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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.'"
I agree with this assessmanent, however, one of the biggest challenges is to get peoples legacy Windows games to work, which is quite the challenge, if possible at all, on a reliable basis.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Yeah, whatever.
There's so much missing structurally for that to even be considered. You know, silly stuff like reliable, robust video and sound drivers.
Cart before the horse.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How about a variation of a bootable Linux Game CD that you can also install later ala Knoppix?
Of course, you couldn't just run OS/2 off of a CD with no install, and video was next to impossible to configure correctly when you didn't specifically know what video card was in the box, and networking didn't work, yada, yada, yada...
Anyway, it would certainly help to have a WIDE VARIETY of games, that rivalled ones on other platforms, etc.
It takes companies years, millions, and hundreds of megabytes to create successful games, and the success to linux is a game that actually runs on linux? No, I say linux needs to be able to run PC games (well and without hassle).
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
The Mac suffers from a shortage of games, albeit not as great as Linux, and those games sell for $$$. It's a nice thought but the reality is that you need the developers too. A whiz-bang platform without games leaves you... well... with a neat looking Linux box with a game controller.
Trolling is a art,
I think knoppix does a great job: you can fire it up and see what it looks like, and if you want, mount a hard-drive partition for the cd, or just install onto your harddrive.
Add games and you've got teen-geek heaven.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
That's a step backwards I think. At least in windows you can both develop/work and play games.
I think a step forward will be to get some form of standard for graphics/sound/input ala DirectX style. sure opengl, oss, sdl are all good libs but they follow the unix philosophy. That is, do one thing and do it well.
There should be a unified development tool/library that includes them all. E.g. I can install "blah" and boom I got 3d graphics, sound support, joystick/keyboard support, timers/interrupt/callback etc...
Of course that doesn't stop people from just picking their fav collection of tools [e.g. ut2k4 which runs perfectly on my Gentoo box].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
As those games are played, kids will be encouraged to learn how they work and maybe work on their own. AMOS and Blitz basic on the Amiga formed a huge range of great games, but getting people learning C++ from an early age would lead to great things for the future, I'm sure.
Does he have any sort of clue what goes into the development of a modern "killer game"?
Programming is nothing. There are thousands of man-hours going into art assets, level design, animation, voiceover production, playtesting, etc..
The days of the kid making a neato race car game on his vic 20 are long, long gone.
And like every other twit in linux land, he offers to "help make a linux games distro, even though im not a programmer and have no appreciable skills". Which follows the standard OSS game production model:
1) Think up cool name for game
2) Open sourceforge project
3) wait for programmers and artists to come write it for you
4) ??
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Mac has tried breaking into the PC gamining scene for decades. They even had that "bigass game thats only available on that platform" called "Marathon."
It requires two things:
Quantity of games
Quality of games
You don't need to make a gaming distro, you need a gaming distro with HUNDREDS (if not more) games already available to it. And not just net-hack and tux-racer, but big name gaming companies spitting out Linux based games.
What do you need to do this? A big-ass company with a ton of cash.
It is a proven plan. Just ask Sony how it broke apart Sega and Nintendo to get into the gaming console. Money, quantity and quality of games.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
For Linux to truly become the gaming OS of choice it will need a killer app that can't run in Windows, forcing users to switch over.
Problem is, no developer will be willing to develop said killer app until Linux becomes the gaming OS of choice.
Windows became the top gaming platform without any special "gaming" versions of its OS. They did this through marketing and its DirectX APIs. Get some good games and people will play them regardless of their distro. Get a "game" distro and nobody will use it without good games. Either way, the distro doesn't matter.
1.- Develop a game locking out 90% of the market.
2.- ???
3.- Profit!
I think that the poster is obviously refering to the X-Box linux project, which via a buffer overflow exploit in certain games, enables linux to be installed without requiring a mod-chip.
The inherent open-ness of Linux and its various development kits allows developers to create software and games software without the costly restrictions and control console manufacturers seem to place over their respective hardware.
It should be noted however that Sony have released a Linux based distro specifically for Playstation 2 for exactly this purpose.
My own personal belief is that it is extremely difficult to create next-gen games without the kinds of near-hollywood budget software houses have to throw at it. Im not saying its impossible, but small scale bedroom coding aint gonna produce the kinds of masterpieces that Lionhead or $GAMESTUDIO_OFCHOICE are producing.
I think a better twist on this idea would be to produce bootable CDROM's ala knoppix, bundled with a specific game. This way you remove the notion of operating system dependancy. Linux enables you to build a very low-level OS, with just enough required to boot the game. If something along these lines were to be introduced it would allow mainstream software studios to sell games to anyone who has an x86 machine, regardless of OS.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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Just about everything I know about gaming
Apparently you haven't heard about DirectX or OpenGL, eh?
Now they want to replace our thin OS-like layers with a complete business/research oriented OS.
Whatchew talkin bout? Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) is a "business oriented" OS; Linux has no orientation at all.
Seriously, the OS doesn't *do* anything for a game.
