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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."
The Apple OS has been "stabilized" for 20 years now; still no games. Sorry dudes. It just ain't gonna happen.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
OpenGL, OSS and X is about all you need to make game [well timers and IP networking]...
You don't need some large ass complicated DX API to make a game in linux. OpenGL + OSS covers graphics and sound. X [motif, etc] cover your window dressing, keyboard and mouse.
This is just another "pander to the concensus" bullshit article. The only thing plaguing "linux gaming" is that people make games with the DX API... Use OpenGL in windows and you save yourself quite a bit of trouble.
Oh no, you won't have the latest doo-dah and VTX shader... well learn this. Doom3 does and it's a craptasticular game.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
First invalid assumption: the same people developing desktop stuff are NOT going to be the people typically developing games.
So, having said that, whats holding back the people developing the games ? It can't be the desktop, they can code around that....
As time progresses and the market matures, we will see a plethora of games on Linux.
I'm not so sure about this. I don't think there is enough incentive among game developers to actually make their products run on Linux. The way I figure it is that every Linux user who is also a gamer is dual-booting Windows (or running Windows on another box). Developer makes a Windows game. Linux guy buys it and runs it on Windows. That's one sale. Now what happens if the developer incurs the cost of developing a Linux version? He sells one game to Linux guy who then runs it in Linux and goes "cool!" That's one sale. Where does the developer gain in this scenario?
Contrast this with the Macintosh game market. Developer makes a Windows version and Mac guy doesn't buy it. Developer incurs the cost of making a Mac version, Mac guy buys it. that's one sale - one sale he wouldn't have had before. There's an actual business case to be made for doing a Mac version, as long as the expected sales revenue is going to outpace the development/support costs of the new version. Not so with Linux. Too many Linux gamers are running Windows for them to count as additional sales.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Firstly Bringing a game to market is extraordinarly expensive, and you won't see game development on the scale or quality of Windows games for Linux until a large number of users (read: not /.ers) Switch to Linux, it's not profitable to do so. Secondly, Linux needs a strong abstraction layer that's as powerful and easy to use as DirectX. The ones out there now aren't up to par yet. One day perhaps, but not one day soon. While some people are satisfied with Quake 3 and a handful of others for Linux, most people want to be able to run the gamut.
BUT! The good news is I think people have recognized it and have started "breaking the cycle". Here's the situation:
"No one wants to develop games on Linux because of lack of hardware support, and no one develops good gaming hardware support, because there is no* games support in Linux"
That being said, I was excited as hell to see UT and UT2003 among others being released on the Penguin Platform.
Better yet, if companies continue to release Linux ports/builds despite mediocre hardware support, it's only going to drive hardware support.
It's a good situation, with the innate potential to be bad.
What do you all think?
The entire premise here is misguided. It's not like Windows gaming is going strong - it's a dying market, and with good reason. People are turning to the consoles for their gaming, and console games sell many, many more copies. Half Life 2 sold 1.7[1] million copies at retail, whereas Halo 2 has topped 7.5 - companies will go where the money is, and the money is not in developing for Windows. If you think there's anything that can be done to make a linux game sell 7.5 million copies, you've got rocks in your head - and *that* is why developers won't be developing for linux based machines - it has nothing to do with the development environment, tools, etc. To put it in context, the PS2 is universally considered a bit of a bitch to develop for - nasty pipeline and memory constraints. Compared to it, linux is a breeeeze. But for some reason, there's a million games avaliable for the PS2. [1] Yes, plus Steam sales, which may account for another 500 K, max. That's why I said retai.
So where are the Open Source Games Projects? Really, the OSS community has tackled massive projects like new kernels and a fantastic browswer. Why are there now OSS game prjects that could set up Linux games. Perhaps even make the 'Killer App' to promote migration.
Game developers will not port their games over to Linux because we want them too. Firstly, they believe a couple things:
- Linux users are such a minority they are a drop in the bucket
- Linux Users won't pay
- No DRM on Linux
The commercial game industry isn't going to buy that. The best thing to do is for F/OSS Developers to knuckle down and develop their own games. Thats right.
We need more Freedroids, we need more Vega Strikes, we need *Good* Versions of LinCity, Wesnoth and what not.
Our focus should be driving the game companies out of power.
The only way we will get the commercial gaming industry to even look at Linux is to make games that bite them in the wallet.
Give me tactical shooters like Operation Flashpoint, Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six that run at the same speed reliably, without having to futz around with X-Windows or sound card drivers, and I'll get rid of Windows on my home computer too. Heck, if they can do it on Mac, I'd be just as happy.
Oh, and what's this "MS owns 60% of OGL" nonsense? Where do you get that from?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Buy a Mac. Seriously.
