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Will the Star Citizen Project Fund Linux and Mac Ports For CryENGINE 3?
Mr. Jaggers writes "Chris Roberts, game designer of Wing Commander fame, has had great success with his new crowd-funded Star Citizen project — so much that the $2m base goal has been smashed with weeks to go on the Kickstarter portion of the campaign. Now Chris is floating a list of stretch goals for fans to vote on, with Linux and Mac support both listed as stretch goal candidates. Since Star Citizen is based on the popular CryENGINE 3 game engine, these stretch goals are equivalent to funding Linux and Mac ports of CryENGINE. Chris couldn't make any absolute promises yet, since he doesn't own the engine, but CryENGINE 3 already supports Android, so at least there is existing OpenGL ES support to be leveraged towards adding Linux and Mac OpenGL support. If there is enough outpouring of cross-platform support from fans in this poll, Star Citizen could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities — analogous to the role played by Wasteland 2 in bringing official Linux support to the Unity 4 engine popular among so many Indie developers."
Do you realize the NFL is on TV right now? Shave your neckbeard and join society. Why are you not down at the pub looking for pussy.
The Muzzies are coming, The Muzzies are coming
Everyone keep calm
They're violend and they're evil
And they mean to do us harm
If there was ever any thought of wanting the game to run on Linux or Mac, why did he base it on CryENGINE to begin with? Isn't that sort of stupid? Really, isn't that all kinds of stupid? I should think that developers would have learned better by now.
I played Wing Commander all night last night on my Tandy 2500SX/20. Down to the last mission at Venice. Beat it a couple times but my wingman keeps dying. I also played it a few years ago on Dosbox. Somehow it's much more fun on the Tandy, even if it's a little slow when there's 8 ships in play. I'm building a 486 for the rest of the series. WCII should play just right with the turbo off.
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It has a $500,000 goal, and has so far only gotten $886,252.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
But they have raised over 2M, 800k of which is on kickstarter, check out their website in the summary link
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
When the original "Wing Commander" was released for DOS, many hardcore Amiga/Atari ST gamers bought PCs just to be able to play it. No game before it had the kind of graphics, story or space combat that Wing Commander offered. And this one game (plus the hugely innovative Ultima Underworld perhaps) turned PCs into a potent gaming machine overnight. ---- Star Citizen may very well do the same for Linux. A Chris Roberts Space Game + Internet Massively Multiplayer + Cryengine 3 graphics + Newtonian Physics simulation on everything in game + Linux = Nerd Heaven!!! ------- I say "Go, Chris Roberts, Go! Bring SC and CryEngine 3 to Linux!!!"
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The Linux Gaming community is a different audience than the Windows Gaming community. It has to be marketed to Linux gamers properly.
Supposedly, there is already a Linux port of the CryEngine 3:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4Mjk
Again, its from Phoronix, so take it with a grain of salt.
There are a good deal of differences between OpenGL and OpenGL ES. In reality Direct3D9 is closer to OpenGL ES than OpenGL is. The syntax and grammar may be more compatible between OpenGL and OpenGL ES, but the more important quirks and behavior are completely different. When I took my renderer from Direct3D9 to OpenGL ES 2.0 it only took a couple weeks, the two were very similar in all the ways that count. But then moving to OpenGL things got very complicated very fast. For any one thing you may want to do with OpenGL there are multiple ways to go about doing it, each with their own pros and cons that must be taken into consideration else you shoot yourself in the foot.
Not saying it isn't possible, anything is possible for an experienced coder. Just saying it's not as clean cut as you would believe given both share the OpenGL name and have similar design philosophies.
I pretty much doubt this will even be CLOSE to a triple A title. Starlancer was no Wing Commander. And even though much of the problem with that game was Microsoft buying it and rushing it out the door. Though if they hadn't it would have been a case like 38 Studios, where the game never gets finished, and the devs go tits up.
Cry engine 3 has had a native Linux/Mac port for ages...
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4Mjk
Phoronix told last spring that there is a native port of CryEngine 3 already. Don't know how true that is, though.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4Mjk
I am finished with dual-booting just to slurp up the latest and greatest games. The last console I purchased was a Playstation 2, and that was about a decade ago. I have the tablet that supports the most games (guess what one!) and a computer that runs a non-Windows OS.
It is a pretty simple thing to use one of the many multi-platform game development engines that are kicking about these days. If a game producer decides not to release a game on my OS, they will not see a sale. It's as simple as that.
The problem with using Wine for games, and dual-booting, is that you are basically telling manufacturers that you don't really care if they actually release their product for anything but Windows, and this sends a signal to Microsoft - that they should try to make Wine less and less useful on the newest games.
