that not a single person in this several-hundred strong thread has commented even once on the most significant part of Hollenshead's complaint: that support for Linux is difficult. Yes, sales aren't good, but support is a nightmare. Not just because of multiple distributions, but because of different kernel versions.
I can't begin to tell you how frustrating using linux as a developer is, particularly if you want to do interesting development at a low level. The kernel devteam seems to have no interest whatsoever in foolish, trivial things like maintaining compatibility with previous APIs, using sane version numbers, etc. Each time a new announcement comes out, every developer cringes and waits to see if their work is going to have to be entirely retrofitted to work for the 5% of users that will be running the new kernel, or the new glibc, or the new version of LinuxThreads, or what have you.
In comparison, the FreeBSD developers seem to have a very good understanding that providing a new feature is not an adequate excuse for breaking existing APIs. And they don't seem to have a problem providing new features without breaking APIs. Maybe that's the benefit of having an operating system that is engineered and designed instead of having one assembled through luck.
Please do not engage in any of these forbidden activities. Thank you.
There needs to be some sort of a "standards commitee" set up concerning the linux desktop OS. Being the proud father of a four month old bouncing baby company, I have little or no time to take charge and head it up (or any other insane idea like that) but I would definately contribute what I could. So someone needs to stand up and take the initiative. I'll donate space on radicalmatter.com for whatever type of site is needed to get it together. What can you contribute? email me at zecho@radicalmatter.com and I'll somehow get a list going.
Are YOU listed?
Does Windows have some kind of secret-magic-gaming-goodness-fairy-dust that nobody else knows about?
An operating system as open and portable as linux will have great gaming support if enough people want it and work toward it... the situation today is already much better than a year ago.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Well, the problem, mainly, is that there are no sales. Who's to blame for this? Loki? ID? No. Linux users. If we don't start paying for games, even the bad ones, we won't see any more come out, much less the good ones. Blizzard has said that they won't release anything for Linux until they can reasonably expect to see $1 million in sales. So the only way to fix this problem is to go out and actually buy the games. Go to Loki's homepage and order some games. Even the bad ones. Unless they start seeing some dollars here, they're going to abandon the platform entirely.
Untrue - I have spent over £100 ($150) on free software in the last two years (more than I have ever spent on propriatory software). I'll spend my money on things I actually want to. Why buy civ2 when you could have freeciv? (It runs on Windows, too, and allows you to play networked games)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Support issues? So let loki support it. I'm sure they'd love to.
Exactly. I was going to buy the Linux version, but between the time when the demo came out, and the full release came out, I upgraded to a TNT2 card. This card was NOT supported in linux at the time, so I bought the windows version so that I could play the game.
If Doom3 came out for linux, and it was good, I would buy the linux version over the windows version because the support exists for Linux.
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
It's never happened to me in 3-4 years of heavy use. Perhaps the problem is on the other side of the keyboard?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Scrap the "real mode/standard mode" variants of each of those OSes, that's like putting down linux as being non-standard because developers would have to target ELKs.
Windows CE is not being targeted as a game platform (and please don't show the two exceptions)
Bob is not an OS.
Real games were not developed for Windows before Windows 95. Prior to that, they were all DOS games. Windows NT 3.x did not have games developed for it.
Win95 b is OSR2
You forgot OSR2.5 (win95c)
Let's run combinations on the Linux compile-time optinons for the kernel alone and see what developers have to target. Then think about video support, the init system, audio, and then think about things which are pretty experimental these days... Like 3d audio and video, truetype fonts(!)
A very good majority of the games which ran on Win95 -- any version -- will still run on any of those platforms you mention... like Windows NT, Win98, WinME, etc.
Then think about something so horribly simple as Netscape which has had to figure out what widget set to use... and Real Player, which before reaching v1.0 had the sound architecture pulled out from underneath them.
The latter is more akin to a badly designed Win95 game, but it just means Linux is at Least as bad as MS OSes for pulling undocumented APIs out from under developers, and breaking code.
Tack on poor hardware support, and there is no reason to run these games on Linux. OTOH, Quake server would be insane not to run on Linux.
Before you flame, keep in mind that I'm merely referring to the perception from the shrink-wrap software community; I'm well aware that all the 1337 hax0rs on Slashdot are capable of dealing with these sorts of problems.
Plain and Simple(TM)
This is something that is going to have to wait a while until KDE/Gnome/Window[*] can play catch-up in terms of acceptibility on a wide scale. Until then, expect to see more stuff like this (commercial apps fleeing the Linux Desktop)...
Hammer of Truth
Loki still hasn't released Alpha Centauri, four months after they claimed it went gold. Anyone who purchased SMAC along with another title(s) still hasn't received their other title(s) because of brain damaged policies with Loki's distributor, Digital River. They've never given an adequate explanation as to why, nor have they attempted to fix their web site to prevent those kinds of purchases in the future.
I bought ten games from Loki, partly because I like the idea of games on Linux, and partly because I wanted some games. But I won't ever buy a product from a company I believe has lied to me. Period.
Supporting 3D hardware under Linux will ease over the next year. The loadable driver modules in XFree 4 is a much better solution to XFree 3's separate X server binaries for various cards, and this will ease the support headaches distributors and games manufacturers have had over the last year. So, please, let's see some other porting companies and multiplatform content creators enter the market. I bought Terminus and have been happy with that game. I'll buy others if I like the demo. There's certainly a hard-core linux community that will buy games right now. Though it's true that the market won't open up until after XFree 4 and 3D support becomes a common component of every distribution.
J. Maynard Gelinas
What you describe seems to be in danger of becoming the official history of the Mindcraft incident, but it was never true. Those tests were bogus in many different ways: they tested a hugely unrealistic scenario, and initially only the NT box was optimised to handle that scenario. Oh, and they lied too.
However, the resulting publicity meant that parallelizing the part of the kernel hit moved up the priority queue from "might be nice someday" to "must be done soon". And so it was done, and well, and now we can kick the shit out of NT even under the bizarre circumstances Mindcraft set up.
There were no "weeks of denial". The objections raised against the tests were fair and accurate. The fact that we would now win this test doesn't change that.
--
Xenu loves you!
GameReady Level 1, or whatever it winds up actually being called, will be a standard, non-moving target. It doesn't matter much what the standard is: for example, I don't care if the 3D part is OpenGL, or some other API that can wrap around OpenGL. The standard will include everything needed to run cool games: a 3D part, a sound part, a 3D sound part, etc.
This is important because you want people to be able to look at the requirements for Linux Quake4 and say "Hey! My computer is GameReady 1!" You don't want to have a long list of 10 different libraries that are required to run the game.
DirectX was valuable because it helped games run more efficiently, but it was also valuable because it provides a unified standard the game companies can write to. We need something similar.
It's also important to get a number in there, so that someday when cool new stuff is invented, it can be standardized as GameReady Level 2.
I have nothing against Red Hat, but I hope never to see games saying "RedHat Compatible". I'd rather see a more open standard.
P.S. When I say "the front of the box", I also mean "on the download page" or anywhere else you get software. I by no means intend that this apply only to boxed retail sales.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The lack of sales for the Linux version were partly due to the earlier release of it's windows counterpart, and the fact that when the Linux version came out, people just d/l the app for Linux and used their windows CDs. Thus making it look like there are less Linux users who purchased Q3 then there really were.
But, the real killer seemed not to be that there weren't a lot of Linux sales, but that the Linux sales didn't pay for themselves. It was, apparantly, a nightmare to support Linux, due to all the variations between them and lack of standardization.
My question is, can there be another way to sell to Linux users? I mean, just because Joe Lamer bought Q3 and needs to talk to tech support for an hour to get his voodoo working, does that mean that I have to pay $200 for q3....or worse yet, not even get the chance to buy it?
I'd be interested in, untill there is better standardization in Linux, purchasing games without tech suppor (for a little bit cheaper). You can bet lots of people would still go out and nab your game, even if they don't get support.
These people are working in what seems to be a real pathological case. Compiling with glibc 2.0 headers then linking against glibc 2.1. This is so far from the common case as to be genuinely inconsequential. Moreover, static linking will generally work as long as you're using standard calls. CD players will not work accross driver versions, generally, but this isn't much of an issue.
Moreover, they're trying to do all sorts of black magic (calling two implementations of the same function simultaneously), providing an odd sort of thing which people can compile against, etc.
He stated himself that his program depends on the implementation of read(). This is inherently wrong behavior, as it is specific to the implementation of read(). It's not fair to start using someone's code in ways that it was never meant to be used and then complain that normal development breaks their bizzarre program (library?).
Moreover, they're releasing binary-only modules that users are supposed to link against which depend heavily on the specific implementation of libc and then expect this to work accross different versions of libc. Give me a break. It's nearly as bad as providing binary patches against someone's program and then complaining that the next version of the program breaks the binary patches.
Who cares? libc was never meant to be portable accross versions during compiles. This isn't a necessary feature for any sane case. Compile and be done with it.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
The problem with redhat is, they dont sell anything substantial..a cd and a book. Woo. As broadband connections grow, more and more people are going to just download the thing, and you can get more support online than in any book. Their investors know this, and are starting to get more than a little spooked (from $150 a share to $6!)
