When the DOJ breaks up Microsoft in the near future, how else are the OS programmers supposed to be sending the details of the new secret API to the application programmers (who will be working for another company) so that they can innovate?
If the OTP is apparently unbreakable, then they can use the MSDN library CD shipping with every copy of Visual Studio to act as a cipher as everyone will have a copy!
It's a nice thought, but unfortunately the commercial games world do not share the Free Software / Open Source Philosophy that the rest of us do.
Consoles development kits are not designed for cross portability. If anything the licences that are used under ensure that people who have them are not able to disclose the details of the machine to others. Games written for the console use hardware optimised APIs and you will never see a cross platform development system with console support - at least not without serious legal challenges from various console companies.
In the land of console development, total control and NDAs keep things the way they want it.
Sony, Nintendo et al, are not interested in working with the rest of us. If that was the case, they would release a consumer level development system. The fact that console dev kits are only available to professional developers hits this home. They want to rule the world of home computing. Hence the reason that they are now building modems and other periphials into consoles. Even MS can see this, which is why the X-Box is something that they are now working on.
As for other platform other than Linux - well yes you can develop games for other Un*xes as well as compatible platforms. It is still a major effort getting stuff from Linux to Windows and vice versa, purely due to the difference in APIs.
Ports of console games to PCs is usually done by writing a high-level emulator (using the techniques used in UltraHLE) to run the console game on Windows. Doing this make more sense commercially than writing a cross-platform library.
Drivers are also a problem for PCs. People in the industry have problems with getting their source working on different hardware even in windows. A lot of bugs occuring in programs turn out to be entirely due to problems with drivers, so programmers prefer to work on machines with a fixed spec. Linux with its current driver system and piecemeal API support is still from being good enough to develop on for 'professional' games developers. I want to see Linux games and develop for Linux, but a lot of companies are not going to even consider it yet on that basis. These people do not want to 'waste' money working on a project, and writing huge chunks of missing features that they would like! DirectX may be development system from hell, but people know where they are with it.
Contrary to popular belief, consoles do not need a OS. The tend to address the hardware directly, and tend to have only one thing running at the same time. The Dreamcast loses 20-30% performance under Windows compared to the native library support, so a lot of games don't use it. So Linux on a console is unnecessary.
Linux is an ideal choice as a console development environment, and I think that the latest console generation are looking at Linux for this as it makes good business sense. Linux may be a good replacement on the X-Box however, but since that system is going to Windows based, I don't think that it will have the performance of the next generation of consoles. I don't see it making any impression on Sony or Nintendo. They have the whole market sown up.
It sounds bad, but Linux is locked out of the major money-making areas of the games market. We may think that it has potential (and we can write good games with it), but the powers that be do not share our community spirit and are not interested in helping us.
I think that supporting Linux is a niche market and will remain so IMO.
The current total games market has around 10%-30% for the Win32 platform and everything else on console. Add to that that approximately 1 in every 10 PC games actually make a profit on their development costs and you can see why small games software houses are not able to survive without a publisher. It is even too big a risk for banks to give you funding - what bank would chance loaning money to something so volatile?
Console games are extremely profitable. By the whole, you can be sure of making development costs on every release, and given a standard development team of 20 spending a budget of a minimum of a million UK pounds, that is rather a lot of money to be playing the PC market with!
Coming back to the original point, PC games manufacturers may not see Linux as being worth the extra effort to develop for, given the share of the market. The fact that there are not more companies rapidly taking up Linux development (unlike new console hardware) would suggest this.
I see Loki as being around for a while, and porting existing games. I can see there also being more original releases by dedicated teams which could be marketed by Loki (or other publishers) on their behalf. This is what I am hoping to do with Cosmic Sheep. This is where the commercial Linux market is going to be (I think). The industry likes consoles for the predictable hardware spec and the potential locked-in games player market they can milk for all its worth.
Perhaps there ought to be a GNUConsole? - Open hardware specs, Linux based development system, CD-ROM based media distribution. That way ordinary people have a chance for developing console games at low cost. The problem with this is that the hardware development costs would be prohibitive..despite the amount of expertise and effort that the community has..
Being a Linux Games Programmer myself, I keep an eye on what else is happening in the gaming world.
The games industry is slowly moving off PCs and onto consoles, purely for their profitability. The new Playststation is being hailed as the latest nemesis of PC gaming. Do you think that consoles are going to make Linux gaming redundant, or too unprofitable to be sustained? Given that consoles are not easily user-programmable, do you think that future talent for games programming is going to be harder to find, as these proprietary boxes do not encourage people to get involved in writing their own games as the 8/16 bit computers used to?
Sure - it looks nice and it has some nice hardware. It this really the future of games programming for the code-orientated hobbyist? I think not.
To get access to a SDK for a console you need to sign NDAs. To publish your games you need to put your code through various conditions and a closed distribution process. Dev kits are only usually given to bone-fide developers and they cost a small fortune.
In addition to this, the manufacturers are keen to keep developer knowledge a secret. Look at what happens with emulators and attempts to reverse engineer the hardware. Legal hassles for all. Nintendo maintain that emulators and reverse engineering is illegal and still keep leaping on anyone who produces anything they disagree with.
