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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.
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
"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
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.
If you happen to have a matrox card, you can use matroxfb to wake up a secondary matrox card. I'm doing so right now.. You should use Gerd's fbdev patches as well since the normal mga driver assumes that the matrox card is the primary card.
I needed to remove the vt switching code from the other server as well, but that was pretty straight forward.. and I'm using x2x to move the pointer between the screens.
Hope that made any sense... anyway you could just wait for XFree86 4.0 which is going to have multihead support. Or you could buy a commercial X server with multihead support.
/Andreas Ehliar
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.
I assume you're joking..?
If not, imagine, say, a Flight Simulator designed for joysticks with 4 buttons via DirectInput, then you plugged a joystick in with e.g. 20 buttons (as some of them do), and your FS doesn't let you assign functions above the first 4 buttons, because the developers though "why support a device that doesn't exist?"
And device enumeration... is it _really_ needed? How many people actually have more than one display device?Me. I have two at work, and am planning to get a second monitor at home.
(Add ons like Voodoo not included...) Why wouldn't I want to use the primary device?Well, because of the example you just gave? I've run a couple of DirectX games that didn't use my Voodoo card because the Matrox Mystique was first in the DX list of 3D drivers. So I had to put up with sucky performance and stippling instead of alpha blending. And I didn't even have two monitors.
Or how about that my first monitor is an LCD panel, and the persistence makes it not great for playing games, so I'd rather use my CRT, which is the second monitor - except I can't, because you don't see the point as hardly anyone has a second monitor, and 640k should be enough for anyone...(sarcasm off)
Games ought to support display (and input device/sound device) enumeration if possible. Sometimes time pressures will force such support out, but if you have a choice, do support it.
Tim
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.
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