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The State of Linux Gaming
Srikant_Chaudhry writes "CTZ has an interesting article that talks about hardware and software problems, along with others, that is limiting Linux gaming as a whole. Here's a quote from their concluding paragraph: "As of this moment, gaming on Linux is still a little like the Wild West. It's somewhat chaotic, random and empty, but it can be very exciting too. As time progresses and the market matures, we will see a plethora of games on Linux. Right now, many distributions are concentrating on other materials, like making their distributions easy to use, and making sure they work well with all the different hardware. Once the Linux desktop has stabilized to a certain extent, you can expect to see developers turn their energies to better gaming support under Linux. That's when the Linux gaming market will really take off."
I've been playing AA:SF on Linux for a couple of weeks and it is rock solid. I was amazed to find that there was a Linux version, and there is one single guy in the credits who is credited with both the Linux and Mac OSX ports. The only problem is that I couldn't signup on their web site with Firefox, had to use IE.
Anyway, good FPS, absolutely free, and downloadable via a torrent (check out the 3dgamers link for download).
Do you have ESP?
With all the previous comments about LiveCDs with games I felt it might be prudent to mention the Linux Live Game Project which was recently mentioned here on /.
Another useful link for people looking for Linux games is, of course, linuxgames.org
It's 19:11:42. Do You Know Where Your Meat Body Is?
There you go
And WoW, all the Blizzard games, Doom3, UT2k4, the Sims, soon the Sims 2, KOTOR...
Okay, some background; up until November last year, I worked in the games industry, coding for Windows and Xbox. I'm now working as a (non-games) developer under Linux. This article utterly fails to get a handle on the size of the gulf between the Windows games platform and the Linux one.
Firstly, and this is a cliche, but hardware support under Linux is poor. Yes, I know you can get drivers for NVidia (and more recently ATI) video cards, but in terms of technological development, these drivers are way, way behind the Windows equivalents. Support for sound under Linux is a complete joke - it's still at the level of playing back PCM data on one or more channels. Fuck, even the GBA can do that; consumer soundcards these days are massive DSP monsters; most of them support at least EAX 2.0, which provides a massive range of reverb, occlusion/diffusion and other environmental effects. EAX 4.0 is incredibly powerful and complex - it allows detailed environmental modelling with up to four simultaneous environments and a complex mixer/router model to allow you to, say, stand in a metal room and listen to an explosion coming from a padded room joined to your room by a stone tunnel. All hardware accelerated.
Secondly, software support is poor. SDL is getting better, but frankly, DirectX is a bloody marvel. It's a standardised, extensible interface that presents a consistent API to an enourmous range of hardware; it's still flexible enough to allow you to optimise for certain cards whilst remaining consistent enought that all hardware will function to some extent.
Thirdly, there's no incentive for publishers to publish games on Linux; Linux represents a tiny fraction of the desktop market, and most Linux users run Windows or own games consoles anyway. They've got nothing to gain from publishing Linux conversions, and with the costs of games development spiralling to Hollywood-esque levels, the extra cost of developing for a minority platform like Linux just doesn't make sense.
Fourthly, PC gaming is dying on its arse anyway: consoles are where the real money is at. Publishers are now considering Windows to be a risky platform to publish on, because the market is hyper-saturated, and unless you get a guaranteed number one, you might as well just throw your money down a big hole and bury it. If *Windows* is a risky platform, then Linux doesn't even get a look in.
If I'd have bounced the idea of doing a Linux port of our game off our publishers/producers/management, they'd have just laughed at me. Linux isn't a serious platform for games, and I can't see that changing in the short-medium term. Sorry.
-- I reserve the right to be completely wrong --
Here you go.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Well, consoles are not the end-all solutiuon to gaming. They might excel in some types of games, but not all. Ever seen strategy or simulation-games on consoles?
