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Last Word on Loki
A random reader sent in: "Loki's public CVS and FAQ database are now being hosted at icculus.org. The information, and a bit of evangelizing about Loki's demise can be found on icculus.org." You might take a look at the Linux Gamers' FAQ while you're there. Update: 01/25 21:05 GMT by M : Scott Draeker sends word that there will be an "official" repository of Loki code, including apparently some projects that weren't finished, hosted by SEUL in the near future.
..... can be convinced to open source/gnu the game titles as the f'd news article or mail from Loki states these titles will no longer be available.
This seems to imply they haven't found anyone to pick up and distribute those titles.
It'd be a shame never to be able to obtain them again.
What I have to ask is: what about the other stuff Loki did? I'd hate to see knowledge lost.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
So if Loki is going to shut down on 31 Jan 2002, which is six days from today, will they fully process any game orders made today?
I haven't seen any termination warnings on their site to dissuade customers from ordering products.
I figured I'd probably want two or three games over the next year, but this is making me think of buying some now before they're gone.
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I think if Loki was just getting started today their chances of success would be much higher. That's often the way it is in technology; the true innovators (Amiga, anyone?)are lost in the rush to succeed. It would have been nice to see Mandrake hire these guys to develop for their Gaming Edition. Loki may have been the first, but they won't be the last..The best is yet to come!
I think the best way of getting games on linux would be to make a kernel with all the sound and SDL etc stuff built in with a framebuffer driver for the chosen platform.
As we all know linux compiles for a whole host of platforms (including a lot of consoles).If we created a standard platform such as this then theres a good chance that people would target this platform first. The idea of having checkboxes for selecting
compile to...
[] xbox
[] PS
[] PS2
[] bootable CDROM
[] Linux PC with Linux Gaming Kernel support
We might even get to the stage where development houses put windows ports on the back burner (eventually).
NB: I realise that all these libraries and generic non-targeted code would be slower than assembler directed at your platform of choice.
Could someone who does game/kernel development let me know if I'm talking crap or would this actually work?
"With java games, or maybe new technologies, Mac, Linux, Windows, Playstation, etc can all play the same games...."
And they can all be crappy, lowest common denominator games.
I am a game developer, and there is a reason why games usually target only one platform. It's the only way to make a truly great game.
Let's examine a scenario of a game developed to run on every system:
-game can't use more than 24 megs of memory (gamecube)
-game can't use high res textures (PS2)
-game can't have high poly counts (PC with budget video card)
-game can't have complex interface (consoles)
-game can't have detailed GUI (consoles/TV)
Now what do you have left after this? Web games. I'm sorry, but web games will never match a true game.
And you can't tweak a game to be optimum on every system, because there are major constraints. A lot of the time to optimize for a target platform, it requires specific art. For every other platform, if you want it to be the best, you basically redo all art development. Nowadays art and content are the longest thing to do, so you basically add another full development cycle for each platform.
Platform independant (real) games are a pipe dream.
Let me prefeace this by saying that I'm an avid linux user, and an avid game player. I'm (presumably) the target market that Loki was shooting for.
Yet I didn't buy any games from them. Why?
Simply put, they didn't release anything that I wanted to play. I had Quake 3 and UT - I didn't need any other FPS games. I had played Heroes III before (yes, under Windows), and while it's a nice game, it's not something I would be willing to purchase a copy of for linux - it just didn't enthrall me that much. I was a fan of the old Descent games, but for me they lost some of their flavor after Descent 2, regardless of the eyecandy that was added.
I will admit - I was SORELY tempted to buy Rune - but after playing the demo, I wasn't totally impressed by the gameplay. Sure, melee is fun - but it got old after about an hour.
What I would have bought (and still will buy, if anyone makes them), no questions asked:
Ports of Bioware's Infinity Engine games (Baldurs Gate I/II, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment) - these are, quite simply, incredible games. They have metric tons of gameplay, replay value, and storyline. That's why they're still fun today.
Ports of Diablo II and Starcraft - yes, I know these are from Blizzard, who will never, ever, release a linux version - but they were DAMN good games that are still loads of fun now, well after the release.
I don't feel bad about not buying their games - I refuse to buy something I don't want, even to support a company that *might* in the future produce something I would like to buy. While I support *what* they were doing, I think their choice of games to do it with was poor (albeit probably the only choice they had in this world of "Intellectual Property" lawsuits)
To my mind, writing software is a SERVICE, with the end result free for all to use.
Sure. But what's the difference?
What the hell, it's only Karma.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
SDL is wonderful, and is evidence that Loki's existance was good for Linux as well as other platforms. But also don't forget about the Loki Installer, used by Codeweavers for the Crossover plugin (as well as RTCW, among countless others), SMPEG, OpenAL, and *free* binaries to Quake3 and Unreal Tournament. Yes, there was a time when Q3 was box-only, but Loki supported Q3 well after that point.
It brings me great sadness Loki is going. But thanks to Icculus, id Software, Loki, and all the countless volunteers we now have a much better platform.
Did you miss the part about not buying windows games?
Windows games DO NOT SUPPORT Linux.