In any case, the problem still exists of the GPL "everything free" culture of linux. That's a hostile business environment. For companies that make a mint making software for the masses which DONT use linux..linux is hardly worth a breath. The exception being hardware makers..writing a driver for linux isnt that big a deal. But porting some large office suite or graphics package is. And when the culture of linux says "what? they're going to sell it? absurd!".. why bother? This is why corel, adobe etc pull out...
(personally i wouldnt let UT's enormous beauracracy touch my software ;)..yes i attend there)
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It doesn't necessarily work that way. Lack of apps, for one thing, killed OS/2. There is a problem here. People will come to linux if it has the ease of use they need/want AND if it has the apps they want but for the apps to appear from the vendors, they require a demand that would be worthy of the effort.
So, people do not go to linux in droves because they can't work with the apps that they need/want/desire - because they are used to them AND because it is necessary to inter-operate with colleagues and customers. Vendors wont produce software for linux because the people aren't there to support the cost.
No, GPL and the like is not the answer to everything. ALL GPL projects that seek to bring equivalent function to linux that people enjoy on their Macs or with Windoze are ALWAYS merely playing slow catchup to the commercial offerings for the other platforms or OSes. By the time the SLOW development of a GPL app gets to the point of having a useful product, the users are using something beyond it in the Mac and Windoze world.
This is PARTICULARLY true of games. Loki is great, and so has been id's support, however, games in linux invariably come too late after the same game has come to 'doze so that the demand for it is low. People who would otherwise PREFER a linux version go with the 'doze version simply because it comes out first and they do not want to wait months (or longer) for a native linux version.
By the time a great new game finally gets to linux, the next big game is out on 'doze and people want THAT one, not the now old game just now coming out for linux.
The problem is that the linux port comes too late so that what was perhaps a high demand has spent itself for the windoze version - why wait 6 months or so for a native linux version when you can get that COOL game NOW and play it on 'doze? IF game companies would simply release their stuff simultaneously for linux and doze (and macs) on the same CD, then there wouldn't be a problem. There would be buyers, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be clear WHAT platform or OS they are purchasing for.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
The key problem here is support. If I write a game using the DirectX API I am going to have a hell of a time rewriting that program to use the myriad of different media systems in Linux. If Linux had a unified media architecture that everyone used it wouldn't be a problem. That is totaly besides the fact that Windows users outnumber Linux users by several orders of ten.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Maybe because they make the quickest cards on the planet.
All fair points. All I'm saying is, don't confuse an environment that is hostile to traditional software sales to an environment that is hostile to business in general. Like ESR says, it is important to distinguish use value from sale value. The Linux community, businesses using Linux included, benefits from an enormous amount of use value from the available software.
And it's largely a matter of perceived value.. if a Lotus or a Corel can't bring something to the table that is substantially better than can be had for free, why is it a problem if they then fail to make a profit at it? I don't think it makes sense to say that the Linux market is too competitive for software companies to survive in it, but if so, don't we as customers/consumers still benefit from the competition? Folks like Oracle and SAP and Verilog and others who make truly world-class software that does things better than the free alternatives possibly can will be able to make money off of the swelling ranks of commercial Linux users. I myself own commercial, non-open source Linux software, and I'm quite pleased with it. It's just that the standards are higher in Linux-land.
And I agree with you about the UT beauracracy.. UT's office of general counsel approved the GPL for UT-published software under certain conditions, and the work we have done on Ganymede just wouldn't make sense without the ability to publish in that way. I'm much happier having the developer-to-lawyer ratio at infinity, thank you very much. ;-)
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
You could stick with a single kernel for a long time if one kernel worked equally with every system with all your components. I've found 2.2.14 to be pretty damn good on my machine while 2.0.something worked pretty shabbily. You've also got to take into account alot of people recompile their kernel to their specifications. You can drop alot of modules you don't ever use but once you do any software that wants to interface with those modules isn't going to work.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Todd doesn't remember the days of Dos VS Win95? Christ, it was when there was some games that were going to win95 that pissed all the people still using dos off. You think some of those early DirectX games hit it big? Nope!
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Standardiztion. I like that fact that Linux is customizable but for god sakes someone take the bull by the horns develop a few standards and proclaim them as such, even if they arent perfect. Microsoft did it, why cant we?
I saw a freaking copy of Mandrake and Redhat at the local WalMart, if they have it at WalMart the prospects can't be all that freakn bad.
They are not losing touch- just incentive. They think "Why bother with this sh*t" when they are not certain it will make a profit. With Windows they know why: It was (is?) the only game in town and leads (hopefully) to $$$$. I am not saying I am happy with this but game companies think with thier wallets.
I miss the Karma Whores.
box looks same way as windows tin box and has paper stick saying "LINUX VERSION"
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
As Carmack mentioned in another post, supporting the Mac is significantly easier to some respects because the platform is standardized. When a developer says "we support a PowerMac G4" you can be pretty sure what that entails, and can test your software on a nearly identical machine as your customers will have. That's not necessarily the case with the infinite variety of wintel clones out there. Furthermore, Apple has solid OpenGL support at this point (don't know where Linux is in this respect). Plus, the Mac version did sell considerably better, which may have had something to do with the fact that most Linux users have Windows on their hard drive as well.
The situation should improve with OSX, because the APIs are far better than Mac OS 9, the environment is far more stable than Mac OS 9, and the development tools are free.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Have you never heard of LD_LIBRARY_PATH? If you really need a specific version of a library, ship with it. Have the users run a wrapper script that sets all this stuff up, then executes your binary. LD_PRELOAD might also be necessary.
...); won't work in binaries that are run against a different libc, or are you claiming something about the symbol _IO_stderr? Moreover, what system call stuff are you using that changes from linux version to linux version?
Unix allows a person to run a particular program in nearly its own environment. If you're that environment specific, take advantage of this. It is there for a reason.
As for libc, are you claiming that fprintf(stderr, "foo",
Besides, wtf are you doing that a change in the execution path of read() matters greatly? Whatever it is obviously violates the idea that you're supposed to not care how a library function is implementedm just care that it does what you want. What on earth is it? I can't think of any legitimate reaason to program this way, so I'm curious. What are you doing that this is an issue?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I think the real problem, as mentioned in a few of the posts on Quakeworld, was that 3D support was totally lacking for anyone who didn't own a Voodoo. I personally run a Rage Fury, and only within the past 3 weeks with the release of XFree 4 in Debian (thanks Brandon!) and a fair amount of tweaking, do I finally have the ability to run that copy of Q3 I bought for Windows back in November or so. A year later.
So now that the infrastructure is largely in place for a lot of users (nVidia finally got great drivers going too) why not give it a go? It simply wasn't there for most people a year ago, but now id may be able to sell more boxes. Hopefully they'll take this in to account and release a Linux box for Doom III. If they do... I'll buy it. I'm already planning to buy either Tribes 2 or Deus Ex when it's released on Linux.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I support ID in this decision. Very few people exclusively use Linux, and it isn't financially sound to attempt to cater to them. If Linux binaries are available, then the Windows version is the way to go, because it will run on both operating systems. Granted it would be nice if ID was willing to get risky and do it regardless of the financial costs. However, it just doesn't make sense.
Home Depot announced that it would stop selling nails designed to be hit with bricks. Surveys indicated that most customers preferred hitting them with hammers, despite the fact that bricks were cheaper and that the process for making bricks was well documented and open.
Many people in the brick community expressed dissapointment. One of their leading spokesman took a break from mixing red clay and was quoted as saying that "bricks still have a promising future as nail pounding devices. We just have to educate users about how it isn't so bad if you have good nails with wide heads, and properly bake your bricks. This doesn't change the fact that bricks are a great building material either, but we think they have the potential for so much more".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
One-ton tomato
We have already heard about Id's dissapointment with the sales of Q3 and the support issues.
One thing I found especially interesting was that he said "retailers don't want it". Not good news for the Linux shrink-wrap software movement."
You didn't know that? I knew this every time I went into Babbages in the mall, and noticed the Linux section of software consisting of about 3 titles.
Retailers don't want Quake 3 Linux unless it is going to sell. We have been knowing that Linux games do not sell well in stores (I'm not saying they sell like hotcakes on-line), and this isn't surprising (at least not to me.) I think most people who would buy for Linux realize that the selection is going to be MUCH better online, and disregard the idea of running to their local game shop to buy a linux version of game X. I bougth Heroes 3 without even considering that I could buy it local.
Retailers won't 'want' Linux games until Linux has a significant exclusive portion of the computer gaming market.
It is great, however, that Id is a supporter of Linux and believes in Linux enough to help 'kick-start' gaming.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Most Open Source developers know that even at a source code level, it is hard to get things to compile and work the same way everywhere. Just between distributions, kernel & glibc patches, and libc and kernel versions differ making things really strange to get to work everywhere without problems. Trying to do something similar in binary is horrible in terms of support. The only thing for a company to do (which seems reasonable, but would also get flamed on slashdot) is to list a specific distribution as supported and categorically refuse to support anything else. That distribution would likely be Redhat (at least in the states). People wanting to run the application in another distro that has problems would have to either match redhat as best it can, ask for help elsewhere.
