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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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Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Linux has gaim.
Id seems to do a good job of getting their games working in Linux and THEY seem to push the envelope of what gaming IS. If they can do it, I'm sure others can as well. Just as soon as the other game manufacturers get their priorities in order that is. :)
Well, I hate to say it but one of the biggest titles coming to Linux was pre-empted from Linux, OS X, and even Windows in favor of the X-box. Yes, eventually it shipped for Windows and OS X, but Linux was left out in the cold when Microsoft purchased Bungie. Bungie had plans for simultaneous release of Halo on Windows and OS X to be followed soon by a Linux release. That all changed when Bungie was bought out. Honestly given the consolidation within the game industry, I don't see much hope for games on Linux for a few years yet which is sort of odd given Linux's marketshare as being so much greater than OS X. Perhaps Toms Hardware is correct when it comes to Linux being a true desktop replacement?
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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.
...it's called Tetris. And XTris. And Hextris. And CubeTris. And TrisTris. And GLTris. And...
Clearly, the most dominant platform on consumer computers is going to have the vast majority of games available.
If Linux was the dominant OS, you'd see plenty of games available.
Simple as that.
This is the final goal for open source. They need to become a gaming platform, both commercially and not, if they want to win the war with Microsoft.
Game developers should only use OpenGL for newly written rendering code. It is a high performance, advancing standard. Microsoft often "borrows" from it for Direct X (n+1).
OpenGL makes Linux, BSD, MacOS X and other ports practical as well as not having to deal with Microsoft's arbitrary API's.
Not being able to play games on Linux is exactly why I still am running Windows on my systems. I am a heavy (as in activity, not weight) Ghost Recon, UT2004, and Diablo II gamer. I also have Half Life 2 that my wife purchased for me for Christmas waiting for my system to be upgraded, and I'm looking forward to the PC version of Ghost Recon II.
Of course, what do these require? DirectX.
And what's the only operating system that truly supports it? Well, it ain't Linux.
All of the other major apps that I use are open source - Firefox, OpenOffice, CDex, etc. I have my trusty Sun Blade 100 up and running right next to me as well. So, I don't need Windows for all of my normal day to day stuff. I can just as easily run Linux or Solaris x86 for everything but gaming. Now that Linux has greatly evolved towards the desktop, the ability to play DirectX games is the last hurdle to getting Windows off of my main systems.
At its core DirectX is just a set of common libraries. Is there no efficient way to convert Windows/DirectX calls to the equivalent Linux calls? We're no longer in the days of having separate VESA drivers for each video card. Surely, there must be some way out there to develop a functional DirectLinuX. Then again, that's why I'm a system admin, not a programmer.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Seriously, why aren't more Open Source games developed? I'm not talking Pong I'm talking Halo 2, Doom 3 level. I know the obvious answer is they are really expensive and time consuming to produce. If many of the people working on current games are into Open Source why not show there support by starting serious Open Source games in their spare time. Aim them first at Linux then port them to Windows and OSX later. Seems easier to port the other direction anyway, more video card support etc.
Just a question. If everyone is so serious about supporting it donate the time and start building games that can compete one to one with the big boys. Technically they should be better since it's a labor of love and all the technical issues that everyone complains about, game play and such, should have been adressed in development. Without marketing and corporate suits to consider the games should be able to hit a whole new level and actually lead the pack.
Just a thought.
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.
...Loki is closed. Thanks for your patronage. Tried & failed already.
/. all the time expressing how game companies should open source their code. Oh wait... maybe not. And also, companies like iD have released the engine code for their old games, which is what I think ALL software companies should do when their code is no longer financially useful.
Yeah, I can see how ONE company failing is indicative of the whole "linux game company" game. Loki failed, so OMG L00NiX GAM35 R T3H D00M3D!11.
Why pay when Linux users use a free OS. Everybody expects their games to be free.
Yeah, I notice tons of comments on
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Look at Oracle. Did they have a Linux port when nobody used Linux? No, but when Linux started to grow at 30% percent rate in the server market they started to think about it.
