Just like us silly people who think 'gas' means something that floats in air. You gotta admit it sounds ridiculous to people with brains that you call petrol 'gas'.
You bastards are corrupting the English language: color, liter, meter, nite, tire, check... the list goes on and on. And all purely because some bloke called Webster decided to spell things incorrectly just to piss off the English.
The case looks cheap. The guts look cheap and messy. The style of the outside is reminiscent of Alienware and the positioning of the PSU is reminiscent of G5's.
It seems like some clueless executive has seen an opportunity to reap big profits and has quickly slapped some crap together to cash in.
Summary: Has all the class and style of one of those people you see walking around with the no-name cheap asian iPod-styled flash-based MP3 players with white headphones.
If people would stop and think for a minute, they'd realise that taping the torch to the barrel of your gun means that you can only use that weapon with lighting. What if you want to quickly change weapons in a dark room? I admit, being able to use the torch with the pistol would have been good. Nethertheless, as it stands, playing Doom is a lot like playing the marine in Alien Vs Predator - which is one of the scariest damn games ever when you're alone at night.
The other key things to remember about Doom is that it's a dark game because it's dark where it's set - a sealed environment on Mars with no windows. When the power gets cut of course it's going to be dark. If you can't see even with the torch on, then make sure that your monitor is calibrated and there is little or preferably no ambient light - it's like taking a photo of something inside with a window visible - if the camera is set for outside (bright light around you) then the inside part of the scene will be underexposed (the monitor).
id really are damned if they do and damned if they don't with all the people who think they know what makes a good game.
Everyone screams that id doesn't make games with good stories, conveniently forgetting that what they've traditionally made are arcade-action games. Now they finally turn around and make a deep and intense game with a decent story and everyone derides it as crap, boring, repetitive and nothing new.
Hey, guess what - games are by their nature repetitive! You yourself even say that you don't like the sort of game that Doom is - so what the fuck are you complaining for? It's a remake of Doom, what else did you expect other than running around a base on Mars gunning down monsters? Do you think a base on Mars overrun by demons and shit would be anything other than dark corridors and rooms? FFS! The story seems like Half-Life because Half-Life seems like the original premise of Doom!
I've only played an hour of the game so far because I'm too tied up at work (where I make games) this week, but from what I've seen so far it's an amazingly polished game. I'm hanging for the weekend when I'll have the time to setup my new surround sound system and be able to sit down in a dark room for a long time and immerse myself in the experience. I hope it continuously scares the shit out of me when I'm not oohing and aahing at the polished design.
"How can you live with yourself playing CS all day..."
I dunno, but I'm sure the hundred grand helps a little.
Just like the fact that finishing first in the special olympics doesn't change the fact that you're still a retard: Even though you won $100K playing CS, it doesn't change the fact that you're still a f4g.
Yeah, I downloaded it and I'm taking it to work tomorrow, as will probably half of the company. (Game developers.)
Where I would really love to see this is on the gigantic silver screen with the x-thousand watt sound system. I doubt it'll happen though, well at least in Australia. Still, it'd be one ad I'd be happy to have paid to sit through =]
Onboard sound sucks for the same reasons as onboard video; the CPU gets too busy, the sound STOPS (on my brandnew laptop its doing just that now), and you get noise from transistors or capasitors near the sound chip.
Wrong. On-board video doesn't stop when the CPU gets busy. You don't get noisy audio from on-board sound if you use the digital outputs. Sound always has the highest priority in a game too, seeing as there is a low-latency buffer that needs to constantly be refreshed. (Ever noticed how the frame rate drops, yet the sound continues on?) If the CPU gets too busy with something else to service the sound buffer then it doesn't matter if it's on-board or add-on sound because the sound will fuck up either way. Oh yeah... if the xbox is a cut-down PC (as everyone here reckons) then why doesn't its on-board audio fuck up or sound shit?
I hate what creative did too, but this move by id will probably make the game run better, since the sound processing will be moved from the CPU to the sound card, leaving more CPU time for the physics engine.
Yeah, the physics engine that's locked to 60Hz. Have you seen that G4TV video on Doom 3 that was linked to from here the other day? JC talks about audio in it... how games have always used a few % of CPU time for it, even as CPU power has increased - hence why modern games have awesome sound.