Of course I am of the opinion that linux in gerneral does not lend itself well to binary distrbution at all. Most Open Source developers
are so reliant upon people using the Open Source development model, that ABI compatibility is not important enough to give enough attention to keep old binaries working, most people can just recompile and go on with their lives.
Well, this might be changing, gcc developers, glibc, and the other big projects seem to be getting more concerned with ABI compatibility between versions, so who knows what will happen..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Linux is my choice but it isn't near Windows in terms of providing a consistant environment when you are trying to sell a product to the masses. I personally don't know many people using it as a desktop operating system. You're fooling yourself if you believe that it is anywhere close to repeating it's server success on the desktop.
Come on, I mean, if I buy a game, I've bought the *game* - I should be able to run it under Windows or Linux or MacOS - whatever operating system takes my fancy at the time.
Why would anyone lock themselves into only playing the game under Linux when they could buy the Windows version, download the shareware Linux version and hack it so it ran the retail CD.
Puhlease.
I completely agree with the post. There are so many different types of Linux that a particular piece of software won't work on all platforms. There's a problem that many programmers have in writting software for all the different desktop environments. Also, I've noticed that many Linux users would rather ge something off the internet or "borrow" it from a friend rather than actually buy a shrink-wrapped box.
--
Let's not confuse slashdot with the linux community as a whole, or especially with the linux development community, ok? There are lots of people working with linux who *are* sensitive to the many ways in which linux falls short compared to the competition.
It seems for every centrist pointing out ways in which Linux needs to be improved, or ways in which the peculiar economics of the Linux community might be a disincentive to some commercial developers, there are 2 anonymous cowards trolling about how linux sucks and will never amount to anything and, yes, they may get modded down pretty quickly. I know that I have seen quite a lot of good, 'centrist' critiques modded up on slashdot, though, so it's not all one way.
I would, however, argue the point you make about 'why linux will never take off'. I believe linux has already taken off, and the more it does take off, the less important the fanatics will be. Keep in mind, OS/2, Amiga, and Macintosh all had legions of fanatics, and the reason they did is that each platform had something genuinely worthwhile to bring to the table, but every user those platforms attracted quickly realized that they were in the minority and that network effects would tend to extinguish their investments in time and money in those platforms. One natural result is zealotry to try and get the numbers up and achieve the critical mass required to have a sustainable community and economy around the platform.
Linux is still in the minority, but it is growing at a rate that the Mac, Amiga, and OS/2 never saw. We have plenty of people developing software for Linux, and we have big name vendors like IBM, HP, SGI, Dell, RedHat, and others who are investing in the platform in their corporate interest as a hedge against Microsoft. We have people around the world, speaking dozens of languages, all contributing to and developing fr Linux. As this proceeds, Linux will grow out of its fanatical stage, because the need for it will have dissipated.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I play Quake III Arena on Linux. I will undoubtedly play Team Arena on Linux, since I'm already planning on buying it as soon as it's released. I didn't buy Q3 for Linux, however.
Why? I bought it the day it came out (two copies, actually... but that's another story). Would I have bought Quake 3 for linux had it come out on the same day? Very possibly. What I'd really like is a CD with the PC, Linux, and Mac versions all there. Because of released schedules very few companies do things like this, though.
I would, however, consider Q3A for Linux a success. Why? Because of the good effects. Loki not only has supported Q3A for Linux, they have also ported QERadiant, the level editor, to Linux. In fact, even on Windows Gtkradiant is now the preferred version of the level editor. It has more features and is considered more complete, and it looks identical on Windows. That's right, the Windows GUI is a copy of the Linux version.
It's interesting how Loki has been able to use their projects to benefit the game community reguardless of platform. Gtkradiant has been an excellent tool. The work on a mpeg library has resulted in the excellent smpeg library that most video apps now rely on. The OpenGL driver that Loki made for Unreal Tournament has been ported back to Windows and is superior to the driver Epic originally had. And while I haven't checked its progress yet, OpenAL is an audio library that has a promising future.
X'cuse me? Not handling dynamic mem alloc? Troll....
Whether you like to hear it or not, he was right: support is a nightmare on Linux. Sure, having about twenty variants of Linux might sound great to a geek, but it *is* a nightmare to someone who has to make sure his game works "out of the box" on each of those variants. Consider the following:
/usr/quake3, /usr/local/quake3, /usr/games/quake3, /usr/local/games/quake3, or /opt/quake3? Or will the user install it someplace completely different? Without something like the registry, how is Q3 supposed to know where the game is installed? If the installer wants to install the proper drivers, how is it supposed to know (without the user telling it) where to do so?
/usr/X11, /usr/X11R6, or /usr/local/X11R6? Or, is it in some other place? Okay, let's have the installer ask the user where X is. Oh, the user doesn't know. What's this? This is a kernel driver? Now the user has to recompile his kernel. Does he even know how to do that? How can the installer tell the user how to do this if it has no idea where the Linux source tree is supposed to be?
1. Packaging - which format? Tar/gz? That would be the most "portable" packaging format, but will your version of Linux keep track of installation/uninstallation of tar/gz packages? Probably not. What about RPM? That could work, but not every distro has the RPM tool. Let's not even get into package dependencies.
2. Location - where do you install this? Should Q3 be installed in
3. Desktops - how do you add a link to the game on the desktop/menu? Does the user have KDE1, KDE2, GNOME 1.0, or GNOME 1.2? Or does the user have some completely different WM (E, WindowMaker, Blackbox)? How can the installer figure out what it has to do to make a desktop shortcut? Answer: it doesn't. There's no standard way to add a desktop shortcut or menu shortcut across window managers/desktops.
4. Drivers - how do you figure out what to do with them? Are these kernel drivers, or are they X drivers? On that note, where is X located?
Now you can mod this down if you want, but keep in mind that I'm not flaming Linux, I'm just trying to point out a serious issue. Yeah, it's really great that you have "choice" but you have to keep in mind that you need a STANDARD way to do things! Period! I'm a FreeBSD user myself, and despite the fact that I have no "choice" (there's only one FreeBSD), I'm quite content with it. Remember kids: even if there's just one Linux you can still pimp it out all you want.
Here are the things I can see wrong with Linux's in userspace.
/proc, and some in source is unacceptable.) Somebody on another discussion pointed out how Sun has a consistant config accessible from /proc that applies to everything on the system. If that works, then copy it. If it doesn't then invent one that does.
/etc and a non-standard script wrapper to the SysV initscripts), developers being non-standard for no good reason ("but I like TK better!") and it gives the users the freedom to just install "Linux" without dealing with the bloat, the headaches, and the incompatibilities that they have to deal with today.
1) The kernel development model is flawed. What they have right now, a major kernel release every two years or so is fine, two years isn't terribly bad in dealing with SW incompatiblity. However, there are scads of changes in the patch releases. That should not happen. The interfaces between minor versions should be set in stone. That's going to take some actual *architecturing*on the part of kernel developers, but hey, the BSD guys do it, so should the Linux guys. Several improvements I can see in this area:
a) Constant interface between patch releases. Even requiring a recompile is unacceptable. You're not in hacker-land anymore, deal with it.
b) Seperate the drivers *completely* from the kernel. Totally modularized, not even part of the same source tree. The kernel should have a well defined API for drivers (like the VFS layer, or a network driver layer) and stick to that API until the next x.y release comes along. The kernel already has these to some extent, but too many important things are dependant on the kernel source, and the interfaces are not written out and strictly enforced. Having the source can be a blessing, but it leads people to access stuff in ways that they shouldn't.
c) Prep the kernel for commercial space. That means a consistant way to configure EVERYTHING. (Seperate methods like some parameters in modules.conf and others via
2) Then there is the issue of distro. Standards are absolutely necessary. Standards != lack of choice. Take 3D cards. There are many different 3D architectures out there, but they all follow a standard API. The only person who should care about the specific distro is the user, who chooses that based on things he likes about it. The app maker should just code to "Linux" and be done with it. KDE and GNOME are only exacerbating the problem. At least when all you had was X and a window manager, you could use 99% of the features of the windowing system without caring what the user is running. KDE and GNOME aren't even source, much less binary, compatible. Sure you can install multiple libraries, but that leads to both bloat and support headaches. Same thing for extraneous libraries. I am furious that urpmi uses Python? Why the hell? You've already got Perl don't you? I don't care which scripting language the system uses (and stuff like urpmi is not an application, it is part of the overall OS) but pick ONE and stick with it. Then there are the miscellaneous libraries that people seem to like using. Don't. Release quality apps should not use TK, XForms, FLTK, or any other non-core API. I have already talked about how the LSB should publish a strict set of guidelines and distro makers should voluntarily adopt them, and about how GNOME and KDE should become binary compatible before their userbase gets too large (see my other posts.) None of this takes away freedom from anyone. Distro makers are free not to obey the standards, users are free to use neither GNOME nor KDE, and developers are free to use miscellaneous APIs. What it prevents however, are distro makers being non-standard for no good reason (like Mandrake and its idotic desicion to symlink the contents of rc.d to
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Instead, the Linux community is too busy with their petty squabbles about whether KDE or Gnome is better. Either one is adequate and the Linux vendors should choose one by coin toss and then standardize on it. As long as getting Linux users together behind something is like herding cats, it will remain a cult OS with limited commercial product support.
few distros come set up for 3d acceleration out of the box, and getting it running requires too much manual configuration. Mesa libraries certainly don't make it easy. Not until XFree86 4 and mature drivers for every major card come standard on most distros will 3d games be easily set up. Stuff like Nvidia's binary only drivers aren't going to make that happen anytime soon.
perhaps it would be better if there were two strains of Linux: one for non-geeks with a canonic Linux kernel that changed every three years or so, and one for strain for the geeks exactly as we have now. this could be implemented in a number of ways, from the top of my head by way of a muliple boot solution. or a "standard" "stable" kernel at all distributsions were obliged to support, or something. certainly it's possible. but is to doable?
