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Loki Games for PPC
Loki Games and Terra Soft Solutions have announced a
partnership where the two companies will work together in order to assure all of Loki's titles run on Linux/PPC as
well as the x86-platform. The article says Loki has 8 games lined up for 1999, and some
will come out before their MacOS counterparts.
It will be interesting to see the performance difference when games that were written for windows are ported to Linux x86, then to Linux PPC. Games have such low level code that it will be a challenge to port.
Finally, some real software for us, the minority of the minority, who managed to put Linux where all too few people knew it could go. Maybe I'll finally be able to spend some time playing a game under Linux that isn't minesweeper! In short, a real victory for the three of us who actually run LinuxPPC and have been holding out to be recognized by companies that we know would have to be out of their minds to support such a ridiculously unused platform. But, hey, I'm not complaining!
p.s. Why does my sound still not work under Linux? Hmm...
Most games have a whole lot of assembly in them to optimize the speed-critical routines. Not as much as they did ten years ago, but hand-coded assembly is still as important part.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I already have a copy of Civilization: Call to Power for LinuxPPC, and it runs great. (You can read a review of it that I wrote at http://linux.macn ews.de/articles/29061999.loki.shtml?lang=english.) Even the sound works, and it was a thrill to see movies in the thing that actually both looked nice and worked. ('Course, I cheated a little and went through and looked at all the movies on the CD. Damn, they're cool.)
The game was a little slowish at times, but on the other hand I have yet to get 100% real genuine accelerated X going (on a beige G3), so it's probably more my fault than anything. :-/
It's especially ironic that Mac users who want to play Civ:CTP have to install Linux to do it. :-)
Can't wait for Myth II...
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
This isn't really true. With newer 3D games, yes, you have a very few routines written in assembly, specifically for vector routines (ie, you want fast matrix inversions or something), but for 2D games and most recent 3D games, almost everything is written in C/C++.
PPC issues are usually pretty typical: insidious endian issues affecting network gameplay, kernel/driver issues for LinuxPPC, etc.
M. Vance
Programmer
Loki Entertainment
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B