You know, this is really getting tiresome... But I'll take the bait anyway.
Here's a list of 319 games.
And here's another 1400 or so games.
Much less than what's on windows, sure but still way more than enough to get my gaming fix. And this doesn't even count what you may be able to get to work through emulation.
And you think they'll just give you the linux port for free because you own a license of the windows version? You'd still have to buy the linux version. More money for them. I'd definetly buy it if it was available.
The problem I have with these machines is the absolute garbage onboard video that they come with.
They should provide something that can do hardware OpenGL. The onboard one is directX only (though they ship with linux).
Somthing with good DRI drivers would be great, but I be happy if they just had an empty AGP slot, I could at least throw a tnt2 video card on them.
The openGL feature is really cool. Any idea if there's a way to turn this on or off programatically?
Having this on the command line is ok, but if someone is using Mesa3d(software openGL on Linux) instead of hardware acceleration, it will be slower than the default rendering path of X11.
Here's a screenshot of my JTurtle application running on accelerated openGL with jdk1.5 and using the new look and feel.
Its been years since I've read these, but I'm not sure these would be the best choice for the new movies. Don't get me wrong, the Timothy Zahn trilogy was incredible. Part 2 & 3 of the series were extremely enjoyable reading, but there's at least two problems I could see with basing VII - IX on these books.
First, the main characters are Han, Luke, and Leia set only five years after Return of the Jedi. Even the geniuses at WETA would have trouble making Harrison, Hamil, and Fisher look 30 years younger.
Second, the books came out when most of us still really loved the Star Wars universe. No one was yet tarnished by Jar-Jar and little orphan Anniekin. The first book in the Zahn trilogy got buy on just the cool factor of being the first book to officially open up the Star Wars universe that was closed for years. Heir to the Empire(part 1) didn't really have a climax that a movie would need, while Dark Force Rising(#2) and Last Command(#3) definetly had the makings for movies.
Still, I would love to see at least an animated series based on these. I would just hate to see Lucas butcher Timothy Zahn's work.
You're probably right but I don't see why it's that important that Linux is #1 in the world.
If not #1 at least a bigger chunk of desktop market share would be nice. Imagine if linux increased to 25% of desktops. Hardware manufacturers would be crazy not to develop linux drivers. Desktop software manufactures would be much more likely to do native ports.
Unfortunately, the major problem here is that, like it or not, Microsoft DirectX provides a more readily available suite of games APIs for developers than does the cross-platform OpenGL standard and that's probably the biggest thing stopping games companies producing for Linux. Those that do, like ID, can do it because they work in OpenGL in the first place.
What about Nintendo & Sony? They don't exactly use DirectX. Many game companies these days license 3rd party engines that have many rendering paths & input/sound abstraction. Sure some comapnies use DirectX only, but a huge portion doesn't.
There may be some developments as a result of Linux going into the arcades but it's important to realise that although the Linux OS in these machine is Open Source (it has to be), the games definitely won't be (and don't have to be) so it's not as though you'll be able to play these at home unless a games publisher decides to releases them for home usage.
I don't think any is arguing this point. I have no problem paying for a decent game to play on an open source OS (i bought all but 2 loki games)
Any games exposure for Linux is a good thing but it always boils down to financial concerns in the end and games developers will only release Linux games if they are confident they can make money from it.
And this will make more and more financial sense the more market share linux can take from windows. Some ports now are just done for the cool factor, or that the developer happen to like using linux.
I agree with you 100% Also Note that K12LTSP is an easy way to get started with this. It is basically Fedora Core 2 ready to install with all the cool LTSP stuff included. Just install the distro on a server with 2 Network cards, buy some bootable nics from disklessworstations.com, slap those in the clients, and away you go. The mailing list and irc channel are also full of helpful people. I've been using this setup in a school for a couple of years now, and it saved us so much money we were able to replace our CRT monitors with flat panels.
Or you could load freedos onto a small partition on the hard drive, and an etherboot com image in the autoexe.bat.