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
Nice comment. But it ignores some things:
1) Not everyone is ready to open source their cutting edge software in a cut-throat market.
2) It would really suck to have to reboot to play a game.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know a lot of dual-booters who bought the windows version the week it came out. They didn't want to wait. You really can't blame ID for releasing for their biggest revenue-generating platform first. That's just common sense business at work.
On to Linux, I think part of the problem is that it is having a massive identity crisis. You don't see the OpenBSD community up in arms about the lack of games there. That's because OpenBSD has established its purpose as a server OS. It does one thing very well, and the rest is not important. Sure, flexibility is nice, but do you really WANT the same basic kernel running both your wristwatch and your render farm? It looks to me like the folks at Be had the right idea. Unfortunately, their market space happens to be the same as that of consumer Windows versions, and those users tend to be the ones who don't want to rock the boat.
I suppose that the distros could solve this to a certain extent, but everyone here keeps getting their panties in a knot about the whole "Red Hat isn't an OS" thing and the "GNU/Linux" thing.
One more point for the "Don't buy it because it's not Free" folks: everything has its limits, even Free Software. One of the joys of entertainment is that someone else is doing the work. I'm happy with a binary if it means that the guy on the other end isn't using an aimbot.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Except those who bought a brand-spankin' new video card six months after the game shipped and realized that this bootable CD has no drivers for it.
What are you suggesting as a solution, then? The only things I can think of, assuming you are not willing to rework your build system to use autoconfigure, is to build for specific distros and get very particular about what rpm or deb dependencies are required.
MacOS X has a nice concept of 'software bundles', where an installed application is actually a directory that contains all of the resources and particular libraries that the application requires. I can imagine that something like that might help the situation out somewhat, but it sounds like you are really complaining about the rate of change in the Linux world, which isn't likely to settle down as soon as you would like.
Speaking as both a developer and as a consumer of software on Linux, I have to say that spending the time to make your build environment shippable and understandable by outsiders is a very worthwhile investment.. it may feel a bit funny to spend development time on something other than the actual code that the user will run, but treating such packaging issues with respect is the mark of a good development team and a good product.
Anyway, I'd say that if your product (which sounds quite complex and interesting.. what does it do, precisely?) is so finicky as you suggest and the burden of compiling binaries for various linux distros is so high, I'd imagine that you would have to decide if the revenue or attention you get from making it available is worth the effort, as it would seem unlikely you're going to be able to get much peer development with a closed source product.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Its so sad, this linux community. Perhaps worse than the os/2 guys. At least those guys were professionals. This group is just a bunch of dirty hippies. "A complete git"? Who talks like that?
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
A very good majority of the games which ran on Win95 -- any version -- will still run on any of those platforms you mention... like Windows NT, Win98, WinME, etc.
This is certainly not my experience! Many games "require" DirectX 5 (*) which was just not available for NT 4. Better yet, a fair number of those games don't work on Win2k because they check for the OS not for the DLLs ("X doesn't work on NT because it required DX5"), even though Win2k does have a full DirectX 7 install, including Direct3d finally. Even a bunch of OpenGL games use DX for either UI or Sound/Control stuff, so they don't work either.
With all of that said, I'd still rather develop my (crappy little) games on Windows than Linux - the big mess of linux 'nearly' things is too annoying: it nearly supports hardware 3d, it nearly supports some soundcards, it nearly supports USB game controllers... maybe I'm just unlucky with my choices of hardware.
(*)the reason seems to be largely because it was the first version to have DirectInput, so you can deal with controllers in a standard way.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Well.... just to nitpick.
Before there was DirectX, there was WinG, a different "high-speed" graphics library. For example, see this thing I found on Google.
WinG originally came out for Windows 3.1, I think around 1992.
So it was at least thirteen years before there was any explicit gaming support in a Microsoft OS.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
In reality linux is the marketing only OS. Let's look at a typical linux distro or dev shop.
- Marketing - $alary plus $tock
- Venture Capital - lots of $tock
- Management - $alary plus $tock
- Developers - mostly "the thanks of the community"
- Testers - almost totally "the thanks of the community"
Let's be honest, in a Linux distro or dev shop, the money you get is inversely proportional to your tech level. (The "mostly" above is because most of the code involved wasn't developed in house). And what's amazing is that a lot of Linux techies actually don't notice that this is just a way of putting the money back in the non-tech hands.At my local Ecectronic Boutigue, the Linux games never drop in price. Q3 is just as expensive as it was the day it became availble. Linux's "Civilation: a Call to Power" is still somewhere in the $40-50 range while the Windoze vewrsion is near $25.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, a simple solution to this problem is to look at Linux Distro sales. RedHat probably wins this one, so, make Q3TA work on that and sell it as such.
Open source some of the code, (not all of it, mind you... Certain portions of the code are crossable to all kernels (textures, for instance) Just enough so that if someone wanted to tinker around with the source, he/she/it would be able to release, legally, a "patch" or new file for a specific flavor of Linux.
That's the way the Linux community is supposed to work.
"Hey, I've got this great new doohickey, and it runs great on my platform..."
"Really? Mind if I take a look at that copy and see if I can get it to run on MINE?"
While id probably wouldn't see too much in the way of sales dollars, they would still see SOME. Especially if they made it available via download from their site for a fee. That would essentially cut the middleman out of the equation.
These so called "Retailers" who don't want a Linux Q3TA on their shelves are probably worried about a possible riot when some ten year olds run in, pick up the "new Q3" and takes it home, only to find out that his computer looked at the disc, put on a beany cap, and started drooling. So, screw them. Don't use them.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
I don't know why people in the discussion where using poor support for NVidia hardware on Linux as an excuse for not buying the Linux version of Q3A.
If you are a Linux user and want to play games on Linux, why the hell did you buy a NVidia card?
Of course, support is better now. But when Q3A was released, it was poor.
Yeah, except for the game company, unless you think that they're in the charity business. And, well, they do happen to be quite an important part of the process. I'm sure they'd be ecstatic at getting nothing in return while having a community of vultures take their code for free.
Uhm...you haven't thought about this very much. The reason we want games for Linux is to avoid rebooting. That stand-alone Linux is not going to be setup to run any servers I need to run, nor will it be set up to allow me to get email, or do anything else I normally do. All it would be good for is playing that one game. Why not just boot to Windows to play the game? Windows is a better gaming OS than Linux at this time (better 3D support, much better sound support, better input device support, better voice support, better networking support) (Before anyone flames me on the networking support, note that I'm JUST talking about for games).
...but Linux just isn't right for games. Linux is good at other stuff. This is the reason I own a G4, for work, and a Windows box, for games. Windows/Linux just isn't good for the WORK I do, and Macs pretty much suck at games. It's just the way it is, and I accpet that. Some people in the Mac/Linux community don't want to accept that. I do, and I know a couple other people I know do. This is why we have different platforms, because people have different needs.
;).
There just isn't a one size fits all computer, just like there is no one size fits all car (or hammer
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
I bought a tin-boxed Q3A for Linux, and I have yet to play it under linux. Or windows for that matter. I ran it under IRIX on a 24 cpu Onyx2 (of course, only one CPU was used... sigh). And after that I played with it on a friend's mac.
Maybe I should have played online so my CD key would be registered... oh well, maybe the next generation of FPSes will offer a better chance for linux.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
This is a good thing. It address some core issue with linux on the desktop.
We must have a driving force that removes the "it's compatible with Whatever distro x.X" and replaces it with "its compatible witl Linux kernak x with library x".We need to get the major distro companies to put in big letters the linux kernal version, with there distro append on it. so 2.16.2.x could be 2.16.2.x.RH1. this would get peopleused to knowing the kernal version.
We are trying to get Clear case on our linux machines, but they only support Linux 6.2. clearly they mean Red hat 6.2 distro of Linux. But as long as I have the "correct" kernal version and libraries it should not, and does not, matter what distro(if any) I use.
So I hope some people with clout in the Linux movements address this issue in a reasonable logical manor designed to make the Linux industry easier for support, but not designed towards a specific distro.
of course having people who sell products for linux uderstand how linux works, and get out of the MS versioning habit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ID claims that sails are disappointing. Quite right. Many users had to wait nearly a year to see normal X 3D support on Linux. And note this "X 3D" support. There is a "less noted" library called Mesa that ID programmers seem to have forgotten. Better to have suffered amnesia. Quake II worked with this library on Voodoo cards and preformed quite good. Yes, this stuff didn't work with other cards but one also has to note that, back then, few card vendors supported Linux. However ID made two big mistakes on this. First it dropped out Mesa support and ran straight to X. That was the MISTAKE. X didn't have normal 3D support back then. Only two months ago we started to see distros with NORMAL 3D support. And even most developers/testers have seen it not before July. So sorry ID. The sales are bad because you made an incorrect move.
