Utterly fails to grasp the scale of the problem
on
The State of Linux Gaming
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Okay, some background; up until November last year, I worked in the games industry, coding for Windows and Xbox. I'm now working as a (non-games) developer under Linux. This article utterly fails to get a handle on the size of the gulf between the Windows games platform and the Linux one.
Firstly, and this is a cliche, but hardware support under Linux is poor. Yes, I know you can get drivers for NVidia (and more recently ATI) video cards, but in terms of technological development, these drivers are way, way behind the Windows equivalents. Support for sound under Linux is a complete joke - it's still at the level of playing back PCM data on one or more channels. Fuck, even the GBA can do that; consumer soundcards these days are massive DSP monsters; most of them support at least EAX 2.0, which provides a massive range of reverb, occlusion/diffusion and other environmental effects. EAX 4.0 is incredibly powerful and complex - it allows detailed environmental modelling with up to four simultaneous environments and a complex mixer/router model to allow you to, say, stand in a metal room and listen to an explosion coming from a padded room joined to your room by a stone tunnel. All hardware accelerated.
Secondly, software support is poor. SDL is getting better, but frankly, DirectX is a bloody marvel. It's a standardised, extensible interface that presents a consistent API to an enourmous range of hardware; it's still flexible enough to allow you to optimise for certain cards whilst remaining consistent enought that all hardware will function to some extent.
Thirdly, there's no incentive for publishers to publish games on Linux; Linux represents a tiny fraction of the desktop market, and most Linux users run Windows or own games consoles anyway. They've got nothing to gain from publishing Linux conversions, and with the costs of games development spiralling to Hollywood-esque levels, the extra cost of developing for a minority platform like Linux just doesn't make sense.
Fourthly, PC gaming is dying on its arse anyway: consoles are where the real money is at. Publishers are now considering Windows to be a risky platform to publish on, because the market is hyper-saturated, and unless you get a guaranteed number one, you might as well just throw your money down a big hole and bury it. If *Windows* is a risky platform, then Linux doesn't even get a look in.
If I'd have bounced the idea of doing a Linux port of our game off our publishers/producers/management, they'd have just laughed at me. Linux isn't a serious platform for games, and I can't see that changing in the short-medium term. Sorry.
Thinking back to when I started programming, all I ever wanted to do was to write programs that drew cool stuff. I ended up learning trig aged 9 in order to draw a circle because the Acorn Electron didn't have a circle primitive on it.
Many varieties of BASIC come with decent enough graphical primitives with them, and whilst BASIC teaches a few bad habits, it shields you from needing to worry about real world issues (which, face it, you don't want to worry about age 11).
Another great thing is that BASIC is usually available as an interpreted language. I certainly couldn't hack the idea of compiled languages when I was 11 - I liked to code, type RUN and see results. It's only now I've grown up that I see the value of things like compilers, IDEs, OO design and stuff like that; kids don't need to worry about that kinda thing.
Another thing - why not consider an older machine? C64s, Speccys, BBC Micros and all that lot all had perfectly adequate BASIC interpreters built into them, with pretty good graphics libraries. For rapid coding and bomb-proof stability they're still excellent machines (and you can pick 'em up for next to nothing these days) - okay, you'll never run Windows on 'em, but why do you need to run Windows (or Linux or *nix) in order to learn to program?
There's plenty of projects available using the Amulet for students at Manchester University. One guy I know was building a robot control board using one of these (it had a particular lysick offboard communications system - it was self-programming using a Xilinx array, and used the bootstrap code to soft-load it).
One of next years projects is to port Linux to Amulet. Should be interesting, as I don't know as there's an MMU yet.
Anyway, I have seen one of them running and it's quite impressive. It has a genuinely low power consumption (almost literally nothing when not doing anything), and because of the wonderful CMOS speedup effect, you can increase the speed of the thing by wacking up the core voltage. Very cool.
The implementation spec is fairly tightly controlled, though, so don't expect to get hold of it just yet.
Aw, damn. The first edition was so great I've already bought that. The second edition addresses most of my problems with the first, so it looks like I'm gonna have to buy it too...
Incidentally, Amazon UK have it for sale at ukp21.83 plus p&p here, which seems like quite a nice price to me. Their review is similarly positive.
