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Linux Game SDK, Fully Playable Game
Denis Oliver Kropp writes "Yesterday was the release of the new ClanLib and of ClanBomber. ClanLib is a game SDK by ClanSoft (www.clanlib.org). ClanBomber is the first fully playable game that uses this API. It compiles under Linux and Win32, uses X11 or DirectX. ClanLib (and the game) even support joystick under both environments. ClanLib will support svgalib and GGI in the near future. Check out the screenshots at www.fischlustig.de/clanbomber "
Games are a big weak spot for Linux, so naturally it seems that making Linux an attractive game platform is an important long term goal for the community. Sure, some people don't like games, but no one can argue that games haven't partially driven CPU technology in the past and have almost totally driven low-end 3d technology.
So how do we push Linux (and unix in general) as a usefull game platform? Obviously we need to present game programmers with a programming interface that they can use to port games to (or ideally write original games for). Like GTK+ is for GUI applications (or Qt, depending on your religion), we need the "GTK+" of the game world. Some kind of library that:
1. Is portable
2. Is extendable
3. Can make use of hardware acceleration
4. Can grow with future graphics/sound technology
5. Is based on _some_ kind of industry standard
Number five is VERY important. A standard has to be agreed upon or developers are just going to shrug Linux off as a bunch of non-standard API's each evangalized by their own creator but no one else.
What we have been seeing lately, is too many chefs spoiling the soup. Everyone and his uncle has their own API they are trying to push, and no one is working together to agree on a standard.
You aren't going to like this but I'll say it anyway. The reason Windows has caught on as a game playform is because of DirectDraw and DirectSound (and to a lesser extent hardware-accellerated OpenGL). Simply, developers don't have to worry about writing their own routines to allocate video memory, access the sound card's dma buffers, etc. etc., because Microsoft for once provided a pretty decent standard API to write to, that everyone could pretty much agree on.
Everytime someone announces his own "KICKASS GAME API" we (the Linux/unix community) actually suffer a set-back. We slip farther from the goal of having a single, open, standard API for mainstream developers to rely on.
Fortunately we have things like Mesa, which seems to "Get It". I'm not going to advertise Mesa more than I have to, suffice to say it meets all of the five criteria I mentioned above. Personally I believe time spent on writing APIs that essentially do what Mesa already does is time wasted. LOOK INTO MESA before you decide to write "Yet Another Graphics API".
On the other hand, we have sound support on Linux. Currently it's a mess. Basically application writers need to directly access the sound driver in order to get any kind of noise working. We currently have no standard _OPEN_ API to work with, and for the most part sound capabilities under linux are limited to a single process using a sound card. This will not fly with game developers.
Like the graphics world, we need an sound API that:
1. Is portable
2. Is extendable
3. Is hardware-independant
4. Allows more than one process/thread access to sound hardware simultaniously (a mixer)
One thing I have seen that looks promising is eSound. Do your own research on it but it looks pretty nice, and it will get the job done if its developers continue to do "The Right Thing".
It is important for us small-time game developers to look for APIs like Mesa and eSound, which are implemented properly and have potential to become some kind of standard, rather than latching on to one that has cool screenshots but only had a single game written to them--or worse, just writing our own game API.
You should alllook at http://privat.schlund.de/g/grumbel/pingus/index.ht ml . It's a GPL'd Lemmings clone, but with Penguins! It also runs on ClanLib, though it's not finished yet.
Not the word multiplatform means supporting more than one platform. I didn't say it was omniplatform.
It's multiplatform in a way that GGI isn't, though. It runs on DirectX too! Thus, you just have to recompile a game written for ClanLib and it works in Windows or Linux