That way you could still used the floppy & cdrom of the thin client. Of course you could just run linux and do an X:query, but then you lose the sound support and other cool local device support stuff that the ltsp.org guys are doing. If the client is really strapped for ram, you could use that HD for a linux swap file as well. Just remeber that its just running a small kernel for X, it doesn't need the ram of a full workstation.
Come on.
Everyone from Phoenix remebers that it goes: "HoHo!HaHa!HeeHee!HaHa!"
Go ahead and call the 5th largest city in the country a disaster because its in the middle of the desert. You can even make fun of the Good 'Ol Boy sheriff. But never under any circumstances disrespect the greatest TV show of all time!
I volunteer for a school in the Phoenix area that I've set up on a K12LTSP network. The money that we've saved on licensing over the last two years has been enough for us to buy bigger better server hardware and replace most of our CRT monitors with flat panels. Also the time saving of centralized administration and not cleaning windows machines of spyware has been immense.
<shamless_plug> And if you haven't seen it yet, check out k12wincd it may help you with getting students and parents familiar with open source software. I plan on sending every student home with a copy of the CD at the start of next year. </shameless_plug>
Remember, K-12 computer classes should be teaching basic computing concepts (hardware,internet, word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) NOT teaching brand loyalty.
Ahhhh.. Popluous. Wish I had some mod points for you.
I played this first on the SNES. It was one of the first games to come out for it. My favorite thing to do was to build my castles on about 5 levels of altitude. Then when the enemy's base was huge you could cause a flood. Since he only build one level up, you'd drown most his guys all at once. After that he'd try to recover, but I'd send in the knights to finish him off.
Strangely enough for a god game, once you beat the enemy he'd say "well done mortal". Kind of freaked me out the first time he did that. Pretty cool little graphic effect with the Grim Reaper's face for time.
I played the Doom 3 leaked alpha over a year ago on a 32 MB Geforce2 MX with a celeron 400. It wasn't speedy, but it was playable. I'm sure they added quite a bit to the engine since then, but they've had plenty of time to add performance tweaks as well.
Take a look at pricewatch.com, you can get a 128MB Geforce FX for ~50 bucks.
I know. I was thinking about using the gtk# bindings for windows. But its a little bit vapor right now. I can't find anyone using SharpDevelop with the windows Mono. I'll stick with java for my project for the time being.
You know Miguel, you've honestly ticked me off in the past with your anti java sentiment. That said, this is the first time I've seen a post of yours that has some merit.
I've been coding in Java for more than 6 years now, and I guess I've just gotten really comfortable with the language. I've also been using linux for several years now. The last few years has seen good JVMs & IDEs available for linux, so I've kept developing with it.
Recently I've become involved in setting up K12LTSP networks. I started a project that's windows companion CD of software the students will be using at school on linux. I wrote the graphical installer in Java and it took me no time at all. Its XML based and exactly what I wanted. One problem, I have to bundle a vm to make it autorun.
Your mono stuff looks like it can do this and totally open source. I'll have to get use to some new libraries and what not, but if this works out, I'd be really psyched about your project.
Anyway, keep up the good work, and congrats on 1.0 !
Absolutely. But for things like application icons, no raster graphics would be necessary. Just colored polygons. Lighting effects and smoothed surfaces can be caculated. Things can be anti-aliased mathematically. This is no different than SVGs.
true enough. I'm just not sure you'd SVG if you have 3D models for everthing. Most of the SVG stuff I've seen on desktops, while cool, doesn't compare the amount of data in say a player model in Unreal Tournament 2004.
Let's say you have twenty quick-launch icons on your 3D desktop. At most what would those have in terms of polygon count? 100? 200? Now add to that 50 items floating on your desktop. For the sake of argument, none of these should need texture mapping, just colored polys. It wouldn't be apples-to-apples to introduce any raster graphics where SVGs are being used on some desktops currently. Anything better that a TNT2 should have no problem.