Really, you know this how? Somehow i think you're talking out your ass...and don't forget there could be an over all performance gain even if thats true, just b/c the CPU has more time to do other things then process sound.
Somehow I think you don't know what you're talking about. Do you code games for a living? I know I do. Doom 3 uses fmod for audio. (Well, I know that leaked version did.) The guy who wrote fmod knows his audio shit way more than you and I, which is why fmod is used in loads of games and you aren't the writer of what is arguably the world's best cross-platform audio API. Doom 3 also uses OGG encoded audio, so there's a CPU-side bit of decoding to do. Mixing audio is far less CPU intensive than decoding OGG, so why bother with setting up the audio hardware for the mixing? I could go on, but really there's no point.
On-board sound is all you need. The only benefit that a sound card can provide you with is perhaps better a DAC and analogue circuitry.
You see, modern on-board sound has digital out, via copper or fibre.
It's usually faster to mix sound in software than to do it in hardware because of the latencies involved in transferring samples over the PCI bus and changing the state of the mixing/processing hardware.
So if you're that serious about sound, use the digital out on your shitty motherboard and pipe it to your awesome receiver.
Here (Adelaide, South Australia) we have a system like this called the O-Bahn, it's a German technology and I think that this is the only place in the world outside of Germany to have one.
It's said that it's cheaper to run than trains, but I prefer to travel by train. There's just something about the motion of a train that's so more reassuring and comfortable than a bus.
Maybe it offends him/her because of your discourteous tone?
I don't suffer fools gladly. People who make such obviously idiotic statments deserve to be shot down in flames. If I ever make such an idiotic statement then I can be shot down in flames, as I should be.
Anyone with even a single brain cell of common sense can see that there's no reason to lower the price when you're already selling more of the things than you can make!
OpenGL is purely an API for drawing graphics, DirectX is a suite of API's for everything to do with games.
There are loads of libraries out there that you can use for those things. It's also not too hard to roll your own - you'll also learn a hell of a lot more in the process.
The beauty of OpenGL is that it sticks to doing one thing and doing it well. The choice of not having an intermediate bytecode for GLSlang is a good one too... it allows compilers to directly optimise the shader program for the architecture as it knows what the high-level context of the code is. If you think about this a bit more, it's like GCC - front-ends compile to a common intermediate format then back-ends take that and translate to machine code - witness the sloppy performance it delivers on certain architectures because it is forced into a generalised format.
To all the people talking about how it's hypocritical to say a security flaw like this is no biggie for Mozilla and rant and rave on about a similar flaw in IE, think about this:
* Internet Explorer 6 * Firefox 0.9
Note the difference? Well, if you can't - basically Firefox is still not a 1.0 product - one that's ready to ship, whereas Internet Explorer is up to 6.whatever... one is a product that has been released, the other is still undergoing development.
Plus, the flaw only affects Windows systems, not Mac or Linux or whatever systems so the blame also partly lays with Microsoft.
Wikipedia is cool... a great concept and it shows just how good and altruistic humans can be. It's unfortunate that they are strapped for cash.
It's the sort of project that makes you wonder why they don't have government or maybe even UN support... since it's a free service to benefit the whole of humanity. (Well, those of us who are fortunate enough to have Internet access.)
It also seems like something that could come out of Google. Perhaps Google, seeing as they go by the motto "do no evil", would be interested in supporting this endeavour?
Pfft... why build on ice when you can build on bedrock? Us Aussies have a few big bases down there - I think the biggest is Mawson - and since they're built on rock they're not going anywhere. Just need to keep up with the snow plowing.
* Of course, I could be wrong or something and be a complete ass since I don't really know much about this stuff and didn't RTFA.
The way this is being talked about it's like it's some revolutionary new thing.
In the developed world, DTV has been going for years now. I have a HDTV tuner card for DVB-T in my PC - records the raw MPEG2 stream being broadcast over the air. 720p broadcasts look friggin' sweet on my 21" Sony. 1080i looks great too, but because it's a progressive display it doesn't look as wonderful and fluid as progressive does. It just gets better and better as more and more content is shot in digital.
