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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."
Play Quake live and get some meaningful stats back to a major developer.
POKE 36879,8
Carmack stated at Quakecon that Betheseda has to sign off on the GPL'ing of any future code. The chances of that happening are slim to none. IdTech5 is a pretty impressive piece of technology; from what I can tell it's Fallout 3 graphics maxed out with about 50% less overhead.
moox. for a new generation.
A while back Slashdot pointed us to this blog, in which the blogger pointed out how having Linux and Mac ports attracted a lot of attention and even boosted the sales of their Windows versions.
I appreciate Carmack's pragmatic reasoning instead of legal bullshit or calling us all pirates.
I have Windows and Linux available at home, so I don't really care. Yeah, it would be nice to not have to dual boot, but I see that as a necessary evil for the time being anyway, regardless of what games become available on Linux.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
So you're claiming all those phones, TiVo's, GPS's and other embedded machines ARE capable of running a cutting edge FPS?
The question is; how many of those Linux systems are desktop PC's with powerful enough hardware to run the very latest in gaming technology?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It is not about piracy, trust me, it is all about Linux not being viable as a platform. That is what TFA is about, they would do it, BUT Linux "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".
Basically what they are saying here is that after over a ten years of Linux development they are unable to effortlessly and painlessly port the game to the platform, or without taking some hard measures that could backfire, being nasty or buggy.
There is little criticism in the Linux community in general, so you would never really hear the X-windows system is probably the worst piece of software ever written or that Linux drivers do not really exist as the frequent kernel changes makes vendor software drivers invalid, lots of people got alienated over the years and even enthusiast now say something like that they've stopped worrying about Linux and love Windows. A sad story.
Very little piracy for Linux games?
That is absolutely false. The piracy even worse because the market is small enough as it is, a small percentage will push the product from barely profitable to absolute loss.
The problem has got so bad that Linux Game Publishing (Major porter of games to Linux and a successor of Loki) were forced to implement DRM for their releases:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=lgp_copy_protection&num=1
And they didn't like doing it one bit. Here is a quote from the above linked article by LGP's CEO Michael Simms:
When this game copy protection system became known with LGP's closed testing community, it had enraged some users. In response, the CEO of Linux Game Publishing, Michael Simms, had a few things to say. "Trust me, I don't like it, I'm not happy about it, but we HAVE to do this. I've fought for 6 years against the need for any kind of protection system and all that's happened is that for every legitimate copy of an LGP game out there, there are probably 3-4 pirated copies. That's the difference between success and failure."
Now I know everyone here buys their Linux games, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of pirates out there that care not for it.
Read Carmack's thoughts on OpenGL and why he's switched to DirectX. What you think is a strength is actually a huge weakness for developers.
Say you've a feature that isn't part of the OpenGL spec and has been introduced into nVidia and ATI's latest cards. Both the companies will want an implementation of this feature optimised for their cards so as a coder, if you want to put this feature in your game, you're going to have to code it in twice and it's probably going to produce slightly different visuals for each manufacturer. It's a lot of extra coding and testing work.
Then, when it comes up to drawing a new spec for the latest version, you'll have two of your most important contributors arguing over which implementation to use and the spec gets delayed.
With D3D they talk to all the manufacturers and say "this is how the feature will work, design your card to use it". If they want their card to be DX18 or whatever, they've got to implement it that way. It can mean you have to wait between revisions for new features but it prevents the kind of divergence than a graphics API is supposed to prevent in the first place.
a few years ago I had to use project 2003 for a class. I was attempting to run only linux on my laptop at the time. It didn't support it.. I put down my pledge. 1.5 years later I get an email saying "This now works on crossover office, pay up!" I no longer needed it, but went over to check out its status. Their definition of "it works" was several users claiming "garbage won't even start" and one user claiming "I got it to run..but you can't open anything, save anything.. or pretty much do anything" and they considered that delivering on their end of the bargain.
They want to make linux appealing, they need to work just a tad bit harder than that.
Gee, I wonder why? It's not like Linux is a different OS and id Tech 5 is a gigantic codebase or anything like that? Oh wait.
Besides, he never said "OMG LUNIX IS THE WORST THING EVER GUYS I CAN'T PORT IT TO THIS PIECE OF SHIT LOL", he said "It isn't out of the question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work." That's hardly the scathing criticism of Linux you so desperately try to make it out to be. Hell, it isn't even a criticism of Linux at all.
He said nothing of the sort, you're just making shit up here. RTFA. What he said was that it'd probably only work on closed source drivers. Not that he can't get it running on Linux without accidentally opening a gateway far into the depths of hell.
No, not really.
No, not even close. It's got a lot of cruft, but it's still managed to keep up with the times quite well. Furthermore, most of the complaints people make about are absurd, outdated, or just plain wrong. Like the ever classic "X uses a server and has network transparency so it uses the network for everything even locally so it's SLOW LOL". Which would be a fine complaint if it weren't for the fact that it is wrong. Locally it'd use Unix sockets, a very different thing from network sockets. Actually, it wouldn't even use that, it'd use shared memory, directly communicating with the server, and avoiding any overhead. So yes, you wouldn't hear that sort of complaint much except from idiots.
It sure makes things easier when you completely redefine words to your liking, doesn't it? The lack of a stable driver API doesn't mean "drivers don't exist". People can either update their drivers themselves to keep up with the latest kernels, or get them in the kernel itself and not have to worry about such a thing anymore. However just because the driver might break on newer versions doesn't make it stop working on older versions and doesn't make it "not exist". In fact, quite a few of them exist; probably more than any other OS comes with out of the box, even Windows. (Certainly more than any OS that's not Windows comes with)
Oh hey that's funny because lots of people I know got alienated by Windows over the years and now say something like they've stopped worrying about Windows and love Linux! Clearly the year of the Linux desktop is finally at hand! (If you don't get what I'm going for here, "the plural of anecdote is not data", especially not anecdotes personally gathered from acquaintances, a, too put it lightly, rather biased group.)
The only thing sad is how your post consists entirely of bullshit, nonsense, and outright lies.
> The plural of "anecdote" is not "proof".
Perhaps you accept as some sort of 'proof' a game developer's viewpoint....like Frictionalgames (Penumbra Series), who even wrote a big thank you note on their page after the Linux version deal got mentioned on Slashdot and people subsequently bought the games (I was one of them and I only ever buy games for Linux). In fact, from the note it appeared, that they teetered on the edge of development with a new version of Penumbra, but due to the sudden influx of cash they'll now happily go forward full steam.