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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."
Linux Gaming not a huge market...more at 11pm
I've come to count on id porting their games, so I'm disappointed over this bit of news.
I use the proprietary Nvidia blob (version 180) for my Nvidia 8400 and I have no qualms about it. Windows users use proprietary drivers for practically every card that I've seen over the years, so how is it any different in principle if you replace Windows with Linux? While I take open stuff when I can get it, I would rather have a video card and wireless device that works on Linux. Not every Linux user sees things the same way that RMS does by insisting on a 100% FOSS operating system. While you can have that if you want it, I prefer the freedom of being able to mix and match as I see fit.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
"and that the Linux port would have to use the binary blob graphics driver in order to work"
From TFA, it seems that Carmack believes it would be hard to get the necessary performance without using the NVidia drivers. It's somewhat surprising to me if it wouldn't be possible to get it running acceptably on anything else, even if the game does use a lot of advanced features - but if Carmack says so!
However I'm not so keen on his assertion that if you're using the binary drivers you might as well run the code under Windows. I guess this probably *does* make sense for most people, since there are relatively few people who don't have a Windows license available somewhere. However, it would be *nicer* not to have to reboot into Windows for a specific app even if that were unnecessary.
Unfortunately I saw a fair few quite negative reactions in the linked thread and I expect we'll see others here. Carmack has not ruled out a port for sure. But even if he does, that's not exactly evil or a betrayal of open source or anything else negative. Many gamers here will have benefited in some way from the GPLed code he's released to the OSS community in the past at some point, pretty much all gamers will have benefited from his position as a developer pushing the games industry forwards. He's not done anything *bad* here, he's just not necessarily doing something we'd hoped for.
Hopefully the Rage code will - one day - be GPLed and get ported to Linux. I think that's a fair way down the road at this point, though.
Nvidia didn't just write a regualr binary driver, they had to rewrite a large chunk of Xwindow and package the resulting mess in a large drop-in binary blob, unstable and heavily dependant on the kernel version.
This part you got backwards. Because they did a pretty clear cut that depends little on kernel versions, they've constantly been much faster at supporting the latest kernels than AMD, like for example kernel 2.6.29 was released in March and supported only by Catalyst in the August release from a few days ago.
(...) windows (non)emulation can not keep up with Microsofts technical progress on directx. So many recent AAA games in every genre are listed as 'bronze' or 'garbage'.
Yes, they are. However, very few of these are related to the Direct3D part of WINE and if they are they're usually solved by installing the d3d dlls. However closed source is very prone to crashing if anything else isn't as it should, particularly Microsoft's Live services have been a big problem. Games that actually get past that like World In Conflict have quite decent performance on par with Windows, same with King's Bounty that's a fairly 3D intensive non-FPS.
The PC gaming market is small enough to justify p[orting to a platform that is a tiny fraction (about 1%) of users.
Yep, this is what it is about. Not just Linux users, but the intersection between those Linux users interested in a high-end FPS having the hardware and willingness to pay with the market that isn't already getting it somewhere on Windows. Don't get me wrong, I get what's native when I can, what's running in WINE when it works, but there's no competing with a Wintendo box...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wow, sorry to say this, but you're a graphics whore. ID has always made great games, and will continue to. If they want to focus on making a good game rather then adding dynamic weather, then that is a good thing. And ID has always put out the SDK's for their games. On a pc, you can mod and change things - make your own part of the game. You can't do that on a console, and that's one of the major reasons i'll stick to PC gaming. That and the xbox/ps3 only have joysticks and i've used a pc mouse nearly all my life :D.