.au differs from the DVB standard slightly I believe, in that we use AC3 audio rather than MPEG audio. At first it's a bit of a bummer because the hardware wasn't available as fast, cheap and plentifully as we'd have liked, though the great benefit is that you can just spit the raw audio stream straight out into your home theatre receiver - pure digital quality!
Seeing as NZ is a Commonwealth country, I'd guess that they have the same rules with regards to meteorites as we do over here in aussie - which is that it's Crown property (you know, the Queen).
"Error Concealment" is a no-brainer. I went to a developer's presentation on XBox Live a couple of years ago and the Microsoft Marketing Shill said that's what they use to make voice sound smooth.
Really, it seems logical to do and sound hardware should handle it automatically... your sound buffer is 20msec long and if it doesn't get new data written into it every 20msec then the DMAC will just send the same sample again. (Hence the no-brainer thing at the start of this.) That's also the reason why you get that little repeating sound when a CD-player buggers up or your game crashes.
As for the dynamic jitter buffer... I don't recall ever hearing about that before. It's definately a cool little trick.
I wonder if Apple will ever put out a VoIP phone or adaptor thingie? Just imagine how much more incredibly cool that AirPort Express would be if it had an analogue phone jack on it too!
If you know about orthographic projection then I'm sure you realise that it's still 3D - it's just not a perspective projection (picture spinning 3D cubes).
If space, not power, was their main concern, they could have also used one of the Shuttle cube boxes. They pack an incredibly strong punch for their size, and are usually on par with their desktop equivilants. Hell... they've even got an opteron box. The performance on the EPIA boards is horrific. What were they thinking designing a processor without a FPU? That being said, they're pretty cool because they're small, low-power, and widely availible (which laptop MBs strangely aren't). Still, they're pretty expensive considering that you're getting a PC which would have been considered pretty slow 4 years ago.
I should bitch-slap you. You're a moron. What the fuck do you need FP for in a network router-type thing? By the way, they do have a FPU... it runs at 1/2 the clock speed.
Small, low-power systems cost $$$ because the volume isn't there.
Those systems also pack more than enough power to do basic networking too. A 486 can easily saturate a 10mbps ethernet connection. Hell, my server was an old Cyrix 686 (now known as VIA Eden I believe) and it ran for zonks until the PSU blew up the other week... it's now a Mini-ITX system. Whilst it consumes less power than the old system, it's still way overpowered for what it does.
If these guys could have afforded it, I'm sure they would have sprung for a soekris board or similar - they suck up almost no juice and have ample power.
Graphics: OpenGL, SDL, PTC, Allegro, etc. Audio: FMod, OpenAL, etc. Input: SDL, etc. Networking: HawkNL, ENet, etc.
Sure, it's not all Free Software and Open Source, but everything you need to make a cross-platform game already exists.
It's all about abstraction baby.
Of course, Linux is a fucking bitch when it comes to having an application run out-of-the-box (at least it was last time I could be bothered to mess with it.) People complain about DLL hell with Windows, but bugger me - Linux has worse problems with library versions and ABI's and shit. When I can download a binary package and click on it to run then call me about using Linux on the desktop - until then you can forget it for games. I repeat - API's are not the issue!
Here in Australia you don't patent plant varieties, you obtain Plant Breeders Rights (PBR) basically it's the same thing. It protects the horticulturalist who came up with the plant from others breeding the plant without permission and without paying royalties.
I read a comment here that you shouldn't be able to do this to plants that were not interbred - plants that grew in nature. What would you say about what happened in our (my family runs a production nursery) place - my late grandfather discovered a mutant plant that had an advantage over what was currently being grown. It was the only one in the lot. Should we have not been able to get PBR on that?
What happened with that plant occurs often in nature, however it rarely gets a chance to be propagated. The plants are all grafted, and it just so happened that this one was a sport (a mutated bud). In the wild, plants do not get grafted. Humans graft trees because it allows us to maintain consistency and grow a plant with certain characteristics as the choice of rootstock has a bearing on how the plant grows and what conditions it can grow in. If you take two plants and cross-pollinate them, the plants that grow from the resulting seeds will all be genetically different - just like humans having babies.
