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."

Comments

I'm willing to change

[October_30th]

Give me tactical shooters like Operation Flashpoint, Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six and I'll get rid of Windows on my home computer.

Re:I'm willing to change

[SilentChris]

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.

Re:I'm willing to change

[kg_o.O]

There you go

Re:I'm willing to change

[Second_Infinity]

Agreed. Gaming is the only thing that's holding me to a Microsoft product. All the other applications I use have exact (or better) linux/unix counterparts, and they're all freeware.

The article may be poorly done as some have stated, and it may be something that's posted about once a year, but it's still good to have a recent update of status.

If the video card manufacturers would really start supporting linux drivers, maybe that would change the face of linux gaming. Until then, we're stuck with tuxracer and sub-par video gaming quality.

Re:I'm willing to change

[Total_Wimp]

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

Re:I'm willing to change

[October_30th]

Are those 3rd person shooters?

Yes and no.

Yes, if you mean that they're (most of the time) played from the perspective of the game character.

No, if you mean that they're like Doom/Quake/Halo where you run alone through a hail of bullets mostly unscathed (and then go looking for a "health package").

There's plenty of tactical thinking involved since in all three games control several other characters (up to 12 persons in Operation Flashpoint) at the same time. Setting your troops up for an attack or at defensive positions is great fun AND you get participate in the shoot-out as well (if you like). You can also create your own campaigns and scenarios and trade them with other players.

I was a text game addict back in the C64 days, I still am a turn-based strategy game buff and now I thoroughly enjoy tactical shooters, too. Don't just a game simply because it looks like a routine 3rd person shooter.

As far as console versions of these games go, they are invariably watered down: less tactics, more action and usually graphics suffer too.

Re:I'm willing to change

[ErroneousBee]

Here you go.

Re:I'm willing to change

[plover]

Seconded! America's Army is The One True Game.

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.

Re:I'm willing to change

[plague3106]

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).

Re:I'm willing to change

[DenDave]

Who cares about gaming? When you have a linux box you can have fun resolving dependancies, building packages and simply netcatting your little brothers porn traffic!!!

Re:I'm willing to change

[SilentChris]

"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).

Re:I'm willing to change

[Contact]

...I've never been able to get Dance Dance Revolution on a PC and that's the game she really wanted

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...

Re:I'm willing to change

[SilentChris]

Does multispeaker support work fine?

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? :) 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.

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

Re:I'm willing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it doesn't run reliably or fast, its probably the game developers fault (or possibly yours, for having a bad setup)."

As someone who has spent some time in the development industry (albeit no games :( ) 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."

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.

Dupe!

[nicholasharbour]

I swear I read this EXACT story 3 years ago.

Re:Dupe!

[Otter]

Sure, but now we have the Cube LiveCD for PegasosPPC!. With a game I've never heard of running on hardware I've never heard of we've entered a new world of Linux gaming!

All that matters

[Sfing_ter]

All that matters is I can play Quake 3 just fine... well, the game plays just fine... :)

Current state of my Linux gaming

[JamesD_UK]

----+--
|`....|
|..f?.|
|..@..|
-------

Lameness filter be gone! Lameness filter be gone! Lameness filter be gone!

Re:Current state of my Linux gaming

[dr_dank]

Wait until Nethack for Playstation2 comes out. The f? rendered in 3d will be breathtaking.

I don't think so.

[Chess_the_cat]

Once the Linux desktop has stabilized to a certain extent, that's when Linux gaming will take off.

The Apple OS has been "stabilized" for 20 years now; still no games. Sorry dudes. It just ain't gonna happen.

Re:I don't think so.

[feldsteins]

The "Apple OS" does have games. the Linux community would cut off it's arm to have the games that the Macintosh has. Obviously it's not the Windows market, but it's lightyears ahead of Linux.

Re:I don't think so.

[essreenim]

Stop sniffing glue and start playing Doom3, and WoW on OSX..

Re:I don't think so.

[DavidLeblond]

And WoW, all the Blizzard games, Doom3, UT2k4, the Sims, soon the Sims 2, KOTOR...

Another state of games article?

[tod_miller]

Well while we are here - I think it has been shown to stem from a) drivers b) opengl only c) user base and portability vis-a-vis drivers and opengl only.

Microsoft owns about 60% of opengl. :-(

In good news, flash games and java games all fly like shit out of a teflon coated colon. Which is kinda cool.

Re:Another state of games article?