I dunno about anyone else, but I simply don't trust my family/friends to know enough about the very specific areas of geekdom that I inhabit to trust them to buy me that kind of thing.
Book tokens - great idea.
I'd personally like a whole bunch of kitchen gadgets (things that have a very small, very specific singular use - eg, something that extracts the seeds from a particularly obscure south african variety of lemon or something), but then I'm a cookery geek as well.
But this year, I'm not getting any presents, anyway. I'm going away with my family to Egypt, and I'm looking forward to that (spending time with my family particularly) more than any present, because due to various circumstances this year I've barely seen my family for more than a week since Easter, and even then under fairly strained emotional circumstances.
Moral of this posting: don't just think of the material. Sometimes other people can be as good any present...
I believe that officially (but please note my sig:) the definitions (in England at any rate) are:
nerd - someone who knows a large amount about a very specialised, probably high tech, subject, who enjoys working with and talking about said subject.
geek - as with nerd, but also with associated social problems (bad hair/breath/clothing, no friends, inability to communicate etc etc)
However, in common with all good things, the media have taken the two definitions and swapped them over, so now if you're a nerd, you have no social life.
I think it's less common (but a growing trend) in England to proclaim and be proud of your geekdom (using the media definition of the word:) - I certainly am, and I know other people who are (gotta get me one of them geekpride t's from copyleft:)
(In Microserfs, Geek is defined as a kind of cross between both of above, but they define nerd as a wannabe-geek - l33t 5cr1pt | Incidentally, I've noticed that the incidence of geekdom amongst Christian scientists (as in, scientists who are Christians) is much higher than in the general populous. Apropos of nothing, but has anyone else noticed this?
I wouldn't trust anything on the RedsHat default install of it;-) I've got a vanilla Debian system, but compile everything up from sources, much safer that way...
> I just hope we don't see religious or other > communities saying this is an answer to their > prayers. And once again slashdot demonstrates its incredible tolerance of religious communities - look, right, it's like any situation with a vocal minority. Just because there's a few nutters out there it doesn't mean that they're representative of the group as a whole. I make no attempt to hide the fact I'm a Christian. I think South Park is utterly hilarious, although on occasion yes, I do find it a *little* close to the mark. However, you are completely right - no loss of life is cause for celebration, and I am saddened to hear this news. I am also saddened, however, that people will pre-emptively attack certain groups of people before anyone has even said anything...
Werrllll... Given that I've had to install machines from Dell that didn't work straight out the box, it wouldn't surprise me if they had virii on them too.
The deal was this: we took shipment of a whole bunch of Dell PCs with their supposedly useful auto-install Win95 thingy on, so you could turn them on, agree to the license and it would install Win95 from a CD image on the hard disc. Only, because of the massive amounts of custom hardware on the mobo, it didn't work, and in quite a major way. The machines firstly died during initial installation, requiring a reboot. They then just about made it to the Win95 desktop, but didn't autodetect any hardware, so you had to restart the machines again, which crashed them. Rebooting into safe mode, shutting down, and restarting finally persuaded them to autodetect the onboard hardware, and then a final reboot bought them up in a 'useable' state.
I repeat, these machines were *straight* out of the box, with no weird setups or anything. My feeling is that if Dell quality control is lax enough to let this kind of thing slip through, I'm not at all surprised a virus made it onto their machines...
I've always been a staunch Gnome supporter - KDE was always a bit slow, flaky, bloated and win95-like for my tastes...
However, I have to conceded that 2.0 is shaping up to look very nice indeed. Konq is something that, as a web designer, particuarly catches my attention. If they get it doing CSS and HTML4 properly then they'll be my friend for life:)
Also, I reckon I'd be far happier letting a new user out on KDE2.0 than gnome in its current state... Though whether KDE lives up to expectations remains to be seen... I for one am looking forward to it:)
This is all very nice and stuff, but I've never been fantastically impressed by 3Dfx cards... Okay, they're fast at blitting stuff to the screen/framebuffer. But that's about it; the 16-bit colour depth restriction is cripplingly bad (yes, it's perfectly possibly to tell the difference between 16 and 24/32 bit colour depths with the human eye; don't anyone tell me it isn't - check out freespace 2 running on a Voodoo 2 if you don't believe me), and the fact that now the Voodoo 4 and 5 have been announced with no kind of geometry acceleration suggests that 3Dfx are content to rest on their laurels and just bang up RAMDAC clock speeds in the hope processors can catch up...
