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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
Linux users: play quake live I incidentally just tried it out on my ubuntu box last night. Pretty impressive for being browser based.
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."
Play Quake live and get some meaningful stats back to a major developer.
POKE 36879,8
"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.
They money they would bring in from a Linux port probably wouldn't cover the man-hours involved in doing the work.
With the recent sale of Id to ZeniMax, it seems unlikely, despite Carmack's continued promises, that Id Tech 4 will be open-sourced either.
No. He's referring to the (native) proprietary Nvidia drivers and the (native) proprietary ATI drivers.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
What exactly does that have to do with the new engine? It's also great how you ignore the fact that every engine they've worked on has been released under the GPL...
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, for one, don't care if it needs to use the Nvidia binary driver, I still welcome it with open arms. And I am still waiting to open my wallet for a decent, Linux compatible, *SINGLE USER*, first-person shooter game. The last game I bought was Castle Wolfenstien for Linux and I loved it dearly (and it was worth every penny).
Cars still work, and are still fun, and can still be innovative, despite all of them using the exact same UI, even when the steering column is no longer necessarily directly connected to anything, and the car could've been driven as easily with a joystick.
The same could be said of first person shooters. The gameplay mechanic may not change much, but the games can be very different experiences, and they are still fun. Indeed, many of us still have fun with the occasional Doom 1 game, so if Doom 4 ends up playing just like Doom 1 but with better graphics, I don't see that as a bad thing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I love how the original poster ends with
The Zenimax deal really has killed id software.
This news needs to be blogged and passed around like wildfire. id software is dead, long live id software!
Yes, it is Zenimax that killed the linux port, not any of the reason that he lists or anything...
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Unfortunetly Linux is still a complete no go for a serious gaming enthusiast. Despite myths of technical superiority common on slashdot, Linux performace lacks in many fundamental key areas, in order to get acceptable performance on Linux, 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. It's a nightmare. In addition, the multitude of overcloking and stability testing tools that arre bread and butter to windows performance gamers are completely non-existant on Linux and 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'. The PC gaming market is small enough to justify p[orting to a platform that is a tiny fraction (about 1%) of users. Aspyre may port the idtech5 games to Mac, who will port it Linux?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Hand has been forced by the fact that NVidia/AMD don't have decent open source drivers.
I guess what he's saying is that ID do not want/can not allocate resources to deal with the flood of tech support calls they anticipate from people who are trying to run it and getting graphical anomolies, etc on Linux.
Which, given the size of the Linux gaming market, is probably a sensible business decision.
Damn shame though, I still hope that down the track they open-source/release this engine like they did with previous versions so that the Linux driver/kernel people can have a crack at making it work, and thus people can run ID tech5 games, albeit "unsupported" officially by ID.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
When the hell did the Ubuntu Forums become a trusted/valid source of news?
Slashdot is going downhill fast. I tried to deny it but this is just crap.
You can't take the sky from me.
"It probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary
drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere
else would be small."
Hmmm, "anywhere else"? That can only be ATI Radeon drivers, as the Intel GPU aren't up to specs I guess.
So, thanks AMD/ATI!
From what I've seen, they have basically worked the game so down to the nuts and bolts as to make it fit into a three year old console. For starters, how about dynamic weather? None? Shame. Carmack is loosing sight of what made games great to buy and own on a PC, that you could enable advanced new graphics techniques on the PC with the latest graphics cards that were not available to the main stream. Even FarCry2, now a year old, has dynamic weather, and good weather too! I've played Crysis and FarCry2, and I think both games are well ahead of idTech5 in some areas, behind in others. FarCry2 is absolutely amazing when played at 1900x1200 with everything turned on. The mornings and evenings are soo real, with the evironmental audio effects as well. Shadows and foilage are quite fantastic. (The night doesn't seem so accurate however, with the night lighting is just too bright.) We've got quad processors now with 4 Gig PC memory standard, and 1 Gig graphics cards. What was the point of me even spending money on a high end machine? When I buy a game, I expect to see some graphics capabilities in the game that are experimental in nature, like volumetric clouds, wind, rain, dust storms, fog, frigid cold/heat haze effects, etc. I expect HDR lighting. I'm not just buying a game to have fun, I'm buying the game to become immersed in a world, and to explore. I want to feel as though I'm there, and have the freedom to just stand around and gawk at the world for hours, just like a lazy Sunday afternoon.
