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Is the Key to Linux a Games-Based Distro?
An anonymous reader writes "If in the FOSS community we could only get our act together and launch a game-based distro, we will be home and dry. That, at least, is the view of one British games enthusiast, Ian Bonham, who says in the short Linux World article: 'I would be happy to help a group of volunteers create a distro based on games, because I believe that's where the next generation is - NOT in giving away copies of Linux or OOo. That's a short-term ideal. The PS2 and the X-Box(sic) run Linux, so let's create a distro that turns home PC into a console with development potential. Expand that distro to the consoles. And lets get some 'killer' games on that disk.'"
...did I miss the point here somewhere? Just about everything I know about gaming says that the more the OS stays out of the way, the better. Now they want to replace our thin OS-like layers with a complete business/research oriented OS. Why?
Seriously, the OS doesn't *do* anything for a game. All a game really needs is a collection of APIs to transparently access low-level hardware. Threading is nice, but "green" thread libraries can be used in its stead. That's much the reason why MSDOS (save for the 640K barrier) was such a great gaming platform. The OS literally did nothing. It got the frick out of the way, and stayed there.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ever heard of a USB HID device? They're all supported.
As for multiple monitor support, it's called Xinerama and it works, as well.
on suse 9.0 and slax live-cd my digital camera (an old sony dsc f505) mounts itself.
gentoo already has bootable game cds, one with americas army, and another with ut2003 demo
He didn't once mention that it would be open-source you know.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Running legacy DOS games natively is a pain when it's not impossible, but the DosBox emulator does a really good job at it, and there are builds available for all major operating systems.
Actually it is a metadistro, hence a potential starting point for a [games-oriented] distro.
Free as in mason.
I thought a few years ago Mandrake had a "gaming edition" that even came with a Linux version of "The Sims". I don't think that really mattered in the long run, though.
-=Android=- Chew's Eye Shop http://www.chewseyeshop.com
In Windows, there are only two modes: clone screen and make all the screens a single desktop. XFree86 (which, I'll consider for the point of argumentation a part of Linux) has much better support, and you can even make many seperate, independent desktops, one on each monitor(very useful for monitors that are of different sizes).
Though seemingly useless unless your budget is really tight, you can even hook up an extra USB keyboard and mouse, and have two people simultaniously use the same computer locally. More info here.
The number of things you can do with XFree86 and Linux is endless, and features are developing very fast. Haven't looked at Linux lately? Look again.
software mixing is JACK's job.
There's so much missing structurally for that to even be considered. You know, silly stuff like reliable, robust video and sound drivers.
;)
Wake up Rip Van Winkle, it's not 1991 anymore. The video and sound infastructure was in place years ago, back when we were playing quake 3 arena on linux.
More recently, games like Return to castle Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor, Enemy Territory, Unreal Tournamanent 2004 etc are all available natively on linux, and play very well indeed - which you might have known if you weren't just a clueless troll
Linux hasn't made it into the enterprise yet, and its whhheeeyyyy ahead there against Linux as a home platform. A crackdown on MS piracy, Media players and P2P apps are more likely to get Linux into the home than games IMO.
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
I'm writing a GBA game right now in my spare time. So far, I've got about 4000 lines of code in the game itself and 7000 in tools (and I'm about to go throw another 3000 or so in tools.) I've spent several days on all of this, and spent about six hours stealing sprites from other games and making other placeholder art. Yes, placeholder art - I needed something to test my code with.
:P) will have spent just as long on art, if not longer.
I imagine, by the time this is done, I'll have spent several times as long working on levels as I have making code, and I imagine my artist (if I ever get one
And this is just a GBA game! I was involved in making Champions of Norrath. The company included:
Five programmers
One (overworked) level designer
Seven artists
And more than once, I ended up implementing stuff we didn't really need because the stuff we did need was waiting on the artists.
Art uses a TON of resources. Programmers, while still absolutely critical to a good game, just don't need as much time anymore.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
There's a Morphix module (Morphix Gamer) that already provides this. Plus there are related projects like KnoppixMame.
