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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?"
Wouldn't the people who benefit the most be gamers themselves?
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
Require Open Source Artists. Art assets are very important to games and most programmer art just doesn't cut it.
That's the real challenge, because while many coders will happily knock up a game engine for their own amusement, handling stuff like artistic direction to get a consistent "look" and generating inane brick textures is not something that many people do for "amusement". Of course, that could change if people got passionate about it, but it's much easier to focus as an artist when working on something like a Source Engine mod, where a lot of the inane brick textures already exist and you can concentrate on building cool character models (etc).
Let me see if I've got this straight: PC gaming was a huge market during the 90's and first half of the 2000's. In the past few years, the PC market has been on the decline, propped up only by the massive MMORPG sales. Now in 2009, a year by which there are three incredible consoles on the market that easily make 80%+ of PC gaming irrelevant, we hear a call to action for more Linux games?
Um, sure. I'll get right on that.
Do they? There was a time when that was certainly true. A lot of the remaining PC gamers I've seen purchase overpriced Alienware hardware and refer to it as their "rig". No offense to the remaining serious gamers who build their own PCs, but the incredible market power that used to be behind PC Gaming simply isn't there anymore. Look elsewhere for your coup de grace.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
There is pretty much zero evidence that if recent games were available for linux it would speed adoption, even though for me personally the thing that let me switch was getting wow to run under wine (along with an unexplainable crappy ping in vista).
What has actually been observed to increase adoption (citation needed) is fancy crap like wobbly windows and spinning cube desktops.
Maybe collectively the companies could make a "content light" face booking, im-ing spinning flashing version of linux and attempt to lock up the teen market, i think you might find that would be of more interest to more people than the marginally smaller "hardcore pc gaming" crowd.
Personally i don't really care.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
I am 35. I got my first computer a Commodore64 around 1984. 1986 I first started connecting to BBS's and then to run my own BBS. I _was_ a hard-core gamer.
Now I play flash-games, or classics in a Dosbox window. Sorry but Linux gaming missed it's mark by being 15 years too late to the table. Don't get me wrong, I still occasionally play Enemy Territory, Padman, and other 'popular' games, but the kids today don't care. Not like we used to care. I am likely to hear BOOM-HEADSHOT! yelled across the LAN party these days as we would yell "I'M IN!!!" when 'searching' for a virgin ftp server to use as dump sites back in the day.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
Ok, now that that's out of my system... your statement is completely and utterly incorrect. Memory usage is generally not a major factor in performance unless the system becomes memory constrained. In that case a system that is not starving for memory will absolutely outperform a system which is not. But in today's world of 2GB+ systems, explorer.exe is not exactly the biggest memory hog. (Try your web browser for a good start.) Video games often worry more about the space available in the GPU's memory than the amount of main memory available.
Secondly, the vast majority of Linux users are going to launch their game via their favorite desktop environment. Since the feature-rich KDE and GNOME desktops are the most popular, there's a good chance that their Linux-based desktops are eating just as much if not more memory than Windows XP's explorer.exe. But no one is really concerned about that on today's multi-GB systems, so I recommend you either not worry about it or run something slimmer like XFCE.
Thirdly, am I the only one who remembers the late 90's where much of the Linux community took it for granted that Linux was faster than Windows? That is, until benchmarks came out in '99 that showed that Windows had a significant performance advantage, especially in I/O heavy areas such as web serving. The news did result in a newfound focus to make Linux highly competitive, but it seems to me sir that your post needlessly repeats history.
Learn from history, least you repeat it. ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
There's nothing wrong with making money off of apps, especially games. I for one am happy to pay for games and have them open-sourced after 3 to 5 years like all the good companies have been doing. Games aren't like other apps where you can charge for support or there is a need for interoperability and backward-compatibility. Yes, game publishers should compile Linux (and BSD) versions of their games. No, it doesn't really matter if they are initally released as open-source or not!