I've owned every id game made in the last 16 years. If all Rage turns out to be is an overblown desert mad max racing game, with pretty good graphics, optimized for a console, I will be thoroughly dissappointed. Thoroughly dissappointed. I may never buy another high-end PC and graphics combo again. What would be the point? When all I really need to browse the web, check email, and watch online videos is a $500 box. So I end up buying a $500 business PC, and a $500 game console, and come out the lesser on both ends?
I never understood why a big game developer like id couldn't eliminate the middleman and just release a game that runs off a liveCD style operating system. Screw windows, mac, or linux, have the game itself be the OS.
It turns the buyer's multi-tasking PC into a video game console.
It means that you are now responsible for securing the system and supporting the hardware.
Whether this is some noble herald of the future, or a side-show that proves unimportant in the long term, is yet to be decided - but it's technically pretty darned impressive. Especially when it'll run on more affordable hardware - because not everyone owns a turbo-powered super-PC.
Nvidia has a long history of working hard to keep their drivers working for as many distros as they can. When they can't, they make smart installers to get it done. In a case like this, I don't mind a proprietary blob. It's also why I never buy ATI.
And you're right: Id has a long and storied history of helping Linux; I remember talking to Darryl Strauss several years ago about the Voodoo GPU work he was doing on Titanic. These are not people liable to sell us out.
This could all change, if they do, but both of these groups have done well by us for a long time, and giving them the benefit of the doubt's the right thing to do.
Besides, with Saurbraten, OpenArena, Nexius and all the rest, there's plenty for me to do in OpenSource while I wait for Id to port it. :>
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Somehow the iPod and the Wii became successful platforms despite only having a subset of the universe of games. It's grasping at straws to say that all conditions must be right first. People don't need to switch completely. They just need a reason to switch some of the time. And, as we have seen throughout this thread, some people have done exactly that. But not nearly enough to generate the kind of profits that high-quality multimillion dollar games need to survive.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
This is pretty much what one of the guys (the tall, non-balding guy, I think the lead programmer?) said during the live demo they gave at quakecon. If it's in the transcript (edited out, probably) he says "so you can shoot a rocket, it blows up, and you feel like you're cool for a minute" at which point he realized what he said and shut up. They did the tech demo using a 360 controller (on a PC) for what it's worth. It's very much a console game, I don't see why they would optimize it for PC. They even made a comparison at one point (well, sort of) they said "this isn't Grand Theft Auto in the desert" but it pretty much is GTA. With a hint of Fallout 3. It'll be a good franchise to work with they have a lot of room to grow it, but this first idtech 5 title is very much a console game that will have a PC port.
moox. for a new generation.
It also relates to Quake 3 Arena Linux box sales, from the past. I still have that steel cool box from Loki Games which Linux nerds ignored because "Windows one is cheaper".
Dual Booting, high end virtual machines, the fact that ID Software is not stupid to use Direct3D as single option is also related. "Run it in a virtual machine running XP" is the idea which came to people's mind.
Nevermind, OS X having "boot camp" (basically dual boot) and its own very high end virtual machines (hypervisors) degraded OS X game scene from almost nothing to nothing. We now have .exes acting like .app more than ever, thanks to Transgaming (!). Old times, you were forced to release OpenGL/OpenAL, now they just pay to get that SDK, re-pack their directx game for OS X, raise price 30% and release it.
Perhaps, people buying consoles have a point.
There is no reason to attack RMS over this. RMS is just telling the true stupidity which breaks the main purpose of Linux OS.
Even using latest OS X and only Macs, I can understand how ridicolous the binary "blob" driver is. One doesn't need to be a GNU fanatic to do so.