:)
And I do have one occasion where gaming has been better on Linux than on W2K. I have some old DOS-games that I like to play, like Steel Panthers 2. It wont work in W2K so, I installed Dosbox on it, and ran the game there. It worked, but it was unbearably slow. I then tried installing Dosbox on my Gentoo (running on the same machine), and it was ALOT faster! The game was actually playable (it wasn't on Windows)!
That said, I do still keep W2K around. Mainly just to play games
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The gameplay is brilliant: no "instant respawn". You die, well, you get to sit there and watch your buddies try to complete the mission. Since your opponents are also equally motivated to stay alive, they're usually much more challenging. The weapons and ammo aren't unlimited, you don't find Big Kegs O' Health laying on the ground, and you don't get powerups. There's no such thing as turning friendly fire on or off -- don't shoot your buddies or you'll get booted from the server and wind up in Leavenworth (worth exploring in cheat mode once or twice, by the way.) The graphics (especially since the 2.x release) are among the best in the industry -- great attention to detail. Most of the maps are fairly well balanced. And while you don't play an ongoing "character", your performance is still tracked, and counts for a little bit in selecting your position on each squad.
Relatively few bugs, and PunkBuster to keep the cheating reduced to a playable level. All that and it's free -- you don't even have to sit through a "Join the Army" lecture to get it.
I've played all the other FP shooters, and I keep coming back to AA for every one of those reasons above. I've not played it on Linux, so I can't swear to the performance on that platform, but if it can run on a crappy Windows box, it should run fine for you.
John
Check out Stepmania. It's an open source DDR clone, runs under windows, and can import third party songs and patterns (there are *cough* allegedly *cough* lots of these available on various file sharing networks).
Without wishing to sound like flamebait, Stepmania is head and shoulders above most homegrown software - it's much better than most commercial stuff. I'm not a huge DDR fan, but I was incredibly impressed by how well this was put together. Best of all - it's available for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.
Just add a USB to Playstation adapter, and you can plug a playstation dance mat into your PC and get going...
And there's also pydance . So that's 2 good DDR-like games freely available for windows and linux.
lol...you wish. especially with WineX, linux has pretty much every game windows has. I'm thinking about getting a mac mini, but unlike linux with WineX, there is still no way to run Counter-strike or Half-life 2 on a Mac. Linux and Mac are going to be facing this together - Macs have sucked for a long time, and had extremely limited success. It's only with OS X and the iPod that the Mac userbase is finally growing. Even so, linux is already a long ways ahead of Mac for gaming.
### If the Linux community are so short on games, why don't they do their usual collaborative thing and make game engines.
They are doing it, we have Stratagus, Flightgear, Cube, CrystalSpace, Ogre and a whole bunch of other games or engines that are more or less ready to use. However none of them really is up to commercial standards and most of them seriously lack content creation tools. Having a good engine is only half the work, you still need to have a good level editor.
The free software world simply lacks the man-power to do all that and do it right. We don't see high quality free games or game engines for the same reason we don't see drop-in Photoshop replacements or Microsoft Office killers. Sure we have Gimp and OpenOffice, but beside being free they don't have all that much to offer. Beside from that in the games world stuff gets quickly out of date, an Office can be maintained for quite some years without huge rewrites, game engines on the other side need to be mostly rewritten from scratch every now an then cause the underlying hardware changes quite frequently.
Wow... you're impressively uninformed. Have you even bothered to use Linux?
Audio Software for Linux, well, let's see, Audacity, that's it. Windows, Audacity, Goldwave, SoundForge, etc.
Check PlanetCCRMA once in a while. Personally, I personally use Ardour + Hydrogen + Jack often. You mentioned Audacity and there's a bazillion 'nothing special' recorders along the line of goldwave.
Video Editing Software for Linux, well, let's see, none that I can think of. Windows, Adobe Primere, Video Explosion Deluxe, Dazzle DVD Complete.
Kino, mencodeer, AVIDemux, DVD-Create...
