The difference between Quartz and DPS is that Quartz is based on PDF while DPS is based on PostScript. I believe PDF is more powerful, and I think is an evolution of Postscript. PDF can do anything Postscript can do except it has more constant color handling, and more features. You can check the MacOS X article a while ago to see what Quartz is about.
Yes, but were talking reality here. When did network gaming as we know it start? When DOOM came out! I'm not talking about some game some guy hacked up on UNIX, I'm talking about a full fledged commercial game with a paper manual and a box and everything that people actually BOUGHT (or sharewared in LARGE numbers. I'm not stupid enough to think that UNIX did not have the first networked games, (it was one of the first networked OSs, and no matter what the technology, there is at least one game in existance that takes advantage of it.) but having some networked games does not make it a "networked gaming platform" just as having blender for Linux does not make it a 3d modeling platform.
Yes, but were talking reality here. When did network gaming as we know it start? When DOOM came out! I'm not talking about some game some guy hacked up on UNIX, I'm talking about a full fledged commercial game with a paper manual and a box and everything that people actually BOUGHT (or sharewared) in large numbers.
That will not happen for years. I get the feeling that Linux people think they have already beaten MS. Linux still has less than.1% of home users. Why would anyone in their right mind make a (commercial of course) game and only release it on UNIX?
I would like to point out two places where you are wrong. 1. UNIX was not one of the first networked game platforms. It was one of the first networked platforms, but I believe networked gaming can be classified has having started back in the days of DOOM, which was Windows only. (In mass) In fact, until recently, UNIX has had very few commercial games. 2. Your comment about overhead is seriously flawed. A) OpenGL and DirectX have nothing to do with each other. DirectX is the media foundation for windows which handles sound, input, graphics, etc. I'm sure that OpenGL does not have lower overhead than DirectDraw simply because DirectDraw is fast as hell, and its only graphics access API. And OpenGL is certainly more bloated than DirectInput. What you are thinking of is Direct3D, and yes, you're right. Direct3D IS more bloated than OpenGL. But you have OpenGL on Windows too. Hardware accelerated no less. 3. I seriously doubt Linux has lower OS overhead than Windows. Some of the OS services may be slow, like networking, but when you are writing an app using DirectX (not Direct3D, the rest of DirectX) you get almost complete control of the system. (Direct even.) Your threads get 90% of the CPU, DirectDraw locks the GDI when you are doing drawing operations, and the OS isn't even involved most of the time since you usually only make calls to DirectX. A DirectX game (which Quake III is.) using OpenGL as the 3D API is about as fast as it gets. With Linux, this kind of total control is unheard of. You have to deal with multiple processes, security, etc. It may be more stable, but it probably isn't faster. (Unless you're making extensive calls to the OS.)
Yo! Why was this post moderated up? It has 5 dead obvious points, then one attrocious, hateful, and just plain wrong! point. C++ does not suck you wanabee assembely coder! When done right, C++ can be very elegant. When done wrong (as it apparently is in Mozilla) C++ can bloatware heaven. Since Mozilla apparently has bloat designed into it, I doubt C++ has an effect on the size. For example, X and Linux are coded in C, and BeOS is coded in C++. Which is more elegant? BeOS of course. But that has nothing to do with language used. BeOS would be more elegant in C too, just with the OO API. It all in the design. BeOS is new and has an entirely focused design, and Linux kind of evolved, and has less of a central design. Thus Linux is more bloated, even with its C heritage. (BTW its no offense to Linux, but BeOS is just cleaner if for nothing more than the fact that its 20 years younger than *NIX and that 100 guys designed the whole thing)
What the hell? What FMWV freak moderated this up? A GUI SHOWLD be cool, sexy, exiting, amusing, and animated. IF you want it to. Or it should be boring. IF you want it to. Thats why I love the concept (but not the implementation) of the Linux window managers. The whole skining thing is GOOD. With window managers that support themeing, you can download a theme to suit your taste. The button set does not change (the close button is still the close button it just looks different) so its easy to learn, and its customizable, so its easy to look at. You want your desktop boring, FINE! I like it a little lively, I enjoy using my computer. The current state of GUIs is RIDICULOUS! Take a hint from the car market. A Jag XKR looks a hell of a lot nicer than a Civic, but they all have basically the same functionality (I mean the buttons and knobs, the shifter, the dashboard, etc.) and basically the same place. It takes you 5 minutes to learn the button layout of a new car. Thats what your GUI should be like. Its a big intrusion into a persons working environment to mess with the asthetics of their tool. Its like back in the model T days, all you could get was black. But these days, every tool has an asthetic, and GUIs should be no different. But all tools also have a standard layout and GUIs should still be no different. So fine, if you like FWMV, good for you. I LIKE working in a lively enivronment, so good for me. My only problem with you is that you are trying to force YOUR work enivronment on ME.
Funny, I don't see how a cool toy has to be counter to something simple for normal users. I think of a computer as a "cewl" toy that I can dig into, but seriously wish that MacOS X were available on x86 because it looks so damn pretty. I'll give you BeOS as an OS thats the best example of "cewl" there is now. Its fast, its easy to use, and it follows a lot of UNIX configuration stuff underneath all the GUI applets so you can tweek to your hearts content. (Okay, so it often doesn't work but thats not my point.) I just don't see why Linux nerds think that its either customizable, or easy to use. Whats the major point of customizability? Something that is flexible, something that you can tweek to be as fast as possible, and something thats fits you needs. Well, BeOS is all of those things. Unlike many other OSs it can do app scripting. So for example, if you don't like the Workspace's default features, you can send it BMessages to change them. Or say you have a hypothetical web server. Everything that the app supports is done through a GUI. However, it also supports app scripting. So you can write your own scripts to access different stuff from the web server. You can look at the usage reports on the usage tab, or you can send it messages that have it write usage statistics to a file and then you can parse those for you own needs. Maybe adjust server properties based on those, again, you can do that with app scripting. So yes, it's HARD to make an environment that both easy, fast and customizable, but hey, if you have a good design, and can and HAS been done.