What was the reason behind binary blob drivers again? Evil competitors stealing x86 code? What competitor really? It is just ATI and Nvidia left. ATI already went open , Intel was always open but not really a gaming GPU company. It is not RMS, it is Nvidia being old fashioned regarding open source. They don't have any competitor left and they aren't aware of it.
I got 3 PPC Macs here, I am the live example of Linux PPC effected by this "binary only" drivers. It kills the experience I would get from Linux, perhaps it would show how Apple wasted the G5 platform (just theory), would give a safe path for future of these PPC machines which still runs, an alternative...
Security is of little concern in this context...
The system will only be running while the game is being played, after that it gets turned off and everything is gone.
There would be no network services running except the game itself (assuming it had some kind of server mode) - having anything extra running would just waste resources that could be used for playing.
Local security wouldn't be an issue, since it would inherently be a single user system.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
For the previous versions of Quake binary blob drivers were always required AFAIK. And the state of free 3D drivers has never been better. It used to be that the only free Linux 3D drivers were for Intel. Back in 2005 Doom 3 was playable in Intel?
Maybe he is raising the issue, because kernel developers threatened to pull the plug on binary blobs. Other than that I see no reason why he should be complaining now.
I know you read this. I have bought all your games since wolf3d. I use Linux. If you don't port Rage then I won't buy it, along with about the entire Linux market. Piracy is very small and the offerings are about zero. So every Linux user out there that wants to game would buy it. Any idea how large that number is in sales? Almost everybody, like me, just buys the Windows version and then downloads the bin about a month later. All Linux users that game use the nVidia and ATI blobs anyway...
Here be signatures
Wait, you want it to take 5 minutes to boot from your normal OS to the game and then 5 minutes to switch back?
Honestly I'm not very surprised.
For sure the new deal with Zenimax has influenced the independence of id.
I mean, the fact they are developing a Linux version for QL is good and reflects that Linux market does exist.
What scares me are the motivation added by JC.
I really find hard to understand about the codepath optimization when:
- 2~3 years ago the Linux version of Doom 3/Quake 4 was faster on Linux than Windows, with worse drivers (you have to admit Linux drivers have been better in these years)
- ET:QW runs smoother on Linux than on my Win XP partition
Again, how comes that drivers have been only getting worse in these last 3 years? I really don't understand this.
Plus, as someone else has already pointed out, if they do a Mac port (it's a unix system as well), how difficult can be to make a Linux port (the most evoluted and used unix system on this planet)?
I've read poor logic in these emails.
Considering Carmack is a very smart and logic person, I'm very surprised by these answers.
Or Zenimax has bought id's freedom, or the emails are fake.
Cheers,
You didn't get the GP's point. All this great megatexture stuff is also running on a $180 console, so what's the point in buying a $2000 gaming machine?
It's a great achievement for the programmers, but they just don't use the hardware available to them on PCs. I mean, no fully dynamic shadows (not even thinking about dynamic global illumination) in 2010? wtf?
It seems to be more about the drivers than anything else. Porting to linux is very easy if it's working on the mac, and the "binary blob" drivers from nvidia are perfectly viable as a platform (in fact they have the best opengl3 support to date). These "paths that are not usually optimized" refer to the open source drivers that are being developed by the community ("nv" and whatever we use for ati), hence the comment about being stuck with the binary blobs (who cares? we all use ubuntu anyway, the binary drivers come installed and we love it).
If there's any sort of "political" meaning to this mail, it's about getting away with full open source support for nvidia and ati hardware, either from the companies themselves, or some community effort. But do we have any pull to persuade nvidia/ati to release open source drivers? Carmack himself is probably in a better position to do this than us.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
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.
Carmack should reconsider releasing games on PC altogether, whether it is on Windows or Linux. Today's console capabilities -especially when it comes to HD display- make PC gaming irrelevant. Ever since I bought a PS3, My PC became Windows-free as gaming seems to be the only reason to keep paying for a Windows license nowadays.
Actually, 100% is also "as big as you can get". It all depends whether you care about gaining support in the niche, or just about the overall volume.