Image Editing Software for Linux, The Gimp, and that's it. Windows, PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro, NeoPaint as well as the Gimp.
Photogenics, X-Paint, Artstream, if course Gimp. If you really can't live without the comfort of Photoshop, 7 runs perfectly under wine.
Email Software, Thunderbird, none other that I can think of. Windows it's Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook/Outlook Express.
Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail, Balsa, GMail, Aethera, Mahogany...
I understand you're trolling and I'm just feeding you but if noone replies to crap like this average people might actually believe the shlop this guy says. If it weren't for games, there would be a lot more converts.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
It's your card. AnandTech did a benchmark in Linux of FX5700 Ultra vs. X800 Pro. The ATI drivers are so bad that the X800 lost to the far inferior 5700 in every test.
Dude... what you previously posted was intentionally and obviously wrong. You didn't even bother to inform yourself in this recent post either.
...no legal Linux DVD software...where Windows has software to play DVDs legally, and even illegal software that will allow someone to copy DVDs. There's only partial support for the Audigy and Live in Linux...
I saw the Audio editing software, and overkill for someone that just wants to copy their old record over, and does it even have any options for cleaning the audio? on top of that, there are so many dependencies that it makes my head spin.
So there wasn't enough Audio software in your previous post and now there's too much? I guess I can't compete with that. For future reference, Audacity, a program you used in your own example, works well for recording from an analog source... like a record.
Mencodeer doesn't exist, the rest either the interface sucks or no screenshots. And Linux doesn't support video capture other than from a lousy Hauppauge Video Card that crashes after so many seconds of video capture, no matter what OS is used.
Sorry, it's 'mencoder'. And I have no idea where you're getting your video capture information. BT8x8 cards, the most popular capture chips are well supported. The more advanced hardware encoders are also supported very well. Capture over firewire works very well but since you couldn't find screenshots of Kino (nice methodology, btw) you wouldn't be aware of that.
Artstream is now gone, possibly forever; X-Paint is a ripoff of Microsoft Paint that comes with Windows, hell, NeoPaint for DOS can do more than that. Photogenics is for both windows and Linux so that means only 1 good image editing Application for Linux, the Gimp has a lousy interface. And Yes, Photoshop may run in Linux under wine, but, how stable is it, and how much configuring does someone have to go through just to get it at least somewhat runnable?
So if something runs on both Linux and Windows it doesn't count for Linux? I gave those examples because it included a simple image editor, an advanced and well supported image editor, and the venerable Gimp. Photoshop 7 runs damn near flawlessly under wine with wine's default config. If you can install the rpm, you can run PS7.
Thunderbird and Mahogany are the only two that looked any good, but, they are also available for windows.
Wow... noone uses Mahogany but Evolution is so popular they're working on a Windows port. Thanks for doing the research before posting.
Any software for Linux similar to Quicken and Quickbooks that will allow someone to import the data from Quicken and Quickbooks?
Can't comment on that... Never tried any of them. I used GNUCash once upon a time but I don't think it's the same.
The Audigy line is supposed to be very well supported in Linux although I don't have first hand experience with it so I'll have to comment on it no further. In fact, in your entire 2 post rambling the single valid point I can pick out is the comment on DeCSS and DVD decryption. The fact of the matter is the licensing costs of a DVD decoder is so prohibitive that you probably will only find it in FOSS that has a huge bankroll with money to burn (like SuSe) behind it. It's a huge ripoff that's unfairly skewed to those making decent profits off of selling whatever is doing the encoding. It's not in the spirit of FOSS and it's not in the spirit of open standards. At this point, I'd prefer a vagabond distribution that give me DeCSS illegally than one that supports the creatons that try to lock away our culture for higer margins (btw, it's just as illegal to copy a DVD using Linux software as it is using Windows software). Regardless, point well taken... but we'll probably never be able to tackle it.
It's obvious that the problem isn't your inability to decrypt a DVD without a proper license... you just don't want to take the time
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto