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Interview With Icculus on GNU/Linux Gaming
Via Phoronix comes a link to an interview with prolific GNU/Linux game porter Icculus about the state of gaming on GNU/Linux. Topics include Steam, Windows 8, his experiences trying to push FatELF vs full screen games, and the general state of the game industry. From the article (on the general state of games on GNU/Linux): "It's making progress. We're turning out to have a pretty big year, with Unity3D coming to the platform, and Valve preparing to release Steam. These are just good foundations to an awesome 2013."
You'll be able to run Unity made games on Linux BUT not able to run Unity itself
The whole point of GNU/Linux is that you have complete control over and significant trust of your system. If you bring closed, proprietary, DRM-infested software onto it, you're just turning it into another Windows; you might as well just go back to it.
No, what we need to get these people to do is to give us the code to their engines (even if under a mostly proprietary license). That way we will be able to continue enjoying what makes GNU/Linux attractive and play games as well.
LOLssia
From the interview:
Between Apple and Microsoft, Valve has to fight for a less restrictive platform.
The interesting thing here is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all building app stores with serious restrictions as a way to improve security, but aside from making stronger brands and improving user experience in removing malware, they don't get a lot out of the restrictiveness. Apple doesn't make money by not allowing pornography apps. There is potential for abuse, but realistically none of the major players have been doing a lot to promote their own software with these restrictions and seem mostly focused on preventing apps that kill battery life, could be malware, or create development chains controlled by their competitors in ways that leave them strategically vulnerable.
That said, I think they could all be persuaded to have more open policies, ones that would allow Steam to be a first class citizen, if they could get the same level of security. The main problem is that in all these walled garden stores the security auditing and the distribution system are tied together and managed centrally by one company. If we could persuade them to split these apart and allow third party security auditing that applies a filter to the distribution system and then put in place policies of completely open distribution, where they distribute anything... but by default apply a user editable filter that removes all the same things they do now it would still solve their security and battery woes for the mass market (potentially improving it by making it competitive) but also open up distribution for third parties like Steam.
In the above scenario Steam would face more competition as well, as much of their value added would already be bundled, but I'm sure Valve would be willing to go with it and innovate in order to earn their dollar.
I don't want another Minecraft. I want Mass Effect. I want Command & Conquer. I want Supreme Commander. I want Borderlands. And I want the absolute latest sequels to each and every one of these. Yes, even Mass Effect 3 (aside from the worst ending in the history of gaming, it's still a good game for the first 99 hours...)
I am sitting here, running XP x64 on a system that isn't even 2 years old built specifically for gaming (an ASUS G72 if you're curious) with Backtrack 5r3 in a VMWare guest running Unity (the VMWare feature, not that god awful Ubuntu desktop system). Yanno why? Because aside from games, every program I run is in Linux. And yet, it took me 2 hours to get EVERY SINGLE LINUX BINARY running flawlessly and fully integrated into the XP Host, whilst I spent over 2 WEEKS trying to get just 3 games running via WINE and only 1 success - and that was Rage, a game that's already in OpenGL (because idTech5 is OpenGL).
So no, we don't need to expect AAA studios who are only in this for the money to release source. That's unreasonable, and you're never going to appeal to someone who's only concerned with the business side of games to do anything because it's the "right thing" to do.
What we SHOULD expect them to do, however, is to pick idTech over Unreal so that their games rely primarily on OpenGL instead of DirectX, and thus make a Linux port (as well as both PS3 and Wii, even if not Xbox) infinitely easier on themselves. And when they do, we should then expect them to see that with the drastically reduced cost of porting their now-OpenGL-based games to Linux, it's financially viable for them to turn a profit on selling those games to Linux users. As binaries. Not source.
This is what we should ask, because if what we're demanding is these people to release source and let us do the porting for them, it ain't happening, and yanno what we get stuck with? Artsy-fartsy indie games like Minecraft that are coded in JAVA so they're cross-platform but basically boring. Don't get me wrong, Minecraft is good, I just don't ever want another game like it. Ever. One is enough of those to last me over a decade.
Seriously, fat elf? ELF was fine, it's another TLA that you might pronounce as E-L-F, but there's only one way people would say FatELF. "Just turn the GIMP into a FatELF and it'll run on all platforms.", seriously RMS should add another one to the list, free as in beer, free as in speech and free as in puns.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And the reason why open source games need statically compiled cross-distro binaries is that these days, you need to assure your game works in an online environment.
Online play requires all clients to have the same game version. There are exceptions I guess, but they aren't worth mentioning it.
What this means is that you need all distros to release(update) your newest game version at the same time, and if they don't (which they can't realistically) users will get locked out.
A good example of this is the Spring RTS engine, probably the best open source 3D RTS engine.
Games that use it are written in Lua language and thus only system-specific constraint is the engine itself.
Recently there was a push, and hopefully from next version we will have Linux static cross-distro binaries.
This gives us both assurance that users will always be able to use the newest, just released version, as well as to have multiple engine versions at the same time.
Just imagine how much package maintenance "fun" it would be to use an old package, with all the old package deps, and to maintain that dependency tree for each old engine version if we didn't have the statically compiled binaries.
If you want the latest and greatest games, I have to ask - why Windows XP 64-bit? While there aren't all that many games that -require- DirectX 10 or higher yet, there are a few,and some of them are really damned good. (Just Cause 2 springs to mind.)
Even games that don't require it are often markedly visually improved by DX10/11 (like Lord of the Rings Online, for instance.)
Because the average gamer's knowledge of computers could fit into two bytes and still leave room to store four nibbles. At best, you have someone who can compare hardware benchmark numbers.
In this specific example, he probably has some idea that he is better at managing his computer's memory than the OS is. 'WinXP doesn't suck up all my RAM!'
The mindset of the gamer does not seem to lend itself to a more than superficial knowledge of computing.
A lot of effort to go to just for the 2 linux users in existence.
And the sad fact is, that as of today, Windows 8 under steam outnumbers *all* versions of Mac OS all together. You can bet that the desktop distribution to Mac is higher than Linux, so what is the point here?
Valve is caught with a problem, they are trying desperately to stay relevant in an era where XBox is actually really good, and while the integration into Windows 8 leaves much to be desired, you now give companies a huge benefit in added revenue via XBox points and Xbox Achievements (which points can unlock certain things). Simply stated, developers and publishers make more money through the Xbox channels than they do anywhere else.
I know the idea of Linux gaming is great on /. but let's face the bad news; only if the community takes on the challenge of porting games (ala Wine or something), will it ever be bothered to be played. And even then, every Linux "gamer" will keep a Windows partition because all games will come to Windows, and only some will come to Linux -- and that's in an ideal world. So if publishers/developers know this, what's the point in adding Linux support in? The games won't play as well, they will lose added revenue via Xbox points/achievements, and they will make a few nerds happy.
Sorry to say but getting a Humble Bundle developer to push the idea that Steam on Linux will be "moderately successful" to "wildly successful" is idiotic and naive. Next time show an interview from a big name publisher and let the entire interview be three minutes of laughing.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I'd like to see more projects like 0ad Game or
unknown-horizons they are open source.
I take consolation in the knowledge that there may be a future (mainly when everyone who didn't go up with games dies of old age) where playing video games carries no more stigma than reading fiction, or watching movies.
What the fuck ever. Whether games are a 'high' art form or not has nothing to do with gamers being appliance users. Go feel superior about your choices somewhere else; this is a tech discussion.
The last generation that didn't 'grow up with games' was decades ago. You're talking about a period closer in time to Prohibition than to today.
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