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Does Linux Have Game?
kwpulliam writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting writeup, discussing the difficulties in bringing games to Linux, and the dilemmas faced by the graphics card developers."
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The problem I have is ATI video drivers for Linux. So far they have been a huge dissapointment. My brother has an Dell notebook with an old nVidia graphics card that works much better than my Radeon 9800.
For productivity, I'm using OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird amongst other open source applications. For games, I play Savage (http://www.s2games.com) which has a native Linux binary. I also play some other games like BattleField 1942 and Vietnam that run under Linux through an emulator.
The rate limiting step here is the ATI video drivers. It's the only thing keeping me running Windows XP instead of Linux.
Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.
Well, with Cedega (formerly WineX), they basically have...
Still, with porting to OpenGL, you get the benefit of not having to use a runtime Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator (which is essentially what Wine/WineX/Cedega uses), and you're also a step closer to the OpenGL-only Mac.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Loki closed almost four years ago. The market today is significantly different then it was then. Linux is used significantly more, on the server and the desktop. Id say with ALSA, and Winelib, the effort required to do source code porting today would be significantly less then it was back when Loki was alive. Also with broadband connections being far more popular as well, a modern Loki could sell direct to users.
So a modern Loki would have more customers. The porting would be easier - cheaper. And they would have higher margins if doing direct-download sales. The economics are compleatly different.
Windows:
3D Hardware Accelerator Card Required - 100% DirectX® 9.0b compatible 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card and the latest drivers*.
English version of Microsoft® Windows® 2000/XP
Pentium® IV 1.5 GHz or Athlon® XP 1500+ processor or higher
384MB RAM
8x Speed CD-ROM drive (1200KB/sec sustained transfer rate) and latest drivers
2.2GB of uncompressed free hard disk space (plus 400MB for Windows® swap file)
100% DirectX® 9.0b compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers
100% Windows® 2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and latest drivers
DirectX® 9.0b (included)
Linux:
GNU/Linux system,
Pentium III, 1Ghz
256Mb RAM
Kernel 2.4, 2.6 is recommended
glibc 2.2.4 and up
3D card:
NV10 or R200 minimum hardware
OpenGL hardware acceleration
64 MB VRAM
sound card, OSS or Alsa, stereo sound and 5.1 are supported with both APIs
Alsa version 1.0.6 or above is required
I got both of these from the respective download sites. The only difference being the Linux version is the demo release, which should cause minimal concern since they are going by how well the engine itself runs on the platform.
My system is an AMD XP2100+ 512MB & ATI9700Pro @ 4x AGP. The Windows version runs great, the Linux version runs so-so. It is playable, but not much fun. I think this has more to do with needing to upgrade to something in the FX53 range than being any blame of ethier operating system.
Let's face it, performance isn't nearly as much of an issue as developer support at this point.
From what I've read, porting MFC-based utilities (such as game editors) is more of a pain than switching 3D APIs.
It's really not all that difficult if you use something like wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows). Slashdot has covered the MFC and wxWidgets comparison before. If your interested, IBM has written an article on Porting MFC applications to Linux. Just let it be known, it is something being done. I've personally converted applications directly from MFC to wxWidgets with very little difficulty and really very little code change. However, none of the apps had non-standard interfaces.
MFC is history anyway. Just something to think about.
Direct3D is exactly like OpenGL. You can argue features (vertex shaders integral or an add-on, etc.), but they are both graphics APIs.
Your point is valid, but you are thinking of DirectX. DirectX contains Direct3D (graphics), DirectSound (um... sound ;), DirectInput (keyboard, mouse, joystick, whatever), DirectPlay (or at least it used to, networking code), and others (I think).
So your right. I doubt many games use just Direct3D. If you are going to use D3D, why not use DirectSound and DirectInput too? They are much better than just programming Win32 for that stuff (I would imagine). Even Quake2/3 used DirectX for everything but graphics (I think).
As the parrent said, there is more to the problem than just Direct3D, there is all of DirectX (which WineX/Cedega/whatever is working on alongside D3D). If more games were written with OpenGL+SDL (or any other cross platform combination that may exist) things would be easier to port.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.