I will club to death the next person who says "okay, now maybe DirectX will bite the dust" or anything along those lines. DirectX is the Windows multimedia API. Its propriatory to windows just like the UNIX joystick API, and the UNIX Sound API. Thats how they chose to implement these functions in Windows. DirectX is actually a nice, fast API. D3D on the other hand, is what many people consider to be the bastard child of the DirectX family. Its gotten within of OpenGL, but is I think as tricked out as the inane design will allow, and OpenGL is still getting faster. (hopefully.) So to recap. DirectX is analogous to what the Loki game SDK for Linux. I don't see windows user bitching that Loki GSDK is not available on windows. D3D and OpenGL are the two things usually in contention here. So go ahead, club D3D over the head. It deserves it. But leave the rest of DirectX alone. BTW> Two points. Quake III uses DirectInput, and Linux NEEDS something like directX. Integrated, low-level, and hardware accelerated. Heaven. (sans 3D API of course.)
I don't really think xload even qualifies as in the same ballpark as the NT monitoring tool. Hell, this thing will tell you everything from the number of threads running to the number of disk cache misses.
I would just like to point out some unnecessary UNIX glamorization. > WRONG! You CAN do that in a non "*NIX" system. Try TManager for BeOS. That is probably the most complete process config. tool I've ever seen. Not only can to change thread priorities, you can suspend and restart threads on the fly, kill them. Plus it give you a listing of all memory areas and images in use on a thread, all the semaphores being used in the system, and get this, the ability to change the count, or delete entirely a semaphore. Plus it gives you access to the BeOS debug server so you can debug a thread. As for monitoring tool. As for monitoring, Windows has some nice monitoring software. Try using System Monitor. Not only does it give you access to more stuff than you'd care to know. (It gives you access to IPX packets per second, file system bytes per second and dirty data, disk cache misses, disk cache cycle times, transaction per second through the network client, etc.) Plus it lets programms or hardware install their own monitoring plugins. My AWE64 installed software that lets me know how much memory is availabe on the card, how many voices are playing, cpu usage from the wavesynth, etc. Plus its all in one place.
I would just like to point out some unnecessary UNIX glamorization. > WRONG! Try TManager for BeOS. That is probably the most complete process config. tool I've ever seen. Not only can to change thread priorities, you can suspend and restart threads on the fly, kill them. Plus it give you a listing of all memory areas and images in use on a thread, all the semaphores being used in the system, and get this, the ability to change the count, or delete entirely a semaphore. Plus it gives you access to the BeOS debug server so you can debug a thread. As for monitoring tool. Windows has that too. Try using System Monitor. Not only does it give you access to more stuff than you'd care to know. (It gives you access to IPX packets per second, file system bytes per second and dirty data, disk cache misses, disk cache cycle times, transaction per second through the network client, etc.) Plus it lets programms or hardware install their own monitoring plugins. My AWE64 installed software that lets me know how much memory is availabe on the card, how many voices are playing, cpu usage from the wavesynth, etc. Plus its all in one place.
Tim has a point on a few things, but notably about how important game developers are to the PC. Although he is a little bit in left field with his $100 graphics chip vs. $100K SGI, he is close. Without gaming and its inevitable push, 3D on the PC would not have happened. Sure there were proffessional OpenGL cards before gaming cards came out, but how did they perform, and where would they be today? It is proven that consumer technology moves significantly faster than corporate and high end technology. I seriously doubt that the high end OpenGL cards on the PC, such as the Intergraph Wildcat 4000, would be as fast as they are without the competition from consumer cards. (Face it, would you want to release an OpenGL card for $2K when a 3Dfx was a quarter the performance, but only $200?) The proof is this. The Quadro GPU is faster than a wildcat at about half the price. Why? Because it is based on the lightning fast GeForce consumer card. Do you really think that Intergraph is going to sit on its ass, or are they going to develop a card that blows it away?Secondly, gaming has pushed the processor and multimedia subsystems to increadible levels. All the technologies that make a PC competitive with a low or mid end SGI, such as AGP, PCI, SDRAM, the new intel multimedia hub, SSE, 3DNow!, etc, are mostley pushed by gaming. (Yes, SDRAM is a gaming technology. It features much lower latency than FPM. Latency really isn't important in image editing or word processing, but is critical in games. Same thing for PCI. ISA graphics cards were plenty fast for word processing.) You can trace gaming's influence even farther than these reletivly new technologies. I seriously doubt that PCs would ever have been seen as a multimedia machine (a term that got coined in the early 486 days.) without gaming. They were the first "multimedia" apps out on PCs and the ones that continued to push technology. The fact that they pushed technology is also important. Do you need a 800 MHz athlon to word process, watch movies, or even photo editing ?(I mean cleaning up old pics, etc.) But you do need it to play quake. So while other technologies have come onto the PC because of its increasing power, the PC would not have that power if games had not pushed it there. (or it would have been much slower to come around.) Of course everyone benifits from that power. The PII was designed to play games (and to a lesser extent to do multimedia), but it still make a damn good server. I often see on slashdot, though people who think that games aren't "real" apps. Or that a server is a "real" computer. I've heard people say things along the lines of, "who needs games on Linux, go out and do some REAL work." Well, sorry to bust your bubble but games got the PC where it is, and all the gamers, everyone who has ever used a multimedia application, all the people who used to have to buy a $20K SGI to do their graphics work but now can buy a $3000 PC, and yes, even all the sysadmins who saved $15000 by not having to buy a SUN, owe game developers.
xload ha ha funny. If you have ever seen the windows NT monitoring program, you'd know why they like it some much. Every value that the system keeps track of is in their. Threads, processes, per proc load graphics, filesystem thoroughput, ipx and tcp packets/sec, etc. And if you look at the system performance manager (Its in Win98, but probably in W2K as well.) applications can install their own monitoring software. Like my AWE64 soundcard installs this plugin that lets system performance manager display how many voices are playing, how much free ram I have, etc.
This seems like a very reasonable comment. He says nothing that would make me doubt who he is and his comments make a lot of sense. Yo moderators, ACs have something to say too!
