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Dave Taylor Interview
Mr.E writes "Dave Taylor, former id code monkey and the
man responsible for the linux port of Doom, is
interviewed
by Ga-source about the past and future of Linux gaming."
He talks about tons of stuff from Id to Crack.com to Transmeta
(no he doesn't spill the beans). Good bit.
If these upcoming Linux and open source IPO's work out, then somebody sitting on a million shares of stock and looking squarely in the eye of stockholder lawsuits is gonna get motivated to insure that intellectual property laws are amended to support business even if you're using an open source model. When that happens, we're gonna see game developers using GPL'd code, because duh, it's free, and duh, they can still protect their property. If that happens, it's game over: Linux wins
Can some explain what that means?
According to the change log, a question and another question on the egcs mailing list, exceptions are thread-safe.
Oh well, I'll soon find out for myself.
The world/internet still seems the same to me. Was he talking out of his ass or did he mean he was going to work for Transmeta? If it was, just what the heck are they up to?
ps. I could have this statement mixed up with other .plan monkey but I think it was D. Taylor's.
Do what Torvalds does: look at the assembly output.
I think you'll find that GCC does NOT generate better code. I'm not saying it's a bad compiler, but you got to remember that this is a portable, cross-platform, cross-target compiler. MSVC is optimized for Wintel.
I've been using MSVC 4.2 to compile an in-house OS for a long time now just because the optimizer kicks ass. Since 5.0 had this bug in the optimizer (that I've never seen confirmed to be fixed) I've never trusted the later versions though.
As with any compiler, to have it turn out nicely optimized code you _have_ to look at the assembly output from time to time. Some functionally identical (C) code just generates better assembly then other (and it could be opposite between compilers - hmm, I wonder if that could be used for an other Mindcraft debacle)
Breace.
And device enumeration... is it _really_ needed? How many people actually have more than one display device? (Add ons like
:)
Voodoo not included...) Why wouldn't I want to use the primary device?
I do, I've been using dual monitors for a couple years now....very sweet
Posted by OGL:
This was a _GREAT_ interview...really worth reading a few times. Thanks for posting this!
-W.W.
Did you READ the article?
Dave talks about how the future is in multiple monitors. 2 17 inchers beats 1 21 incher any day.
Place 3 monitors in front of you, and bingo: widescreen MEGA Game. Turn the outer 2 slightly toward you, and you have amazing feel of realness due to the extra degrees of field of vision. Add more monitors as your CPU/3D/budget/wife allows.
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
--
And gee, who worked on Doom? Why, it was Dave Taylor. :)
I've often wondered why more games didn't support multiple screens like this. I can think of few games that were too crowded on one monitor to play.
I expect that the cheaper computers get, and the more Linux and other 'networked from the ground up' OSes spread, the more we will see games that be run off of multiple screens/cpus/videocards...
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
Is there any reason why I get nothing but a
blank window when I clink on http://www.ga-source.com/interviews/ddt.shtml
?
What Linux needs is more developers. It has a never-ending thirst for them. The more you get, the more gems you get, the more likely the tough, killer apps, drivers, and infrastructure are developed.
... linux distributions such as 'rh', suse and caldera (and i single these distro's out because they are targeting the business market..) gain more market share the developers will more likely be 'application-developers' rather than the traditional hard core system hackers typified by the comment, 'true coders used Debian and Slackware'....
well i think the third-party tools developers are also hoping for this as well. not long after the Linux is Not Red Hat (red-hat/codewarrior) article, i got an email from mark of metroworks customer service asking a few questions and agreed to a comment i made about the 'new breed' of application developers that will eventually flood linux.
it was good to read another ddt rant (informative and easy to read with a bit of a chuckle)..things got pretty boring on finger.planetquake after he left.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I think it was Jonathan Clark who said that.
Getting Cavedog to port Total Annihilation!
Imagine playing that game with SMP!
That's not a new quote. For example, it's standard in MENSA gatherings where the difficulty of managing Mensans is compared to... you've guessed it! herding cats!
Too lazy to log in
It's almost a pity that the games on the Unreal engine ended up sucking.
... and today's pet project has
OK, I admit making assumptions about how something is going to be used is stupid.
As for supporting devices that don't exist, I was thinking more of testing. How do we test how our software works on hardware that is still on the drawing board or a gleam in the designer's eye.
It's the guy from Vault 13... damn small monitors.. ;)
I don't want to be flamed for just saying "First Post", so let's come up with something interesting.
Oh yes. What is crack.com? The newest drugdealer site?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I especially loved the part about "How does Linux game programming different from Windows game programming?" Go..read..enjoy.
;) You know a game is good when its like "ya okay already, I'll come to bed in a _sec_ honey...let me just finish this round!"
It would be really nice if Blizzard would get their collective heads out of their butts and port StarCraft to Linux (or even let Loki do it). Such a great game, and such a waste to have to run Windows to play it. As a direct result of SubSpace and StarCraft, I nearly lost 2 girlfriends and flunked out of college
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
ok I love the bit on
How does Linux game development differ from Windows game development?
oh debigging dont we just love it
and yes the documentation with direct x is very YOU WILL USE IT THIS WAY or bill wont be happy
and yes doing things in winnt you surprise how fast they can go but simple things NO so slow
ah well
windowed games uha yeah realy
go read what apple GUI boys have to say !