The way one plays windows games via Wine is to create a separate account with X that only spawns an xterm. One gets better performance than Windows does, doing this way.
Perhaps one could load a 2d Windows platformer via Gnome or KDE, but it'd probably be slow. oh well.
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 too pathetic for words.
Walmart.com will gladly sell you a HP Pavilion Slimline
Quad Core AMD CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 Bit Vista Premium, NVIDIA DX 10 graphics, a 640 GB HDD, an HDTV tuner and the combo Blu-Ray drive and DVD Burner for $1K.
Monitor extra.
The truth of it is that Walmart has never been able to sell OEM Linux at a significant discount.
Though every now and again the big W will unload a few carloads of junk it picked up on the cheap on the ever-so-naive and hopeful Linux Geek.
Linux distributions need to start sponsoring companies like the old Loki Software. Companies like Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell would do well to sponsor some of that work.
The port is what you get when you are the PS3. The original big-budget production is for the Wii and the XBox 360. The port simply keeps you in the game. It is not the winning hand.
The commercial Linux distros are shamelessly enterprise oriented. There is no intelligible reason for Novell or Red Hat to go into the high risk, high stakes, game business.
This is a start
-- Cheers!
If you do a search of source forge for open game development kits you will be spoiled for choice.
There are plenty of gamers who are pretty smart, and ready to make content using modeling and content creation tools, (www.racer.nl - huge libraries of fan-made performance cars and stuff imported from other games). Gamers are highly conditioned to not paying money for games... and ready to bit torrent anything they want at the drop of a hat. So I think all the ingredients for a OSS gaming revolution is there. What we need is a few killer projects to get things going. The few OSS games now aren't very good - they pale in comparison to some excellent indie games out there.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Linux does the same, using memory not used by programs as cache. But unlike in Vista, the System monitor in Ubuntu gives you the memory used by programs and not the silly and meaningless total used memory like in Vista.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I have no idea what you are smoking either - I just did your 'example' and got 50fps on Vista (Home Premium), 1.2GB ram usage when running WoW and Firefox (plus system monitor). I cant do the Wine example, but from the look of your Vista example you have something seriously broken and thus it isnt a good example.
The GP Metaarticle is wrong.
1) Frequently, the best and most successfull games our at least their proofs-of-concept don't come from the industry anymore, but from the modding community. In fact, the modding community is such a powerfull force in gaming you *must* play ball with it, if you want to be taken for granted. However, the modders, being passionate freebee providers themselves, have considerably different ethics on some issues. In ways they are even more pragmatic than the OSS vs. FOSS crowd. And they have to be, as they have a completely different goal, which is: Building good games. Duh. Right now, Valve and the Source engine are pulling over quite a few of the modders, for the simple reason that they have one of the best engines.
2) The best people built games primarly because it's their passion, not because they are paid. However, these people want to build games, and not have to dick around with XFree86 crap with problems which, believe it or not, that sorry excuse of an operating system called Windows solved something like 2 decades ago.
3) As with #2, game builders want to build games. They want a working production pipeline. As long as that is virtually non-exsitant on OSS, they won't use OSS. Plain and simple. Cudos to the Blender team for hacking away at this problem one step at a time. However, modders use free versions of Softimage or Maya or UT Editor to build their stuff, and they quite frankly care squat wether it's FOSS or not, as long as it gets the job done.
And last but not least: Good software takes time. From an non-expert end-user standpoint, Linux is barely stopping to suck with Ubuntu 8.10 - and only if you don't want plug-and-play your printer or want to play games that don't run on Wine without a hitch. AFAIAC, Gnome & Nautilus has just stopped sucking a few months ago (I like(d) KDE/KUbuntu much better before) and one-stop zero-fuss printing as in Mac OS X will probably take another year or two until the vendors finally catch on. The very same goes with games.