Come on. If I hear ONE more Linuxite bitching about GPL I'll crack. Who is most qualified to write drivers for hardware. The hardware manufacturers. I would think if companies could make closes source drivers and that if there was a standard driver API, then linux would have a lot more support now. And this thing that some body posted about linux being a "dynamic entity." When translated into english it means that linux has a piece of shit driver API. On purpose, but still a piece of shit. My major bitch with open source drivers is that many things may work, but they don't work well. Or parts of the card work, but not all of it. And why are we even writing drivers for these companies? Doesn't Linux have sufficiant hype that companies do it out of their own will? What used to be a great aid to linux, open source drivers, in an age when it did not have commercial support has now become a handicap. Face it, in Windows, drivers get update often. My 2 year old Riva 128 still has new drivers coming out for it. And by the time they do stop coming, they are more or less done; stable, tweeked, etc. Only crappy companies (ahem, ATI) write crappy drivers. And usually those products are crappy themselves so it doesn't matter. So keep the OS open source, and let the driver manufacturers do as they please. Drivers after all, are NOT part of the OS. (I know they compile into the kernel, but thats a UNIX bug.)
I don't know about everyone else, but this news worries me. Sure, its good in the short term, Linux get a great 3D sound API, but do you realize that this means for Linux? It means, soon, there will be a bunch of imcompatible, competing APIs. It happened to windows too. There were all these APIs like A3D, Sensura, Dolby, then Microsoft (not everything they do sucks) released DirectSound3D. Not only was it competitive, it really leveled the playing field. Now, instead of HAVING to buy an Aureal card for a new gaming system, one could choose from SBs, Ensoniqs, Orchids, etc. (ie. NON propriatory hardware) The end result is all the fantastic sound cards out now. The same thing happened with 3D. OpenGL was not established on windows, and when 3dfx came out with Glide, it grabbed a stranglehold immediatly. How could it not, there were no other APIs. Then Microsoft saved the day and brought out D3D. Sure it sucked, but it meant that people could choose from different graphics cards. When I bought my computer, there were many options. I could buy a Diamond Monster 3D with Voodoo chipset, an Orchid Righteous 3D with Voodoo chipset , or a Canopus Pure3D with Voodoo chipset. Now I can buy a GeForce if I want extreme performance, a Savage 2000 if I'm looking for cheap performance, or a G400MAX for feature filled performance. But I don't see how these things will happen with Linux. When 3dfx tried to capture Linux 3D with glide, it didn't really succeed because of Mesa. But there is no "mesa" of 3D sound. I hear ALSA is doing something, but it may take so long to come out that Linux may be in for a period of intense API competition. The solution is simple, but one I doubt the Linux people will take. (Look at GNOME and KDE! We shouldn't have THAT level of imcompatibility in one OS) It would be to create a unified Linux API. A so called LinuxX if you will. Take ALSA's work and modify it to be DirectSoundish so it can be accelerated on existing DirectSound cards. And sound is only the nearest threat. By looking at windows history, force feedback is next, (first came glide, then A3D, then iForce) so get working on that standardized joystick API. Oh, how history repeats itself. PS- The first person who argues that making a standardized API is not the Linux "way" gets a "living in la la land award of the day." Competing window systems is one thing. Things can be ported from KDE to GNOME fairly simply, but editing some code and recompiling. Were talking about acceleration. Competing acceleration APIs is bad because it screws the user having to decide which API to spend his money oon, then potentially losing it when that API sinks. Not to mention the fact that until there is a global standard, most app developers won't use it. Until Direct3D no apps were hardware accelerated because only 3dfx users could then use the game. But after D3D it is hard to find a non-accellarator required game on the shelves. Same for 3D Sound and ForceFeedback.
You missed my point entirely. I know DRI does that, but what does it work for? Voodoo 3. I even pointed it out when he borrows his friend's voodoo 3! My point was thats about the ONLY thing it supports. Its an antiquated card no less. What about TNT? What about GeForce, what about all the other nice card out there, what about GeForce! I thought Linux was about choice. Yes, Linux supports SMP, but so does NT and NT has a better threading model at that, which should help out SMP performance even more. Second, I think Aureal is porting A3D to Linux. SBLive is an Aureal competitor. (Don't get your hopes up on getting SBLive 3D support in Linux. EAX is just an extension of DirectSound 3D. They would have to add an entirely new model to it to make it work.) But have they done it yet? My point was that with all the hype over Linux, some guy will go out and buy stock Redhat 6.1 with X 3.3.5, start the game, and have it not work! At a minimum X4 will take another 3 months to get here, and if A3D is just now being ported, it could take until July. So were talking summer 2K for a good Linux gaming experience, yet the hype is here NOW. So in that six months much of the hype will dissipate as people say, "oh. Linux. I tried that, it sucked!" And once the hype is gone, its gone for good. Suggestion: Code now, hype later.
Picture this. Someone buys a brand new copy of Shogo, their favorite windows game because of its shlightly offbeat and unusual nature, loads it up into linux, giggling with anticipation. He installs it. Opps, need a new version of Mesa. He downloads it and installs. He giggles with anticipation as the game loads. He enters the level, and... he sees the unaccelerated, blocky backgrounds running at 15 fps. He thinks to himself, doh! He borrows his friend's aging Voodoo 3 and puts it in in place of his GeForce DDR. He giggles with anticipation. He sets the settings to medium to go easy on the voodoo. He giggles with anticipation. Soon he is off. Lower res and slower than he is used to in windows, but playable. He enters a fight and hears... nothing because his brand new MonsterSound MX300 is not supported. Doh again! Thinking this is a good time to upgrade, he rushes and buys a new soundblaster live! He giggles in anticipation. He enters the fight. He gets fragged by someone behind him because he couldn't hear him since 3D sound is not supported under Linux. Doh the third time! Well, who needs 3D sound. He hooks up his Wingman force and starts fragging and feels... nothing, because Linux does not have a force feedback API. He thinks, well, I've giving it 4 strikes, one more than in baseball, I'm finished. He reboots into windows.