I'm sorry if I seem ungrateful and all that, but the tying of the Linux 3D market to 3Dfx cards (as it effectively is at the moment) is a bad thing, we're suffering from relatively low quality graphics compared to the 'doze world...
However, if this means that it's now going to be easier to write glide wrappers for other cards which do support some kind of extra acceleration, then this makes me happy...
Any news on the state of play with Linux and the GeForce yet?
Personally, I can't wait for PHP4 - mainly for the neat session management module. Okay, I know it's technically been possible to do this for ages using cookies and a whole bunch of custom written stuff, but to have a nice module that actually gives you some kind of illusion of state within the stateless environment of the web with minimum effort is a wonderful idea...
I couldn't help but feel that the interview was deeply disappointing. Okay, I watched it when I was feeling tired and thoroughly ill, but I felt that Paxman wasn't anywhere near his usual standard and it just sounded like Billy had a set script which he'd prewritten and twisted each quesiton asked around to that, rather than answering honestly and openly.
Agreed. Contrary to what you might believe, not all of us Christians go around screaming heresy at anything and everything. Most of us have a sense of humour. Some of us even drink beer I presume everyone here has also seen www.landoverbaptist.org? One of the funniest websites I've seen in a long while, and another one which skirts the border of are they/aren't they seriousness.
Have you ever done development in Windows as opposed to Linux/Unix? I've never been too keen on Borlands tools, personally (preferring MSVS6 - sorry and all that:-/ ) but even using VC++ or whatever, it's still horrible; it creates half of the code for you in its own bizarre style. The documentation isn't too hot and there seems to be little reference material about. Linux/Unix development is much cleaner, and you can generally say you understand pretty much all of what is going on.
This would probably explain why people want to develop under linux rather than windows. The Windows desktop gets horribly crowded with millions of toolbars, menus, dialogs etc when developing. Under Linux, I have three windows - Emacs, shell and the application I'm running. That's it. Much cleaner, much nicer.
I'm currently working on some development in IRIX using Motif/Xt, which is so much easier (and infinitely faster) than under Windows. Personally, I find a lot of IDEs counterproductive anyway, and prefer to write and manage my own makefiles etc.
On the subject of widget sets, I've only ever used GTK+, not looked at Qt. AFAICT, however it looks fairly 6 and two 3s between them; what would be cool is an interface layer for Qt->GTK+ or vice versa, but as I don't know much about the architecture of Qt, I can't comment on whether this is possible.
How happy was I when I found out that the view was better up here in Manchester than down there in Cornwall? Heh. Gutted, guys. Shame we didn't get a totality, but 90% was pretty good...
Hey, another non-Merkin slashdotter. And Liverpool's not that far from me in Manchester. Maybe we should have a NW England/. meetup, or summat? What's that about the party should liven up after the 3rd Guinness, anyway? What kind of lightweights are these Americans? Heh, 3 pints is just a quiet social night down the pub, guys: the party really gets going after the 3rd double whiskey, which comes after the four pints of [insert decent real ale here]. And a curry or a kebab or something, too...:)
I imagine that yes, it would be a help to you to get TrueType fonts up and running, if you want to use them:) Something like xfstt or xfsft will allow X to use TrueTypes as well as its own fonts. (I prefer xfstt because you don't have to recompile to font server...)
I bought this book about a year ago, and it was one of the best purchases I made. It's a great step-up to Linux type book - I could already program in C, and had a working knowledge of shell and stuff, but had never done any real *ix programming before; this book was a real boon in learning how to do it.
Admittedly a few of the examples are a bit contrived, and some of the networking section isn't wonderfully explained, but as a quick stepup for people coming from other platforms to Unix, its great...
I'm a supporter of the OpenSource movement. I think it's a great idea; whilst I don't currently have the necessary skill to contribute to the development of a large project personally, I appreciate the outcome of them as an end user.
However, I also have no objection to paying money for a game. As the author of the article quite rightly points out, games to not fit the evolving software model, and as such are not really suitable for Open Source development.
However, I think that we can learn a lot from the explosion of popularity in things like TCs and so forth - I am far, far happier to buy a game if it comes with an editor of some sort that will allow me to extend the game as I see fit, and exchange my extensions/modifications with other people. In this way, the game becomes an evolving entity (although slightly more restricted than a 'true' software entity) - and I think this is where we should be looking...
This is great news - whilst I could get my onboard SB16 compatible to work with Linux, since I upgraded to my SB Live (for music stuff in 'doze) my Linux world has been sadly silent... C'mon guys, hire someone and get that driver out soon! I want four point surround sound in Linux too!
Of course, this will only be any use if we get some decent audio software written as well - I don't just mean silly sample twiddlers or 'Kubase' (bletch bletch bletch). Something along the lines of CoolEdit Pro would be ideal (64 track DTD recording with real time effects) - and hey, if it was free, even better.
Then I'd be one step closer to switching to Linux completely (the other step being making all my Win95 games run in Wine)
A certain Redmond based company almost certainly used to bloat their code, due to an alliance with a certain chip manufacturer. However, now both companies have other alliances, I can't see what the benefit is to MS now. Due to the way MS dev tools work, though, they tend to generate very bloated code (don't know much about it, but I guess there's a/lot/ of static linking going on)
Still, it does mean that us Linux users either get fabulously cheap, or superbly fast, spacious machines, whilst the rest of the world have to settle for bloated grinding 'doze.
Perhaps I should try it without eFX this time. It didn't help that the theme I was using didn't seem to dock windows properly and whenever I shrank them down I lost them completely! I might give it another chance, but to be honest I don't give a toss what Win95 looks like, it's only there so I can play games and run Cubase.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, some background; up until November last year, I worked in the games industry, coding for Windows and Xbox. I'm now working as a (non-games) developer under Linux. This article utterly fails to get a handle on the size of the gulf between the Windows games platform and the Linux one.
Firstly, and this is a cliche, but hardware support under Linux is poor. Yes, I know you can get drivers for NVidia (and more recently ATI) video cards, but in terms of technological development, these drivers are way, way behind the Windows equivalents. Support for sound under Linux is a complete joke - it's still at the level of playing back PCM data on one or more channels. Fuck, even the GBA can do that; consumer soundcards these days are massive DSP monsters; most of them support at least EAX 2.0, which provides a massive range of reverb, occlusion/diffusion and other environmental effects. EAX 4.0 is incredibly powerful and complex - it allows detailed environmental modelling with up to four simultaneous environments and a complex mixer/router model to allow you to, say, stand in a metal room and listen to an explosion coming from a padded room joined to your room by a stone tunnel. All hardware accelerated.
Secondly, software support is poor. SDL is getting better, but frankly, DirectX is a bloody marvel. It's a standardised, extensible interface that presents a consistent API to an enourmous range of hardware; it's still flexible enough to allow you to optimise for certain cards whilst remaining consistent enought that all hardware will function to some extent.
Thirdly, there's no incentive for publishers to publish games on Linux; Linux represents a tiny fraction of the desktop market, and most Linux users run Windows or own games consoles anyway. They've got nothing to gain from publishing Linux conversions, and with the costs of games development spiralling to Hollywood-esque levels, the extra cost of developing for a minority platform like Linux just doesn't make sense.
Fourthly, PC gaming is dying on its arse anyway: consoles are where the real money is at. Publishers are now considering Windows to be a risky platform to publish on, because the market is hyper-saturated, and unless you get a guaranteed number one, you might as well just throw your money down a big hole and bury it. If *Windows* is a risky platform, then Linux doesn't even get a look in.
If I'd have bounced the idea of doing a Linux port of our game off our publishers/producers/management, they'd have just laughed at me. Linux isn't a serious platform for games, and I can't see that changing in the short-medium term. Sorry.
Many varieties of BASIC come with decent enough graphical primitives with them, and whilst BASIC teaches a few bad habits, it shields you from needing to worry about real world issues (which, face it, you don't want to worry about age 11).
Another great thing is that BASIC is usually available as an interpreted language. I certainly couldn't hack the idea of compiled languages when I was 11 - I liked to code, type RUN and see results. It's only now I've grown up that I see the value of things like compilers, IDEs, OO design and stuff like that; kids don't need to worry about that kinda thing.