Now about kernel changes and other stuff. I have Quake2 working for nearly two years. under those same binaries of version 3.20. Software mod AND 3D mode. Yes, on Voodoo. But they are working! I ran from 2.0.X through 2.4.0-test6 with it (the newest kernels were not tested because I had no time to play). I ran from glibc 2.0 through 2.2. I had TONS of Mesa and glide libraries running on this Quake2 stuff. Yes, sometimes something broke. But mostly because I wanted to test a new beta or to play a little with performance/quality. So I don't get the point. Even considering the dangers of closed source, their damn Quake2 3.20 is still alive.
Maybe the fact ID tried to play a pioneering role on Linux 3D games. provoked this? Very probable. They started when all here was damn green alpha. No drivers, no libraries, no architecture. And the risks were HUGE. So probably, due to this, Quake2 became unpopular. But there is one thing that ID can be proud of... Their push through linux gave the system a real 3D system. The one we have been waiting for nearly 3 years. It is fantastic how things run now. Their push forced everyone to think and do the engine. Before this there were only some adventurous attempts. After Quake3 we had a real combinated push through 3D support on X. And here I can only say - Thanks ID...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here is my list of why I think Quake 3 didn't sell well for linux, and why I personally didn't buy the linux version:
1. At the time of launch (last christmas) there wasn't a whole lot of consumer 3d support for linux. XFree4.0 wasn't out. Aside from a few unstable snapshots of XFree 4.0 (3.9.17 or something like that), only a few cards actully had performance capability marginally adequate for Quake3 (some 3dfx and Matrox using the utah-glx drivers, I believe). Nvidia cards didn't get functional 3d driver support till the end of spring, and they represent at least half of the hardcore gamer 3d card market. In addition, most gamers at the time who cared about 3d performance had a Nvidia Geforce256 or Nvidia TNT2, which at the time were essentially unsupported in linux. Tell me id, now why would people buy your game if they couldn't it play well on their machine? Did you ever consider that? Do you think linux zealotry extends far enough to buy non-functional products just to support an o/s?
2. Quake 3 wasn't exactly the holy grail of gameplay, either. Quite frankly, it looked like id must have given all of it's game designers vacation while they put it together. And I'm not just talking about the first player missions sucking. That is excusable: obviously the game was made almost solely for multiplayer play. The problem was that the multiplayer game was crappy, too, and what it tried to do a number of other games were already doing a whole lot better (e.g. Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, Tribes). By the time most savvy linux gamers had the ability to even play Quake 3 in linux with the 3d drivers released later, they had already sampled it under Windows 9x and been bored with it. This was the experience for me and most of my friends, at least. Most everyone in my dorm stopped playing it extensively and went back to other games after a month. Contrast this with Starcraft or Diablo II, for instance, which would probably sell pretty well right now if blizzard bothered to release a linux port.
PC game sells are nothing - a mere 15% of the game market at most? Consoles will always trump PCs, so why bother to make PC games? Now you can make and use game mods on your PSX2 and most of the consoles coming out - why bother with the various types of hardware and operating systems?
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Gee, linux seems to have as much or better potential for games as windows after all - since linux can be embeded in consoles.
When I bought it, I enquired for the Linux version, but was greeted by blank stares.
So I went and bought the Windows version.
I later bought the Linux version as well, but many people will not do this. (It's a waste of money, I know, but I really liked the tin box!
;)
People tend to buy the first version available.
I'm not sure how other people in other countries experienced this, but I stay in South Africa, and the average IQ here is abysmal.
The problem is the script-kiddie type of people that work in computer software retail stores tend to be pro-DOS... erm... Windows 98/ME I meant.
My $0.01999999999999999999999
Domini.
And don't forget, UT runs _FAST_ on 1920x1200...
(like 25-35fps in 16-bit, which is fine for me.. I remember when 10fps in Quake I was l337...)
Your Working Boy,
Why should games be any different? If the commercial developers won't make games, then we're going to have to do it ourselves, just like much of everything else in Linux.
As a blatant plug for my own project, this is exactly what we at WorldForge are shooting for. Good, free games targeted to Linux (with Windows ports being secondary.) If you want to see more Linux games, with the added benefit of being free and open, then lend a hand.
Bryce
Well, almost nothing. Since Windows 2000 has native DirectX, that means that sound and input don't lag as much as they do in NT4. Also, that interview was back in September of 99. When Win2K was released (which was only a week after I got my copy at the Microsoft RoadShow, hehe), he probably got it right away. Sound and input lag were a total bitch back in the NT4 days; when games started to get really popular, Microsoft knew that they had to get true DirectX support into the next NT.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I thought the beauty of Linux was the customizeable kernal. Couldnt game companys use bootable CD's to distribute their products? That way they could distribute custom kernls, X-servers and the like for their games. Maybe they could seek out the swap part on a users hard drive for storage or whatever. Maybe the problem isn't which distro to support but which distro to boot on the CD.
Given the major linux distros like fighting for marketshare, none of them will agree on a format.
Rather than try to get all the Linux distros to play nice together, it would be eaiser to point to an outside source of Linux compatibility and declare that the standard. This is a BETTER solution than declaring one distro your 'standard'.
Lo and behold, such a platform exists. FreeBSD and the Linux compatibility layer.
Think of this: If your code works with the BSD compatibility layer (BTW, Quake runs FASTER {ok, not much faster} on FreeBSD's compatibility layer than it does on RedHat 7.0), and it doesn't work on a 'linux distro' or your configuration, exactly how compatible is said distro/your configuration?
The only other way is to ship a distro on the game disk and claim that is the SUPPORTED version. All others are unsupported.
RPM does NOT solve the issues with the 150 or more linux distros, nor the different kernels. RPM is a RedHat solution, and there are a whole bunch of other Linux distros that don't think RedHat *IS* linux, just *A* linux.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I try to take a objective view on this issue. However, I can say that I think that, given a choice, developers would go for ease of distribution multiplied by volume to decide the amount of effort they put into a product. If there was, for example, a set standard that was uniformly (and officially) upgraded every six months to a year, then this would be a bit easier for all parties involved.
Someone earlier posted a great idea about a standards committee. If such a governing body did exist, then any changes made could be regulated. If a user wants to go ahead and add the latest, greatest builds of code to his machine, let him. However, if a board existed, then it could withhold updates until everything is (known to be) compatible, at least within reason.
Anyway, these are my late-night ramblings. If the above makes no sense to you, it's not your fault.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I use both Windows 2000, IRIX, and MacOS, so I'm not exactly partial to any one view. I mean, If I could get more games that worked on my SGI system, I'd be in heaven!
--
Mike Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
they'd like to do that, and Carmack has made Q3 to be very portable, but with Christmas approaching, they can't afford not to release the windows version as soon as they can, even if putting a linux binary on the same cd would only take a week more. The plan with Q3 was to release Linux, Mac, and Windows at the same time, but the holidays again forced them to release windows first, and then Linux a couple weeks later. Much quicker than most porting efforts, but not quick enough to stop the dual booting Linux users to get the windows version and wait for the linux binary to be posted for download
Well, actually we don't, but I bet alot of people would buy it - maybe just so they could convert from a dual boot sys to a Linux only. It would save some headaches. It would probably have to be VERY straightfoward/easy to use. Once people get sucked into the system they tend to fool around with it and then they'll learn Linux.
Personally, I think that computer games were responsible for the success of the home PC and made them ubiquitous.
..........FULL STOP.
I totally agree with this. The only thing that I suggest is not to release it for one distribution, but to make Linux operating systems run on the same KDE. Also, open source is great but when there are too many hands in the pot, things can go awry. Also with the drivers it is not only quake 3 that had problem with drivers but many graphical 3d programs. The only way is to adapt with patches. Supporting it with only one video card would by pass our business laws that keep one company from having a monopoly. To better the release of quake for linux, it would be best if all of the developers get together and say "HEY!". That way they can all develop along the same standards.
Remember, too, that Windows has, for Microsoft, no marginal cost: A hardware manufacturer makes copies from a master disk for each new PC it sells.
Marginal costs are not a true measure of costs to a company for developing software. Sure, the marginal cost is near zero (or closer to $3.00 if you buy it in a store). So what? What about the cost of R&D? Marketing? Sales departments? Legal departments? Designers, artists, foleys, etc. all still need to get paid.
They pay this cost up front, and amortize the rest over time. The average MS software package gives you 90 days of free tech support. This can cost MS anywhere upwards of $5 per call.
So it DOES cost a lot of money to produce windows. Just because the media doesn't cost much, that doesn't mean that it doesn't cost anything to create.
You might want to think about that.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I think the most serious flaw with linux is the fact its under GPL... the GPL is very anti-business (GPL == no money, business == money..therefore business != GPL) in its very form. The culture that's built up around GPL makes it very difficult for a company to make money off linux (yes i know not all software must be GPL'd..but the culture is that way).