Interesting. I have ONE encountered problems with the 4.5 bootloader or heard of such things for that matter, except for the adaptec incedent where the SCSI card's driver were in R4.5.2 but you needed R4.5 to install the patch, but needed R4.5.2 to boot the system. That was fixed with a floppy image. Its interesting that you have to "stab at the dark" to do anything under BeOS. If you haven't figured out, anything that isn't configured automatically is covered in the manual. There is no setting on the system that is not covered in one of the prefs applets. If it isn't there you can't configure it. What are you doing anyway? Going into the sytem folder under/. Those are only for the BeOS system to use. I don't think there is anything in there that the end user has to configure. Other wise I can't possibly see anything taking more than a few minutes to configure under BeOS. It might not work, but you will know the minute the prefs. applet gives you an error. And I doubt anything take minutes under "linux the OS that makes me go into/etc to change my hostname even though GNOME has a preference for it because the GNOME developers were not bright enough to realize that hosts is kept in two files." Or that I have to go into xf86config just to change my resolution. If something doesn't work automatically under BeOS, it won't work period. (With the sole exeption of WON) Second, whats wrong with a company repositioning its product? Happens all the time, especially with such a small company. Plus, its not so much a repositioning as the press releases would have you believe. I think Be realizes that it can get its foot in the door by capturing the webpad market and is uplaying that to get some hype.
I think that nVidia's history in OpenGL can be related to Linux in anyway. Linux is still a perehprial market, and even the best Windows OpenGL ICD (The GeForce's) is not implemented in Linux. Sucks, but you can't judge nVidia's OpenGL history by it. Comments like that make it seem as if nVidia doesn't know how to do OpenGL (like 3Dfx, Matrox until recently, and Ati (hmmm, all the manufacturers who released register info to Linux) none of whom have developed good OpenGL drivers. (You may think Matrox's or 3DFxs are good on linux, but try using Windows sometime. The quality of the current matrox drivers are nowhere near that of the nVidia ICD) It also sounds like nVidia doesn't support OpenGL. Not true, nVidia was the first major manufacturer to have a FULL OpenGL ICD (not miniGL like 3dfx). So please refrain from making comments that only make sense to Linux people, but are wrong unless one has a similar linux zealot state of mind.
Sorry, but under REAL 3D operating systems, like windows 98, TNT 2 was the fastest consumer card available. (esp. The hercules TNT 2 Ultra, 175 mhz core, 200MHz memory!) I don't know about Linux, but since linux 3D is still a piece of junk, you can't judge a card or company by it.
You major jackass. what kind of pompous nutball talks about "raw UNIX" or "wintendo" UNIX is not the ultimate OS. The UNIX designers were not gods. A lot of stuff about UNIX sucks! What is this layered crap? Everything including networking in the kenel yet the graphics on the outside! Relience on ancient standards and hundreds of independant libraries! UNIX does have its good points, which is why people still use it. But it was not made of media, the desktop, or for anything but sysadmins. Linux, Sun, SGI have come very far with it, but has had to introduce layers of crap and libraries and hacks to do it. X should not exist. Neither should ESound, Gnome, KDE, ALSA, Mesa, etc. All these should be part of the OS, but had to be grafted on. The second thing I take offense to is your classification of the gamer. By your logic I could say that all Linux users are pompous sysadmins who think that "raw UNIX" make them more manly. gamers are among the most knowledegable of computer users, and many go on to become good programmers. Games drive hardware technology. If it weren't for "silly" things like Quake, Linux would not exist. x86 hardware would be too weak to support a server OS and we would still be looking at a green monitor that beeps at us every few minutes. Everyone who wanted a server would have to pony up $60K to Sun or SGI and the internet would not exist because home computers did not have the power to browse it. And the only application of 3D is not gaming. Believe it or not, programming isn't the only thing that can be done on a computer. There are these people called "artists" who use 3D to make movies, like, oh, I don't know Titanic, Star Wars, Jurrasic Park, Matrix, etc. They also make these things called "commericals" and "billboards" and "magazines" all on a computer! Isn't it mind expanding! If you came out of your basement, maybe you would have heard of them.
Well, since no one has made a comment on this as of yet, I guess I will. Transmeta has domeonstrated BeOS running on Curusoe. Considering Stinger (Be's embedded product) is almost nearly BeOS, it should be a chinch to put Stinger on Curusoe. That means two things. A) Be gets a huge boost considering stuff like the Compaq webpad (which uses Stinger) can be made much more powerful, and B) It helps embedded products in general since Be is probably the best suited general purpose OS for embedded products. Speaking of OSes I'm not too particularly impressed with the whole embedded linux thing. In my experience, the good Linux GUIs (ie. Windows maker, E, KDM) need a fast graphics card and lots of RAM to work well. Not to mention all the hardware X needs. Can something like the compaq webpad be made that uses X as the GUI? Even the most basic linux X system needs a few hundred meg and that simply isn't available on a webpad type device that uses flash RAM cards. (Or even microdrives) Not to mention all the cost for RAM. QNX would also be a good platform (better than Be maybe) but the lisencing costs would be a bitch. Another problem is the fact that the users of these embedded products are about half as smart as users of normal computers.(not everyone, just most of them.) Were talking iMac user level here. (not mac users, iMac users) I don't see them being too happy trying to configure all the options in GNOME. So reaching the end of my rant it is time to make some forcasts. A) Be makes a killing of Curusoe by putting Stinger on every webpad out there. B) All the Linux heads go out and buy a webpad then install linux on it.
Actually, I didn't think R3 was THAT bad, and sorry, I forgot about the PR release. And Be is not a buzzword machine. It can actually back it up. All the cool stuff like prevasive multithreading, digital media support, Journaling FS, etc. MEAN something. Threads spawn like mad from any BeOS machine and that is really helpful when you consider it leads to the system being asynchronus and more responsive. It does have a very fast jouraling FS that has database and attribute capabilities to boot. Not to mention how well it handles audio and the really great API. It might not have much success (to a small degree due to the current focus on Linux and a large one due to the lack of advertising) but its getting better, and they have their own bandwagon, that a lot of companies are jumping on. I actually think that Stinger, (their embedded OS) may be a foot in the door that will lead to a more widespread use of the desktop OS.