But back to the PBR debate. As you may guess, it takes many years to develop or discover new varieties of plants - it is a very labour intensive and drawn-out process inherent with risks. Should a plant breeder not be afforded protection from unscrupulous operators moving in on his new variety and flooding the market to make a quick buck?
For those that are interested, that mutant plant that my grandfather found was a Kaffir Lime. When we brought the Kaffir to Australia we could only obtain a very limited amount of budwood. We were under an agreement that we could not sell them for a few years whilst we ramped up production (using budwood from the previous years' lot for the next years lot.) because they were a tree that was in such demand that other nurserys would have bought the trees and propagated them, which would have denied the originator their royalties. The variety we grew was the best one to use for cooking - it had an extremely high concentration of volatile oils in the leaves - only problem was that it had big bastard thorns and the damn trees would scratch your arms to shreds (even through a jumper) when handling them. The mutant we found was the same, except it had no thorns! After keeping that tree under lock and key and giving it lots of TLC we took budwood and propagated it, repeating the process over a few years until we had enough to replace the volume of the original variety. The other main variety of Kaffir Lime sold in Australia is a fast-growing variety with large, light leaves and no thorns - only problem is that there's no flavour in the leaves. Go into an Asian grocery store and look at the Kaffir Lime leaves - they're all like the sort that we grow.
Was Noah's Ark more than 40,000 years ago? If not, then why don't we hear about that crap from Aboriginies - who have been around in Oz for at least that long? Sure, they don't have written languages, but you'd think there'd be some similarities or references there in their Dream Time stories. Same with Kangaroos - why do they only exist in Oz?
Also, how does it explain people with different coloured skin?
I'm sorry, but it just all doesn't add up. Actually, I'm not sorry at all - I pity the fool who gets suckered by this crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like us silly people who think 'gas' means something that floats in air. You gotta admit it sounds ridiculous to people with brains that you call petrol 'gas'.
You bastards are corrupting the English language: color, liter, meter, nite, tire, check... the list goes on and on. And all purely because some bloke called Webster decided to spell things incorrectly just to piss off the English.
The case looks cheap. The guts look cheap and messy. The style of the outside is reminiscent of Alienware and the positioning of the PSU is reminiscent of G5's.
It seems like some clueless executive has seen an opportunity to reap big profits and has quickly slapped some crap together to cash in.
Summary: Has all the class and style of one of those people you see walking around with the no-name cheap asian iPod-styled flash-based MP3 players with white headphones.
If people would stop and think for a minute, they'd realise that taping the torch to the barrel of your gun means that you can only use that weapon with lighting. What if you want to quickly change weapons in a dark room? I admit, being able to use the torch with the pistol would have been good. Nethertheless, as it stands, playing Doom is a lot like playing the marine in Alien Vs Predator - which is one of the scariest damn games ever when you're alone at night.
The other key things to remember about Doom is that it's a dark game because it's dark where it's set - a sealed environment on Mars with no windows. When the power gets cut of course it's going to be dark. If you can't see even with the torch on, then make sure that your monitor is calibrated and there is little or preferably no ambient light - it's like taking a photo of something inside with a window visible - if the camera is set for outside (bright light around you) then the inside part of the scene will be underexposed (the monitor).
id really are damned if they do and damned if they don't with all the people who think they know what makes a good game.
Everyone screams that id doesn't make games with good stories, conveniently forgetting that what they've traditionally made are arcade-action games. Now they finally turn around and make a deep and intense game with a decent story and everyone derides it as crap, boring, repetitive and nothing new.
Hey, guess what - games are by their nature repetitive! You yourself even say that you don't like the sort of game that Doom is - so what the fuck are you complaining for? It's a remake of Doom, what else did you expect other than running around a base on Mars gunning down monsters? Do you think a base on Mars overrun by demons and shit would be anything other than dark corridors and rooms? FFS! The story seems like Half-Life because Half-Life seems like the original premise of Doom!
I've only played an hour of the game so far because I'm too tied up at work (where I make games) this week, but from what I've seen so far it's an amazingly polished game. I'm hanging for the weekend when I'll have the time to setup my new surround sound system and be able to sit down in a dark room for a long time and immerse myself in the experience. I hope it continuously scares the shit out of me when I'm not oohing and aahing at the polished design.