If you don't release a game on the OS that I already have and use, then I will just keep playing Dwarf Fortress instead. DF is surely better anyway.
"could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities"
Is he trying to make out CryEngine 3 will be the first AAA game engine on Mac and Linux? I guess the Quake, ID Tech, Unreal and Source (been on Mac for a while, Linux is in Beta now) engines done count?
Chris Roberts, game designer of Wing Commander fame, has had great success with his new crowd-funded Star Citizen project
Success? What success? He's raised a bunch of money by promising a whole lot of people something that it's probably going to be impossible to deliver on. When you raise people's expectations this much, you can only fail.
The Chris Roberts retirement fund is looking very dubious right now. New gaming engine for Linux? I'd be shocked just to see a new game.
About a bit over a year ago, I had Chris Roberts him self find me via Craigslist about some issues with his machine. I did not know at the time it was Chris Roberts or my childhood hero that was coming over. While I worked with him looking over my shoulder and a trip to Frys, we found out it was a faulty board. I told him I could not charge the man who nearly caused me to get a TCS Victory tattoo for just telling him the board was bad after the years of enjoyment he had given me. Still one of the best days of my life.
The developers of the futuristic racer Distance (12 days to go on Kickstarter) has tried a beta of Unity 4 on Linux, and now says that they will definitelly bring the game out on Linux as well.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
If there is such a large support for the space-flight sim. genre in the Linux community, then they might consider Strike Suit Zero, with a stretch goal of $180k that will make them deliver a Linux version.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
AFAIK, it was more because a new PC clone/parts were cheaper than other platforms while still offering equal or superior sound/video abilities. (My family switched from Apple IIgs to PCs back then in part so I could play the latest Ultima games, but we wouldn't have been able to do it without favorable pricing.) You're conflating two separate years & shifts in computer ownership, though:
--In 1990-1991, PCs were just starting to dominate the market, and Origin Systems released Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Ultima VI, and Worlds of Ultima, which were all developed (for the first time) on DOS PCs, with major improvements in graphics/sound as a result.
--Ultima Underworld came out in 1992 alongside Ultima VII, at the same time CD-ROMs became affordable and a bunch of games started coming out that used them to offer greater sound/graphics. Contrary to our preferences, though, the games most often credited with driving consumers to DOS (and making the PC a major gaming platform) were Myst and The 7th Guest.
I'm not sure whether we can draw parallels with support for Wing Commander & Linux today, though... Back then, consumers were switching to PCs because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new games for their older computer systems -- unless MS really sabotages its own market with Windows 8, that dynamic won't be at work here. I do think that Kickstarter could be used to make developers more aware of the many people that are using Linux and only booting into Windows for games, however, and somebody like Chris Roberts taking notice would put out a pretty strong message in the game dev community, I would think.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
The main problem between mr torvalds and nvidia, is that up to that point nvidia has never ever wanted to collaborate with them, nor even try to use whatever already exist in linux.
nvidia wanted the lazy way and share as much code as possible. their current way to do things is throw everything in the garbage and do things their own way. the problem is that this doesn't play nice with everyone else (including Intel hardware) and thus some functionality is completely broken (Optimus only works though third party hacks) although the necessary functionnality is alread in the kernel (but ignored by nvidia).
recently they've started to wisen up. they are open to collaborate better and try to use what exist. but now the situation has reversed and currently the linux developpers aren't playing nice (the necessary technology has been licensed as GPL only from the beginning)
Maybe Valve will solve the problems by simply forking Linux for their Steambox project
and that would be stupid.
Instead valve went the hard route and started collaboration between their own developers, and GPU drivers developers (both official binary at AMD and Nvidia, and official opensource at Intel and AMD). All this leading to several improvement.
Thanks to them, binary driver are being improved, and even the opensource stack (the Intel driver is officially opensource, and AMD officially supports opensource efforts in addition to their own in-house binary drivers. All these based on the same standart Linux infrastructure) has seen an increased pace of development (among other Valve is responsible of adding several debugging related extension to Gallium 3D, paving the way for future OpenGL 4.x).
And these efforts do indeed pay back: Source engine with an opengl back-end is much faster than with direct3d... even on windows.
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Just bought Quad Damage (Title: Scout) package as I want to support sandbox games with co-op (drop in / out), private servers (host yourself), and maybe Linux support.
Just to clarify a common misunderstanding in the original article: Wasteland was not a trigger factor in getting Unity ported to Linux. The project Kickstarter happened to coincide with the announcement of the platform support, but did not cause it. Dedicated developers had been working on the port for a long time before it was announced. One does not simply walk into Linux.