Games programming is dying amongst amateurs. Most computers do not come with a compiler these days to encourage people to start (GNU tools excepted). Computers of the past used to have a built in language to get people started. Asm language could be learnt on these machines.
People writing games today have built experience programming 8/16 bit computers and PCs. If consoles are the only way to play games, can the next generation be skilled and motivated in the same way?
Consoles do not encourage tweaking being a black box, and a lot of younger games no have no impetus to write their own games. There is not even a keyboard or storage on these machines to learn how to program on these even if you could..
Having a console only future would be a nightmare. Talented people would not develop skills to write games, and the large companies will employ the people they want to write the game that they want. No innovation, No hacker spirit.
Console games now dominate the market where PC games are down to a third or less of market share. Profits on console games are much higher and therefore much more desirable..
With Sony et al wanting gaming to be a closed console affair, and MS trying to turn the home PC into a set top box/ X-box games console - I am really worried that a lot of potential talented games programmers will not have the options of learning to program and developing skills to help move the existing games industry out of a rut..
Thank goodness for Linux. A proper low-cost environment for learning to program on. All we need now are complete device drivers to cover new hardware and the Linux games industry can really take off:-)
'Mmm. Goody goody goody. $400 dollars better off..and what shall I spend it on?
[Notices shelves full of bright boxes]
Microsoft software! Visual Basic Std.Ed., and other 'computer-enhancing' packages, and even a copy of BOB left all alone in the bargain bin here. Aww. Cashier? How much is all that going to cost me?'
A bit like being in a casino. Make a small win, and you are encourage to spend it the same place. If MS has a stockpile of discounted software two feet from the till, then they could be sure of some people paying it straight back, and perhaps with some of their money as well!
Being an happily ex-salesperson (I couldn't stand the morally bankrupt ways I was encouraged to sell things), you would be surprised how effectively that works...
This is a clear indication of where we go next. We have a installed server base, and the applications are where we need to concentrate. I think that a browser that is extensible with the use of source level plugins makes it future-proof and easily customisable. Why stop here? An office suite that has the ability to be tailored to a user's requirements. MS Office is not my choice of software for scientists (being what I am) and having a decent framework for adding new graph types, analysis tools and other really useful features is what we need. Forget expanding useless features - paperclips - Wizards - I need something can can configured to do the job for me. Not for anyone else. If I want MP3 support in a browser, then add a module and run make. It's there. Software is different things to different people, but having something can be made to suit the person is going to win. Who cares if MS bring out 'standard' after 'standard'? We can support them all - and remove them again once they fail to corner the market. Proprietary software is going to hate this, because they are not going to sell a new version every year or so - but for Free Software/Open Source it makes sense. The framework is the most important part. Get that right, and you can hang virtually anything off it. All we need are a few good hackers and the desktop market is then ours too...
Slashdot Mirror
If the OTP is apparently unbreakable, then they can use the MSDN library CD shipping with every copy of Visual Studio to act as a cipher as everyone will have a copy!
Consoles development kits are not designed for cross portability. If anything the licences that are used under ensure that people who have them are not able to disclose the details of the machine to others. Games written for the console use hardware optimised APIs and you will never see a cross platform development system with console support - at least not without serious legal challenges from various console companies.
In the land of console development, total control and NDAs keep things the way they want it.
Sony, Nintendo et al, are not interested in working with the rest of us. If that was the case, they would release a consumer level development system. The fact that console dev kits are only available to professional developers hits this home. They want to rule the world of home computing. Hence the reason that they are now building modems and other periphials into consoles. Even MS can see this, which is why the X-Box is something that they are now working on.
As for other platform other than Linux - well yes you can develop games for other Un*xes as well as compatible platforms. It is still a major effort getting stuff from Linux to Windows and vice versa, purely due to the difference in APIs.
Ports of console games to PCs is usually done by writing a high-level emulator (using the techniques used in UltraHLE) to run the console game on Windows. Doing this make more sense commercially than writing a cross-platform library.
Drivers are also a problem for PCs. People in the industry have problems with getting their source working on different hardware even in windows. A lot of bugs occuring in programs turn out to be entirely due to problems with drivers, so programmers prefer to work on machines with a fixed spec. Linux with its current driver system and piecemeal API support is still from being good enough to develop on for 'professional' games developers. I want to see Linux games and develop for Linux, but a lot of companies are not going to even consider it yet on that basis. These people do not want to 'waste' money working on a project, and writing huge chunks of missing features that they would like! DirectX may be development system from hell, but people know where they are with it.
Contrary to popular belief, consoles do not need a OS. The tend to address the hardware directly, and tend to have only one thing running at the same time. The Dreamcast loses 20-30% performance under Windows compared to the native library support, so a lot of games don't use it. So Linux on a console is unnecessary.
Linux is an ideal choice as a console development environment, and I think that the latest console generation are looking at Linux for this as it makes good business sense. Linux may be a good replacement on the X-Box however, but since that system is going to Windows based, I don't think that it will have the performance of the next generation of consoles. I don't see it making any impression on Sony or Nintendo. They have the whole market sown up.