I honestly think the processing of the XML for SVGs is probably one of the smaller CPU intesive parts of the process. As bulky and overly verbose as XML can be, most of the icon xml files would be relatively small and the ojbect representations in memory would probably invoke some sort of caching mechanism. Heck, even in Java you can breeze through several megs of xml parsing with something like xerces almost instantly.
Aren't all the 3d models already scalable vector graphics in a sense?
When you move about in 3d space, you are rendering the models with relation to a camera. The actual 2d pixels being displayed are scaled based on the distance and angle of the camera. If the overhead was too high there would never be any OpenGL or DirectX based games. The trick is to only render what's actually viewable to the camera. Also you can use less complex models(lower polygon count) when they are far away enough to not need the detail.
As far as the textures on the models being SVGs... kinda seems redunant when the model could just use the extra memory for that data in a more detailed model. Then again I'm sure someone's found a reason to do such.
Pronouncing a short 'e' as 'ay' is something I've seen many times, but its usually just when someone is butchering a language like Spanish, French, or Italian. Not saying you're wrong, just curious.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this is really getting tiresome...
But I'll take the bait anyway.
Here's a list of 319 games.
And here's another 1400 or so games.
Much less than what's on windows, sure but still way more than enough to get my gaming fix. And this doesn't even count what you may be able to get to work through emulation.
And you think they'll just give you the linux port for free because you own a license of the windows version?
You'd still have to buy the linux version.
More money for them. I'd definetly buy it if it was available.
(irregardless of what fanboys like to say)
So then you have some regard to what fanboys like to say?
Did anbody the original trilogy? I could have sworn Lucas made few million with it.
I always hear that "Han shot first".
Han was the only one to shoot. Therefore he also shot last.
How about "Greedo never fired a shot".
The problem I have with these machines is the absolute garbage onboard video that they come with. They should provide something that can do hardware OpenGL. The onboard one is directX only (though they ship with linux).
Somthing with good DRI drivers would be great, but I be happy if they just had an empty AGP slot, I could at least throw a tnt2 video card on them.
Yay, I get to plug one of my projects again :)
Metal
VS.
Ocean
The openGL feature is really cool.
Any idea if there's a way to turn this on or off programatically?
Having this on the command line is ok, but if someone is using Mesa3d(software openGL on Linux) instead of hardware acceleration, it will be slower than the default rendering path of X11.
Here's a screenshot of my JTurtle application running on accelerated openGL with jdk1.5 and using the new look and feel.
Failing in the embedded hardware space is debateable.
But failing in the web-app space?
You ever hear of JBoss, tomcat, weblogic, Jrun, websphere, jetty, orion, oc4j, resin.. etc?
J2EE is going strong as ever.
Its been years since I've read these, but I'm not sure these would be the best choice for the new movies.
Don't get me wrong, the Timothy Zahn trilogy was incredible. Part 2 & 3 of the series were extremely enjoyable reading, but there's at least two problems I could see with basing VII - IX on these books.
First, the main characters are Han, Luke, and Leia set only five years after Return of the Jedi. Even the geniuses at WETA would have trouble making Harrison, Hamil, and Fisher look 30 years younger.
Second, the books came out when most of us still really loved the Star Wars universe. No one was yet tarnished by Jar-Jar and little orphan Anniekin. The first book in the Zahn trilogy got buy on just the cool factor of being the first book to officially open up the Star Wars universe that was closed for years.
Heir to the Empire(part 1) didn't really have a climax that a movie would need, while Dark Force Rising(#2) and Last Command(#3) definetly had the makings for movies.
Still, I would love to see at least an animated series based on these. I would just hate to see Lucas butcher Timothy Zahn's work.
You're probably right but I don't see why it's that important that Linux is #1 in the world.
If not #1 at least a bigger chunk of desktop market share would be nice. Imagine if linux increased to 25% of desktops. Hardware manufacturers would be crazy not to develop linux drivers. Desktop software manufactures would be much more likely to do native ports.
Unfortunately, the major problem here is that, like it or not, Microsoft DirectX provides a more readily available suite of games APIs for developers than does the cross-platform OpenGL standard and that's probably the biggest thing stopping games companies producing for Linux. Those that do, like ID, can do it because they work in OpenGL in the first place.
