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World of Goo Ported To Linux
christian.einfeldt writes "Lovers of both games and Free Open Source Software will be pleased to see that the popular indie puzzle game World of Goo has been released for Linux. It was designed by a small team of two ex-Electronic Arts developers, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, who used their entire combined savings of $10,000.00 USD to create the gooey game aimed at guiding goo balls to salvation. The developers built their gooey world with open-source technologies such as Simple DirectMedia Layer, Open Dynamics Engine for physics simulation, and TinyXML for configuration and animation files. Subversion and Mantis Bug Tracker were used for work coordination. Blogger Ken Starks points out that the release of this popular game for Linux could be a big step toward ending the chicken-and-egg problem of a dearth of good games that run natively under Linux."
realize that this game isn't free or open source. It is fun, though.
I think the 10K includes developing all versions of the game, it probably included visual studio and the sdk for the Wii.
Being a PPC Linux user, you should understand that unless a piece of software specifically offers a PPC download alongside the 'regular' (x86) one, well, it most likely ain't available for PPC. For some reason you seem not to.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Where I live there's no such thing as 'unpaid overtime'. Instead by law this is the standard: regular overtime means 1.5x regular pay, overtime on weekends and national holidays means 2x regular hourly pay. Unpaid overtime sounds pretty much like slavery to me. I don't understand how this can be acceptable to anyone.
Chicken-and-egg problem? If i remeber correctly Loki games went under exactly because no one was buying any (enough) Linux games. It's laughable to think that the release of Goo will change the gameing landscape on it's own, as the summary suggests. Linux is not mainstream yet, unfortunatly.
Run the game in a window.
Frankly I'm already amazed they bothered to target Linux/x86, which is already an incredibly tiny games market. Linux/PPC is a fraction of the size of that again! There may well not be more than a few dozen people in the world who (a) use Linux/PPC, (b) don't have a single x86 box they can play games on, and (c) are interested in paying for closed-source games.
Cross-compilation is not always trivial. And then you need to conduct all the testing, etc. And at the end of all that, you might get a handful of sales at most.
The simple truth is that no commercial software company is ever going to target desktop Linux on anything but the most common platforms. If you want to use an unusual processor, you're going to have to stick with free software.
Slave owners usually find slavery quite acceptable due to the profits it brings them, and have more power than their slaves. And, of course, libertarians and their ilk are all for total contractual freedom, which results in de factor slavery due to the inherent power difference between a single employer and a single employee; this could easily be solved by unionising, but such voluntary cooperation is communism even thought corporations aren't for some reason.
In unregulated capitalism, slavery is freedom.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Wow, the ministry of truth is out in numbers today. He stated his opinion, so it gets modded down as overrated and gets told it's because he steals so much. I played it, it was fun but it was also fairly repetitative. Doing just a quick search shows that you can get Civilization 4 complete (Civ4, Beyond the Sword and Warlords) for 22$ or Oblivion for 19$. A bit unfair competition maybe against older games that's now in the bargain bin but if you hadn't tried any of them I'd buy either before World of Goo. 20$ is quite okay, but it's nowhere near a bargain and just because it has a native Linux version doesn't make it so either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In the US, salaried jobs are exempt from most overtime rules.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No, Java runs platform-independent code in a virtual machine, with no guarantee that any architecture-specific code will be compiled at any point.
Except for the fact that all major desktop Java implementations do just that with JIT, and gcj can statically compile it.
It provides portability but there's a significant performance cost.
Also a performance advantage. There's a reason LLVM is used in some parts of OS X that actually need performance.
Sometimes JIT compilation can be used to claw back a fair bit of performance, but that's not available for all platforms, and mostly useful for long-running server processes.
It is available for far more platforms than a platform-specific x86 binary. And a game certainly runs long enough for the performance advantages of runtime optimizations to kick in. About the only thing that wouldn't is a commandline app.
Loads of games are written to run in VMs: the most popular host VM is of course Flash.
Which really doesn't have a compatible open source implementation. Also doesn't support many targets we'd like -- for example, PPC LInux.
Major titles still need to be written in languages that compile down to native code
Like Java?
in order to provide the level of AI, physics, etc. that today's gamers expect.
I don't think you'll find any such heavy CPU requirements for World of Goo.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!