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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."
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.
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.
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...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Ah, fanboys. nVidia's didn't "rewrite a large chunk of Xwindow [sic]". The driver just bypasses the OpenGL direct rendering stack. OpenGL requests still go to from userland to the kernel just as they would under DRM, but under the control of the nVidia driver and not the generic rendering pipeline. nVidia's reason for doing that has nothing to do with performance, but rather with using a common codebase for their Windows and Linux drivers.
Furthermore, "overcloking" [sic] is not "necessary" in any way for playing games. Unless you're 14, that is: thanks, but Linux is for adults (unless you're running Gentoo and compiling everything with -O1.7e34 -fOMGLOLHACKS, which would be the moral equivalent of this overclocking nonsense.)
You're right about it being difficult to use Linux for gaming (though my copy of Alpha Centauri still runs fine), but the difficulty has nothing to do with technical merits and everything to do with the small intersection between the Linux desktop user base and the set of people likely to purchase games. That's the sad reality. For other tasks of equal complexity, like software development, audio editing, and document creation, the free software world is at or near par. There's just not a whole lot of interest in gaming.
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. But that's not the case. They have been put out but are simply not selling large enough numbers to justify additional investment. Porting more games would simply make the debit side of the balance sheet worse. And that kind of investment can't be justified these days -- we're in the midst of a huge game recession. Even consoles games are hurting, so what would inspire a major game studio to leap into Linux?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
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?
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
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...
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,
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.
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.
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.
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!