The linked article is just bad, even beyond turning one page into four for ad purposes. Linux is not a game market, plain and simple. It isn't really even a desktop market. The only commercial alternative to Windows you can expect to make a statement is a Mac. With a Mac you don't have driver issues or the possibility of emulation for games. A Mac port will involve technologies that are also mostly available for Linux.
No game company with a clue would target Linux before they target the Mac, so you can count on the Linux game market always trailing that of the Mac (which isn't exactly stellar). CoolTechZone is beyond deluded to suggest that buying Linux games is going to do anything significant for the platform. It makes sense only on the surface; the real market dynamic points to the Mac as your best bet for eventually seeing more major games on Linux.
The OS that takes a gig of HD space and a hundred or two megs of RAM while still providing no true real-time responsibility does not a good gaming platform make. Be it Windows or Linux. Witness a _great_ decline of PC gaming quality during the move away from DOS games. Also - it is _much_ harder to program something like a game these days. Amazingly, despite the interfaces that were supposed to "protect" you from learning your hardware, you have to learn much bigger amount of stuffs these days to do it. Not to say that super-high-res graphics is harder to make than what it was in low-res days. Also - 3D is not the answer for everything, hear that gaming companies! Polygon-composed human models suck incredibly when compared to old-school animations (and blurred textures suck on everything). In short - to make _a_ game nowadays one should invest a huge amount of man/hours -> large stuff working on it -> big money -> no risks allowed -> PHB-style management -> crap. I dunno, maybe if we have some better game programming facilities provided to everyone than maybe there's a hope of revival of these sector. Come to think of it, it does apply not only to games.
The problem with development on Linux, especially in a GUI desktop, is that it keeps changing too often! Its frusterating to be a developer on linux, because you waste so much time trying to ensure that your products work properly with all the new distros, which ship library X as apposed to library Y, and very often break compat.... One thing windows has going for it, is that software written 10 years ago will still run, and software written today will still run on a windows box many years old... The same cannot be said for linux... Try running something on RH 6.2 nowadays..
As much as I agree with you in theory, it's a little more complicated than that in reality. Even though both my daughter and I have mid (her) to high (me)-end gaming computers, and even though we have tons of games on the PC that we like, I still bought her a PS2. Why? Because I've never been able to get Dance Dance Revolution on a PC and that's the game she really wanted.
On the other hand, I've never considered buying her a Mac for gaming because all of the good games are just late ports of PC games.
If you want to have people going to Linux for the games, you need more than just late ports of great PC games. You need some great games that come out for Linux FIRST and stay only on that platform for a significant amount of time. No one bought a PC to play Halo, but plenty of people bought Xboxs for it.
TW
Exactly. Companies don't avoid OSX (or Linux) because they are such huge fans of win32 that the though of releasing software for anything else is abhorrent (Microsoft's first and second party studios aside). It's simply not worth the time and effort to do so for relatively few sales.
The huge popularity of consoles relative to the PC games market is already cutting in to the number of Windows compatible titles. If companies aren't willing to develop for Windows, why on Earth would they port their games to a platform with 1/50th the potential market?
There will always be games for the Mac and Linux. But they are going to be few in number and (mostly) behind the curve due to the time it takes to port them. Crappy video drivers for Linux and Apple selling machine with sub-laptop video performance isn't helping the matter either.
Why is this insightful?
My SB Audigy 2 worked fine OOTB with Mandrake 10. I had to install the drivers for my Nvidia 5700 (whihc you have to do in windows too).
Once id released the Doom 3 client for linux, I could stop going back to windows to play it. It DOES run at the same speed as it does in windows, and I didn't have to muck around at all. It just worked.
I even run it thru KDE, with my IM client still going. Seriously, what is the problem? If it doesn't run reliably or fast, its probably the game developers fault (or possibly yours, for having a bad setup).
id can do it, its not impossible...and the fact that it did 'just work' really impressed me (i've been trying to game since '98 on linux).
"My SB Audigy 2 worked fine"
Does multispeaker support work fine? How about EAX? Does it eat up your CPU cycles (it did the last time I tried the SB Audigy on Linux).
"Once id released the Doom 3"
id is a notable exception. They make some damn fine games, and they run damn fine on multiple platforms. Blizzard (to a certain extent) does the same thing.
"It DOES run at the same speed as it does in windows"
I'd be interested in seeing some benchmarks. I haven't seen one comparison of Windows/Linux id software that doesn't have Windows running about 10-20fps on the same hardware.
"I even run it thru KDE, with my IM client still going."
That's impressive.
"If it doesn't run reliably or fast, its probably the game developers fault (or possibly yours, for having a bad setup)."
Or, just possible, the drivers aren't optimized, there's too much cruft in the sound system and there isn't a unified API for network, sound and inputs like DirectX (OpenGL is only for graphics).