Games are a problem of how many people uses it on a desktop, nothing else. And games should be easier to support than a database since in games they spent most of the time in the "data" which depends on the game engine not in the OS, and the game engine can't be that hard with companies like Id. The core problem here is Direct3D but if people starts using linux I don't doubt lots of game companies will consider to create new games in opengl if they can get enought revenue from linux people.
With the current market share linux has is quite difficult to get anything. But if it grows we'll have lots of games, be sure. Heck, just look at doom, halflike, quake. Those games have been ported to linux (or they're in their way), and how much money can they have got those companies from the linux port? Nothing? Or almost nothing, compared with the revenue from the windows clients. That demonstrates that supporting games in linux is not hard, if it were too dificult and with the current lack of interest in the linux port they wouldn't have done it.
From the article:
ATi cards' initial problems with Linux were due to a lack of driver support for Doom III. (...) Regardless of whether a game is based on an OpenGL or Direct3D API, the graphics card vendor's driver must support the game.
Bullshit. What's the fucking point of utilizing any API for any development if you have to have the vendor modify it to work with your product? I suppose that absolutely no OpenGL game ever works under linux without ATI modifying thier drivers to specifically support that game? There's a lot of games out there. Good luck implementing support at the driver level for each and every one of them, ATI.
It just pisses me off to see ATI try to pass this off as id's problem, when in reality there wouldn't be any fucking problem if ATI were make a proper implementation of OpenGL on linux, instead of focusing entirely on D3D/Win32.
End rant. Flame on, and all that good shit.
Wait a minute... did I miss anything (probably), but what's this thing that "Regardless of whether a game is based on an OpenGL or Direct3D API, the graphics card vendor's driver must support the game."?!?
... or not?
The graphics card vendor's API implementation should be complete regardless of the games that use that API. Of course a card could have certain hardware limitations not allowing it to actually support the whole set, but this doesn't look to be the case with Doom3 and ATI.
True, today developers usually choose just one reference vendor for the development process (maybe sometimes because of the money they get rather than the actual lack of time to test on both, cmon there are just two!), therefore there could be some (possibly minor) incompatibilities with the other, but if both vendors' drivers were as complete as possible, that would definitely be a step in the right direction...!
Ok, maybe Direct3D is the main GUI on windows but it is of no relevance anywhere else. Not on Linux. Not on BSD. Not on MacOS. Not on the PS2. Not even Windows-CE and therefore not on PDAs and Mobile Phones. Nowhere except Wintel.
Therefore any sane producer should use OpenGL which makes it very easy to bring a product to any console, any computer and after some years to PDAs and Mobile Phones.
Today a productive sellcycle for a game should be:
1. sell on consoles - they have less problems with piracy and people are more willing to pay (overpriced) prices.
2. after the first hot sellcycle - three to twelve months - port the game to Desktop-Computers. There are million people which do not want a console but still want to play a game. Also those games are a bit cheaper which gets you more customers. Your game gets pirated though but as sales for (1.) already are over you simply live with it.
3. Meanwhile port it to Unix-Desktops or in other words, MacOS and Linux. It is a piece of cake, given you planes porting through all cycles means you gave some thoughts right at the start about portability and this pay off now. 10-20% additional sales for maybe 10 working days.
4. After several years portable gameconsoles, PDAs and Cell-Phones are becoming a target - your game outsold on the desktop and consoles, people knew your game and have good memory. People actually are willing to pay for Mario/PDA after having played Mario/Console. So now you recompile your game to those portable plattforms, sell it for a real low-budget-price and most likely you are outselling all earlier sales.
All portings only take some days of work, yes this can be done with some planing.
This cycle and no other will give maximum earnings. And it simply forbids use of Direct3D.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
To get better gaming support on Linux we need more Linux gamers, but to get more Linux gamers we need better Linux gaming support.