Exactly! Which is why Linux might (in a few years, if all goes well) be a better platform for PC gaming than Microsoft(tm) Windows!
If Microsoft continues to screw up with DirectX "upgrades" that fix one game and breaks another, then game publishers might just start shipping their installation media as bootable Linux DVDs, so their support costs can be cut away. ("Put in the disc and hold down the power button of your computer")
That's much the reason why MSDOS (save for the 640K barrier) was such a great gaming platform.
Some users might've liked it, but the programmers who had to manually support each possible piece of hardware had different opinions. Back when there were only 4 video cards and 3 soundcards, it was painful but possible. Today that the complexity of the hardware has multiplied, it's no longer an option.
Even though "perfecting" WineX is an enormously challenging task, the problem is not even that simple.
The most important new PC games coming out are multiplayer online games, and they're starting to standardize on Evenbalance's Punkbuster library as the way to prevent cheaters from hacking their local environments with transparent walls and magic maps.
Punkbuster works by examining the entire memory environment where the game is running. If it detects something that could be a cheat attempt, it shuts you down (optionally blacklisting you with the publisher's master server). It's constantly updated to respond to new threats.
What this means is that game publishers soon will not want you to run under Wine, and will pay programmers to ensure that you don't. (For example, Battlefield 1942 used to work in WineX. Since Punkbuster was added to the game, it's no longer usable)
To prevent cheaters, game makers have decided to allow playing only under a "trusted" environment. They won't allow you to play from an Open Source OS or emulator, because that opens up the possibility that you've changed the graphics driver to make wireframes instead of solid textures.
Hopefully X-Bill doesn't count as a killer game. Linux gaming is getting better (Quake 3, and other OpenGL based games don't requier much re-working to port to other platforms, AFAIK), but let's not kid ourselves. Games that come with window managers usually just can't be touted as features. 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).
Linux is free. It can be included on a bootable disk with your game. So while hardware remains an unkown, at least your game can run on a known kernel, known libraries, optimised X server etc. Swap space (if needed) can be automatically found in Linux partitions or Windows swap files.
Managing players' saved data is the biggest problem here. A nice solution might be to save it over the internet to central servers. Now they can load their saved games from anywhere, and play on any PC.
Of course the hardware detection would have to work more flawlessly than Knoppix, not an easy task. This method of distribution would not suit all games.
Heheh, this of course highlights the problem with Linux gaming that we all refuse to admit:
they suck.
I'm sorry, but a million clones of warcraft II and Quake 1 does not a gaming environment make. Still, there are Tux games that have real futures. I'm a windoze user and I can think of a few free software games that I play incessantly. Now, as I understand it, Tux Racer is not multiplayer. At this point, I stop giving a shit. There are some good ones like Cube and Armagetron, but even they are only skeletons of games - they have the minimum "get online and play" gameplay, and graphics that would be current for 1997. Still, I love them to death and have sunk countles hours into Cube (wouter.fov120.com).
The fact is that there is not a complete free software offering to counter the Quake and Unreal engines. Yes, crystalspace is nice, but it just doesn't have the complete feature-set and complete game to build a model of a full game onto.
Think about this - all of the retail engines have heaps upon heaps of mods that a) completely replace all of the in-game media and b) replace tons of code. Linux does not have a similar free alternative to these frameworks. As such, people that would like to develop for a free platform are instead relegated to retail world, and games that could become the basis for a free software community stay fringe.
Look at the best offerings of the free software community for gaming engines - CrystalSpace and various flavours of the Quake 1 and 2 engines - tell me that they really come close to the Unreal or Quake 3 engines, much less the current generation.
now, one thing I can't help but notice - free software games do not seem to be aware that I own a joystick, much less many joysticks. People who talk about "linux as a console" seem to neglect this little detail. I have a windows 98 box and an old gravis multiport wired to my TV set, and I have a handful of games that I play on that. The PC selection for games that support multiple joysticks for multiple players on a single screen is damn small, and all of them are DirectX-based games (blaster disaster rulz). None of the SDL-based offerings have shown me anything in that department.
Take the Quake II engine, give it a non-shitty modeling system, some physics, and some real shader support and convert it over to a Python or some other script-based framework so people can develop for it easily. Then re-implement a basic online CTF+DM game for people to start their work from. Then, maybe, Linux games will be able to compete. I haven't seen anyone succeeding at that. Even Doom engine ports are still painfully primitive in terms of script support and other features you'd expect them to get after so long.
Another aspect to consider is system security. If every app on a linux system came with static libraries, then you have multiple libraries scattered all over the drive. Will all those application authors update their program to include library updates? What if a nasty buffer overflow turns up in libBlah...do you want to leave all the dependent programs around for crackers to stumble upon?
I am not saying that the convenience factor is not important; rather I think that an altogether different approach is needed, one that tackles the problem at a different level. Development on ports systems (Gentoo) is one interesting direction, autopackage another. Better that than applying static libraries to a problem they were never designed to fix.
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