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The difference between Quartz and DPS is that Quartz is based on PDF while DPS is based on PostScript. I believe PDF is more powerful, and I think is an evolution of Postscript. PDF can do anything Postscript can do except it has more constant color handling, and more features. You can check the MacOS X article a while ago to see what Quartz is about.
Yes, but were talking reality here. When did network gaming as we know it start? When DOOM came out! I'm not talking about some game some guy hacked up on UNIX, I'm talking about a full fledged commercial game with a paper manual and a box and everything that people actually BOUGHT (or sharewared in LARGE numbers. I'm not stupid enough to think that UNIX did not have the first networked games, (it was one of the first networked OSs, and no matter what the technology, there is at least one game in existance that takes advantage of it.) but having some networked games does not make it a "networked gaming platform" just as having blender for Linux does not make it a 3d modeling platform.
Yes, but were talking reality here. When did network gaming as we know it start? When DOOM came out! I'm not talking about some game some guy hacked up on UNIX, I'm talking about a full fledged commercial game with a paper manual and a box and everything that people actually BOUGHT (or sharewared) in large numbers.
That will not happen for years. I get the feeling that Linux people think they have already beaten MS. Linux still has less than .1% of home users. Why would anyone in their right mind make a (commercial of course) game and only release it on UNIX?
I would like to point out two places where you are wrong.
1. UNIX was not one of the first networked game platforms. It was one of the first networked platforms, but I believe networked gaming can be classified has having started back in the days of DOOM, which was Windows only. (In mass) In fact, until recently, UNIX has had very few commercial games.
2. Your comment about overhead is seriously flawed. A) OpenGL and DirectX have nothing to do with each other. DirectX is the media foundation for windows which handles sound, input, graphics, etc. I'm sure that OpenGL does not have lower overhead than DirectDraw simply because DirectDraw is fast as hell, and its only graphics access API. And OpenGL is certainly more bloated than DirectInput. What you are thinking of is Direct3D, and yes, you're right. Direct3D IS more bloated than OpenGL. But you have OpenGL on Windows too. Hardware accelerated no less.
3. I seriously doubt Linux has lower OS overhead than Windows. Some of the OS services may be slow, like networking, but when you are writing an app using DirectX (not Direct3D, the rest of DirectX) you get almost complete control of the system. (Direct even.) Your threads get 90% of the CPU, DirectDraw locks the GDI when you are doing drawing operations, and the OS isn't even involved most of the time since you usually only make calls to DirectX. A DirectX game (which Quake III is.) using OpenGL as the 3D API is about as fast as it gets. With Linux, this kind of total control is unheard of. You have to deal with multiple processes, security, etc. It may be more stable, but it probably isn't faster. (Unless you're making extensive calls to the OS.)
Yo! Why was this post moderated up? It has 5 dead obvious points, then one attrocious, hateful, and just plain wrong! point. C++ does not suck you wanabee assembely coder! When done right, C++ can be very elegant. When done wrong (as it apparently is in Mozilla) C++ can bloatware heaven. Since Mozilla apparently has bloat designed into it, I doubt C++ has an effect on the size. For example, X and Linux are coded in C, and BeOS is coded in C++. Which is more elegant? BeOS of course. But that has nothing to do with language used. BeOS would be more elegant in C too, just with the OO API. It all in the design. BeOS is new and has an entirely focused design, and Linux kind of evolved, and has less of a central design. Thus Linux is more bloated, even with its C heritage. (BTW its no offense to Linux, but BeOS is just cleaner if for nothing more than the fact that its 20 years younger than *NIX and that 100 guys designed the whole thing)
What the hell? What FMWV freak moderated this up? A GUI SHOWLD be cool, sexy, exiting, amusing, and animated. IF you want it to. Or it should be boring. IF you want it to. Thats why I love the concept (but not the implementation) of the Linux window managers. The whole skining thing is GOOD. With window managers that support themeing, you can download a theme to suit your taste. The button set does not change (the close button is still the close button it just looks different) so its easy to learn, and its customizable, so its easy to look at. You want your desktop boring, FINE! I like it a little lively, I enjoy using my computer. The current state of GUIs is RIDICULOUS! Take a hint from the car market. A Jag XKR looks a hell of a lot nicer than a Civic, but they all have basically the same functionality (I mean the buttons and knobs, the shifter, the dashboard, etc.) and basically the same place. It takes you 5 minutes to learn the button layout of a new car. Thats what your GUI should be like. Its a big intrusion into a persons working environment to mess with the asthetics of their tool. Its like back in the model T days, all you could get was black. But these days, every tool has an asthetic, and GUIs should be no different. But all tools also have a standard layout and GUIs should still be no different. So fine, if you like FWMV, good for you. I LIKE working in a lively enivronment, so good for me. My only problem with you is that you are trying to force YOUR work enivronment on ME.
Funny, I don't see how a cool toy has to be counter to something simple for normal users. I think of a computer as a "cewl" toy that I can dig into, but seriously wish that MacOS X were available on x86 because it looks so damn pretty. I'll give you BeOS as an OS thats the best example of "cewl" there is now. Its fast, its easy to use, and it follows a lot of UNIX configuration stuff underneath all the GUI applets so you can tweek to your hearts content. (Okay, so it often doesn't work but thats not my point.) I just don't see why Linux nerds think that its either customizable, or easy to use. Whats the major point of customizability? Something that is flexible, something that you can tweek to be as fast as possible, and something thats fits you needs. Well, BeOS is all of those things. Unlike many other OSs it can do app scripting. So for example, if you don't like the Workspace's default features, you can send it BMessages to change them. Or say you have a hypothetical web server. Everything that the app supports is done through a GUI. However, it also supports app scripting. So you can write your own scripts to access different stuff from the web server. You can look at the usage reports on the usage tab, or you can send it messages that have it write usage statistics to a file and then you can parse those for you own needs. Maybe adjust server properties based on those, again, you can do that with app scripting. So yes, it's HARD to make an environment that both easy, fast and customizable, but hey, if you have a good design, and can and HAS been done.
I will club to death the next person who says "okay, now maybe DirectX will bite the dust" or anything along those lines. DirectX is the Windows multimedia API. Its propriatory to windows just like the UNIX joystick API, and the UNIX Sound API. Thats how they chose to implement these functions in Windows. DirectX is actually a nice, fast API. D3D on the other hand, is what many people consider to be the bastard child of the DirectX family. Its gotten within of OpenGL, but is I think as tricked out as the inane design will allow, and OpenGL is still getting faster. (hopefully.) So to recap. DirectX is analogous to what the Loki game SDK for Linux. I don't see windows user bitching that Loki GSDK is not available on windows. D3D and OpenGL are the two things usually in contention here. So go ahead, club D3D over the head. It deserves it. But leave the rest of DirectX alone.
BTW> Two points. Quake III uses DirectInput, and Linux NEEDS something like directX. Integrated, low-level, and hardware accelerated. Heaven. (sans 3D API of course.)
I don't really think xload even qualifies as in the same ballpark as the NT monitoring tool. Hell, this thing will tell you everything from the number of threads running to the number of disk cache misses.
I would just like to point out some unnecessary UNIX glamorization. >
WRONG! You CAN do that in a non "*NIX" system. Try TManager for BeOS. That is probably the most complete process config. tool I've ever seen. Not only can to change thread priorities, you can suspend and restart threads on the fly, kill them. Plus it give you a listing of all memory areas and images in use on a thread, all the semaphores being used in the system, and get this, the ability to change the count, or delete entirely a semaphore. Plus it gives you access to the BeOS debug server so you can debug a thread. As for monitoring tool. As for monitoring, Windows has some nice monitoring software. Try using System Monitor. Not only does it give you access to more stuff than you'd care to know. (It gives you access to IPX packets per second, file system bytes per second and dirty data, disk cache misses, disk cache cycle times, transaction per second through the network client, etc.) Plus it lets programms or hardware install their own monitoring plugins. My AWE64 installed software that lets me know how much memory is availabe on the card, how many voices are playing, cpu usage from the wavesynth, etc. Plus its all in one place.
I would just like to point out some unnecessary UNIX glamorization. >
WRONG! Try TManager for BeOS. That is probably the most complete process config. tool I've ever seen. Not only can to change thread priorities, you can suspend and restart threads on the fly, kill them. Plus it give you a listing of all memory areas and images in use on a thread, all the semaphores being used in the system, and get this, the ability to change the count, or delete entirely a semaphore. Plus it gives you access to the BeOS debug server so you can debug a thread. As for monitoring tool. Windows has that too. Try using System Monitor. Not only does it give you access to more stuff than you'd care to know. (It gives you access to IPX packets per second, file system bytes per second and dirty data, disk cache misses, disk cache cycle times, transaction per second through the network client, etc.) Plus it lets programms or hardware install their own monitoring plugins. My AWE64 installed software that lets me know how much memory is availabe on the card, how many voices are playing, cpu usage from the wavesynth, etc. Plus its all in one place.
Tim has a point on a few things, but notably about how important game developers are to the PC. Although he is a little bit in left field with his $100 graphics chip vs. $100K SGI, he is close. Without gaming and its inevitable push, 3D on the PC would not have happened. Sure there were proffessional OpenGL cards before gaming cards came out, but how did they perform, and where would they be today? It is proven that consumer technology moves significantly faster than corporate and high end technology. I seriously doubt that the high end OpenGL cards on the PC, such as the Intergraph Wildcat 4000, would be as fast as they are without the competition from consumer cards. (Face it, would you want to release an OpenGL card for $2K when a 3Dfx was a quarter the performance, but only $200?) The proof is this. The Quadro GPU is faster than a wildcat at about half the price. Why? Because it is based on the lightning fast GeForce consumer card. Do you really think that Intergraph is going to sit on its ass, or are they going to develop a card that blows it away?Secondly, gaming has pushed the processor and multimedia subsystems to increadible levels. All the technologies that make a PC competitive with a low or mid end SGI, such as AGP, PCI, SDRAM, the new intel multimedia hub, SSE, 3DNow!, etc, are mostley pushed by gaming. (Yes, SDRAM is a gaming technology. It features much lower latency than FPM. Latency really isn't important in image editing or word processing, but is critical in games. Same thing for PCI. ISA graphics cards were plenty fast for word processing.) You can trace gaming's influence even farther than these reletivly new technologies. I seriously doubt that PCs would ever have been seen as a multimedia machine (a term that got coined in the early 486 days.) without gaming. They were the first "multimedia" apps out on PCs and the ones that continued to push technology. The fact that they pushed technology is also important. Do you need a 800 MHz athlon to word process, watch movies, or even photo editing ?(I mean cleaning up old pics, etc.) But you do need it to play quake. So while other technologies have come onto the PC because of its increasing power, the PC would not have that power if games had not pushed it there. (or it would have been much slower to come around.) Of course everyone benifits from that power. The PII was designed to play games (and to a lesser extent to do multimedia), but it still make a damn good server. I often see on slashdot, though people who think that games aren't "real" apps. Or that a server is a "real" computer. I've heard people say things along the lines of, "who needs games on Linux, go out and do some REAL work." Well, sorry to bust your bubble but games got the PC where it is, and all the gamers, everyone who has ever used a multimedia application, all the people who used to have to buy a $20K SGI to do their graphics work but now can buy a $3000 PC, and yes, even all the sysadmins who saved $15000 by not having to buy a SUN, owe game developers.
xload ha ha funny. If you have ever seen the windows NT monitoring program, you'd know why they like it some much. Every value that the system keeps track of is in their. Threads, processes, per proc load graphics, filesystem thoroughput, ipx and tcp packets/sec, etc. And if you look at the system performance manager (Its in Win98, but probably in W2K as well.) applications can install their own monitoring software. Like my AWE64 soundcard installs this plugin that lets system performance manager display how many voices are playing, how much free ram I have, etc.
This seems like a very reasonable comment. He says nothing that would make me doubt who he is and his comments make a lot of sense. Yo moderators, ACs have something to say too!