[CAIMLAS]

Oh, and what's this "MS owns 60% of OGL" nonsense? Where do you get that from?

bullshit

[tomstdenis]

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

Software Like Cedega I get 75% working.

[BrianHursey]

Well already I have about 75% of my windows games working with transgaiming cedega. But I do not see many more game developers moving over to a Linux native option. They see it costing them to much money because most of them use the directx platform. Although I here Microsoft doesn't support direct play any more. But I doubt this will discourage them.

I'm worried

[feldsteins]

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.

Re:I'm worried

[Minna Kirai]

Developer incurs the cost of making a Mac version, Mac guy buys it. that's one sale

It's true that the revenue boost from a Mac version is far greater than what a Linux version would provide today. However, if a company has already decided on releasing a Mac port, then the additional effort required for a Linux port is far less.

Once the codebase is platform independent, adding 3rd or 4th platforms is far simpler than adding the 2nd.

Consider: to port a game to Mac, you must reprogram the internals to function in a Unix-based OS, and change the graphics engine to output OpenGL instead of DirectX. And of course, those two things are also the greatest obstacles to a Linux release.

Further reasons why porting to Linux can be relatively cheap: 1) Unlike the Mac port, the Linux version will usually run on the same hardware as the original, meaning there's no CPU-specific optimizations to change. 2) If the game is online multiplayer, it probably already had a partial Linux port for the dedicated server, so some of the work has been started.

Re:I'm worried

[GreatDrok]

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?

I have bought a fair number of games for my PC now and some of them will only run on Windows but others run on both. For the ones that run on both I have hardly played the Windows version (UT2004, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom III). They are the games that I enjoyed and got through quickly, the Windows games I have require me to reboot so it takes me longer to get through them. More to the point, the native Linux games play better than their Windows version, especially Doom III which is noticibly smoother.

If the Linux version comes out at the same time, or very shortly after the Windows version I think there is definitely a point, if it comes out at the same time as the Mac version then just forget it. In the end, the developers should make sure that their games work on Linux too and they can ride the wave as Linux inevitably becomes more popular. It took Windows gaming years to get where it is today, Linux will catch up. Mind you, I think the PC, whether Windows or Linux, is going to have to watch out as the next gen consoles look likely to finally be capable of unseating the PC as the high end gaming platform of choice.

Re:I'm worried

[Tim Browse]

Actually, if companies were smart, develop on Linux then port to Windows and Mac.

Why would they develop on Linux first? Surely basic risk management would dictate that you ensure that you develop for your primary platform, e.g. Windows (compared to Mac/Linux). I'm assuming from your use of the word 'companies' that some kind of profit is intended to be involved.

It is even comparably easy to add support for say the PS2.

Comparably easy in what way? I'm not aware of having met anyone who's developed for PS2 that would use the word 'easy' to describe it.

Re:I'm worried

[Tim Browse]

By developing on multiple platforms you reduce bugs.

This can happen, but are you suggesting that game developers develop for Linux just to reduce bugs, and not because they will ship on Linux? There are much more efficient ways of spending your time if you want to reduce bugs.

There will be fewer stumbling blocks porting from Linux to Windows than Windows to Linux.

Why is that then? Or is it just received wisdom?

It is all too easy to use a library on Windows that has no correspondence on another platform.

Many game developers are working on projects for which the finance runs to millions of dollars. They do actually think about these things. If they choose a library that is specific to Windows, it's usually for a reason (often financial). I sometimes think that some people think games developers use DirectX to develop for Windows, but then try to port to other platforms, only to find DirectX isn't supported, like a bolt out of the blue. "Oh no! No DirectX for Mac or Linux?! How were we supposed to know that? We thought DirectX ran on everything!"

The developement kit is running Linux on the PS2. The case of taking something already running on Linux over to the PS2 is simplified somewhat.

Oh please - nobody uses the Linux devkit for PS2 outside of some mad Japanese developers and the occasional masochist. The Windows tools are poor enough, without wanting to use the Linux ones...shudder. Besides which, that's like saying that if I code my game on Windows, that'll make it easier to port it to the GameCube because all the GC dev stuff runs on Windows.

Also it requires a bit of vision to go I want to develope for multiple platforms, what is the best way to do this, rather than a short term how do I maximize profit.

When you say 'vision', you mean extra cash, because it costs extra. You seem to be grasping, as if developing for Linux is in some way self-righteous, and inherently just better than developing on Windows.