And lets face it and be realistic: The first thing you want out of the way is your grafics layer, and that has been sucking long enough with XFree86 (Yeah, I know, neat networking, whatever, XFree fanboy, screw you, that's a total non-issue nowadays). Since that appears to be out of the way and desktops are rapidly maturing left, right and center all over the OSS community it is now moving to productivity apps. And AFAICT only now are Evolution and KMail slowly closing in on closed source apps in the field. (Allthough I could be wrong, the KMail crew could still be flat out lying about their ability to provide viable working mail encryption, as they have done for many years).
Once that is all aside and the more complex apps required for multimedia are nearing their true 1.0 release in the OSS community and we finally get a FOSS 3D game engine and a 3D production pipeline that doesn't suck by todays standards, we will see games pop up left right and center as the modding community joins the FOSS fray. And we all will be blown away by the quality they bring to the table. The gaming industry will be hit just as hard as other software fields and will have to adapt with pay-for-content or simular strategies.
Bottom line: ... (I can't believe I just said that.)
If you want to know how the future of FOSS gaming looks like, check out the modding community. And yes, it's a 120% Windows world right now. And, yes, believe it or not, for its very own very good reasons too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
> Linux would be great for gaming, since the OS itself uses so little memory, it means there's a good chance that games are going to run faster than on Windows (XP) with explorer.exe taking up a large chunk of memory.
Linux is terrible for gaming; the driver support makes Vista look like heaven. As a result, assuming you can even get drivers for your card, and you can get them to run with the distro you use, and you can get the accelerated mode to work, they're still probably going to be slower than the Windows drivers.
As soon as you get quality games like WoW, LotRO, EVE, Portal, C&C etc running natively under linux, you'll get people using linux as their primary platform and wow, wider adoption of the platform. There is no chicken-egg situation. It's the developers that need to take the first step.
Why can't we let people believe whatever they like? It's not like a little religion has ever hurt anyone.
I don't think it's quite got it, though.
Proverbially, the path to wide adoption starts with a killer app and proceeds through early adopters. However a killer app in this situation is a bit of a catch 22. The kind of massive games that take hundreds of man years of art work and coding take investment, and investment is attracted by installed base. I suppose we can use Linux as a counterexample to this idea, but I think Linux is a special case for several reasons. First the basic kernel was not a huge engineering task. Second, the stuff that went around it was already largely done. Third, Linux is a platform and there are a lot of companies interested in not being beholden to a single monopolist for their livelihood.
There are lots of games on Linux, and the best ones aren't very complex, they're just fun to play. And that's the catch 22. A simple game is readily cloned to Windows. Think about Tetris in its many manifestations. It's a fun game, but simple enough to be given as a student programming assignment. On the other hand, really complex games take investment for very little guarantee that you'll get a winner.
I think, however, there is a paradigm, which is the Wii. Wii Sports isn't a terribly complicated game; if it were a killer app then it could readily be cloned on other platforms. However, with Wii sports and the Wii, you had an affordably priced killer bundle.
So, what I'm thinking of is a netbook, with good battery life and fast boot time. The idea is that you'd be to take it out at more or less any time and within thirty seconds to a minute be playing a simple but addictive game. Where the article goes wrong is this: success won't come from exploiting the early adopters willingness to try something different, although that is part of the formula. Success will come from pricing the package affordably enough for an impulse purchase, without making any part of the system seem cheesy. The Wii is well and innovatively designed without necessarily being cutting edge technologically. Buyers get something new and well made at a pretty much no-brainer price for the amount of pleasure they anticipate getting from it.
We're pretty close, I think, to being able to put together that killer package. The EeePC is now sellign in its 512MB version for as little as $219. That's getting into handheld console territory. For a bit more than a hundred more, you can get a netbook with a GB of RAM and a 1024 x 600 display. This tells me the technology is there for the killer package, especially if the battery issues can be resolved. All that's needed is an app that is addictive, from which a $300 machine can get you your fix in under a minute.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Excessive amounts of money are not a requirement to a good game, nor are they a guarantee of success. The same applies to many other entertainment industries as well.