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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.
I bought Neverwinter Nights Saturday, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
With the Diamond Edition ($30 at Best Buy), you get both expansion packs, and you can follow some online directions to install to Linux without passing through Windows.
I also bought Return to Castle Wolfenstein a while back. That was good, too.
Oh, and there's DOOM, DOOM ][, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, several versions of Unreal...
If you'll go the Open Source route, there's DarkPlaces, Cube, Duke Nukem 3d (engine, anyway. You'll still need the gamedata.
Uhm...no games? How about, no hyperadvertised games?
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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)).
You should not that easily mod the parent troll.
Actually, some time ago WINE was under BSD license, that permitted proprietary modifications. After WINE was forked to WineX, then renamed to Cedega and closed their source, the WINE developers changed the license to GPL so future "freeloaders" are not allowed.
Now Cedega are going backwards because they cannot use the new WINE code. While WINE is going forward in the compatibility for things like DX9, the rest of the APIs in Windows, all Cedega developers are doing is trying to make it compatible with the latest and greatest of the protection schemes for CDs like SafeCD and such... Good for games, but for how long?
Gaming companies don't develop for Linux because it's not pratical to support properly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Combine the constant, frequent changes that aren't guaranteed to be backwards compatible like the Windows platform provides with the sheer number of distributions of Linux you would have to support to make it worthwhile, and then consider that all this effort just to support one platform might translate to an extra 5% sales and you have your reason why game companies don't develop for Linux.
Linux is a great platform to develop for; it's a terrible platform to support. This is what's holding Linux back from becoming truly mainstream. It has nothing to do with features or hardware support or useability. If a company can't reasonably develop and SUPPORT their applications for a platform and expect a reasonable amount of sales while doing so then it's not worth doing it when you can simply focus on another platform (Windows) that is much easier to support and maintain and hits 90% of your whole market in the first place.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
I agree with you, but I think the big difference between OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL and DirectX, is that DirectX is the XBox platform. So writing for Windows DirectX is not a lot different to writing for XBox.
So it's not a technical problem, it's a matter of market forces and games developers only having a finite budget for porting.
When/if Sony release a development suit for Playstation 3 that can be made to run on Linux/PC, then we'll start to see titles made available for it. I don't think that's likely though, or if it is, it won't be Free Software.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso