You can probably put some blame on the late release of the Linux version. Too many linux users just went and got the windows version. And I blame them if no more games are ported to linux and Loki goes out of business:)
Warning, just complaining about my experience below
I rpm-3.0.5 from ftp.rpm.org's (get it from the test directory). I got bash2, which I also needed. I then tried to get the Xfree86-4.0.1 rpms from rawhide, but they required a new glib and other junk. So I got the source rpm overnight.
I tried to rebuild, but that messed up when Mesa thought I had ggi, but i didn't have recent enough version, and I forgot about it. Ok, so I clean ggi traces from my system, manually, since I lost the source with uninstall makefiles. So I try rebuilding all of XF86 again, which takes forever, and when It seems to be done, finding dependices and such, it just quits, no rpms spit out. Damn. I hate when that happens.
Anybody built rpms for i386 - i686. I am sick of this, and I have no idea what to do. I guess I could just stick to the tdfx drivers from 3dfx, but they don't have old dga mouse support, and the older stuff doesn't have acceleration in windows.
Wouldn't it have to have huge liscence fees, since otherwise the console manufacturer won't break even. It would be kinda shitty to pay 500+ for a game console, since the game company would only be able to sell hardware, and not liscences for developers.
Linux will be missing out on quality if it doesn't have a large share of the market. I don't give a shit about 90% of users having linux on their PC, or grandmothers using linux, I just would appreciate it if I could view those cool movies on the web, and get great support for my hardware. That won't happen without it being a desktop OS with large market share.
Already, I am missing out on many things on the internet like video, sound, certain javascript, and sites that simple don't work in netscape. This is just the internet, something that is supposed to be portable. People who make web sites forget that not everybody has Windows, asx and quicktime players, and IE.
Also, what about hardware. If linux didn't have a large market share, many companies would just ignore it, and not give out specs or drivers for the system. Just look at video cards. I had to ditch my TNT becuase it had crappy support. Just a year ago, this kind of support would have been considered great. Just now we support for 3d sound cards.
No matter how hard linux programers try, and how good the applications become, even if linux gets free applications that are better than windows counterparts, it won't do good if half of the web won't look right, and half of your hardware isn't working correctly.
Yes, for the voodoo3 and banshee. All the other cards (including yout tnt2) already have drivers that support window acceleration.
If you want tot try windowed acceleration, get the dri drivers from linux.3dfx.com (which includes a XFree86 4 snapshot). Or get the drivers for you tnt2, from somewhere on nvidias site (but, like tnt2 fullscreen acceleration, window acceleration is kinda slow)
I too won't just buy a linux game for linux sakes. You see, I like mindless games, like first person shooters, which is why to date I have only got bought q3a.
I got the impression from Scott's message that he wanted me to buy more loki games, since those are like the only ones that will be counted as linux sales. I say get better games. Those games you ported might be ok for some other people, but the money would be in action games. And of course dear hunter (never played it, but is has money written all over it). And if you could, some RTS games.(and and and)
PS: are you really intreasted in how many slashdotters have bought a linux game. It doesn't mean dick, and won't mean dick even if a hundred slashdotters reply to say they have. So, my question is, where could I find out how much loki's games sold, especially q3a, compared to the windows version (and all that distributed linux binaries, SHAME on you:)
Get a voodoo. Comparable speed to windows (and don't run your mouth if your gonna complain about a 4fps difference). G400 and ATI also have comparable speed.
I don't know what is wrong with your g400. I see benchmarks were it beat out windows drivers in lower resolutions.
I thought Daryll Strauss said that the dri model used in Xfree86-4.0 will surely result in slower drivers for the 3dfx cards. Not signifigantly, but just a little slower, since they supported windowing and security. No big deal, just 1-3 fps drop. With Xfree-4.0 betas, the voodoo3 drivers are about 8fps slower, which I guess will be better. This is not counting other cards, which may or may not get a performance drop. NVidia's drivers can't get any worse at least.
Also, aren't 3dfx drivers already pretty fast. About 4fps slower than windows drivers I think.
3D is fine under linux, at least, I see no reason why XFree86 4.0 will make a big difference at all. Maybe by that time nvidia will have made better drivers for their cards, but current 3d drivers for matrox, ati, and 3dfx cards will have matured. Thats to be expected, with any drivers, even on windows, XF4 or not.
Besides, if they do Mac ports, they might as well do a linux port.
I guess it really doesn't matter. I got starcraft working under wine months ago, BUTTT, multiplayer crashed wine. Since I ran wine as root, I think it also might have crashed my whole system. You have to run wine as root to get direct video access, I think. It just ain't worth mentioning unless you can play online.
PS.(but back then, I didn't know that the background console may still be working, so I could log into root, do killall -KILL X, then startx again to get a display. Just in case you didn't know)
rpmfind gtk-1.2.6 Was that so hard. Especially if you have one of those slick package managers that get dependant packages on the fly.
You could do what windows does, and include the newer library, and install it for them. Since gtk-1.2.6 is backwards compatible with gtk-1.2.x, there is no problem.
Yes, I know this qt app (which i am still trying to compile), which does not work with kde's qt. I can install both libraries, qt-2.0.2 and qt-1.44, and (eventually) both this app and the kde app will work.
The point is, this does exist for both qt and gtk, and it is not a big deal.
Considering personal computers are used mostly for games (you know its true:), setting up the mtu and mru are really important for getting nice performance in multiplayer games. That is why there are special gui tools made for windows and I guess mac to handle that. (pretty much repeating what that guy said)
I'd say at least (out of my ass)25% of lusers would set the mru and mtu manually. And yes, I am ignoring most of you comment, sorry, i don't know about macs, or g4's.
QuickTime is already available for linux. You can play *.mov files. There is just one little problem, and that is that the sorensen(sp?) codec is unavailable, which is what most *mov files on the internet use. And, it seems it will cost money to make it available. Apple payed for it with Mac and Windows versions, so thats why they have no problem. right? So the real problem is that somebody needs to pay for a licence of the sorenson codec, right? If thats the case, and if you don't have to pay a per copy fee (which i guess is the case, or the QT player wouldn't be freely distributed), couldn't redhat, corel, va, or some other company pay for it, so it could be distributed with Xanim, or some better media player?
Having played Mario1 and Mario3, Mario2 shure did seem weird compared to those two. Different graphics and evrything. Nothing more to say, as that was years ago, and I have almost forgotten about it.
NVIDIA had 6 months, and there drivers are still shitty. Even the pretty much new ATI drivers are better than theirs. The ATI drivers may require all types of hoops to jump through to get working, and may be unstable (and, then again, maybe not, I havent used them), but they are fast, which is what you really want from a TNT.
Seeing as how NVidia has already released a buggy and slow driver, it better be open source, with specs, or it must a perfect driver (which aint gonna happen). Nvidia has proven it can't be trusted to update it's linux drivers. It has known problems, and it takes them 6 months to address them (by the way, what bug did those latest drivers fix. They seem to just crash more:). With open source AND specs, someone else could fix it (maybe even me (I doubt it)).
So yes, generaly I would say you don't need them, if the company is trustworthy, but this case . . .
(Yea, im ignoring SGI and VA, they may be good, but nvidia is so damn evil, they will cancel out their goodness;).
The voodoo3's are faster, don't require root access, have access to more games (glide only games), have more specs available (the WARP engine still doesn't have all specs released),and I would guess are more stable (seeing as how they have been around longer, and don't require root access). I know the G400 must have better image quility, but that doesn't make up for the other stuff.
Ok, I don't really care at this point if the drivers is closed or open source. All I wanted were fast drivers. I didn't care if they were a little buggy, had rendering artifacts, or didn't work with most games. And most importantly, I really don't give a damn if they are 100% opengl compliant. But why the hell has it taken them this much time to make a fast driver for Quake3?
I use to believe that waiting for DRI and XFree86 4.0 excuse, but with ATI, Matrox, and 3DFX all having direct access without a finished XFree86 4.0, it really seems like bullshit to me. Really, I think most people who want to play Q3 on linux with their TNT's wouldn't mind much if it required root access.
Now I just don't believe them. They were simply dumb to have crappy drivers out for six months with no updates, while their competitors linux drivers smoked 'em, even with much worse hardware.
(Ohh yea, I would guess anyone who would care about 100% compliancy has a $1000+ card. You really shouldn't expect that from a consumer card like the TNT or GeForce.)
I had a USB mouse, and it worked fine with redhat 5.1 and up, until the mouse or the port broke, and it wouldn't work under linux or windows. I think it was like an emulated PS/2, but it was still a lot more accurate than the current mouse I have, a microsoft ergonomic mouse, connected to a comm port.
Since Loki supports SDL, and it is used in many free and commercial games, you might consider it the winner for a unified game API (at least for loki ported games). Of course, you could always write directly to linux API's like OSS, ALS[Some letter I forgot], and Mesa. Ohh yea, SDL doesn't include 3d, so you still would have to use mesa for that.
But why does there need to be a winner for a game API? If just one is good, or hell, if many are good, I would think that's fine. Worst case scenario, 100 commercial games come out for linux next year, and they all use some different, yet high quality game api. The size of a game and its media would dwarf the size of the library it needed, which would probably be staticly linked anyway.
Doesn't berlin use corba for all of it's widgets? Would that also be a little slow? Not like it really matters, I doubt either (XF864.0 or Berlin) will be much slower than windows.
This is not a good comparison. This is not like one of 50 shitty 0.1 ICQ clones. It is one good window manager, that reached 1.0. Again, like I said, they . . . , ahh fuck it, im watching TV.
Slashdot Mirror
You can probably put some blame on the late release of the Linux version. Too many linux users just went and got the windows version. And I blame them if no more games are ported to linux and Loki goes out of business:)
Warning, just complaining about my experience below
I rpm-3.0.5 from ftp.rpm.org's (get it from the test directory). I got bash2, which I also needed. I then tried to get the Xfree86-4.0.1 rpms from rawhide, but they required a new glib and other junk. So I got the source rpm overnight.
I tried to rebuild, but that messed up when Mesa thought I had ggi, but i didn't have recent enough version, and I forgot about it. Ok, so I clean ggi traces from my system, manually, since I lost the source with uninstall makefiles. So I try rebuilding all of XF86 again, which takes forever, and when It seems to be done, finding dependices and such, it just quits, no rpms spit out. Damn. I hate when that happens.
Anybody built rpms for i386 - i686. I am sick of this, and I have no idea what to do. I guess I could just stick to the tdfx drivers from 3dfx, but they don't have old dga mouse support, and the older stuff doesn't have acceleration in windows.
Wouldn't it have to have huge liscence fees, since otherwise the console manufacturer won't break even. It would be kinda shitty to pay 500+ for a game console, since the game company would only be able to sell hardware, and not liscences for developers.
Recently, I gave up buying any games for just windows. This unfortunatly means few games, though just enough for me.
Linux will be missing out on quality if it doesn't have a large share of the market. I don't give a shit about 90% of users having linux on their PC, or grandmothers using linux, I just would appreciate it if I could view those cool movies on the web, and get great support for my hardware. That won't happen without it being a desktop OS with large market share.
Already, I am missing out on many things on the internet like video, sound, certain javascript, and sites that simple don't work in netscape. This is just the internet, something that is supposed to be portable. People who make web sites forget that not everybody has Windows, asx and quicktime players, and IE.
Also, what about hardware. If linux didn't have a large market share, many companies would just ignore it, and not give out specs or drivers for the system. Just look at video cards. I had to ditch my TNT becuase it had crappy support. Just a year ago, this kind of support would have been considered great. Just now we support for 3d sound cards.
No matter how hard linux programers try, and how good the applications become, even if linux gets free applications that are better than windows counterparts, it won't do good if half of the web won't look right, and half of your hardware isn't working correctly.
http://OpenUT.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=975
They have updated drivers, including new opengl drivers, which might work better. I don't have UT, so i don't know how it works.
Also, last time I checked, XFree86 4 does not support old glide games. Maybe it will later though.
Yes, for the voodoo3 and banshee. All the other cards (including yout tnt2) already have drivers that support window acceleration.
If you want tot try windowed acceleration, get the dri drivers from linux.3dfx.com (which includes a XFree86 4 snapshot). Or get the drivers for you tnt2, from somewhere on nvidias site (but, like tnt2 fullscreen acceleration, window acceleration is kinda slow)
I too won't just buy a linux game for linux sakes. You see, I like mindless games, like first person shooters, which is why to date I have only got bought q3a.
I got the impression from Scott's message that he wanted me to buy more loki games, since those are like the only ones that will be counted as linux sales. I say get better games. Those games you ported might be ok for some other people, but the money would be in action games. And of course dear hunter (never played it, but is has money written all over it). And if you could, some RTS games.(and and and)
PS: are you really intreasted in how many slashdotters have bought a linux game. It doesn't mean dick, and won't mean dick even if a hundred slashdotters reply to say they have. So, my question is, where could I find out how much loki's games sold, especially q3a, compared to the windows version (and all that distributed linux binaries, SHAME on you:)
Get a voodoo. Comparable speed to windows (and don't run your mouth if your gonna complain about a 4fps difference). G400 and ATI also have comparable speed.
I don't know what is wrong with your g400. I see benchmarks were it beat out windows drivers in lower resolutions.
I thought Daryll Strauss said that the dri model used in Xfree86-4.0 will surely result in slower drivers for the 3dfx cards. Not signifigantly, but just a little slower, since they supported windowing and security. No big deal, just 1-3 fps drop. With Xfree-4.0 betas, the voodoo3 drivers are about 8fps slower, which I guess will be better. This is not counting other cards, which may or may not get a performance drop. NVidia's drivers can't get any worse at least.
Also, aren't 3dfx drivers already pretty fast. About 4fps slower than windows drivers I think.
3D is fine under linux, at least, I see no reason why XFree86 4.0 will make a big difference at all. Maybe by that time nvidia will have made better drivers for their cards, but current 3d drivers for matrox, ati, and 3dfx cards will have matured. Thats to be expected, with any drivers, even on windows, XF4 or not.
Besides, if they do Mac ports, they might as well do a linux port.
I guess it really doesn't matter. I got starcraft working under wine months ago, BUTTT, multiplayer crashed wine. Since I ran wine as root, I think it also might have crashed my whole system. You have to run wine as root to get direct video access, I think.
It just ain't worth mentioning unless you can play online.
PS.(but back then, I didn't know that the background console may still be working, so I could log into root, do killall -KILL X, then startx again to get a display. Just in case you didn't know)
rpmfind gtk-1.2.6
Was that so hard. Especially if you have one of those slick package managers that get dependant packages on the fly.
You could do what windows does, and include the newer library, and install it for them. Since gtk-1.2.6 is backwards compatible with gtk-1.2.x, there is no problem.
Common, admit it, this is a not a real problem.
Yes, I know this qt app (which i am still trying to compile), which does not work with kde's qt. I can install both libraries, qt-2.0.2 and qt-1.44, and (eventually) both this app and the kde app will work.
The point is, this does exist for both qt and gtk, and it is not a big deal.
Considering personal computers are used mostly for games (you know its true:), setting up the mtu and mru are really important for getting nice performance in multiplayer games. That is why there are special gui tools made for windows and I guess mac to handle that. (pretty much repeating what that guy said)
I'd say at least (out of my ass)25% of lusers would set the mru and mtu manually. And yes, I am ignoring most of you comment, sorry, i don't know about macs, or g4's.