Paying five dollars a month to extend the directx gaming monopoly to our platform is most certainly not supporting Linux.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
SDL is an awesome platform and toolkit for games graphics whatever. It makes direct X look like a nasty hack. Best part is that SDL is platform agnostic. It dont care and happily runs under windows. Anyone that is into serious game development or graphics development is using SDL. as it's faster, easier, and darn it it makes you feel good!
I tried for months to understand Direct X, and toyed with example after example... doing the same with SDL is tons easier and allows me to code the software in a real dev os instead of windows. (ok that was a harsh jab at windows... sorry... well. at least let me take back the sorry)
SDL can be used easily by a newbie to C programming... something that Direct X cannot do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm proud to say that I bought all five of my Loki games. I was thoroughly impressed with the ports, and it's a pity they aren't sticking around. The best part was that they(usually) chose only the best to bring over, so us Linux users weren't stuck with mediocre games. Quake III, Railroad Tycoon II, Heroes III, Myth II, Heavy Gear II... these are the games I bought, and they're worthy of keeping installed. If I can find the money to buy these games on a shoestring student budget, why couldn't others?
Sorry for the rant... it's been a bad month, and I don't want to see Loki go.
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
Another, Linux-based dedicated game Distros. You pop in the CD and boot, start the game, no install required. Make the PC into kinda a game console. The wide variety of PC hardware makes this not work that well however...
/bin is 6 megabytes. /lib is 48 megabytes. /usr/X11R6 is 239 megabytes. Now, even assuming you can cut these down to half the size they are on my box, that's still 173 megabytes total. Accounting for hardware differences, you'll need to have *at least* three (3dfx, nVidia, and everything else) XFree86 servers and GL driver sets, for another 21 megabytes or so. We're up to 194 megabytes at this point, and it doesn't run a game yet. Now, you can't pull out a whole game to core, as most people don't have 400 megabytes of RAM to blow on top of the game's footprint and X, etc; therefore, to prevent significant performance losses, you'll need to store the game uncompressed on CD. According to the bottom of the Quake3 box I have here, an install takes no less than 440MB. At this point, we've hit 634 megabytes.
OK, for the sake of this argument, we'll assume you're talking about a standard CD, maximum capacity somewhere around 650 megabytes.
To get a minimal gaming Linux distro up and running, you'll need:
a) the kernel and some essential binaries and libraries,
b) XFree86,
c) sound, networking, etc. drivers, and
d) the game itself.
Now, let's take a look at some sizes.
On my current Linux box (RedHat Linux 7.1, kernel 2.4.17),
This doesn't include audio or networking drivers, both of which are dodgy to get working even with human intervention at this point in time.
In addition, you're going to need swap and storage space that work irregardless of the user's chosen operating system, and that's going to be another 2 headaches.
(For the record: someone on OpenProjectsNet:#loki brought this up about 6 months ago, and I challenged them to come up with such a CD that would work on Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, etc. I never heard back.)
Let me sum this up in two words:
not feasible.
For one, transgaming. Full porting takes too long, while you port, the market buys up the windows version.
Uhh, not if you have the miraculous luck to be working with a company that's not a bunch of idiots. In those cases, you can achieve simultaneous release across platforms.
By 6 months, the market was saturated. With Transgaming, they have a chance to get to the market before it *completely* dries up.
So, you propose to save Linux gaming by having people purchase the Windows versions in a manner indistinguishable from the other 95% of the public, then having them play them in a sub-par API wrapper layer. <sarcasm>Sounds absolutely freaking great.</sarcasm>
I'm inclined to agree with both Draeker and icculus. It's partially the Linux gaming community's insistence that everything should be free (if someone mirrors news.lokigames.com, take a look in loki.games.* for all of the "free binaries" threads; you will find them).
In any case, TransGaming is not the solution. The only places where I find it anywhere close to appropriate to use WineX is when I'm using free programs that are Windows-only (say, 99.999% of all 3D modelers (UnrealEd, QuArK, and WorldCraft, too...), media players, and installer packages for products produced by a bunch of single-platform ninnies), very few of which, I've found, actually *work* in Wine.
In other words, I'm inclined to agree with both Draeker and icculus. The Linux gaming community as a whole had a great opportunity to make themselves heard, and they spoiled it by being a bunch of warez monkeys, Wine boosters, and dual-booting cheapskates. Now that Loki's gone, and there's one fewer company to mooch off of, you recommend stopgap solutions that perpetuate Windows-centric gaming.
To quote the late Douglas Adams, "'Pathetic bloody planet. I've no sympathy at all.'"
Want Linux games? HERE.
Looking at a Linux distribution to find out how many files you need is about as silly as looking at hypothetical bootable-into-Quake3 CD and saying 'But my windows directory takes up 250 megs'! Linux strips down just as much as DOS does.
I've personally ran Linux on 120 meg drives, and that install was fully usuably, which the 'linux distro' on the CD does not need to be. We're talking one statically linked binary here, no libraries, no /bin, and no X.
It would be trivial to fit most of this on a floppy, not to mention a CD. They have boot linux floppies that have a ton of stuff the game CD does not need, and nothing it doesn't, except the statically-linked game.
Now, swap is tricky, but, you don't really need it. Most game binaries are not more then 10 megs. You just need an intelligent way to load files yourself when you need them, from the CD. While this sounds like a lot of work, it would make the game run faster even without swap, so it's a smart idea anyway.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?