Another thing - why not consider an older machine? C64s, Speccys, BBC Micros and all that lot all had perfectly adequate BASIC interpreters built into them, with pretty good graphics libraries. For rapid coding and bomb-proof stability they're still excellent machines (and you can pick 'em up for next to nothing these days) - okay, you'll never run Windows on 'em, but why do you need to run Windows (or Linux or *nix) in order to learn to program?
There's plenty of projects available using the Amulet for students at Manchester University. One guy I know was building a robot control board using one of these (it had a particular lysick offboard communications system - it was self-programming using a Xilinx array, and used the bootstrap code to soft-load it).
One of next years projects is to port Linux to Amulet. Should be interesting, as I don't know as there's an MMU yet.
Anyway, I have seen one of them running and it's quite impressive. It has a genuinely low power consumption (almost literally nothing when not doing anything), and because of the wonderful CMOS speedup effect, you can increase the speed of the thing by wacking up the core voltage. Very cool.
The implementation spec is fairly tightly controlled, though, so don't expect to get hold of it just yet.
Anyway. Come to Manchester! It's got pubs!
Are technically banned and Manchester University, England. Which is bizarre, because the University itself hosts a talker-conferencing thingy.
Incidentally, Amazon UK have it for sale at ukp21.83 plus p&p here, which seems like quite a nice price to me. Their review is similarly positive.
Book tokens - great idea.
I'd personally like a whole bunch of kitchen gadgets (things that have a very small, very specific singular use - eg, something that extracts the seeds from a particularly obscure south african variety of lemon or something), but then I'm a cookery geek as well.
But this year, I'm not getting any presents, anyway. I'm going away with my family to Egypt, and I'm looking forward to that (spending time with my family particularly) more than any present, because due to various circumstances this year I've barely seen my family for more than a week since Easter, and even then under fairly strained emotional circumstances.
Moral of this posting: don't just think of the material. Sometimes other people can be as good any present...
However, in common with all good things, the media have taken the two definitions and swapped them over, so now if you're a nerd, you have no social life.
I think it's less common (but a growing trend) in England to proclaim and be proud of your geekdom (using the media definition of the word :) - I certainly am, and I know other people who are (gotta get me one of them geekpride t's from copyleft :)
(In Microserfs, Geek is defined as a kind of cross between both of above, but they define nerd as a wannabe-geek - l33t 5cr1pt | Incidentally, I've noticed that the incidence of geekdom amongst Christian scientists (as in, scientists who are Christians) is much higher than in the general populous. Apropos of nothing, but has anyone else noticed this?
I wouldn't trust anything on the RedsHat default install of it ;-) I've got a vanilla Debian system, but compile everything up from sources, much safer that way...
> I just hope we don't see religious or other > communities saying this is an answer to their > prayers. And once again slashdot demonstrates its incredible tolerance of religious communities - look, right, it's like any situation with a vocal minority. Just because there's a few nutters out there it doesn't mean that they're representative of the group as a whole. I make no attempt to hide the fact I'm a Christian. I think South Park is utterly hilarious, although on occasion yes, I do find it a *little* close to the mark. However, you are completely right - no loss of life is cause for celebration, and I am saddened to hear this news. I am also saddened, however, that people will pre-emptively attack certain groups of people before anyone has even said anything...
The deal was this: we took shipment of a whole bunch of Dell PCs with their supposedly useful auto-install Win95 thingy on, so you could turn them on, agree to the license and it would install Win95 from a CD image on the hard disc. Only, because of the massive amounts of custom hardware on the mobo, it didn't work, and in quite a major way. The machines firstly died during initial installation, requiring a reboot. They then just about made it to the Win95 desktop, but didn't autodetect any hardware, so you had to restart the machines again, which crashed them. Rebooting into safe mode, shutting down, and restarting finally persuaded them to autodetect the onboard hardware, and then a final reboot bought them up in a 'useable' state.
I repeat, these machines were *straight* out of the box, with no weird setups or anything. My feeling is that if Dell quality control is lax enough to let this kind of thing slip through, I'm not at all surprised a virus made it onto their machines...
