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Maxis Developer on Linux Game Porting

Posted by chrisd on from the isn't-xbill-and-same-game-enough-for-ya dept.

friedmud wrote in to tell us about a comment from a Maxis developer, Don Hopkins, who did a partial linux port of "The Sims". You can find his post here (3rd one down, comment from Don Hopkins titled "Reality check from a game developer") in a LinuxGames.com forum. I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Wine is the best way to have games happen on Linux but his comments on the economics of Linux games development and especially the costs of keeping versions concurrent on multiple platforms are insightful.

1 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Platform-independent games by smcv · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why stop at netcode?

    "It is entirely possible to have this part of the code isolated from the rest of the code, and for it to be completely platform independant."

    This applies nicely to other stuff too.

    Have you seen the Unreal engine, responsible for Unreal, UT, Rune, Deus Ex and others? Video, audio, input, physics, etc. are implemented in C++ for speed. The game code ("when the player touches a gun lying on the ground, add it to their inventory" and so on) is written in UnrealScript, a compiled-to-bytecode language vaguely similar to Java. In the case of UT, you'd probably be surprised how much is done in Unrealscript (you could quite conceivably make a whole new game without changing the C++ bits, although you'd be stuck with a slightly older graphics engine that way).

    I believe Quake 3 uses a similar system (mostly so that auto-downloaded mods can't carry viruses because they run in a Java-applet-like "sandbox"). This is why the UT and Quake 3 Linux ports consist of a smallish set of replacement binaries (the UT one is around the same size as the latest Windows UT update patch), and require a Windows CD to install from.