If you're writing cross-platform games, your (current) platforms are basically PC, Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. I don't see how developing your game on Linux is going to help you achieve that. If anything, on Linux you'll end up with the same problems as you do on Windows - i.e. resource usage too high (because PCs are big and powerful - huge hard drives and RAM), which leads to code/architecture which crashes and burns when you port to a console. Or using fancy features like rampant C++ template/STL usage which you find won't compile for consoles, or frags the (fixed size) heap like hell.

You can overcome these problems by developing first on consoles, but I prefer to develop the game primarily on the platform with the best tools, and apply some engineering discipline and structure, rather than develop the game for a platform that it will never ship on.

To me, this is pretty basic risk management.

I can't agree with the statement...

[cnelzie]

...that once the Linux desktop is easier to use that LInux Gaming will 'take off'.

PC gaming 'Took Off' without PCs being easy/simple to use devices. Just remember back to the days of DOS with games like the original Wing Commander, not necesarily very easy to get running, when compared with installing and getting modern games to run under Windows.

Linux gaming shouldn't be an afterthought, it should be a current thought, going along with the development of an easy to use desktop operating system.

Re:The problem with Cedega

[BrianHursey]

Why pay when you can use cvscedega? http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfsection/arti cle.php?articleid=45

Linux gaming rather is like the South Sole

[rudi_v]

"It's somewhat chaotic, random and empty, but it can be very exciting too."

Yes, and there will be no more life in 100 years than there is now.

Linux gaming lacks 'critical mass', required for justifying the huge game development investments. And I don't see how it could acquire the critical mass, some great independent developers don't count compared to the Nintendo's, Sony's et al of this world.

America's Army rocks

[Trailer Trash]

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).

Re:America's Army rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

AA:SF is cool. Can someone help me with the later missions. I've toppled the statue, and am holding my own against the insurgents, and I've seen the "Mission Accomplished" splash screen... but I can't seem to find the WMD anywhere? Is there a secret button I need to push somewhere?

God be with you,
George.

I think not.

[Morphix84]

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.

It's actually a bit of a Catch-22

[Biff98]

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?

Plenty of small free games

[Rik Sweeney]

There's

Project Starfighter

Blob Wars

Virus Killer

Give them a try. After all, they're completely free.

My favorite Linux games just for the record.

[pecosdave]

UT2004 (and the older UTs also)

The Battle for Wesnoth very good freebie.

These are the ones I'm focusing on right now. I've played lots of others. Quake III, Frozen Bubble, I saw someone complain about lack of tacticle shooters, I did have Soldier of fortune. Now that Loki is gone ports don't happen quite as often, but they do still happen. Right now Blizzard is probably the biggest gaping hole in the Linux game library.

Re:There are ALOT of invalid assumptions here

[gandell]

So, having said that, whats holding back the people developing the games ? It can't be the desktop, they can code around that....

The same thing that's holding back gaming on the Mac: Marketability / Userbase.
When you only have a few people to cater to, it doesn't make for a very profitable venture. So what do you do? You stick with the name brand that sells, or at least what everyone owns.

LiveGames

[Doc Ruby]

I remember when lots of "Windows" games just booted into DOS, for performance and stability. That's when Windows gaming really started to take off. Linux is so much more flexible, the OS is freely available and hackable by any game developer, and "LiveCD" and other subinstance techniques are now widespread. Why wait for the Linux desktop to stabilize? Why not just take a lesson from "Windows" gaming, and develop Linux games embedded in a complete, bootable Linux image? The increased use by demanding users (without developer fetish for touching the bleeding edge tech) will instead pressure the Linux desktop to stabilize. It worked before, on Windows, and such "bootable Linux games" can even be run on a "Windows" box, helping convert them to the Light Side.

Fighting the wrong battle

[morganjaffit]

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.

Re:Fighting the wrong battle

[fitten]

Well... people have said this same thing for at least a decade (I remember talking about exactly this in the very early 1990s). The console has always been poised to "take over the home" but hasn't yet. It's still a little to special purpose and lacking of standard input options (yes, you can get keyboards for them but how many people actually have them?) Top that with pretty low quality graphics for most people (how many people do you know with HDTVs?), little/no local storage, and the lack of a real general purpose OS (anyone plugged a USB printer into a console yet?) and no other apps (when can I run OpenOffice on the PS2 - not Linux on the PS2 - on the PS2) for the most part. As you said... development on embedded systems is a bit harder than on an OS with things like virtual memory.