However, I tried Morphix-Gamer a week or two back and feel compelled to point out that easily half of the games that came included either would not run at all (at least not from the CD), or were unbearably slow and clunky (TuxRacer for one). My machine at home is nothing to brag about (Athlon XP 1800, 1/2 gb ram), but it seemed to me it should have been sufficient to run whatever was bundled with the gamer module.
Not sure why they bothered included games that wouldn't run tolerably well from the CD. Sure someone might choose to install it to HD, but the whole point of a live-cd is just that.
The kernel can definately be hacked so that it allows this, but this presents a huge security concern. Every user would have to have the same priveledges as root in order to do this, or the user must play as root.
Or ESD's job. Or aRts's job. Or JACK's job. Or god knows what else's job. Most people don't have ANY of those. If it doesn't come included by default, if most programs don't support it, it's completely useless. All of the above are. ESD is marginally effective because many people do use it. It also sucks horrible horrible ass.
If my kernel comes with swmixer.o directly hooked into the kernel's ALSA support, everything can switch to using that, and everyone is happy. End of story. Philosophy is good, but pragmatism is sometimes needed. Sometimes, to get a standard, uniform way of doing things stamped out someone has to give up some of their philosophy and take the pragmatic approach. Suck it up.
Random and weird software I've written.
This is so true. In many discussions with friends about open-source I bring up what I call the "Direct-X" factor (groan). To which they reply "What about Open GL?"
The problem is that Direct X != Open GL. Direct X is a whole group of "libraries" that game developers can use - need a graphics interface? Sound? Input? Networking? All taken care of by DirectX. Ok, there is Open GL and AL, but where is the rest of the stuff? Without sounding trollish, this is one of the strengths of the Windows platform WRT games. Developers do not have to write to specific hardware (remember the "sound blaster compatible" fiasco in the dos days?), Hardware manufacturers have a "spec" to target. MS doesn't have to support individual developers requests for "feature X".
Maybe I am mistaken, but there is no Direct X equivalent in the Open Source world. Maybe this is what we should focus on first?See The New Adventure Shell. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The killer app I think that may have potential to be front runner is Cube. www.cubeengine.com It's not super pretty but its really got a lot of potential, and it really illustrates a lot of the strengths of the open source model. It has innovative features, an ingame map editor for instance.
software mixing is a baaaad idea in kernelspace, since there's potentially no upper bound on the cpu usage.
userspace is where you want to do mixing.
Actually, a Mario Kart type game with all of the different free (gratis/libre) software mascots would probably be a big hit...
I mean, who wouldn't want to race a penguin and a devil?
This clever piece of code performs mixing using shared memory and IPC primitives - no kernel support, no sound servers. It's the Way Forward(tm)
I wish people would stop bringing up this total red herring.
Microsoft did not "change their APIs". Sorry, that's just wrong. They did add a whole ton of new ones, and because IBM was not cloning the Windows API but got the code through an agreement with Microsoft, when it came out they couldn't keep up. No support for Win32 was added, and surprise surprise nothing worked anymore.
Comparing this to Wine is totally bogus. Wine is not the result of a legal agreement with Microsoft that can be severed, and the code is free software. The more manpower the Wine project has, the more software it can run. The equation really is that simple.
Yes it's easy to make grand, sweeping statements about how Windows emulation is evil and native apps are the way forward, but in that view is the implicit belief that everybody should junk their existing games library. Not going to happen anytime soon.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
>At least Microsoft never said (to my knowledge) "Our OS comes with games built in," referring to Solitare and Minesweeper (and whatever else comes with XP now).