"How can you live with yourself playing CS all day..."
I dunno, but I'm sure the hundred grand helps a little.
Just like the fact that finishing first in the special olympics doesn't change the fact that you're still a retard: Even though you won $100K playing CS, it doesn't change the fact that you're still a f4g.
What the hell is it with CS?
Yeah, I downloaded it and I'm taking it to work tomorrow, as will probably half of the company. (Game developers.)
Where I would really love to see this is on the gigantic silver screen with the x-thousand watt sound system. I doubt it'll happen though, well at least in Australia. Still, it'd be one ad I'd be happy to have paid to sit through =]
Onboard sound sucks for the same reasons as onboard video; the CPU gets too busy, the sound STOPS (on my brandnew laptop its doing just that now), and you get noise from transistors or capasitors near the sound chip.
Wrong. On-board video doesn't stop when the CPU gets busy. You don't get noisy audio from on-board sound if you use the digital outputs. Sound always has the highest priority in a game too, seeing as there is a low-latency buffer that needs to constantly be refreshed. (Ever noticed how the frame rate drops, yet the sound continues on?) If the CPU gets too busy with something else to service the sound buffer then it doesn't matter if it's on-board or add-on sound because the sound will fuck up either way. Oh yeah... if the xbox is a cut-down PC (as everyone here reckons) then why doesn't its on-board audio fuck up or sound shit?
I hate what creative did too, but this move by id will probably make the game run better, since the sound processing will be moved from the CPU to the sound card, leaving more CPU time for the physics engine.
Yeah, the physics engine that's locked to 60Hz. Have you seen that G4TV video on Doom 3 that was linked to from here the other day? JC talks about audio in it... how games have always used a few % of CPU time for it, even as CPU power has increased - hence why modern games have awesome sound.
Really, you know this how? Somehow i think you're talking out your ass...and don't forget there could be an over all performance gain even if thats true, just b/c the CPU has more time to do other things then process sound.
Somehow I think you don't know what you're talking about. Do you code games for a living? I know I do. Doom 3 uses fmod for audio. (Well, I know that leaked version did.) The guy who wrote fmod knows his audio shit way more than you and I, which is why fmod is used in loads of games and you aren't the writer of what is arguably the world's best cross-platform audio API. Doom 3 also uses OGG encoded audio, so there's a CPU-side bit of decoding to do. Mixing audio is far less CPU intensive than decoding OGG, so why bother with setting up the audio hardware for the mixing? I could go on, but really there's no point.
Fuck Creative.
On-board sound is all you need. The only benefit that a sound card can provide you with is perhaps better a DAC and analogue circuitry.
You see, modern on-board sound has digital out, via copper or fibre.
It's usually faster to mix sound in software than to do it in hardware because of the latencies involved in transferring samples over the PCI bus and changing the state of the mixing/processing hardware.
So if you're that serious about sound, use the digital out on your shitty motherboard and pipe it to your awesome receiver.
Here (Adelaide, South Australia) we have a system like this called the O-Bahn, it's a German technology and I think that this is the only place in the world outside of Germany to have one.
Click here to read about it.
It's said that it's cheaper to run than trains, but I prefer to travel by train. There's just something about the motion of a train that's so more reassuring and comfortable than a bus.
You've got your dates off by a year there!
Doom was released in 1993
Doom II was released in 1994
Quake was released in 1996
/me stands back and waits for Sony to crush SCO like a bullant that's just bitten them.
Maybe it offends him/her because of your discourteous tone?
I don't suffer fools gladly. People who make such obviously idiotic statments deserve to be shot down in flames. If I ever make such an idiotic statement then I can be shot down in flames, as I should be.
Anyone with even a single brain cell of common sense can see that there's no reason to lower the price when you're already selling more of the things than you can make!
Why do they refuse to offer an iPod for $200? They'd sell like hotcakes. Not everyone needs 40 freakin' gigs.
They're already selling like hotcakes, nimrod.
Q: Why would you drop the price on something that you already can't make enough of?
A: You're an idiot?
If this post offends you, it's because the truth hurts. Try saving up, it's how a lot of us can afford expensive items.
OpenGL is purely an API for drawing graphics, DirectX is a suite of API's for everything to do with games.
There are loads of libraries out there that you can use for those things. It's also not too hard to roll your own - you'll also learn a hell of a lot more in the process.
The beauty of OpenGL is that it sticks to doing one thing and doing it well. The choice of not having an intermediate bytecode for GLSlang is a good one too... it allows compilers to directly optimise the shader program for the architecture as it knows what the high-level context of the code is. If you think about this a bit more, it's like GCC - front-ends compile to a common intermediate format then back-ends take that and translate to machine code - witness the sloppy performance it delivers on certain architectures because it is forced into a generalised format.
To all the people talking about how it's hypocritical to say a security flaw like this is no biggie for Mozilla and rant and rave on about a similar flaw in IE, think about this:
* Internet Explorer 6
* Firefox 0.9
Note the difference? Well, if you can't - basically Firefox is still not a 1.0 product - one that's ready to ship, whereas Internet Explorer is up to 6.whatever... one is a product that has been released, the other is still undergoing development.
Plus, the flaw only affects Windows systems, not Mac or Linux or whatever systems so the blame also partly lays with Microsoft.
I rest my case.
Wikipedia is cool... a great concept and it shows just how good and altruistic humans can be. It's unfortunate that they are strapped for cash.
It's the sort of project that makes you wonder why they don't have government or maybe even UN support... since it's a free service to benefit the whole of humanity. (Well, those of us who are fortunate enough to have Internet access.)
It also seems like something that could come out of Google. Perhaps Google, seeing as they go by the motto "do no evil", would be interested in supporting this endeavour?
Pfft... why build on ice when you can build on bedrock? Us Aussies have a few big bases down there - I think the biggest is Mawson - and since they're built on rock they're not going anywhere. Just need to keep up with the snow plowing.
* Of course, I could be wrong or something and be a complete ass since I don't really know much about this stuff and didn't RTFA.
In the developed world, DTV has been going for years now. I have a HDTV tuner card for DVB-T in my PC - records the raw MPEG2 stream being broadcast over the air. 720p broadcasts look friggin' sweet on my 21" Sony. 1080i looks great too, but because it's a progressive display it doesn't look as wonderful and fluid as progressive does. It just gets better and better as more and more content is shot in digital.
.au differs from the DVB standard slightly I believe, in that we use AC3 audio rather than MPEG audio. At first it's a bit of a bummer because the hardware wasn't available as fast, cheap and plentifully as we'd have liked, though the great benefit is that you can just spit the raw audio stream straight out into your home theatre receiver - pure digital quality!
Seeing as NZ is a Commonwealth country, I'd guess that they have the same rules with regards to meteorites as we do over here in aussie - which is that it's Crown property (you know, the Queen).
"Error Concealment" is a no-brainer. I went to a developer's presentation on XBox Live a couple of years ago and the Microsoft Marketing Shill said that's what they use to make voice sound smooth.
Really, it seems logical to do and sound hardware should handle it automatically... your sound buffer is 20msec long and if it doesn't get new data written into it every 20msec then the DMAC will just send the same sample again. (Hence the no-brainer thing at the start of this.) That's also the reason why you get that little repeating sound when a CD-player buggers up or your game crashes.
As for the dynamic jitter buffer... I don't recall ever hearing about that before. It's definately a cool little trick.
I wonder if Apple will ever put out a VoIP phone or adaptor thingie? Just imagine how much more incredibly cool that AirPort Express would be if it had an analogue phone jack on it too!
If you know about orthographic projection then I'm sure you realise that it's still 3D - it's just not a perspective projection (picture spinning 3D cubes).
If space, not power, was their main concern, they could have also used one of the Shuttle cube boxes. They pack an incredibly strong punch for their size, and are usually on par with their desktop equivilants. Hell... they've even got an opteron box. The performance on the EPIA boards is horrific. What were they thinking designing a processor without a FPU? That being said, they're pretty cool because they're small, low-power, and widely availible (which laptop MBs strangely aren't). Still, they're pretty expensive considering that you're getting a PC which would have been considered pretty slow 4 years ago.