I've been thinking about why there's a lack of high-quality open source games. The easy answer would be the huge artistic & etc. effort required, but I'm not entirely sure that's true: just look at the huge number of free (unsure whether Free) mods for Windows games. So the problem actually seems to lie with the engine. We need a high quality (as in, up there with the latest commercial ones) open source game engine first; having it be cross platform wouldn't hurt, either.
Unfortunately, though, games are dissimilar to most other apps in that, for most other apps, you only need one: Windows has MS Office, Linux has OpenOffice.org, for example. For games, however, you need lots of them: Linux has Unreal and Doom, but Windows also has Far Cry, Half Life, and all the rest. So just having good open source games won't be enough unless all the Windows ones suddenly turn open source as well, which is unlikely.
So in the end it's back to the chicken-and-egg situation of the most popular OS getting the most games, and the OS with the most games getting more popular -- Linux will have to gain a larger installed base in other, non-gaming circles first, for game creators to have an incentive to port to it. (Which is already happening, to a degree. It just needs to continue.)
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
I think this article, while right in its own context, is too graphics-centric and doesn't provide a full perspective on the problem, it's far worse that one can expect from just RTFA.
Sure, graphics are important, but sound, network and input APIs are actually in a much worse situation.
We can argue all we want about how OpenGL is better in many ways and I'd agree wholeheartedly, but Linux's sound, input and network support is just too behind the times in terms "out of the box" functionality or ease of use.
I have been a developer for many years and worked on many platforms, and a common pattern on any serious platform (even going back to the 8-bit days) is that there's complete (granted it's almost never perfect) support for all areas, and DirectX here is no exception, it has by far the best integrated gaming support of any API in existence. Whether it's buggy or low-performance or not cross-platform portable doesn't matter that much. Time-to-market is the name of the game, you want a sellable product and DirectX is the fastest way.
Too often for this kind of argument I receive answers that are ignorant, or uninformed at best, some of them sound like: "But there's OpenAL and it's cross-platform", "udev and hotplug are TEH R0x0RZ", "Linux networking is robust and good enough for servers, therefore desktop performance is guaranteed", "ALSA is better than the Windows crap", "Linux is more stable". Some of them may be right, and Hey! I want Linux to be successful too! But they're completely missing the point and that doesn't help the situation.
We need better API integration, better driver support from chipset vendors (not just graphics, you pixel whores!), BETTER END-USER UTILITIES and some company like Transgaming that can provide a sensible porting/cross-platform middleware solution for developers, not just wrappers for end-users. Criterion's Renderware is a very successful solution for home consoles, one would think there's a market for something like this on the PC.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Two worries were preventing me from doing it. One was a worry about the inability to send a Microsoft Word format document like a resume in an e-mail, but of course, you have the ability to do that in Linux currently, and I guess for now, legacy Word programs force Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility. The second worry, a more real one, was games. I knew the latest versions of Doom, Warcraft, Everquest and so forth were on Microsoft and not Linux. This turns out to be more substantial than my vague uneasiness over the ability to send Word format documents (which of course, for now, you can send in Linux).
What I did is install Debian 3.0 ("woody"). I played some games with lightweight graphics capability like Freeciv or Xboard, but then wanted something more hardcore so I downloaded Tux Racer. It was slooooow when I played. Averaging 0.7 frames per second actually. So then I read I needed drivers for my specifics graphics card to get it to a higher fps rate. I began installing the non-free kernel modules for it, but it was unhappy with the versions of some Debian 3.0 packages, especially XFree86 (xserver-common). I was also having some problems with my H-P PSC (Printer-Scanner-Copier) and its Linux drivers because Debian 3.0 had an ancient version of Python and so forth. So I decided to upgrade from stable version Debian 3.0 ("Woody") to testing version Debian 3.1 ("Sarge").
This fixed my HP PSC problems with Python versions. I am still struggling with Mesa, OpenGL and so forth, and right now can not run tux-racer. I have newer version of Mesa then I did with Debian 3.0, but I'm told my newer one is out-of-date by Tux Racer (whereas my older one was not). I haven't even tried to put the special drivers for my graphics card driver in (which needed the newer version of XFree86).