;-)
Wanna bet?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
GentooGames
http://www.gentoogames.com
From gentoo.org:
Today, we announce the creation of Gentoo Games, Inc., a gaming technology company created to deliver innovative Linux-based game technologies to the public. To kick off this new initiative, we are also announcing a full version of the very popular (Linux exclusive) America's Army military combat simulation on a self-booting Gentoo GameCD. Thanks to hosting services provided by Super Computer, Inc., the America's Army GameCD can be downloaded here. This CD includes the full version of the America's Army game and requires an NVIDIA or recent ATI (Radeon 8500 or higher) graphics card. Enjoy!
There is also a UT2K3 version...
Hardware is autodetected... and so just works... It boots straight into X. There is no configuration needed. You don't even need to install the game. Great for a LAN party as every computer that is reasonably new should boot straight into a networkable game...
Isn't that sorta like asking everyone to agree on one distro and discard or assimilate all of the others? I agree, it's a nice idea, but I don't see it happening any time soon. As long as you understand your package manager and your system, does it really matter that someone else's system is configured slightly differently?
/usr/bin if you want. That seems to be the popular route, and it's worked well enough so far.
As far as the difficulty of making installers for linux, just create a directory, stuff the whole game in it, and compile it staticly. Put a symlink to the game executable under
If you have upwards of 1GB of RAM, 'morphix toram' will copy the CD to memory and things run just fine. To get TuxRacer to run well, you need 3d 'accelerated' graphics; Morphix has the nVidia driver, and I think Intel 'extrame graphics' works too. (Does the Windows port of TuxRacer at http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/ work for you ?)
Actually, we at the Autopackage project recognize this problem and have already made a solution. See apbuild.
gameprogrammer.com is a decent place to start. So is icculus.org. If it's just general programming you need to learn, prior to jumping into a larger project, check out the Programming Howtos.
You're in luck.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Do you have an nvidia card? If so, try typing xmodule=nvidia at the boot prompt, all the games run fine for me.
System specs:
1.4ghz P4
512mb ram
nvidia gforce 400mx 64mb
52x cdrom
Gnoppix UT2003 LiveCD ISO
Software Freedom Day!.
Also, the MS page linked above is for their optional "Plus" pack, not for the base XP system (which comes with, what? Solitaire, hearts, minesweeper? Do we now have a more advanced MCSEHS qualification? - Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert and Hearts Shark). I do notice an ominous counter to one FOSS advantage, though, a "365 tips from users like you" section.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In a recent thread over at Beyond3D forums, we asked developer of Max Payne 2, how are the costs distributed in a project like this between middleware, code development and content development. He said:
- middleware 10%
- content 60%
- and the rest is code, i.e. only 30%
So, unless you wire up some really innovative procedural content generation routines, Open Source Software alone isnt going to get you far in game development.Btw, im quite certain that the trend is ever growing, i.e. content part is going to take up more and more of game budgets.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
...when John Dvorak said precisely the same thing in his column. I guess this guy liked what he read there too.
-Tom
..are the only reason why this isn't a windoze-free box. I know that there's Flight Gear, but it's a long ways from my favorite flight sim, European Air War (by Infogrames). I also love the MechWarrior game series (I own all the MW-3/MW-4/Mercenaries+expansion packs). I just wish that somebody other than M$ had the rights to it. USB joysticks are a pain to get working in linux, also. *IF* a linux-gaming distro came out with anything close to the same quality/quantity games available, and better support for joysticks, graphics cards, etc., I'd be grabbing a copy pronto, and saying a permanent goodbye to windoze. The biggest problem is game makers not porting to linux, which a new distro, no matter how good a gaming platform it may be, won't affect until the game makers see enough of a market for it to be worth the effort/expense.
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Tenebrae is a great example of a free open-source game engine with linux support. It even supports pixel shaders and 3d audio.
I beleive StepMania has support for Pump It Up
one of the other arcades around here had PIU, but it kinda sucked.
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
SDL is what you're looking for; it's been around for several years. It's mature and in use in many projects. I don't know everything that DirectX does, but I believe most of it can be handled by SDL combined with OpenGL. Not only does SDL run on many platforms (including Windoze), it has bindings for various high level languages, so one isn't stuck with C or C++.