If anyone was working an open source project that they'd like to have a business based around some day, I would definately tell them to NOT GPL it under any circumstances.
-
No offense, but it's a support nightmare due to the multiple flavors of popular versions and ever-changing kernel...
Well, idFolk, no offense, but it's a nightmare to think you're this out of it. "multiple flavors of popular versions" -- I assume they're referring to distributions. This isn't a terribly hard problem to get around, and for the sake of comparison, it's not much different than Win95 v. Win98. Things are in different places, versions of files may be different, etc. If it really gets your panties in such a knot, static link the binaries.
The "ever-changing kernel" also has me a bit confused -- what's the issue here? As a general rule, the guts don't change significantly inside of a version series (e.g. 2.2.x) to make incompatibility issues. So what's at hand here? My Loki tin specifically says "Kernel 2.2.x". If you're running on, say, 2.0.1, why would you purchase this game, or even expect it to run, hmm? I've been through probably 3 or 4 2.2.x-series kernels and 30 recompiles since purchasing Q3A, and it's gone off without a hitch each time. It's also run perfectly on both a Redhat system and a Debian system (which has been slink, woody, and potato).
Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like id's sold out to the FUD market. Have they been purchased by MS pending X-Box, too?
Microsoft have been in existence since 1979, and DirectX 1.0 came out in 1995, so therefore it was sixteen years before they had any kind of framework for gaming on any of their operating systems.
The launch of Windows 2000 came and went with only modest fanfare despite Microsoft's best efforts to turn the San Francisco announcements into a big event. Some observers took this as a sign that Microsoft's heyday has passed or even that the company might be in trouble.
) by John Heilemann reveals how Silicon Valley's most powerful executives showed craven cowardice when government officials asked them to speak publicly about the need for stern remedies in the antitrust case.
Bull. Microsoft is still by far the most powerful single force in the technology industry. The woe-is-Redmond chorus is a combination of wishful thinking and misinformation. And Microsoft's public relations tactics are at least partly responsible for the impression that the company may somehow be facing tough times.
Consider the company's response after U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his scathing "findings of fact" in the antitrust trial last fall. The judge almost totally accepted the government's arguments, making clear he hadn't believed a word of Microsoft's testimony. The findings, by almost all expert accounts, are a prelude to a verdict against the software company.
Microsoft launched a furious public relations offensive, trying to convince the public that even if it was found guilty of wrongdoing -- of course, the company continues to deny what almost everyone else not on the Microsoft payroll can plainly see -- the offenses didn't justify any serious remedies.
The company then posted another quarter of massive earnings and revenue growth. Microsoft's cash-generation machine has accelerated despite a spending spree for new technology "outside such core businesses as Windows and the Office suite. Those investments in bandwidth and other technologies would be almost impossible for any other company, but they guarantee Microsoft a strong position in whatever markets emerge in coming years. Wall Street's valuation of Microsoft is a rational bet on further strong growth.
Anyone who thinks Microsoft's clout is ebbing needs only to read the March issue of Wired magazine. An article (www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/deepthroat.html
Microsoft likes to talk about how the prices of personal computers keep dropping. What it doesn't like to remind people is that the price of a single, crucial component in desktop computers -- the Windows operating system -- hasn't gone down, and it certainly hasn't improved in functionality at anything close to the rate of hardware improvements.
Remember, too, that Windows has, for Microsoft, no marginal cost: A hardware manufacturer makes copies from a master disk for each new PC it sells.
Sure, Microsoft faces competition on the server, as it always has, and in the newer market for handheld devices. But more and more PCs are still being sold every year, and in that market Microsoft continues to wield almost absolute power and collect continued monopoly profits, generating more than enough cash to buy into the new technologies it covets.
Some trouble.
Huh? How do you define a standard? What other OS or platform support directX? Am I missing something here?
modprobe emu10k1
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I hate to compare this to a hot-button political issue, because some people will be against the argument just because they're mad at the analogy (so I suppose that getting modded down for this part wouldn't be too unfair), but the situations are too similar, so here goes. Your post totally reminded me of Al Gore's speech on Monday where he stood smiling before the cameras and told America that his losing in front of the Supreme Court wasn't bad, and in his eyes, wasn't even a neutral thing, but actually a good thing, because it gave him a roadmap for his lawyers in future cases. I didn't even see one single person, not the shillingest of the shills, actually try to defend him on that one.
This is all my opinion and you may not agree. I had not planned on buying Q3 Team arena anyway. I am sorry but I was dissapointed with Q3. (That may account for low sells. Q3 was just quake2 mulitplay with better graphics and higher system requirements) Also I wish they would quite saying linux sales were low. I am sure most desktop linux users bought Q3 just the windows version because the linux version was not avaible. I don't even own a windows system and I bought the windows versoin because it was at Best Buys and the linux versoni was not. Don't get me wrong I think Id supporting us is great. I am sorry but I think I will stick with UT. The weapon choices are alot better in my opion and it is just great. just my $.02
-- Tyler >+++++++[-]++++.---------.+.++++.++.
Yes, I wrote that article and I stand by what I wrote. Your characterization aside, Loki made a promise to me to resolve an issue I had with an order which they broke. Then they never fixed their web page, allowing others to make the same mistake again and again without even letting their customers know beforehand just what might happen. In a nutshell, if one purchases a pre-release title and in the same order purchases something else (even several titles), because of issues with their distributor whatever else was purchased will get back ordered along with the pre-release until that pre-release ships. This is right off of their web page, with no warning whatsoever. Months later, the problem with their web page still hasn't been fixed, nor has the game in question been released (though I admit that's a separate issue). I note that anyone who ordered other product along with Alpha Centauri five months ago would still not have receieved any product. This is no way to maintain customer friendly relations.
Have you ever experienced problems like this with L.L Bean or Amazon? Neither have I. Welcome to the world of business, where customer service matters.
Cheers,
--Maynard
All I have to say is, when the hell are they going to update their website?? I mean, c'mon, Quake II is so 1990's!
---
evil adrian
evil adrian
This isn't anything that someone else hasn't said, but I figure if I put it up here, it will make the point that much more clear.
Any game that comes out should be released with both the Windows and Linux version together. Not only with this help make up for the supposed money lost, but it will make me feel much safer with my purchase. Ok, if it I can't get it to work with Linux, at least I can reboot and play it with Windows.
Plus, there are many times when I just don't want to go through the hassle of rebooting my machine just to play a game. (Which means that the saves from the game should be compatible with both versions of the games).
Fair enough, but two points. First, GPL is not anti-business.. there are *tons* of companies producing and selling Linux and Linux accessories.. every PowerEdge server that Dell sells with Linux pre-loaded is real money. The support and service contracts that Red Hat has with Dell, IBM, etc., are real money. The $70 it costs you to pick up a box o' Red Hat at CompUSA is money. Signing up for automatic updates with the Red Hat network is money. TiVo is money.
Second, GPL is a particular license that is granted to J. Random User to download and use one's software, nothing more. If someone came to me and said, 'hey, i wanna use Ganymede on terms other than the GPL', I would say, 'take it up with The University of Texas at Austin's intellectual property licensing department, I'm sure they'd love to make a deal with you.'. Just because something is GPL'ed doesn't mean that commercial variants cannot be sold, provided that there was not significant contributions by others who would not be willing to see their contributions relicensed under a non-GPL license. TrollTech is doing this with their dual GPL/commercial licensing of Qt, and they are hardly alone in doing so.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
The software is not free. They are planning to release Q3 in binary form only. Thus the number of compiles they can do is limited compared to the possible configurations of kernel, distro, & countless other things GNU/Linux users can have. I know id releases old versions in source form, but I doubt they will be selling GPL-liscenced new software any time soon.
:-)) would allow a lot more users to enter their market. Sure they would lose some users to sharing, but they would also gain people running obscure configurations, not to mention the *whole posix market*. Yeah, this is mostly server/workstation, too, but there are a lot of BSD home users, plus a number of people who would install it anyway. I took a tour of my school's CS lab the other day and they were running Solaris (with GNOME!) on a Sun network (with Sun Rays--DAMN that was some cool stuff) and they were running Doom, I think. Maybe it was Quake 1. I'm not sure. It was probably because they knew they were having perspective research assistants coming through on tour, but it is a market, especially considering the number of UNIX machines out there. Plus, people could port it to Be, Amiga, and any other OS they want and send it back to id. In the end, company's really do benefit from making their software free and so do customers.
The other problem is that they way they are marketing the game, GNU/Linux is not a huge market for gaming. Windows may seem to have the lion's share (and then some) of gamers as users. GNU/Linux may seem to be mostly a server platform, but lots of home users are installing it to toy around with a UNIX-like OS. This is the real market for games on GNU/Linux. id should think of it this way: making their apps free (as in freedom
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# cd /
...have you ever tried to buy Q3A in germany? it's nearly impossible. the only european distributor (suse) wants you to show up and show them your ID-card, because Q3A is on the index of violent games in germany. that would be ok, but the problem is that you can't get the retail version in any regular gamestore either!
