Slashdot Mirror
Gentoo Games
TheSurfer writes "Today, Gentoo announced the creation of Gentoo Games, 'a gaming technology company created to deliver innovative Linux-based game technologies to the public'. They also released a GameCD with the full version of America's Army. For more information, see the threads in the forums here and here."
Wouldn't a company of this kind need a lot of money to operate?
How do they expect to pay for themselves?
but I cann't seem to find one! A couple forum threads about the game doesn't really count.
Anyone got more information about the company?
For some reason I just don't think this is going to make that much of a difference to your Linux user/Gamer. Unless they can get the game developers to actually develop Linux ports at the same time they are doing their Windows design then we will just continue to see a few old games ported over. By old I mean like 1 year of course.
I think this is a great idea, and I love Gentoo, but I know I will be keeping a Windows partition around to dual boot until more companies like id (read Valve!!!) release for both Windows and Linux at the same time.
Anyone else find that America's Army game kind of sick? Sort of glorifies the horrors of war by caricaturing it through a cartoon-like portrayal. Plus, it makes it look like war is a cakewalk for a teenage audience. Reality is people dying, not losing 20 points off your health.
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
I really hope this is better than it looks.
20 or so posts in a forum plus a logo doesn't form the foundations of a great company. Especially when half the posts are discussing installation and politics of America's Army.
Yeah, we have America's Army... but surely the fledging company was helped by the Army's obvious goal of getting the game out to as many people as possible...
That being said, I don't know how many of us geeks they want to recruit onto the front lines... (pizza boxes under the bunk beds, wars would have to be scheduled between 3pm and 2am, Simpson's battle crys, etc.)
Anyway, I hope this is more than it now appears.
Davak
They're going to do what every other commercial linux vendor does.
Repackage other peoples shit as their own and sell it to morons.
As opposed to the way it is today where todays youth enjoys the fun and games of killing demons from hell on mars or killing Germans in World War II ect.... Kids are already killing people in there games; this is an ATTEMPT to show a slightly more realistic view of this and do a little recruiting while at it. What's wrong with that?
I don't know about "cunning ploy." They are pretty open about the purpose of the game, especially as they have to justify the cost of its creation to the taypaying public. Recruiting is needed to run a volunteer army the size of America's; this is not any markedly different from TV or mailing campaigns.
I suspect the government (and parents who buy their kids the game) see it this way: if kids are going to play violent games anyway, why not get the kid a game where violence is at least being carried out for a "positive" goal, as opposed to games like Postal or Grand Theft Auto which depict criminal acts, or games like Quake and Unreal where the violence is mindless and the only point. There are other objectives in America's Army, and, while there may be some discrepencies, it is not a totally inaccurate and unrealistic idea of military service [i.e. you can't take 40 hits before dying]. Most Americans respect members of the armed forces, whether you agree with it or not, and see it as having a positive influence. Any good parent would have a serious talk with their child about the armed forces before their kid decides to march into the local recruiting office based on a video game.
I suspect most of those who play are quite immune from the propagandizing effect anyway, and simply enjoy the game.
Care to be asshole buddies?
Reminds me of the morons who object to liquor or tobacco ads, because they don't present "the whole picture". Why should they?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Free as in beer. I don't think it's open source. It is well-done, from what I've seen.
And why such blatant propaganda for militarism?
It's the American Way. (The American Way apparently consists of lots of violence along with minimal sex.;)
Flamebait: I wonder what Joe Lieberman thinks about the US Army being involved in creating violent video games. Of course, far be it from a Democrat to actually take a stand on something. :)
America's Army takes the wimpy way out - no blood etc.
It really ought to use Doom 3 type graphics to really educate people about war and the military - but no.
As to Lieberman...who cares? ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Gentoo is great, but I don't particularly care to 'emerge ut2006' and wait 6 hours while it compiles.
Then bite the bullet and invest in broadband. It only took me about an hour to "compile" ut2002, and 58 minutes of it was for the download of the binary.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
just quit yer beeching already.
./configure && make && make install's there are. gentoo simplifies all that crap.
first off, gentoo makes building complex apps EASY!. if you've ever built kde from source, you know what a lot of tar xvfz's;
next, commercial games don't come as source, they come in binary format. try to build tuxracer from scratch and see how long it takes or gltron or BillardsGL. some more than others, but they go fairly quickly.
finally, if and when the 1.4 version of gentoo goes final, they're plannign on releasing a binary version as well as the source based. IIRC, they're calling it a reference platform. so, you will be able to install gentoo 1.4 in under an hour just like all the other distros. upgrading might take a while, but isn't that the case will all other distros?
and try an 'emerge -b ut2006'
duh.
Recently, I gained a first-hand understanding of the frustration of having to explain to a child that the game that was just bought for the child won't run on the child's computer due to some software incompatibility.
Before now, I had always assumed that by paying attention to logos on boxes, etc. it would be possible to avoid such problems. However, a child doesn't care about things like logos when shopping for games. Instead, a child cares about things like pictures on boxes. Once a child makes up his/her mind in a store that he/she wants a particular game, as a parent it's difficult to argue against a chosen game on the basis of lack of logos. Instead, it is sometimes easiest to just take a chance and buy the game (even if un-logoed) and hope that it will work.
Of course, a parent quickly learns that taking a chance often ends in the game-won't-work frustration that I mentioned earlier. What's a parent to do?
Enter consoles.
Consoles are great at solving this problem. During the shopping trip, a parent can simply say to his child "you can have any game as long as it's from the PlayStation section." When the child picks a game from the PlayStation section, the parent can be assured that the game will run and that there won't be any frustration.
Does this relate to Gentoo Games? Yes.
Bundling pre-integrated, no-install-required Linux in with a bootable game cd basically changes the experience of using a general purpose computer into the experience of using a gaming console. Just pop in the game cd and run, the same as when using a PlayStation. In both cases, the OS is invisible and irrelevant. Perfect.
Granted, there could still be considerable hardware incompatibility issues. However, at least the software incompability issues would be gone as they would have been resolved beforehand by the game developer. Given the pain that average computer users have when installing software on Linux, this could be a big advantage.
Perhaps Gentoo's compile-upon-install model could be leveraged to eliminate many of the hardware incompatibility issues by compiling some stuff to the needs of the hardware upon startup. On a network-enabled computer, the startup routine could even include a fetch of necessary drivers, etc.
Anyway, as a new buy-games-for-children parent, I appreciate anything that would make the experience of gaming on general purpose computers be more like the experience of gaming on consoles.
Wow, how many years has it been since we had to have a "boot disk" in order to run games? That's not something I want to go back to.
Also, how could Linux geeks be in favor of rebooting their machine to play a game? You guys think dual-booting Windows for playing games is absurd, yet don't have any problem rebooting to play the game in Linux? Huh?
I don't think that's accurate. Average Linux users don't want to build everything from source. They use binary distros.
ut2003 installs faster than it does on any other distro since it's a binary(no compiling) and gentoo knows where to dl it. I assume ut2006 will be the same