Slashdot Mirror
Linux Port For id's Tech 5 Graphics Engine Unlikely
DesiVideoGamer writes "John Carmack, the lead developer for id's Tech 5 graphics engine, does not plan on making a Linux port for the new engine. From his e-mail: 'It isn't out of the question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work. If there are hundreds of thousands of Linux users playing Quake Live when we are done with Rage, that would certainly influence our decision.' One of the reasons for not making a Linux port was due to the fact that the new engine 'pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized' and that the Linux port would have to use the binary blob graphics driver in order to work."
You don't need a "plural." A singular positive anecdote is enough to disprove a categorical negative assertion.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The big issue is the stability of the OpenGL 3.x codepaths on Linux. You'll need some relatively up to date drivers(binary blobs) to get all those new calls working. And no guarantees it won't break, later.
Since OpenGL 3.x and DX10/11 share a lot, it should be more straightforward than it was in the past porting from one to the other. The major differences between OGL and DX have partially been eliminated. Thanks to The Khronos Group, they're both moving in the same direction.
You've not developed for OpenGL3 have you?
DX10 came out November 30, 2006 - which gave DX10 devs geometry shaders
The OpenGL 3.2 spec was released 21 days ago (spec != drivers though!), which finally put Geometry shaders into the core specification. That's only, what, almost 3 years after DX developers got them.
So... if you need to use geometry shaders in your game, what GL extension do you code against? GL_EXT_geometry_shader4? GL_ARB_geometry_shader4? NV_geometry_program? or the core spec? Chances are you'll end up coding against all 4, because you can be absolutely certain most cards will support 1 of those extensions, but each card will probably support a different one.
If the Khronos group keep insisting that they must keep the OpenGL APi 3 years behind D3D10, it's not difficult to see why developers aren't all that keen to go with OpenGL. If the Khronos group continue to keep giving us information which they later back track on (like the entire OpenGL3 spec), it's not surprising to see game developers ditching OpenGL3 in droves. To see Carmack ditching OpenGL really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone working with OpenGL3. I've worked with OpenGL for the past ten years or so, and I'm sad to say that I'm currently stripping all OpenGL out of our codebase in favour of the 'other' API. Currently it seems to be what every developer is doing at the moment. OpenGL is just a royal pita these days. Let it die.
Carmack also stated at Quakecon that he now has a pretty good business case for doing so. With the success of Wolfenstien 3D Classic on the iPhone, which uses an OpenGL port of Wolfenstien 3D, there is now a real business case where a contribution to the open source community can pay dividends in the future.