QuickTime is already available for linux. You can play *.mov files. There is just one little problem, and that is that the sorensen(sp?) codec is unavailable, which is what most *mov files on the internet use. And, it seems it will cost money to make it available. Apple payed for it with Mac and Windows versions, so thats why they have no problem. right?
So the real problem is that somebody needs to pay for a licence of the sorenson codec, right? If thats the case, and if you don't have to pay a per copy fee (which i guess is the case, or the QT player wouldn't be freely distributed), couldn't redhat, corel, va, or some other company pay for it, so it could be distributed with Xanim, or some better media player?
Having played Mario1 and Mario3, Mario2 shure did seem weird compared to those two. Different graphics and evrything. Nothing more to say, as that was years ago, and I have almost forgotten about it.
NVIDIA had 6 months, and there drivers are still shitty. Even the pretty much new ATI drivers are better than theirs.
The ATI drivers may require all types of hoops to jump through to get working, and may be unstable (and, then again, maybe not, I havent used them), but they are fast, which is what you really want from a TNT.
Seeing as how NVidia has already released a buggy and slow driver, it better be open source, with specs, or it must a perfect driver (which aint gonna happen). Nvidia has proven it can't be trusted to update it's linux drivers. It has known problems, and it takes them 6 months to address them (by the way, what bug did those latest drivers fix. They seem to just crash more :). With open source AND specs, someone else could fix it (maybe even me (I doubt it)).
So yes, generaly I would say you don't need them, if the company is trustworthy, but this case . . .
(Yea, im ignoring SGI and VA, they may be good, but nvidia is so damn evil, they will cancel out their goodness;).
The voodoo3's are faster, don't require root access, have access to more games (glide only games), have more specs available (the WARP engine still doesn't have all specs released),and I would guess are more stable (seeing as how they have been around longer, and don't require root access). I know the G400 must have better image quility, but that doesn't make up for the other stuff.
Ok, I don't really care at this point if the drivers is closed or open source. All I wanted were fast drivers. I didn't care if they were a little buggy, had rendering artifacts, or didn't work with most games. And most importantly, I really don't give a damn if they are 100% opengl compliant. But why the hell has it taken them this much time to make a fast driver for Quake3?
I use to believe that waiting for DRI and XFree86 4.0 excuse, but with ATI, Matrox, and 3DFX all having direct access without a finished XFree86 4.0, it really seems like bullshit to me. Really, I think most people who want to play Q3 on linux with their TNT's wouldn't mind much if it required root access.
Now I just don't believe them. They were simply dumb to have crappy drivers out for six months with no updates, while their competitors linux drivers smoked 'em, even with much worse hardware.
(Ohh yea, I would guess anyone who would care about 100% compliancy has a $1000+ card. You really shouldn't expect that from a consumer card like the TNT or GeForce.)
I had a USB mouse, and it worked fine with redhat 5.1 and up, until the mouse or the port broke, and it wouldn't work under linux or windows. I think it was like an emulated PS/2, but it was still a lot more accurate than the current mouse I have, a microsoft ergonomic mouse, connected to a comm port.
Since Loki supports SDL, and it is used in many free and commercial games, you might consider it the winner for a unified game API (at least for loki ported games). Of course, you could always write directly to linux API's like OSS, ALS[Some letter I forgot], and Mesa. Ohh yea, SDL doesn't include 3d, so you still would have to use mesa for that.
But why does there need to be a winner for a game API? If just one is good, or hell, if many are good, I would think that's fine. Worst case scenario, 100 commercial games come out for linux next year, and they all use some different, yet high quality game api. The size of a game and its media would dwarf the size of the library it needed, which would probably be staticly linked anyway.
Doesn't berlin use corba for all of it's widgets? Would that also be a little slow? Not like it really matters, I doubt either (XF864.0 or Berlin) will be much slower than windows.
This is not a good comparison. This is not like one of 50 shitty 0.1 ICQ clones. It is one good window manager, that reached 1.0.
Again, like I said, they . . . , ahh fuck it, im watching TV.