Come on. If I hear ONE more Linuxite bitching about GPL I'll crack. Who is most qualified to write drivers for hardware. The hardware manufacturers. I would think if companies could make closes source drivers and that if there was a standard driver API, then linux would have a lot more support now. And this thing that some body posted about linux being a "dynamic entity." When translated into english it means that linux has a piece of shit driver API. On purpose, but still a piece of shit. My major bitch with open source drivers is that many things may work, but they don't work well. Or parts of the card work, but not all of it. And why are we even writing drivers for these companies? Doesn't Linux have sufficiant hype that companies do it out of their own will? What used to be a great aid to linux, open source drivers, in an age when it did not have commercial support has now become a handicap. Face it, in Windows, drivers get update often. My 2 year old Riva 128 still has new drivers coming out for it. And by the time they do stop coming, they are more or less done; stable, tweeked, etc. Only crappy companies (ahem, ATI) write crappy drivers. And usually those products are crappy themselves so it doesn't matter. So keep the OS open source, and let the driver manufacturers do as they please. Drivers after all, are NOT part of the OS. (I know they compile into the kernel, but thats a UNIX bug.)
I don't know about everyone else, but this news worries me. Sure, its good in the short term, Linux get a great 3D sound API, but do you realize that this means for Linux? It means, soon, there will be a bunch of imcompatible, competing APIs. It happened to windows too. There were all these APIs like A3D, Sensura, Dolby, then Microsoft (not everything they do sucks) released DirectSound3D. Not only was it competitive, it really leveled the playing field. Now, instead of HAVING to buy an Aureal card for a new gaming system, one could choose from SBs, Ensoniqs, Orchids, etc. (ie. NON propriatory hardware) The end result is all the fantastic sound cards out now. The same thing happened with 3D. OpenGL was not established on windows, and when 3dfx came out with Glide, it grabbed a stranglehold immediatly. How could it not, there were no other APIs. Then Microsoft saved the day and brought out D3D. Sure it sucked, but it meant that people could choose from different graphics cards. When I bought my computer, there were many options. I could buy a Diamond Monster 3D with Voodoo chipset, an Orchid Righteous 3D with Voodoo chipset , or a Canopus Pure3D with Voodoo chipset. Now I can buy a GeForce if I want extreme performance, a Savage 2000 if I'm looking for cheap performance, or a G400MAX for feature filled performance. But I don't see how these things will happen with Linux. When 3dfx tried to capture Linux 3D with glide, it didn't really succeed because of Mesa. But there is no "mesa" of 3D sound. I hear ALSA is doing something, but it may take so long to come out that Linux may be in for a period of intense API competition. The solution is simple, but one I doubt the Linux people will take. (Look at GNOME and KDE! We shouldn't have THAT level of imcompatibility in one OS) It would be to create a unified Linux API. A so called LinuxX if you will. Take ALSA's work and modify it to be DirectSoundish so it can be accelerated on existing DirectSound cards. And sound is only the nearest threat. By looking at windows history, force feedback is next, (first came glide, then A3D, then iForce) so get working on that standardized joystick API. Oh, how history repeats itself.
PS- The first person who argues that making a standardized API is not the Linux "way" gets a "living in la la land award of the day." Competing window systems is one thing. Things can be ported from KDE to GNOME fairly simply, but editing some code and recompiling. Were talking about acceleration. Competing acceleration APIs is bad because it screws the user having to decide which API to spend his money oon, then potentially losing it when that API sinks. Not to mention the fact that until there is a global standard, most app developers won't use it. Until Direct3D no apps were hardware accelerated because only 3dfx users could then use the game. But after D3D it is hard to find a non-accellarator required game on the shelves. Same for 3D Sound and ForceFeedback.
You missed my point entirely. I know DRI does that, but what does it work for? Voodoo 3. I even pointed it out when he borrows his friend's voodoo 3! My point was thats about the ONLY thing it supports. Its an antiquated card no less. What about TNT? What about GeForce, what about all the other nice card out there, what about GeForce! I thought Linux was about choice. Yes, Linux supports SMP, but so does NT and NT has a better threading model at that, which should help out SMP performance even more. Second, I think Aureal is porting A3D to Linux. SBLive is an Aureal competitor. (Don't get your hopes up on getting SBLive 3D support in Linux. EAX is just an extension of DirectSound 3D. They would have to add an entirely new model to it to make it work.) But have they done it yet? My point was that with all the hype over Linux, some guy will go out and buy stock Redhat 6.1 with X 3.3.5, start the game, and have it not work! At a minimum X4 will take another 3 months to get here, and if A3D is just now being ported, it could take until July. So were talking summer 2K for a good Linux gaming experience, yet the hype is here NOW. So in that six months much of the hype will dissipate as people say, "oh. Linux. I tried that, it sucked!" And once the hype is gone, its gone for good.
Suggestion: Code now, hype later.
Picture this. Someone buys a brand new copy of Shogo, their favorite windows game because of its shlightly offbeat and unusual nature, loads it up into linux, giggling with anticipation. He installs it. Opps, need a new version of Mesa. He downloads it and installs. He giggles with anticipation as the game loads. He enters the level, and...
he sees the unaccelerated, blocky backgrounds running at 15 fps. He thinks to himself, doh! He borrows his friend's aging Voodoo 3 and puts it in in place of his GeForce DDR. He giggles with anticipation. He sets the settings to medium to go easy on the voodoo. He giggles with anticipation. Soon he is off. Lower res and slower than he is used to in windows, but playable. He enters a fight and hears... nothing because his brand new MonsterSound MX300 is not supported. Doh again! Thinking this is a good time to upgrade, he rushes and buys a new soundblaster live! He giggles in anticipation. He enters the fight. He gets fragged by someone behind him because he couldn't hear him since 3D sound is not supported under Linux. Doh the third time! Well, who needs 3D sound. He hooks up his Wingman force and starts fragging and feels... nothing, because Linux does not have a force feedback API. He thinks, well, I've giving it 4 strikes, one more than in baseball, I'm finished. He reboots into windows.