Because nobody would buy a piece of software that requires a reboot just to start it, the days of DOS and custom bootdisks are luckily long gone and nobody with a sane mind would want them back.
Funny i saw a Carmac talking about it, and was under the impression that it was being designed with all the platforms in mind, the PS3 will have better graphics (than the 360) because the larger discs allow it, the PC will allow users to choose all the settings so they can vary it by hardware. Even if release dates are staggered, because the id Tech engines are "done right", i doubt any of the versions can be regarded as a port. A port is:
bob: We really need to get into the ps3 market
jon: OK well, we'll just move over our $existing_game, and fix any bugs as we go
This is more like:
bob: remember jon the key markets are ps3 and xbox360
jon: OK we will spend more time making sure $new_game, works well on them.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
>>I mean, no fully dynamic shadows (not even thinking about dynamic global illumination) in 2010? wtf?
Are you talking about enabling the innate self-shadowing a lot of cards do?
Because innate self-shadowing looks like ass.
Insert "Wardell" for "Carmack" and "OS/2" for "Linux", and you'll be reading the posts from the days when Stardock started to abandon OS/2 support. .NET.
Write your government representatives and ask for further antitrust remedies to be placed on Microsoft! Until the "applications barrier to entry" is broken, all of this blustering from 'niche' operating systems users will only be nothing more than noise.
Other actions can be to try to proliferate non-Microsoft usage as much as possible. Work to get Microsoft Office, Outlook, Sharepoint, Visio, etc. out of the workplace. Try to get family members off of Windows. Ask software providers for non-Windows versions. Refuse to take programming jobs that require C# or
It's been like that since the beginning. Or more precisely, after Doom2's DM was made literally into a new sport. I had friends who participated (and trained a lot for it) in state level Doom 2 (and later Quake *) deathmatch tournaments.
I enjoy FPS, but quite bad at it. In past we had a rule that pros play only with a basic gun, bare hands or a chainsaw. That was leveling up playing field a bit - but also was helping pros to polish their skills in close quarter battle. (Going with a chainsaw vs. RPG never going to be easy.)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
No, I'm talking about something like this. Note how in the walls in the Manhattan Apartment demo take on the color of the colored carpet when the light is shining on it.
Because you gain nothing for extraordinarily large amounts of work?
You don't get speed boosts, you have to write an OS (or borrow one) anyway, you have to write/maintain drivers for every piece of hardware under the sun (which almost certainly means licensing binary blobs from their manufacturers), cope with all their fancy BIOS-bugs and workarounds that even modern PC's still suffer from (read the Linux source code for these sorts of things - there are "QUIRK" entries everywhere) and for this you gain... What? Not a lot. You have a "unified" platform that nobody writes for so you're stuck with maintaining it. Every time machines are updated, you get complaints from customers that the software won't run, you don't get *any* performance benefits at all and it takes the customer 10 minutes (and probably several tries) to boot into the software... that's if they can manage it AT ALL... I don't know any "ordinary" user that has ever booted from CD/USB deliberately.
You basically take on Microsoft / Linux's job of building an operating system and don't get any benefit for you / the consumer.
Back in the days of standardised buses, soundcards, VESA VGA, 2Mb RAM etc. - possibly. Nowadays, not a chance in hell. It's a ridiculous suggestion on modern hardware.
iD has always been a company that made money by selling games and licensing the game engines. The vast majority of their direct and indirect customers have always been running DOS / Windows flavor of the year. They have never been a charitable organization, and any donations of code made have always been last-gen stuff with little remaining commercial licensing potential.
iD's aim has never been to make Mac / Linux users feel better about themselves, or to get involved in fan-boy OS flamewars. If by "subjugated by the suits" you mean "expected to concentrate on profitable projects in return for the well-deserved remuneration you receive" then so what? That's the way things generally work.
Linux is for real work and Windows is for gaming.
"Linux is for real work and Windows is for gaming"
NO, Linux is for real work, Games Consoles are for gaming and Windows is for swearing at !
