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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."
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..
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).
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...
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.
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.
No! Targeting one distribution annoys all the other users more than it pleases the Red Hat users. Quake 3's problems had more to do with video drivers and X configuration than anything else. It would make more sense to sell the game only for one video card, but that era has come and gone, thankfully.
Retail is a rat race, but you can't live without it. People like to fondle pretty boxes in the store. How we do love retail, let me count the ways:
- mind share (quick, when did you last visit idsoftware.com, except to get a patch for a game you already own?)
- impulse buys (after working thirty days straight, I have a weekend; hey, look at the pretty box)
- return policy (at MicroCenter and some of the mall stores)
- sales (I've never found a game online cheaper than a Best Buy sale price)
- no shipping
- did I mention the pretty boxes?
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! That's an easy problem to solve: put the Windows version in there, too. While you're at it, put in the Mac and Be version too.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.
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
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.
I didn't buy the Windows version either.
Woz
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.
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.
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
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"?
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...
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
You know, when Doom 1, Episode 1 came out, almost everybody who used computers for games had to run out to upgrade their 386's and 486's RAM to just 4 MB. What else is new?
As for me, I waited for the Linux version to come out because Carmack said we should buy that version if we wanted to support Linux boxed games. Then it didn't come out, until I already played it long enough on my friend's Windows box. I held out because I didn't want to put my money into the Windows version instead of the Linux version (even though I do put lots of money into Windows games) like Carmack said. By the time the Linux version came out, and I looked through tons of stores, I just didn't want it that badly anymore. I ended up eventually buying U.T. instead... the Windows version even! It turned out it was a much better game anyway. And to think, I was big into Quake 2 (and I worshipped DOOM, but that is another story).
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
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.