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Cedega and Linux Games
Linux.com's Stefan Vrabie has a look at the state of Transgaming's Cedega, which some claim to be the best current offering for running Windows games under Linux. While it may be better than nothing, the author still puts this solidly under the "plug and pray" column with the biggest drawback being the amount of fiddling required to make it work. From the article: "Cedega may not be the answer to games under Linux, but it's better than not being able to play at all, until gaming companies notice Linux users as a market and release games for Linux." Linux.com and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.
You missed Civilization II: Call to Power. And on the open source side, try Wesnoth and Freeciv.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm not a developer, all I see are bottom-line numbers. Hiring a QA team and a support team for Linux is probably two of the biggest cost factors. it is quite simply adding up all the associated costs with:
releasing, supporting, marketing, testing, and (rarely) developing something for a platform a developer is not familiar with (and quite frankly, scared of)..
Versus...
Potential sales to a platform comprising largely of a "free" atmosphere (that I enjoy myself), of limited and wide distribution (there's no 'region' that could be targeted), with a poor track record of profit for game releases.
Two ways to bring gaming to Linux are to (a) reduce costs (such as making smaller scale, indy-style games), or (b) waiting the Linux community grow to a size where potential profits outweight the potential costs (which could be caused by (A)).
We all know that Linux isn't a platform for gamers, but still there are a few games for GNU/Linux.
They can actually, and do still. Only a month or two ago they took several dlls from vanilla Wine (they, of course, are still licensed under the LGPL, not the regular Cedega license).
Furthermore, Cedega is generally full of hacks to make specific games work, which is good in the short run, but bad in the long run. This is especially showing now, as in many ways, vanilla Wine has better D3D support than Cedega. Expect this gap to continue to widen as time passes. There may be a point where Cedega starts using vanilla Wine's D3D implementation too.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Using OpenGL as the graphics backend does not imply that the program is compilable on other platforms, such as linux. There are many other things involved, of course, like third party libraries, such as bink (video format). Even though the game Neverwinter Nights had a linux port, it didn't include video support due to the closed nature of bink. OpenGL and Direct3D are obviously two completely different APIs. The interesting thing is that, a little less than a decade ago, OpenGL was mature while The DirectX stuff was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, as 3D acceleration became a reality, more and more developers began using DirectX. It was backed by Microsoft, after all. Why an alternative when you already have something that works? Because Microsoft didn't own it. It's that simple. As for which is "better", there is an interesting comparison at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL
In my opinion, and I'm sure everyone with a sane and reasonable way of thought will agree, an open source implementation would be a fool's errand. With the limited amount of hardware-accelerated drivers for linux, just how large are the chance for an implementation by a hardware vendor even if open source Direct3D was a reality? The best solution, which both Wine and Cedega utilize, is a Direct3D->OpenGL wrapper. It's not optimal, but it often works decently.
I'm not picking a fight, but I have a couple of issues with your post. First, I spent over $500US in the last seven months on Linux games. I think this is profitable for someone. When Win95 came out there was a transition. People didn't rush out to buy native Win95 versions of thier DOS games.
There are too many Linux distributions, none of which have a big enough of the Linux market to be considered the de facto standard Linux distribution to develop for and build a customer service department to support.
I bought just about every port that Loki did and I didn't have any problems playing them on on any >= 2.4 kernal version SuSE, RedHat or Ubuntu. Instead of a customer service department, how about a good technical support forum? The Linux Standards Base is your friend.
Finally, once you manage to get things working on a couple distributions, a new release comes out that invalidates your existing application. And in another 6 months another release of Linux is going to come out and invalidate your work again. A developer has a hard time keeping his game working under one distribution from one version to the next. Now multiply that by 10-20 for the most popular Linux platforms each releasing new versions every 6 months.
See above. All my Loki games have worked since SuSE 6.4/RedHat 7.0. As a user space game programmer why should you care about kernal changes. Just code to SDL/OpenGL (Both are backwards compatible).
Game applications are the most strenous and sensitive to the capabilities of the platform. Windows is pretty standard with DirectX. On Linux you don't know what's going to work; the very philosophy of choice with Linux translates to everyone's machine is just different enough in a way that makes developing a game for Linux a real frustration.
Thats nonsense. Code for the lowest good versions of SDL and OpenGL. You will be suprised on how many different distributions of Linux it will run on.
Shipping source code to your customers and expecting them to build it every time they upgrade their machine or switch distributions isn't a solution.
I have purchased over 20 commercial Linux games, none came with source. Are you trolling? You have never purchased/installed a native Linux game yet your an authority on shipping source with a Linux game? I call bullshit.
I buy my Linux games from here: http://www.tuxgames.com/ (No I'm not affilated with the site).
Check out the loki games from here, http://liflg.org/, pay special attention on how the installer works. You can get the installer sources for free from here: http://www.lokigames.com/development/setup.php3
As a Windows developer, you can always code your game/application to work with wine. http://www.winehq.com/ It seems to work OK for Google http://earth.google.com/earth4.html.
Your post does disgrace Interplay, SirTech, MindScape, SSI, Origin and many other great gaming companies from the 80s/90s that did (Intel/Non-Intel CPUs/OSs) cross-platform games.
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
very simple answer, DirectX currently beats the hell out of openGL for development time, saving millions in dev costs makes it easier for game companies to ignore the linux community, openGL needs to either massively improve or this will remain the situation for years to come.
We have two screencasts (swf) which show how to setup and test Cedega for Suse Linux. These were contributed by Bruce Cadieux of ItsYourPC.org. It all looks rather straight-forward, but I haven't tried it myself...maybe these help with the 'plug and pray' comment in the original article?