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
I cannot believe that people are ragging in ID so much. I am disappointed that there will not be a Linux boxed version of TA (I did purchase the boxed Linux version of Q3A). I am disappointed that they are not going to let Tux Games put the Linux binary on a CD -- although I have DSL so that matters less to me. But they are still going to release something that is Linux capable and try to improve Linux 3D in the process. That is giving a lot to the Linux community.
This whole "If ID had just released the Linux version at the same time..." mantra is getting old. If it is right or not we will never know. Yes I wish that they had and yes I believe that it would have made a difference but that is not how it played out. Live with it. I just hope folks "have learned their lesson" and are NOT going to purchase the Windoze version instead of a Linux version just because it is available sooner.
I have read on the Loki news groups a few times that 3D drivers are Loki's biggest support issues. That is why I try to read the news groups and even make a post when I discover a problem and solution even if I did not see that someone else had a problem. If you have any knowledge about 3D on Linux, I ask that you do the same. The better we can get 3D working for folks and the less support Loki and company have to do the more likely developers are to develop for Linux.
Thank you ID for your Linux support! Now everyone go vote with your dollars: Purchase games from Loki; Purchase games from Tribesoft.
This point seems obvious. The Linux 3D World is currently going through a chaotic transition state with a widely fractured installed base. Supporting a shrink-wrapped commercial application that depends on the details of that 'platform' is noble but kooky. This doesn't say much about what the state of Linux 3D in the future will be or what it would be like to support an application that used only Linux functionality in areas that are well standardized.
ID's "simultaneous release" meant that US shoppers were buying Win32 Q3A boxes in stores weeks before Loki were able to process "priority" orders for the Linux version.
I called shops over here "Will you have it?" "Yes". "On Linux?" "Yes." "Should I order?" "No, we'll get lots". Six months later they've never seen a single copy. I bought by mail order, from the states, paid a huge premium and got comparatively bad service, late. Only a few hard core people are going to put up with that. It shows.
Now, you own Linux and Windows, you know ID won't let you run one CD on both, and you know the Linux CD won't come for a month (maybe two). Which do you order? It's a no brainer. Good thing we're not depending on the Games industry to lead us anywhere these days.
I bought the aluminum box, and have been playing for months on my debian system.
I've done many, many "apt-get update ; ap-get dist-upgrades" over the same time period.
Absolutely no problem installing, and I consistently get 40-50 fps on a old K6-2 with a voodoo banshee.
The single issue I had was the game would slow to something like 1fps if the lighting was set to "lightmap" instead of "vertex", and I fixed that by experimenting with settings.
As far as slow sales, well, that's the "linux communitys'" fault. Freedom is not free, and you're gettig exactly what you pay for when you don't buy Linux products.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
If you wish to show Linux support, either make the purchase from us, or when you buy it, email to quake3@tuxgames.com and tell us that you bought it at a store elsewhere specifically to play it under Linux. We will forward our collected figures to id.
Unfortunately, however, id software have denied us permission to put their Linux binaries on the CD we will include, so we will instead be including an installer that will download the latest correct Linux binaries from the ID site during your installation. This will lead to a fairly slow installation, but is the best we can do to create an out-of-the-box linux game version.
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
I think retailers don't want linux games cause they will be no linux users in their store ! That's a normal thing if you thing of an FREE opereting system with FREE software policies :)
Perhaps a better solution to all this is to develop a linux distribution with the sole purpose of being a workstation. It would focus less on services like BIND and sendmail, and more on GUIs, games, office suites, etc. A distro or two like this would be easier to support and could be used as something developers can make games for.
This would be nice, considering all the extra crap that comes in distros that no one will ever use. Furthermore, a lot of that extra stuff presents security risks (like the ever-dangerous BIND). Developing for a desktop-centric linux distribution might help push linux on the desktop faster, too.
Regards,
Neil O_o
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
I don't know if anyone has noticed a few things yet:
a) q3a has been sold by loki for almost a year, and if you read their newsgroups, you see not very much problems related with kernel versions / distribution differences...
b) the sources for quake1 and quake2 are out for I don't know how long, and there are already several free quake-clone projects.
c) I don't know exact figures, but if the sales were so bad, loki would have shut down...
d) If the linux version came such a long time after the windows version (uhh two weeks! almost an eternity!) why is it that the demo versions appeared for linux first?
And if I remember it right, there was an interview in german c't, with one of the id developers, which summed up to 'we develop our stuff on linux'. If that's still true they should be able to do it properly, so that such issues as kernel versions, differences between distributions would never arise, right?
He admits that it wasn't terribly successful, but chooses to keep pushing it anyway. They're planning on continuing to release versions for Linux, just not in boxes... for now. Darn, a Linux version of a game requiring end users to install additional drivers and shipping later than the Windows release didn't do so well. I feel so underwhelmed.
Linux still isn't a "plug it in and go" as Windows. 3D acceleration is pretty iffy. There is nothing as smooth as GLSetup. But it's getting there. And when I plug something in and it doesn't go, Linux is much better at recovering and helping me fix it.
Have a bit of patience. As XFree 4 stabilizes and 3D acceleration becomes easier to install and maintain, I definately expect to the see the situation improve.
I eagerly look forward to removing my Windows partition.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
I'm not so sure unix is tamable anymore, and open source wars only make things all the worse. Just look at emacs and vi and their syntax influence extended poorly in many mixed programs in unix.
Whats a few dollars wasted on buying a worthless game, we keep doing it anyway buying other waste, if it can help. And remember "drops make an ocean".
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Oh well. It's nicing using good software. It's a whole lot nicer using Free software.
I understand that games are not easy to develop, But I for one can live without them.
signature smigmature
- James
Todd Hollenshead's Quake3World forum posts carry this information as well as much more. Including a little bragging about Id's Linux support:
"I challenge you to find a developer who has done more to support the Linux community than id. There isn't even a second place."
I don't think that's id's responsibility. DirectX comes with a program to do this called DXDIAG and I'm pretty sure whatever API Linux has should come with a way to test it as well. It's not the game creator's responsability to make sure the OS runs smoothly.
> They could also have provided some additional software to help the user configure their X server;
This should be the responsability of the people who programmed X. Why would they make an interface that can't even be configured properly with their own software?
To me, X should have been distributed with these features already there. Why should software developers have to also support the OS? The OS should be supporting the software developers.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Windows has binary-only drivers and it is hugely successful. I don't see your point.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
And for all the naysayers who said Quake was better because "it's open source", I'd like to remind you of something. UT was not open source. Buy EpicGames released a *free* full version edition of UT off their website. Granted, the graphics weren't as optimized as the Windows version, but it was trivial to get a dedicated server up and running (one of the main things I saw many Linux boxes doing for Quake 3).
Think about it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
What I have noticed among friends who have linux is that most are not into games like quake. Instead they own games like RailRoad Tycoon 2, Civ:CTP, Heroes 3 etc all purchased from loki games. All those programs have worked flawlessly on all the boxes I have tried. What I have seen is strategy games are far more popular on linux then twitch action games. I think it is just a different kind of market. Most of the people I know that use linux tend to be a lot more savy about computers and many are programmers. In that group thought games do better then twitch games.
.com s that failed because they mistargeted their market. It was not that the internet was a bad place to do business which some assumed it was that they were trying to sell to a demographic that was very rare to find on the internet and those that were there were targetted badly enough they felt insulted by the site.
What ID got was the people who decided to use linux because it is cool but who really know nothing about it. Since they were not tech savy they did not know how to set things up and thus support costs were higher for it. Honestly in any sales system you have to know your market. Considering the difficulty right now of setting up 3d graphics in linux they should not have marketted a twitch game on linux.
However this does not mean the linux game market is dead by any means. It just means that games have to be marketed more carefully. Windows is a huge market so the odds are any program will find a niche somewhere. Linux is smaller and also more specialized so mismarketing a product can be a killer.
Look at all the
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
That's the funniest damn thing I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. Wow, I bet you feel stupid now. Heh. (Hint: Lose the sig next time you post "anonymously")
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I think what the linux community needs is to get together, as a whole, and develope a really good abstraction layer for dealing with low-level hardware/kernal issues that vary between strains and distros. Just imagine a common interface that game devolopers could write for that would guarantee compatibility for just about any *nix (leaving those nitty details to the abstraction developers of course). Of course each version would be backwards compatible (a la M_soft's COM interfaces.. but better, of course ;). And it would mearly be an addition to the OS, not superceding anything.
(can i patent this? ;-)
+1 Funny guys
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CitizenC
My name is not 'nospam,' but 'citizenc'.
This should not have been modded up. Moderators please read what he's saying slowly. It's simply fuel at the OS war. And notice how the poor bugger posts anonymously asking to be modded up and then forgets to remove his sig (must have pressed the post anonymous button). Truly insane.
First off, I don't speak for Loki here; these are my personal observations.
Quake3 came out as a boxed product for Windows before it came out as a boxed product for Linux (speaking of the full commercial game, not the demos). Many of the hardcore Quake people went out and bought the Windows version, knowing that that Linux binaries could be downloaded for free. How many people are going to wait an unknown amount of time for a possible boxed Linux product when the Windows version is readily available with easily downloadable Linux support?
