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Westwood Linux Petition for C&C II
dr bacardi writes "A link is up on the Linux Games page that is a request for mail-in petitions to get Command & Conquer II: Tiberian Sun ported over to Linux. The reason for mail-ins is to, "ensure that no 'slashdot effects' occur." Thanks to Kevin Scruggs, a Linux geek from Westwood for doing this. " Kevin e-mailed me as well-let's see if we can crash the mail server *grin*
This is important, it is just not a game, but linux Growing even bigger (user base). If the 15-16 year old kids realize they can play all there games on linux, they will swith. When the start college they are going to be extremely comfortable with linux. When they leave college (or before even) they will be great hackers and most likely contribrute code under the GPL for linux.
When I was younger, I heard linux this, linux that. I didn't change, I keep running windows. They said quake is avaible for linux. I switched, have NOT used Win(anything) unless I had to (IE. customer calls and doesn't know how to install modem, etc. etc.)
Even if you look at the kids on IRC, they use linux, but they also still use windows! The most common answer they give is "Yea I dual boot -- Just to play games though" Lets switch them over so they can free up 500-1000 megs on their hard drives.
Well, lessee:
someone mentioned http://www.eletter.com in the
USPS article, which lets you send postal mail from your computer.
Combine that with a bunch of opinionated Linux freaks and a petition that that can be only signed by snailmail...
My hatred for snail mail outweighs said love. :
There is no reason the Internet can't be used in this case. If Id Software can distribute Q3A these guys can take a few thousand emails/web hits.
By all means, go and petition them, but when you write your email, keep some things in mind:
- They are being very kind to this community as a whole by taking requests like this at all.
- They do not _have_ to do anything. They are a company, and they sell games. Make a good arguement by telling them that demand is there and this would be in their interests.
- Nobody likes hate mail. If you get hate mail, when was the last time you paid more attention to a letter because it insulted/threatned you?
- Give the message at least one once-over. If it is full of spelling/grammar errors, the reader's respect for the writer will go down. Messages full of errors make us all look bad.
That's about it.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
W[h]ich raises the question, without directX, what do linux game dev[e]lopers use? I know DX works in WINE, but that can't be used.
Why not? Even if you don't want to require the program be set up, there's the WineLib library, and I believe it's BSD licensed. Apparently Corel is putting resources into getting Wine/WineLib improved from pre-Alpha quality. Still, it's not a perfect emulation yet by any means.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Ugg, I just went through hell and I still cant get q3test to work on my debian computer. I am not computer illiterate. Is it just me or is there like 5,000 things that can or can't come with a "standard" Linux installation. Right now ls -1|wc -l tells me there are 423 files in /usr/lib. What damn mess.
.tar.gz (bzip2 isnt in every distribution yet) and I would imagine that most people don't want to tar xzvf and follow installation instructions in a text file.
People don't port to Linux because Linux is a kernel, there are 20 or 30 different Linuces out there most of which have different version of different librarys/compilers/configuration files/programs...etc.
There isnt even some kind of standard packaging system, other than
I can understand why people are starting to support Red Hat Linux instead of just Linux.
Although they could always include their own librarys for everything with their game and their own installation system. Sound familiar? Win32 maybe?
What is with LSB? How long does it take to say, use rpm, use glibc2.0 use...etc. Don't include the extra 500megs of stuff in the main install sequence.
It seems like someone needs to create a standard dist with only essentials so users and developer's don't have to wade through crap before trying to accomplish something.
Anonymous Coward of course.
I must've been confused when I read hemo's remark about 'crashing the mail server'. Obviously, I see now that that was a joke. Feelin' like an idiot...
To answer your question: what is there to be mad about? Obviously, there is nothing to be mad about, but you might be surprised by some of the stupid things people will write. Many companies such as this will get hate mail/threatning messages. People will write them simply because they can.
Vidi, Vici, Veni