Anyhow, I've been using UNIX since 1989, and have been a UNIX sysadmin since 1996, and getting Mesa/OpenGL packages working on Debian is giving me trouble, I can imagine what it would be like for someone less experienced. Plus, even if I do get Mesa working for Tux Racer, I will have to be fortunate enough to have graphics acceleration support for my card in Linux. And then, even if those two birds get knocked down, how many games are there out there for Linux with those capabilities - Tux Racer? One or two more? What else? I already know that ease-of-setup for graphics is easier in Windows than Linux (system upgrade, then Mesa problem, followed by looking for graphics acceleration support for my card which may or may not be a problem), how does it stack up against DirectX for the same equipment?
Of course, for free systems, one good thing is I can be part of the solution. I have over a decade of UNIX experience, but only recently has my C programming gotten semi-decent (if that - I can write an OK program in a month, but then it takes me a year to debug all the thread race conditions, buffer overflows and so forth I seem to leave about). Even so, it is very daunting for me to feel I can contribute to these sorts of projects. I know a lot about how the Gnutella protocol so I have a leg up on other people looking to contribute to them - but looking over the code and seeing all of the linked lists, pointers to pointers, calls to GLib and so forth, I wonder if I can ever make a contribution to them since unlike full-time developers, I only have the faintest ideas how things like linked lists work. The learning curve to be able to contribute to these projects is somewhat steep in my opinion, although I always hear stories about kids who stumble over some code, begin sending contributions, and begin running some major project while a teenager, like the guy who maintains the Linux 2.4 kernel I run on my machine.
NVIDIA does have alot of third party extensions and other third party IP in their code...so if they open sourced that it would piss off alot of other companies.
Needless to say, I hope one day they can provide a nice driver that doesn't taint the kernel, however I am grateful that they are actually giving us something that is fully functional in Linux (x86, AMD-64) and FreeBSD.
Some years ago I abandoned Windows on the desktop and switched entirely to Linux. I bought every game from Lokigames with the exception of Eric's ultimate solitare. (I hate solitaire). I purchased Unreal Tournament and other linux compatable games and wrote on the cards "PURCHASED FOR USE WITH LINUX" on the cards that I mailed back.
Problem was, as an advocate (zealot?) I could not play Half-Life with my friends, and they were all into Half-Life. Now, don't tell me that you can run Half-Life on Linux by doing this or by doing that... I know all the things needed to make it work (it works now much better than it did then). However, it really never worked on Linux, or at least I should say it BARELY worked. I certanly could not use it for deathmatching.
When Q3A came out, I bought a Matrox card specifically because of the Linux compatible drivers, and their support of Linux. But Q3A did not run all that great on my machine, even if Linux did have a higher FPS at some of the more esoteric resolutions (Like 640X480 or LESS).
Now, as I type this, I am typing from an XP machine. It is not nearly as stable as I would like - nothing like the non-gui server I have next to me running RH 6.2 (Never bothered to upgrade it, it is still running just fine thanks.) I work on Linux all day, and I now do all my work with Putty to connect to the servers I work on. I am considering going back to Linux on the desktop for browsing, email and chat as I have been having stablity issues with XP and my DVD burner. However, I like my games, and I like playing them well. Furthermore, I like having the highest FPS and quality settings avaliable.
I use my computers as a tool, and when I get home and I want to play Counter Strike Source, Desert Combat or America's Army with my friends I use Windows XP. Don't tell me that these can work on Linux - I already know - and I don't care. I wasted too much of my time in zealotry trying to get some of my older games to run as well under Linux as they do on windows. I don't love XP - but it runs my games. You see, I like Windows for the ability to play games with my friends. I like Linux to run as a server and have the stability and power that a server should have. I don't use Windows servers myself, and I dont use Linux gaming machines. I would like it to change, but when I get home after work, I just want to game with my friends. I have no desire to poke a Linux box more. I get paid to do that at work, I dont want to do it at home.
Would I like to see it change? Sure, but it won't happen for some time if it does, and I have better things to do with my time than be a zealot.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!