Interesting. I have ONE encountered problems with the 4.5 bootloader or heard of such things for that matter, except for the adaptec incedent where the SCSI card's driver were in R4.5.2 but you needed R4.5 to install the patch, but needed R4.5.2 to boot the system. That was fixed with a floppy image. Its interesting that you have to "stab at the dark" to do anything under BeOS. If you haven't figured out, anything that isn't configured automatically is covered in the manual. There is no setting on the system that is not covered in one of the prefs applets. If it isn't there you can't configure it. What are you doing anyway? Going into the sytem folder under /. Those are only for the BeOS system to use. I don't think there is anything in there that the end user has to configure. Other wise I can't possibly see anything taking more than a few minutes to configure under BeOS. It might not work, but you will know the minute the prefs. applet gives you an error. And I doubt anything take minutes under "linux the OS that makes me go into /etc to change my hostname even though GNOME has a preference for it because the GNOME developers were not bright enough to realize that hosts is kept in two files." Or that I have to go into xf86config just to change my resolution. If something doesn't work automatically under BeOS, it won't work period. (With the sole exeption of WON) Second, whats wrong with a company repositioning its product? Happens all the time, especially with such a small company. Plus, its not so much a repositioning as the press releases would have you believe. I think Be realizes that it can get its foot in the door by capturing the webpad market and is uplaying that to get some hype.
I think that nVidia's history in OpenGL can be related to Linux in anyway. Linux is still a perehprial market, and even the best Windows OpenGL ICD (The GeForce's) is not implemented in Linux. Sucks, but you can't judge nVidia's OpenGL history by it. Comments like that make it seem as if nVidia doesn't know how to do OpenGL (like 3Dfx, Matrox until recently, and Ati (hmmm, all the manufacturers who released register info to Linux) none of whom have developed good OpenGL drivers. (You may think Matrox's or 3DFxs are good on linux, but try using Windows sometime. The quality of the current matrox drivers are nowhere near that of the nVidia ICD) It also sounds like nVidia doesn't support OpenGL. Not true, nVidia was the first major manufacturer to have a FULL OpenGL ICD (not miniGL like 3dfx). So please refrain from making comments that only make sense to Linux people, but are wrong unless one has a similar linux zealot state of mind.
Sorry, but under REAL 3D operating systems, like windows 98, TNT 2 was the fastest consumer card available. (esp. The hercules TNT 2 Ultra, 175 mhz core, 200MHz memory!) I don't know about Linux, but since linux 3D is still a piece of junk, you can't judge a card or company by it.
You major jackass. what kind of pompous nutball talks about "raw UNIX" or "wintendo" UNIX is not the ultimate OS. The UNIX designers were not gods. A lot of stuff about UNIX sucks! What is this layered crap? Everything including networking in the kenel yet the graphics on the outside! Relience on ancient standards and hundreds of independant libraries! UNIX does have its good points, which is why people still use it. But it was not made of media, the desktop, or for anything but sysadmins. Linux, Sun, SGI have come very far with it, but has had to introduce layers of crap and libraries and hacks to do it. X should not exist. Neither should ESound, Gnome, KDE, ALSA, Mesa, etc. All these should be part of the OS, but had to be grafted on. The second thing I take offense to is your classification of the gamer. By your logic I could say that all Linux users are pompous sysadmins who think that "raw UNIX" make them more manly. gamers are among the most knowledegable of computer users, and many go on to become good programmers. Games drive hardware technology. If it weren't for "silly" things like Quake, Linux would not exist. x86 hardware would be too weak to support a server OS and we would still be looking at a green monitor that beeps at us every few minutes. Everyone who wanted a server would have to pony up $60K to Sun or SGI and the internet would not exist because home computers did not have the power to browse it. And the only application of 3D is not gaming. Believe it or not, programming isn't the only thing that can be done on a computer. There are these people called "artists" who use 3D to make movies, like, oh, I don't know Titanic, Star Wars, Jurrasic Park, Matrix, etc. They also make these things called "commericals" and "billboards" and "magazines" all on a computer! Isn't it mind expanding! If you came out of your basement, maybe you would have heard of them.
Well, since no one has made a comment on this as of yet, I guess I will. Transmeta has domeonstrated BeOS running on Curusoe. Considering Stinger (Be's embedded product) is almost nearly BeOS, it should be a chinch to put Stinger on Curusoe. That means two things. A) Be gets a huge boost considering stuff like the Compaq webpad (which uses Stinger) can be made much more powerful, and B) It helps embedded products in general since Be is probably the best suited general purpose OS for embedded products. Speaking of OSes I'm not too particularly impressed with the whole embedded linux thing. In my experience, the good Linux GUIs (ie. Windows maker, E, KDM) need a fast graphics card and lots of RAM to work well. Not to mention all the hardware X needs. Can something like the compaq webpad be made that uses X as the GUI? Even the most basic linux X system needs a few hundred meg and that simply isn't available on a webpad type device that uses flash RAM cards. (Or even microdrives) Not to mention all the cost for RAM. QNX would also be a good platform (better than Be maybe) but the lisencing costs would be a bitch. Another problem is the fact that the users of these embedded products are about half as smart as users of normal computers.(not everyone, just most of them.) Were talking iMac user level here. (not mac users, iMac users) I don't see them being too happy trying to configure all the options in GNOME. So reaching the end of my rant it is time to make some forcasts.
A) Be makes a killing of Curusoe by putting Stinger on every webpad out there.
B) All the Linux heads go out and buy a webpad then install linux on it.
Actually, I didn't think R3 was THAT bad, and sorry, I forgot about the PR release. And Be is not a buzzword machine. It can actually back it up. All the cool stuff like prevasive multithreading, digital media support, Journaling FS, etc. MEAN something. Threads spawn like mad from any BeOS machine and that is really helpful when you consider it leads to the system being asynchronus and more responsive. It does have a very fast jouraling FS that has database and attribute capabilities to boot. Not to mention how well it handles audio and the really great API. It might not have much success (to a small degree due to the current focus on Linux and a large one due to the lack of advertising) but its getting better, and they have their own bandwagon, that a lot of companies are jumping on. I actually think that Stinger, (their embedded OS) may be a foot in the door that will lead to a more widespread use of the desktop OS.