Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown

bonch writes "Steve Bowler, lead animator for Midway Games, has written an article for Next Generation called Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown. He talks about id no longer being the king of the hill in the FPS genre, losing the multiplayer gaming wars to Counter-strike and the engine licensing wars to competitors like Unreal 3.0, and focusing too much on rendering realistic environments at the expense of modern gameplay features. From the article: 'It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.'"

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[Anonymous Coward]

For an upstart operating system, BeOS hit a lot of marks: It outran Mac OS and Windows on their own hardware, supported modern operating system features before anyone else did, piqued Apple's interest as the replacement for Mac OS, ideologically succeeded the Amiga platform, started a rivalry with embedded operating system QNX, and did all of the above while booting in under thirty seconds.

Such innovation does not always equal success, however, and Be, Inc. was liquidated by late '02, its intellectual property being swallowed up by Palm (and now held by PalmSource, Inc.). The last release of the BeOS was in 2000, and in five years the computer industry has leapt ahead, while Be fans remain in limbo on an increasingly outdated system with no hope for reprisal.

Or is there?

Today there are three efforts to maintain and extend the BeOS experience on modern hardware, each with a different story but all holding the same basic goal: Keeping BeOS alive in a post-Be, Inc. world. And with three very different approaches, each of the BeOS projects is worth taking a look at, if not downloading and installing. Be fans, get ready to restart your engines.

Zeta

German yellowTab's Zeta is based directly on the BeOS 5 source code, as well as source to unreleased updates such as BONE (BeOS Network Environment) and BeOS 6, all inherited directly from Be, Inc. As such, it starts out of the gate with a working product and an easy ride to future updates and patches. Zeta is actually shipping at the moment despite still being in development. So what's to see?

Sadly, not much. Zeta is still doing work to bring BeOS 5 forward to compete with Windows and Mac OS X bringing an operating system back to life after five years is a trying task. For instance, only in recent builds have SSE and HyperThreading been recognized, and both still remain un-optimized for in the operating system. Likewise there is a 2GB RAM limit and no FireWire support.

Zeta should hit a final version this Summer, and while BeOS fans would find this intriguing, there is one huge catch with Zeta: It comes only in German. Until the operating system returns to its roots in English, this son-of-a-BeOS will remain a German attraction only. Efforts to port the interface to English have begun, but aren't reported to be ready until sometime after Zeta 1.0's release.

Haiku

Haiku, once known as OpenBeOS, is an Open Source effort to first recreate BeOS 5 functionality (Haiku R1) and then to extend the experience through updates to the operating system's core functionality (R2 and beyond). Haiku has attracted many developers and fans, mostly desperate BeOS refugees, though numbers mean little Haiku is far from being without problems.

Due to its Open Source development model, the same one the Linux kernel is based on, Haiku progress is slow and plagued with internal political struggles. The project hasn't fully reached beta yet, with most of its components still in alpha or development stages. To put that in perspective, it's taking five years to recreate a five-year old operating system. Haiku, upon completion, will be ten-year old technology.

The project claims that through various community channels many part of the system are already complete. Haiku uses NewOS, a kernel similar to BeOS's created by a former Be, Inc. engineer. There are also Open Source versions of the BeOS interface as well, the project site notes. Without the working middleware, however, the kernel and GUI are useless.

Another bottleneck in the Haiku roadmap is that without hardware partners, the project is relegated to old garage-sale systems. For instance, the main development system is a dual-Pentium Pro system over-clocked to 233 MHz with 512M RAM. That's a ten-fold decrease in power and bandwidth from current Pentium 4 and Pentium M-based systems and another way Haiku will be ten years behind.

Overall, Haiku is an interesting hobbyist project with implications for

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YOU know WHAT@

[TheRealMindChild]

Ill TELL you how iD lost it's crown. One dark night when the moon was purple and the grass was shiny, iD decided to go bar hopping after work, but rather then visit the lavish establishments surrounding the workplace, he decided to meet some new people, and walked to the more shady side of the tracks. Passing many of the local, dirty, cross-dressing prositutes junkies, he wanders into a joint called "The Bitch Slapper". He sits down, orders a brew, and takes a swig, starting to realize that all eyes were upon him. This didn't bother iD initially, that is, until an obese, hairy fellow, who smelled of urinal cakes, sat at the stool beside him and started staring. Trying to ignore the stanky fellow, iD orders a shot of Crowne Royal. Meanwhile, Mr Gorilla kept inching closer and closer to iD until finally something had to be said... "YOU GOT A PROBLEM, FELLA?". "Your mouth am purty" replied the sasquatch. Knowing where this situation may eventually lead, iD got up and started beating the living bejesus out of the hygenically impaired patron. Not paying attention to his surroundings, as the final blow was coming down, iD smacks his undrank shot glass clear across the bar, having it shatter into pieces just inches in front of the bartender.

When the turbulance of the former situation subsided, iD found himself without his drink... without his Crowne.

The End