An extensible flight engine using public domain mapping data could catch the imagination of the MS Flight Simulator fans -- let's call this Open Air -- and the other firm favourite that should be fairly straighforward would instantly have a catchy name: Open Golf.
First person shooter engines, RTS engines, Turn-based map/strategy engines.... Once you have all these available for free, the the average home-coder gains the ability to generate a decent game quickly and easily, and the profit for those who chose to make a commercial game increases dramatically.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
That large ass complicated API is many times better than having to futz with APIs provided by multiple vendors. It also reduces if not eliminates the worries that they may have bad versins of all of these independant APIs. It also provides you with several known levels of feature support.
In other words it is LESS COMPLEX to deal with.
On a side note, your entire comment is very hostile to the current game development community and its standards and you wonder why this platform is ignored? Your type are the ones they notice and guess what, they don't want'em.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Does multispeaker support work fine?
:) I find Doom unplayable on anything less than 60 fps. And, again, comparing the two platforms, I've never seen Doom 3 on Linux perform as well as Doom 3 on Windows using the same hardware.
I have 2.1 sound...so I couldn't really tell you. I know that either ALSA or the (for pay) OSS DOES support multispeakers. Doom3 for linux supports this as well (under linux).
5.1 or 7.1 sound. Last I saw of the Audigy drivers, they only supported "mirroring" 2.1 sound along the back channels. I have a fairly high-end 7.1 setup and I would want more than just mirroring.
How about EAX?
Give me a way to tell, and I'll let you know. I do know that the game sounds the same in both windows and linux.
Ok, you don't know what EAX is. EAX provides environmental effects -- for example, it's what makes the sounds clang off the corridors in Doom, or makes an NPC sound positionally different in Wow if they're behind you vs. in front of you when you click on them. Last I checked, EAX wasn't supported at all in Linux. You may *think* the game sounds the same, but it probably doesn't.
Does it eat up your CPU cycles (it did the last time I tried the SB Audigy on Linux).
What exactly are you refering to? EAX? The sound in general? The game would eat up CPU in windows too..its a game, and its doing alot of things. I know that my IM client continues to chime away as people sign off and on, and without studdering.
The sound card's CPU usually handles EAX and multiple speakers. If the drivers offload to the main CPU (which many Linux drivers do) you end up eating up cycles doing the same effects. Cycles the game could be using to render graphics or handle AI.
The idea that your IM client chimes in the background isn't amazing. Most people who play Windows games have a few IM programs running in the back, and (if you're not playing multiplayer), a P2P app or two downloading stuff.
id is a notable exception. They make some damn fine games, and they run damn fine on multiple platforms. Blizzard (to a certain extent) does the same thing.
Which is getting to my point...it not Linux that's holding up games on linux, its the game developers choosing not to support it. But there's no technical reason they couldn't if they wanted to.
I agree, it's mostly marketshare problems. However, that doesn't defeat the problem that there's still no DirectX-style API for other game functions in Linux (input, network and sound). That goes a long distance in making games easier to port.
I'd be interested in seeing some benchmarks. I haven't seen one comparison of Windows/Linux id software that doesn't have Windows running about 10-20fps on the same hardware.
I get about 30-40 on average, and both linux and windows drop when there's a large # of monsters on screen (well, imps..for some reason it didn't slow when the mancubus came out).
Ouch. Not a gamer, huh?
That's impressive.
Not sure if its sarcasm or not..but I pointed it out b/c alot of people claim the only way to get games playable is to kill your desktop / WM. I put that in to show its simply not true.
It was sarcasm.
Or, just possible, the drivers aren't optimized, there's too much cruft in the sound system and there isn't a unified API for network, sound and inputs like DirectX (OpenGL is only for graphics).
Yes, those are certinaly possiblities. But the fact that Doom 3 plays very well on linux leads me to think that those aren't really the causes for any slowdown. If I play another game w/a linux client that doesn't perform well, i'd be included to blame the game developers, not my linux system.
Take the sims for example; thats slow even on good (fast) windows machines...proof that developer can make a game really slow if they don't try hard enough.
The big difference is that id has a track record of sticking with O
"If it doesn't run reliably or fast, its probably the game developers fault (or possibly yours, for having a bad setup)."
:( ) I take a little bit of issue with this (as I do with most Monday morning developing). This is like saying, "Cars dont' drive on water 'cause those slacker engineers in the industry don't want to get down to work."
As someone who has spent some time in the development industry (albeit no games
It is a matter of resources. A company can spend X dollars, use DirectX and reach 90+% of the market. Or, they can spen X^N dollars, use whatever and reach a small minority of the market. It is pretty unreasonable for me to bash some engineer/company because they are not willing to lose their #@*&s to make a water car for me and the three other people out there just dying for it.
I know the analogy is a little bit of a stretch, but not that much. I find it hard to "fault" anyone or any company for wanting to succeed.