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Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system
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If you read Slashdot for more than a little while, you find a non-trivial amount of posters that seem to think charging any money for software is wrong. "Information wants to be free," and all that. They believe everything electronic should be no cost. That is part of why they use Linux.
Well, it would be no surprise at all if those people copied their games. After all, they believe it is right. There is no ethical dilemma for them, they think this is how it should be.
Also, doesn't matter if there is very little copyright infringement on Linux, there are very little customers. Doesn't matter WHY people aren't buying the games, it just matters that they aren't. So even if 100% of users willing to pay for the game are in fact paying for it, that doesn't help if that number is too small to support the costs in porting it.
It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's fulfilled by the external factor that not enough Linux users are buying games. For it to be self-fulfilling would indicate circularity -- that Linux users aren't buying games because they aren't being put out.
I think it's in part a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Part of the reason Linux users don't buy Linux games is the lack of Linux games (which means there's insufficient revenue in releasing for Linux, which drives away the offers of Linux games).
Why? Well, if a large portion of your PC games are for Windows only, it means you have to have a Windows machine around. As long as you have that, you won't mind buying one more Windows game. Since porting to Linux costs money and those who sell games can get the same amount of your money without porting, why should they?
Now, let's assume that 95% of games were available for Linux. Enough people would stop having a Windows machine around and buy only those games available for Linux. That means there's a real return to porting to Linux.
That's part of the explanation. There's probably also an element of this: I got my OS for free, I got my applications for free, I get my movies and music for free (offa' legaltorrents.com of course :D), why should I pay for games? That's not self-fulfilling. But some of the explanation is.
[if my assumptions about what's really an empirical question are correct.]
Well, that's fine, isn't it?
The licensing on the various OSS projects allows you to use them to create closed-source products. It's one of the Freedoms you're being granted - if the developers had considered fighting closed source code to be more important than that freedom (and other related ones) then they'd have licensed the tools differently. They could have chosen a license that says "If you use this then you must donate other stuff to the open source community for free" but the developers of the code didn't, since that was not the conditions *they* chose for *their* code.
We're typically all pleased to hear Linux is being used as a platform for rendering the latest awesome movie's CGI sequences but it's probably running custom closed code. We're all pleased when a major company switches to Firefox or Open Office but they're probably also using copyright law and patents to control various of their products. I don't see how this is different, OSS code being used to produce stuff is generally a good thing no matter what license the product is released under.
...the binary blobs do matter. In a sector we hardly expected, but care about.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
ID has always made great games, and will continue to.
Really? Do you know anyone who actually completed Quake? I just about managed to finish the shareware version without getting too bored. In multiplayer it was quite fun, but not amazingly good. The thing that sold it were the mods - things like Team Fortress, Quake Rally, PainKeep, and so on that built games that were fun on top of the core of Quake. The graphics were ahead of everything else (although Duke3D looked better on some machines because it could manage 800x600 with 2.5D where Quake could only do 320x200 with real 3D), but the game was tedious.
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"It seems to be more about the drivers than anything else. Porting to linux is very easy if it's working on the mac, and the "binary blob" drivers from nvidia are perfectly viable as a platform (in fact they have the best opengl3 support to date)."
The nice thing about developing for Apple is the heartless, uncompromising lockdown of the software. Make your game for Mac and you aren't dealing with dozens of distributions and a large number of systems that don't have complete, tuned drivers. You also aren't dealing with problems unique to some twat who made some ridiculous change to a conf file somewhere and is complaining that something in the game is glitchy. This strikes me as more likely in linux than it is on either Windows or MacOS.
If you develop an official linux client, you legitimize it and you adopt the requirement of supporting it. For Windows that's acceptable because of the vast and proven customer base. What would be the cost of supporting linux, on a per-copy-sold basis? Would it be low enough (with sufficiently high unit sales) to push the "linux initiative" into a profit?
If not, does it make any sense for a for-profit company to go down that road? In the past the linux community has benefited from what can only be called "generosity" on the part of Id. That's great, on their part, but I'm not surprised that it couldn't go on forever.
Buy every Linux release.