It sounds bad, but Linux is locked out of the major money-making areas of the games market. We may think that it has potential (and we can write good games with it), but the powers that be do not share our community spirit and are not interested in helping us.
--
Arron Shutt
The current total games market has around 10%-30% for the Win32 platform and everything else on console. Add to that that approximately 1 in every 10 PC games actually make a profit on their development costs and you can see why small games software houses are not able to survive without a publisher. It is even too big a risk for banks to give you funding - what bank would chance loaning money to something so volatile?
Console games are extremely profitable. By the whole, you can be sure of making development costs on every release, and given a standard development team of 20 spending a budget of a minimum of a million UK pounds, that is rather a lot of money to be playing the PC market with!
Coming back to the original point, PC games manufacturers may not see Linux as being worth the extra effort to develop for, given the share of the market. The fact that there are not more companies rapidly taking up Linux development (unlike new console hardware) would suggest this.
I see Loki as being around for a while, and porting existing games. I can see there also being more original releases by dedicated teams which could be marketed by Loki (or other publishers) on their behalf. This is what I am hoping to do with Cosmic Sheep. This is where the commercial Linux market is going to be (I think). The industry likes consoles for the predictable hardware spec and the potential locked-in games player market they can milk for all its worth.
Perhaps there ought to be a GNUConsole? - Open hardware specs, Linux based development system, CD-ROM based media distribution. That way ordinary people have a chance for developing console games at low cost. The problem with this is that the hardware development costs would be prohibitive..despite the amount of expertise and effort that the community has..
--
Arron Shutt
The games industry is slowly moving off PCs and onto consoles, purely for their profitability. The new Playststation is being hailed as the latest nemesis of PC gaming. Do you think that consoles are going to make Linux gaming redundant, or too unprofitable to be sustained? Given that consoles are not easily user-programmable, do you think that future talent for games programming is going to be harder to find, as these proprietary boxes do not encourage people to get involved in writing their own games as the 8/16 bit computers used to?
-- Arron Shutt
To get access to a SDK for a console you need to sign NDAs. To publish your games you need to put your code through various conditions and a closed distribution process. Dev kits are only usually given to bone-fide developers and they cost a small fortune.
In addition to this, the manufacturers are keen to keep developer knowledge a secret. Look at what happens with emulators and attempts to reverse engineer the hardware. Legal hassles for all. Nintendo maintain that emulators and reverse engineering is illegal and still keep leaping on anyone who produces anything they disagree with.
Games programming is dying amongst amateurs. Most computers do not come with a compiler these days to encourage people to start (GNU tools excepted). Computers of the past used to have a built in language to get people started. Asm language could be learnt on these machines.
People writing games today have built experience programming 8/16 bit computers and PCs. If consoles are the only way to play games, can the next generation be skilled and motivated in the same way?
Consoles do not encourage tweaking being a black box, and a lot of younger games no have no impetus to write their own games. There is not even a keyboard or storage on these machines to learn how to program on these even if you could..
Having a console only future would be a nightmare. Talented people would not develop skills to write games, and the large companies will employ the people they want to write the game that they want. No innovation, No hacker spirit.
Console games now dominate the market where PC games are down to a third or less of market share. Profits on console games are much higher and therefore much more desirable..
With Sony et al wanting gaming to be a closed console affair, and MS trying to turn the home PC into a set top box/ X-box games console - I am really worried that a lot of potential talented games programmers will not have the options of learning to program and developing skills to help move the existing games industry out of a rut..
Thank goodness for Linux. A proper low-cost environment for learning to program on. All we need now are complete device drivers to cover new hardware and the Linux games industry can really take off :-)
[Notices shelves full of bright boxes]
Microsoft software! Visual Basic Std.Ed., and other 'computer-enhancing' packages, and even a copy of BOB left all alone in the bargain bin here. Aww. Cashier? How much is all that going to cost me?'
A bit like being in a casino. Make a small win, and you are encourage to spend it the same place. If MS has a stockpile of discounted software two feet from the till, then they could be sure of some people paying it straight back, and perhaps with some of their money as well!
Being an happily ex-salesperson (I couldn't stand the morally bankrupt ways I was encouraged to sell things), you would be surprised how effectively that works...
This is a clear indication of where we go next. We have a installed server base, and the applications are where we need to concentrate. I think that a browser that is extensible with the use of source level plugins makes it future-proof and easily customisable. Why stop here? An office suite that has the ability to be tailored to a user's requirements. MS Office is not my choice of software for scientists (being what I am) and having a decent framework for adding new graph types, analysis tools and other really useful features is what we need. Forget expanding useless features - paperclips - Wizards - I need something can can configured to do the job for me. Not for anyone else. If I want MP3 support in a browser, then add a module and run make. It's there. Software is different things to different people, but having something can be made to suit the person is going to win. Who cares if MS bring out 'standard' after 'standard'? We can support them all - and remove them again once they fail to corner the market. Proprietary software is going to hate this, because they are not going to sell a new version every year or so - but for Free Software/Open Source it makes sense. The framework is the most important part. Get that right, and you can hang virtually anything off it. All we need are a few good hackers and the desktop market is then ours too...