Multiple versions and ever-changing kernels? Please. Ever-changing GL drivers, perhaps, but that was hardly a problem since Quake3 was THE driver benchmarking tool (and Carmack was somewhat involved in their development). Support was a nightmare? I thought Loki was handling the support for the Linux version.
The Linux gaming community will get over it. There's more impressive stuff coming out (like Tribes 2). We'll get our gaming fix.
-John [badly in need of a faster 3D card for T2]
A common denominator in poorly written trolls such as this is the reference to "Windows". No discerning between 3.1 or 2000 Server; to the average Linux flameboy, it's all just "Windows". Sadly, ignorance of this type will be your downfall. Nonspecific xenophobia is characteristic of many violent, short-lived social movements. Nazism, for example. If you insist on criticizing my company's products, why not at least accurately specify which you are referring to? Even the difference between Windows® 2000 Professional and Server is significant. They are different operating systems intended for vastly different purposes. The differences are as clear as those between Linux and this ominous, uncertain "Windows" you describe.
Another flaw in your people's reasoning is your stubborn insistence that no other perspectives besides your own can possibly exist. From the perspective of a corporate executive, Linux is the "toy": it has a poor user interface; it does not support business standards (The fact that we are responsible for said paradigms becoming "standard" is irrelevant. Microsoft has gotten where it is by providing quality software and through smart business practice.); it has no real support; it is provided by at least a dozen "distributors" whose motivations are are often very different; it does not fit comfortably within existing enterprise computing environments. The closest thing Linux has to a business operating system is Red Hat's distribution, which, sadly, is bloated, buggy, and has an uncertain future.
Finally, I would like to say that you do have a choice. Any other belief is a delusion. Users have always had a choice, and Microsoft would not have survived the late Eighties (when Apple and IBM held marketshares comparable to our current so-called "monopoly") if this were not true. Linux has been a "hot topic" in the computing industry for over a year, and has received support from inummerable corporate juggernauts. The reason it has not succeeded is that it, at the moment, lacks what it takes to satisfy business computing needs both on the desktop and in the server room. It really is quite pathetic; if Linux's fifteen minutes of fame had come but two years later, it may have been mature enough to "make it". But Linux has proven itself to be yet another come-and-go, drop-in-the-bucket fad in the Dot-Com age. So the Enterprise returns to the tried and true solutions which have worked for as long as the modern business computing envirnonment has existed: Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hewlett Packard, et al. Even Apple has more of a place in this world than Linux does.
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
(This post is ©2001 Microsoft(TM) Corporation.)
"A country that's divided surely will not stand" As long as Linux is divided between all its different versions and variations software companies will be reluctant to develop and distribute Linux programs because there's too many version of Linux. Add to this the support problem and it just makes matters worse. Once Linux is one OS, once developpers and distributors unite to create one strong and stable version of Linux then things will be different. That's the way I see it. One standard, one OS, no division. Of course people are free to create separate customized versions and distribute them but they will have to adapt themselves to the programs released for Linux, not the contrary.
the subject says it all.
My problem is that model for running games sucks goatse asss. If that's the best you can do, just pack it in now and join the NetBSD users in the cellar.
I had every intention to purchase Q3 for Linux, however I had trouble getting hold of it and any retailer I went to (ignorance), and I couldn't order it online since I don't have a credit card.
There certainly are other contributing factors to why Q3 for Linux didn't sell as much as anticipated. If you think back a year ago to when it was first released, the only cards compatible with it were Voodoo2s. Eventually the Matrox cards gained support thanks to Mr Carmack, but NVidia had not released its GLX just yet, and XFree 4.0 was still a little while away.
No wonder it didn't sell as much as anticipated. Not only did you have to be a Linux user to consider buying it, you also had to have a Voodoo2.
Kinda gives me a warm fuzzy to see something like this. Linux is dead. why? different distributions. There's not enough of a real standard in it. It's all downhill from here unless Linus himself steps in and makes an official distro, ala FreeBSD. I hate windows, but still use it because I don't want to have to spend a few hours tweaking my system just to run a simple program. (I can already hear someone say "you don't have to take hours, just do this." sure... under WHICH distro? which kernel?) I wonder how well Q3:TA would do if they locked the linux version to a single distro... Flame on, I've got my asbestos underwear on.
Id may be disappointed with sales of Q3A, but I have to give props to Loki software, who are doing amazing work at not only porting games to Linux (real, full-on games like Unreal Tournament, yum), but who is also developing and releasing libraries like SDL and OpenAL to give Linux something akin to DirectX.
I've bought SimCity 3000 from Loki and have been playing a ton of Unreal Tournament with their downloadable patch, and both games feel every bit as professional and polished as their Windows counterparts, right down to the graphical install.
Game after game, Loki continues to do what I would have sworn was impossible to do on Linux, and they really deserve the support of the Linux community.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Instead, just pop over to Loki and order it.
I can easily see how it might be a losing proposition to try and get a Linux game shrink-wrap onto a retail shelf... I'm not sure that kind of volume exists in Linux gaming right now -- sounds like a money-losing proposition. Better to sell online.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Windows 2.0 (stillborn)
Windows 2.1 (real mode)
Windows 2.1 (standard mode)
Windows 2.1 (enhanced mode)
Windows 3.0 (real mode)
Windows 3.0 (standard mode)
Windows 3.0 (enhanced mode)
Windows 3.1 (real mode)
Windows 3.1 (standard mode)
Windows 3.1 (enhanced mode)
Windows 3.11
Windows for Workgroups
Windows for Workgroups (no networking)
Windows 3.x with Win32
Bob
Windows CE
Windows 95
Windows 95a
Windows 95b
Windows 95 OSR 2
Windows 98
Windows 98 SE
Windows NT 3.50
Windows NT 3.51 (much different from 3.50)
Windows NT 4.0
Windows ME
Windows 2000
That's 27 and I probably missed a lot. Double it many times more for int'l localized versions, esp, CJK versions.
Every OS has problems getting software onto it at first, so any panic is rather premature. Windows has a huge stranglehold at the moment, but as people move and as Linux improves, the apps will come. The corporate market is the one to aim at, as that's how DOS/Windows got acceptance, using the same thing at home as at work. Give it time. It took Microsoft 16 years to create a decent framework for games and Linux isn't even 10 years old yet. I doubt, though, that it will take more than a year to get this sorted. The Linux movement has gained serious momentum in the last 18 months - expect even more excellent things for the next 18.
Damnit. I'm sorry if so. :(
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So who's going to be running game servers then?
I work for a research project that releases binaries of its product free to whoever wants to download it. Our source is closed(for reasons too nasty to get into, so don't bother asking) and this is the best solution we have right now. Supporting linux is a right bastard of a nightmare when you are releasing binaries. Sure, dynamic objects were supposed to solve the problem, but uh, ever use NIS? The totally braindead way of doing NIS completely kills any hope of releasing a statically linked binary that uses it(the nss libraries hard code dl_open, and use full library paths instead of the shortcut names like they are supposed to). If you supply -static on the gcc command line you'll get something static, that then mmaps and dl_opens a shared library manually. :(
Needless to say the backwards compatibility is a very scary concept concerning libraries in linux, especially libc!
Routinely hyperimportant symbols like _IO_stderr
get changed with a difference in the third revision number of a library! That is insane. This means if I used stderr in the compilation of a library with one version of libc, and then later link against it with the new libc while creating a static executable you get permanant, unfixable link errors. This is not happy for people who just shrink-wrap executables and sell them. Not everyone wants or is able to release thier source to be compiled on the target architecture before use. One of the reasons we don't is because our project is pretty old and the build system is a total house of cards nightmare and only the hard core developers truly understand it. Do you realize how many support problems we would have to waste time on just to get a user to compile our product when all they just want to do is use it?
The build system works just fine for us, and it would take too much effort to make it easier to do for the average person. Why break it if it works already?
Also, another killer for doing any type of code that depends on the libraries themselves is that people will partially upgrade thier distribution.
Say thier running a 2.4 kernel with a glibc-2.1.1 library. Sure this is fine, but a shrink-wrapped
binary is gonna flip out if you do anything even remotely system-code oriented. Since so much changes in linux so quickly and there can be so many permutations, it becomes impossible to produce executables that will run reliably on linux.
So enter the subject of the message. It is in linux's best interest that you actually compile the product you are about to use before using it.
Linux is trying to kill executable only distibution methods and promote open source. Frankly it is a bad idea to exclude precompiled binaries and here's why. Say you are in a situation where a group of people run a centralized file server, and other groups with different administrative domains all share from the centralized server. Now, install some packages on the file server and immediatly there are problems as now only SOME of the other groups can run your program. The solution? Recompile the program for every single type of linux there is in each group(yeah, just try to get them to do that all at once, they are seperately administered right?) and complicate the file structure of the server to accomodate everyone's variation. This is utter hell from an admin's point of view.
I am very happy that linux is evolving and getting new features, but I am sick and tired of yet again discovering the subtle problems every 6 months when we run our code on more up to date distros and then having to fix them(we do serious systems programming and even a small change of a symbol in libc, or an alternate path of execution in the core functions of say read(), matters to us greatly). There are a lot of distros and consequently it takes an increasingly large amount of time to deal with it all.
only the shrinkwrap duh.