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Pushing Linux Adoption Through Gaming
An article on CNet questions the viability of using games as part of a strategy to increase Linux adoption. It points out a blog post by Andrew Min which suggests:
"... Linux companies also need to start paying attention to the open source gaming community. Why? It's lacking. However, gamers can get excited about free games. They just have to be up to par with commercial games. The problem is, commercial companies pay hundreds of employees to build a game for several years, while many competing gaming projects only last several years before the developer moves on. It's time for open source developers to start getting paid for their jobs. Who better to pay them than the companies that benefit most?"
Paying the OS Game Developers sounds like a good idea but most companies just wont pay for frivolity. In these uncertain economic times, I just can't see any but a Game company putting any money towards game creation. Especially if they don't receive a direct source of revenue from their investment. All of that said, I would certainly like to see it happen. If not that, how about some way for people to pay for features added to games that are already in development so that a game will be made better. If that sounds silly, then just a way to donate a few bucks would be good. I'm not talking paypal either, I don't trust the company as they have too much control over my money and I have none.
Or as an alternative, working on a commercial game and releasing the engine code as Open Source (like id software does).
You don't actually need the games to be completely free to users. But if the code is available for Open Source developers to port to Linux with the existing art (that costs money), then Linux still gets a boost. Of course, porting a Direct X game to OpenGL is a pain in the behind that is going to make the release lag a little.
But a lot of people here only claim to have Windows installed to play games.
I'm all for getting games away from Windows, because I remember DOS, I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them, and I remember just about every version ever Windows breaking games that ran just fine either on DOS or older, lighter-weigh versions of Windows.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles. Consoles don't have to worry about whether they need to be doing all kinds of other crap at the same time; PC's running Windows do (and this is more true with each version). Same goes for Mac, and frankly, same goes for any mainstream distro of Linux.
So one big thing that needs to be overcome is how to optimize Linux so it's actually better for gaming than Windows or Mac. Do you strip it down and get rid of stuff games don't need, come out with a gaming-specific distro? Or do you work on making the internals as fast as possible in ways that matter to games? Or something else entirely?
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
The issue of artists someone pointed out is the other big issue. You need to motivate the artists. And - especially if you want them to work for free - you need to give them something really compelling. That means something OSS that's better than what they have now. Something that beats DirectX, beats OpenGL, or whatever. I don't know whether adding OpenCL support like Apple is doing will help - that seems more aimed at offloading processing tasks to the GPU, not offloading graphics tasks to spare CPU cores.
But in both cases, I think Linux is going to have to be a clear "best choice" before game developers will flock to it. Make it outperform other OSes in game execution as well as graphics and multimedia, and make compelling tools or toolkits for developing games and the graphics and multimedia they need, and they will come.
I honestly don't see it happening, though. :(
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Indeed. Engines are the easy part, and there are a lot of coders ready to work on them - either starting from scratch or modifying one of the existing ones. We have trouble finding artists and content creators though. A good first step might be to get a large Creative Commons texture repository that all games can share from. Then the big problem will be finding modelers and mappers.
On the other hand, nowadays there's less and less proprietary code in games. Everybody's licensing Havok's physics engine, for example. That's code that would either need to be released by the developer as open source (ha ha--when they make their money from selling the stuff, no way in hell will they give it away), or replaced wholesale (which is likely to not be as good, and would, at least in the case of gameplay-affecting physics, bork any hope of crossplatform multiplayer).
That also completely ignores the unlikelihood that any multiplayer code will be released, for fear of exposing vulnerabilities. Rather than dealing with paying to fix them, publishers would rather hide the code and hope that it works.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I honestly don't know what you're smoking. I submit the following example:
Running World of Warcraft + Firefox (and system monitor) in Vista = 15 frames per second, over 2gb RAM usage
same hardware, ... WoW for x86 isnt really meant to run in OpenGL mode, and like I said, under WINE, and I'm getting four TIMES the performance?
WoW (under WINE, no less) + Firefox (and system monitors) in (a fresh install, no tweaking) of Ubuntu = 60 frames per second, only 700MB total RAM usage.
J
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
This is a start
-- Cheers!