However, I have to conceded that 2.0 is shaping up to look very nice indeed. Konq is something that, as a web designer, particuarly catches my attention. If they get it doing CSS and HTML4 properly then they'll be my friend for life :)
Also, I reckon I'd be far happier letting a new user out on KDE2.0 than gnome in its current state... Though whether KDE lives up to expectations remains to be seen... I for one am looking forward to it :)
I'm sorry if I seem ungrateful and all that, but the tying of the Linux 3D market to 3Dfx cards (as it effectively is at the moment) is a bad thing, we're suffering from relatively low quality graphics compared to the 'doze world...
However, if this means that it's now going to be easier to write glide wrappers for other cards which do support some kind of extra acceleration, then this makes me happy...
Any news on the state of play with Linux and the GeForce yet?
And it wasn't really long enough...
This would probably explain why people want to develop under linux rather than windows. The Windows desktop gets horribly crowded with millions of toolbars, menus, dialogs etc when developing. Under Linux, I have three windows - Emacs, shell and the application I'm running. That's it. Much cleaner, much nicer.
I'm currently working on some development in IRIX using Motif/Xt, which is so much easier (and infinitely faster) than under Windows. Personally, I find a lot of IDEs counterproductive anyway, and prefer to write and manage my own makefiles etc.
On the subject of widget sets, I've only ever used GTK+, not looked at Qt. AFAICT, however it looks fairly 6 and two 3s between them; what would be cool is an interface layer for Qt->GTK+ or vice versa, but as I don't know much about the architecture of Qt, I can't comment on whether this is possible.
I've rambled, sorry...
Chris
Hey, another non-Merkin slashdotter. And Liverpool's not that far from me in Manchester. Maybe we should have a NW England /. meetup, or summat? What's that about the party should liven up after the 3rd Guinness, anyway? What kind of lightweights are these Americans? Heh, 3 pints is just a quiet social night down the pub, guys: the party really gets going after the 3rd double whiskey, which comes after the four pints of [insert decent real ale here]. And a curry or a kebab or something, too... :)
I imagine that yes, it would be a help to you to get TrueType fonts up and running, if you want to use them :) Something like xfstt or xfsft will allow X to use TrueTypes as well as its own fonts. (I prefer xfstt because you don't have to recompile to font server...)
chris
Admittedly a few of the examples are a bit contrived, and some of the networking section isn't wonderfully explained, but as a quick stepup for people coming from other platforms to Unix, its great...
However, I also have no objection to paying money for a game. As the author of the article quite rightly points out, games to not fit the evolving software model, and as such are not really suitable for Open Source development.
However, I think that we can learn a lot from the explosion of popularity in things like TCs and so forth - I am far, far happier to buy a game if it comes with an editor of some sort that will allow me to extend the game as I see fit, and exchange my extensions/modifications with other people. In this way, the game becomes an evolving entity (although slightly more restricted than a 'true' software entity) - and I think this is where we should be looking...
Thoughts?
This is great news - whilst I could get my onboard SB16 compatible to work with Linux, since I upgraded to my SB Live (for music stuff in 'doze) my Linux world has been sadly silent... C'mon guys, hire someone and get that driver out soon! I want four point surround sound in Linux too!
Of course, this will only be any use if we get some decent audio software written as well - I don't just mean silly sample twiddlers or 'Kubase' (bletch bletch bletch). Something along the lines of CoolEdit Pro would be ideal (64 track DTD recording with real time effects) - and hey, if it was free, even better.
Then I'd be one step closer to switching to Linux completely (the other step being making all my Win95 games run in Wine)
A certain Redmond based company almost certainly used to bloat their code, due to an alliance with a certain chip manufacturer. However, now both companies have other alliances, I can't see what the benefit is to MS now. Due to the way MS dev tools work, though, they tend to generate very bloated code (don't know much about it, but I guess there's a /lot/ of static linking going on)
Still, it does mean that us Linux users either get fabulously cheap, or superbly fast, spacious machines, whilst the rest of the world have to settle for bloated grinding 'doze.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody"
One of the great William H. Gates quotes, along with "What's a network?" (circa 1985)
Perhaps I should try it without eFX this time. It didn't help that the theme I was using didn't seem to dock windows properly and whenever I shrank them down I lost them completely! I might give it another chance, but to be honest I don't give a toss what Win95 looks like, it's only there so I can play games and run Cubase.