PCs are making strides to get down to the sub-$200 home computers (where the console market lives). That's because many families will/can purchase a $200 machine (console) but can't afford a more expensive computer.

To contrast your HL2 and Halo2 numbers, go look up how many copies WoW, EQ, and EQ2 have sold. Also, instead of looking at the blockbusters, look at some of the lesser games. Crappy console games sell about the same as crappy PC games.

Anyway, consoles will be at a point to 'take over the home' when they become more general purpose. So far, there haven't been many attempts (especially successful attempts) to make them more general purpose (yet).

So,

[Moby Cock]

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.

I've said this before I will say it again...

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

Linux Live Game Project

[SteelLynx]

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

Let's pick on the Linux community today!

[HarveyBirdman]

GAME PROGRAMMER: How about we do a version for Linux?

GAME COMPANY CEO: That's that OS used by those people who are rabid about not paying for anything involving software, right?

GP: Yeah.

GCC: Get back to work, dumbass, or I'll cut your balls off.

Hey! I tease!

Re:Let's pick on the Linux community today!

[RupW]

That's probably not far off. The problems are, AFAICS,

1. support burden; you're fighting a huge number of distros, half-assed drivers from companies who don't really care about Linux, and so on
(related: QA burden: double the testing!)
2. cost of port in the first place
3. less of a framework to implement copy protection; it's even easier to drop stuff into the kernel, libs, etc. to fake it
4. commercial demand; OK, chicken and egg, but it's basically negligable right now

I think support is the real killer: even if evangelist programmers will do the port in their spare time, you can't try and sell a Linux version in small quantities unless you're willing to invest in supporting it - and who's going to buy a game if they can't expect support?

Re:Let's pick on the Linux community today!

[WilyCoder]

GCC: Get back to work, dumbass, or I'll cut your balls off.

I thought I was the only one to get that compiler error.

How to *really* get Linux games

[droleary]

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.

Hmm

[Azureflare]

What blizzard game doesn't run in linux?

Oh.. Diablo 1 doesn't play, I don't think... But Diablo 2 and the expansion, StarCraft + Expansion, World of Warcraft, warcraft 2 (dunno about the expansion for that), Warcraft 3 + expansion... They all work. I know, because I play them in linux with cedega.

I wouldn't consider that a "gaping hole."

Utterly fails to grasp the scale of the problem

[parm]

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.

Linux is too unstable...

[piett134]

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..

Introversion

[Smiffa2001]

Introversion Software http://www.introversion.co.uk/ are performing small miracles. Uplink was great, and Darwinia looks to be fantastic.

Best of all, they're available (at least Darwinia very soon after Win/Mac release) for Linux. If you've not seen em, go on over and take a look. If anything, it's people like Chris Delay and the rest of Introversion that might just be Linux gaming's "future".

+5 Insightful

[vrai]

The same thing that's holding back gaming on the Mac: Marketability / Userbase.

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.

Re:+5 Insightful

[bersl2]

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.

If companies knew to write them in a portable way in the first place (OpenGL + SDL), porting would be relatively trivial, cost-effective, and beneficial to both parties.

we might not get good commercial games but...

[vivehosting]

it doesn't mean Linux won't continue to see a few good games. Wildfire Games are developing a 3D real-time strategy game, 0AD. Just like we enjoy free/open source software applications such as openoffice and the mozilla suite, there will be free games worth playing. America's Army has a large fanbase, 0AD most likely will have one when released, more will come :).

Re:why linux?

[10Ghz]

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 :)

Is it just me...

[dafragsta]

... or is everyone ignoring the fact that the icon for games or linux games (not sure which) is a MICROSOFT Sidewinder joystick? It seems oddly out of place.

What I don't understand is...

[Half-pint HAL]

If the Linux community are so short on games, why don't they do their usual collaborative thing and make game engines.

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.

Re:What I don't understand is...

[grumbel]

### 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.

Actually DirectX is the key to windows gaming..

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:Actually DirectX is the key to windows gaming..

[happyfrogcow]

LibSDL... uses OpenGL when in Linux. Uses DirectX in Windows when in windows.

Granted, i'm not a Windows game developer, but i'm not sure why anyone uses DirectX anymore unless they explicitly don't want to port the game elsewhere.

Re:How the fuck

[LilMikey]

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.

Re:Linux gaming for modern games is a log way off

[WMD_88]

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.

Re:How the fuck

[LilMikey]

Dude... what you previously posted was intentionally and obviously wrong. You didn't even bother to inform yourself in this recent post either.

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.

...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...

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