I have a policy: If I think I'll get more than a few hours of entertainment out of a game and it runs on Linux, I buy it.
I've purchased a bunch of Id releases (Q3, Q4, D3), a couple S2 titles (Savage 2, Heroes of Newerth), World of Goo, UT 2k3, Neverwinter Nights, and a few others. These games are WELL WORTH their box price, and I'm telling these developers to keep it up with their linux ports.
I would bet if every gamer that also runs Linux does the same, we'd see a lot more Linux games. So, Linux gamers, do your part!
It feels a bit pointless to reply
The poster you replied to extrapolated about 30 million (or maybe 3) linux computers - someone stupidly replied as though it was all the linux systems in the world.
However, the statistics generally place the server market at somewhere between 25 and 35% Linux, the rest being Windows, the BSDs, and UNIX. Thus, assuming there's only about 30 million linux computers, total, smartphones, servers, embedded and all included, there's at most 100 million servers in the world. I was pointing out that the statements made by you and wampus to do as though linux-on-the-desktop was an insignificant speck when it's in the tens of millions.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The plural of "anecdote" is not "proof".
But then, neither is the plural of "+1, Funny".
Not only would Carmack have ported to linux, he would have talked about it here on Slashdot. He's probably too busy still building his Iron Man suit to port to Linux nowadays.
Have fun writing your own ATI and nVidia drivers then. Oh, and sound card, input, USB, network card drivers. Did I miss any? Oh yeah, SATA and IDE for the CD. Or maybe it's a USB-attached drive? Don't forget the high end DisplayPort graphics cards! Oh by the way my sound card was made in 1998, the manufacturer went bust without releasing specs or code, and I see no reason to throw it out just for one game.
Oh, you mean dynamic radiosity.
Yeah, an engine I worked on for a 3D arcade game back in '95 had radiosity in it, but we had to precompute the values. It wasn't dynamic.
To be honest though, most people don't notice things like that in a game.
To be honest though, most people don't notice things like that in a game.
Well, usually with those features, people don't notice the presence, but afterwards they notice the absence in other games (even when they can't point their finger on it, it just doesn't look right).
Actually I remember playing some games when I was really little where you had to boot from the game disk, not into DOS first. Kings Quest I -- some ancient CGA version -- comes to mind. They tended to work pretty well but they were a huge pain for exactly the reason you mentioned -- you now had essentially a game console.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
I've had the G200 myself, the support was great and one of the best cards at the time.
The Linux drives have to be easily maintainable and switchable, the Windows driver model works so well, why it is such a problem to adapt similar scheme or allow to load Windows drivers? I believe there are some Windows network drivers that one can load to kernel, why not adapt and enable this also for the other drivers? That would solve hell of a problems. Imagine you can grab the latest Windows scanner or printer driver and use it. Vendors willing to open source the driver will do it regardless of the supported driver model, those uncooperative will never do it anyway, but at least one would not need to wait forever until somebody reverse engineers their stuff.
Then the devs could simply state that you need this nvXXXX.drv for the game to run properly, problem solved.
Good thing that I got my PS3 already.
Whilst it was fun to have apparent parity with Windows games for ID's previous releases, it was always really a fake. Requiring propriety drivers which replace half of the kernel and half of X11 (which were defiantly needed for Tech 4) you may as well have been dual booting.
The recent rapid development of open sourced 3d drivers is far more important in the medium/long term. They are currently reaching the point were they can run modern Tech 3 derived games as often as not. An imminent release of the Tech 4 code could be instrumental in continuing this development.
Forcing Linux gamers back on the BLOB drivers would do far more harm then good.
That's why you can use a stripped down linux, which will already support most of those things.
SATA has a standard - AHCI, easy to support
USB has standards, OHCI/UHCI for USB1 and EHCI for USB2, so easily supported
USB-storage for the CD or whatever other USB attached media you have..
USB HID has standards too...
There used to be standards for sound and video (vga/vesa, soundblaster) that various manufacturers followed, but that's not the case these days. Having totally nonstandard hardware and relying on driver layers for compatibility is just another method of lock-in tho.
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