I should bitch-slap you. You're a moron. What the fuck do you need FP for in a network router-type thing? By the way, they do have a FPU... it runs at 1/2 the clock speed.
Small, low-power systems cost $$$ because the volume isn't there.
Those systems also pack more than enough power to do basic networking too. A 486 can easily saturate a 10mbps ethernet connection. Hell, my server was an old Cyrix 686 (now known as VIA Eden I believe) and it ran for zonks until the PSU blew up the other week... it's now a Mini-ITX system. Whilst it consumes less power than the old system, it's still way overpowered for what it does.
If these guys could have afforded it, I'm sure they would have sprung for a soekris board or similar - they suck up almost no juice and have ample power.
Cross platform game development:
Graphics: OpenGL, SDL, PTC, Allegro, etc.
Audio: FMod, OpenAL, etc.
Input: SDL, etc.
Networking: HawkNL, ENet, etc.
Sure, it's not all Free Software and Open Source, but everything you need to make a cross-platform game already exists.
It's all about abstraction baby.
Of course, Linux is a fucking bitch when it comes to having an application run out-of-the-box (at least it was last time I could be bothered to mess with it.) People complain about DLL hell with Windows, but bugger me - Linux has worse problems with library versions and ABI's and shit. When I can download a binary package and click on it to run then call me about using Linux on the desktop - until then you can forget it for games. I repeat - API's are not the issue!
Here in Australia you don't patent plant varieties, you obtain Plant Breeders Rights (PBR) basically it's the same thing. It protects the horticulturalist who came up with the plant from others breeding the plant without permission and without paying royalties.
I read a comment here that you shouldn't be able to do this to plants that were not interbred - plants that grew in nature. What would you say about what happened in our (my family runs a production nursery) place - my late grandfather discovered a mutant plant that had an advantage over what was currently being grown. It was the only one in the lot. Should we have not been able to get PBR on that?
What happened with that plant occurs often in nature, however it rarely gets a chance to be propagated. The plants are all grafted, and it just so happened that this one was a sport (a mutated bud). In the wild, plants do not get grafted. Humans graft trees because it allows us to maintain consistency and grow a plant with certain characteristics as the choice of rootstock has a bearing on how the plant grows and what conditions it can grow in. If you take two plants and cross-pollinate them, the plants that grow from the resulting seeds will all be genetically different - just like humans having babies.
But back to the PBR debate. As you may guess, it takes many years to develop or discover new varieties of plants - it is a very labour intensive and drawn-out process inherent with risks. Should a plant breeder not be afforded protection from unscrupulous operators moving in on his new variety and flooding the market to make a quick buck?
For those that are interested, that mutant plant that my grandfather found was a Kaffir Lime. When we brought the Kaffir to Australia we could only obtain a very limited amount of budwood. We were under an agreement that we could not sell them for a few years whilst we ramped up production (using budwood from the previous years' lot for the next years lot.) because they were a tree that was in such demand that other nurserys would have bought the trees and propagated them, which would have denied the originator their royalties. The variety we grew was the best one to use for cooking - it had an extremely high concentration of volatile oils in the leaves - only problem was that it had big bastard thorns and the damn trees would scratch your arms to shreds (even through a jumper) when handling them. The mutant we found was the same, except it had no thorns! After keeping that tree under lock and key and giving it lots of TLC we took budwood and propagated it, repeating the process over a few years until we had enough to replace the volume of the original variety. The other main variety of Kaffir Lime sold in Australia is a fast-growing variety with large, light leaves and no thorns - only problem is that there's no flavour in the leaves. Go into an Asian grocery store and look at the Kaffir Lime leaves - they're all like the sort that we grow.
Was Noah's Ark more than 40,000 years ago? If not, then why don't we hear about that crap from Aboriginies - who have been around in Oz for at least that long? Sure, they don't have written languages, but you'd think there'd be some similarities or references there in their Dream Time stories. Same with Kangaroos - why do they only exist in Oz?
Also, how does it explain people with different coloured skin?
I'm sorry, but it just all doesn't add up. Actually, I'm not sorry at all - I pity the fool who gets suckered by this crap.