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
"I think trying to direct Linux is like herding cats. Cats are not motivated by anything resembling what motivates you, but if you get enough cats, some portion of them will go the right direction just by chance."
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh wait wrong story, I meant to say I can't wait to find up what the hell transmeta is up to. Espically with all that shit he just said about it. I don't know if their product will be able to live up to all the hype.
GCC is _not_ superior to MSVC ! Well, it is when you need to write code for 10 platforms but from technical point of view gcc-generated code is much worse ... Wake up dude. Eveybody uses GCC cause it is evailable for just about every platform out there and , well, there is nothing else available for Linux ( maybe KAI ... is it better then GCC ? Anyone ? )
was the company that brought us Abuse; which featured a full LISP interpreter for the AI. Well, it was pretty sweet otherwise, too -- even for something that wasn't "3D"
The most shocking thing to me is the how Dave talks about how wonderful open source is, and how great Linux is because of that; but on the other hand completely accepts the insane secrecy at Transmeta. Now, I suppose I'd give my eyeteeth to work there too, but it's an odd juxtaposition that is made odder in that he doesn't seem to notice it himself.
The description of programming for windows is great. I'd had exactly that experience; it's upsetting that OpenGL programs run so much faster under windows than Linux. Still, for the FX work that we do, it's much more important to have real operating system support than fast graphics.
And finally, I agree that the integration of X window system support for games is extremely important; not for the success of the games as for the success of the X window system. If we make X work for games, it will work for anything -- and there will be cards and other hardware that will almost magically appear due to the awesome economic power of the gamers.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
DirectX in general is pretty crapped up. Although DirectInput isn't so bad for dealing with the keybaord, but joysticks... good god! Somewhere in "Inside DirectX" (I can't find it at the moment), it talks about how DInput was designed for joysticks and controlors that have yet to be made. WTF? Why would I support a device that doesn't exist? Man, can you imagine the testing...
And device enumeration... is it _really_ needed? How many people actually have more than one display device? (Add ons like Voodoo not included...) Why wouldn't I want to use the primary device?
Short in simple: it was poorly designed, but at least you can get it to perform half decent, speedwise anyhow, but debugging full screen DirectDraw apps requires remote debugging; maybe there's something to these windowed games after all.
Taylor mentioned the speed of linking under MSVC.
I've always wondered at this. Why is compiling/linking
so much slower under linux? Is GCC just that much better of a compiler
that it takes that much longer to compile the source (into a
superior binary)?
I mean, before Linux I used Borland's Turbo C, and later
other products, and they were so much faster on the same 486!
I have a nice, medium-sized C++ project with around 15 KLOC. This project does not use any kind of GUI, but it does have to include all the windows.h bloat on NT. Using the WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN switch helps a little, but not much.
I don't know how representative this is, but egcs 1.1.2 on Linux compiles and links this project almost twice as fast as MSVC++ 5.0 on NT 4.0. In general, I was surprised how fast egcs can be, because I used to think of gcc as a nice compiler, but slow as molasses.
Also, precompiled headers and incremental linking don't always seem to buy a speedup. There's one particular project on Borland C++ Builder 3 where incremental linking slowed down build times by a factor of 2.
Am I reading too much into it when I note that the website we all love to hate is down. Will it be back up on Monday with some content?
Unless they are contracting for the NSA they will have to tell the public what they are up to at some point, otherwise how can anyone buy the product.
At the moment the best bet seems to be that it is a project rather like the Elbrus E2K, but who knows?
When it comes online they are going to need the 4-way SMP and Apache tweaks to stop being slashdotted...
I don't know about large projects, but I know that on my very old Pentium, a "Hello World" program in Borland TC would compile immediately, whereas in Linux this would take a second or two ..
advocates (though none of the really religious ones)
and also Robert Collins, who spends his free time on
lambasting Intel
for not releasing documentation, plus people
like DDT who comes from the very open id culture,
so you have to assume they will open up at some
point.
Also, if you look at their patent, it reveals a
Also, if you look at their patent, it reveals a lot more than it claims. It looks a lot like an attempt to place some techniques they are using somewhere where the average dozy patent official can find it, so they don't have to fight groundless patents later.
Erik Corry without his cookies (and without a Lynx accidental submit this time!)
A rather good interview...but one thing didn't ring true in my head:
"OK, here's a fairly far-sighted prediction. I think PC games in general are going to move away from being full-screen, and they're going to start being windowed."
Gamers tend to like to immerse themselves in the gaming experience. I somewhat understand his explanation about larger screens becoming the norm, but (for me, at least) one of the most frustrating things is having to play a game in windowed mode. It tends to take away from the atmosphere, making it harder to lose track of yourself and just PTFG (Play The Fucking Game). This is true especially in adventure and role-playing games, where a good game of the genre can make you think you are Tex Murphy, or Sonny Bonds, or the dude from Vault 31...if only for a little while. With your desktop staring back at you around the borders of the game window, this is much harder to do.
You dim the lights in a movie theater when the film starts for a reason.
-
Kinda cool you get 3 networked computers and they each show a different part of the display, haven't seen anything like it in a game since....
Problem is, MSVC doesn't come nearly as close to compiling real C++ code and having it work. MSVC still thinks "new" should return NULL for failed allocations and that variables declared at for (...) scope should remain in scope for the rest of the function (or other enclosing scope). On the other hand, MSVC does support thread-safe exception handling, unlike the current releases of FSF and egcs g++...