What about Nintendo & Sony? They don't exactly use DirectX. Many game companies these days license 3rd party engines that have many rendering paths & input/sound abstraction.
Sure some comapnies use DirectX only, but a huge portion doesn't.
There may be some developments as a result of Linux going into the arcades but it's important to realise that although the Linux OS in these machine is Open Source (it has to be), the games definitely won't be (and don't have to be) so it's not as though you'll be able to play these at home unless a games publisher decides to releases them for home usage.
I don't think any is arguing this point. I have no problem paying for a decent game to play on an open source OS (i bought all but 2 loki games)
Any games exposure for Linux is a good thing but it always boils down to financial concerns in the end and games developers will only release Linux games if they are confident they can make money from it.
And this will make more and more financial sense the more market share linux can take from windows.
Some ports now are just done for the cool factor, or that the developer happen to like using linux.
I agree with you 100%
Also Note that K12LTSP is an easy way to get started with this. It is basically Fedora Core 2 ready to install with all the cool LTSP stuff included.
Just install the distro on a server with 2 Network cards, buy some bootable nics from disklessworstations.com, slap those in the clients, and away you go.
The mailing list and irc channel are also full of helpful people.
I've been using this setup in a school for a couple of years now, and it saved us so much money we were able to replace our CRT monitors with flat panels.
Or you could load freedos onto a small partition on the hard drive, and an etherboot com image in the autoexe.bat.
That way you could still used the floppy & cdrom of the thin client.
Of course you could just run linux and do an X:query, but then you lose the sound support and other cool local device support stuff that the ltsp.org guys are doing.
If the client is really strapped for ram, you could use that HD for a linux swap file as well. Just remeber that its just running a small kernel for X, it doesn't need the ram of a full workstation.
Or better yet, go to Disklessworkstations.com and buy some bootable NICs.
Or even better than that, buy some acutal thin clients from them.
Come on.
Everyone from Phoenix remebers that it goes:
"HoHo!HaHa!HeeHee!HaHa!"
Go ahead and call the 5th largest city in the country a disaster because its in the middle of the desert. You can even make fun of the Good 'Ol Boy sheriff.
But never under any circumstances disrespect the greatest TV show of all time!
Definetly the way to go.
I volunteer for a school in the Phoenix area that I've set up on a K12LTSP network.
The money that we've saved on licensing over the last two years has been enough for us to buy bigger better server hardware and replace most of our CRT monitors with flat panels. Also the time saving of centralized administration and not cleaning windows machines of spyware has been immense.
<shamless_plug>
And if you haven't seen it yet, check out k12wincd it may help you with getting students and parents familiar with open source software. I plan on sending every student home with a copy of the CD at the start of next year.
</shameless_plug>
Remember, K-12 computer classes should be teaching basic computing concepts (hardware,internet, word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) NOT teaching brand loyalty.
Ahhhh.. Popluous. Wish I had some mod points for you.
I played this first on the SNES. It was one of the first games to come out for it.
My favorite thing to do was to build my castles on about 5 levels of altitude. Then when the enemy's base was huge you could cause a flood. Since he only build one level up, you'd drown most his guys all at once. After that he'd try to recover, but I'd send in the knights to finish him off.
Strangely enough for a god game, once you beat the enemy he'd say "well done mortal". Kind of freaked me out the first time he did that. Pretty cool little graphic effect with the Grim Reaper's face for time.
I played the Doom 3 leaked alpha over a year ago on a 32 MB Geforce2 MX with a celeron 400. It wasn't speedy, but it was playable.
I'm sure they added quite a bit to the engine since then, but they've had plenty of time to add performance tweaks as well.
Take a look at pricewatch.com, you can get a 128MB Geforce FX for ~50 bucks.
If only I could afford a graphics card to actually run Doom on :/
What, fifty bucks?
I know. I was thinking about using the gtk# bindings for windows.
But its a little bit vapor right now. I can't find anyone using SharpDevelop with the windows Mono.
I'll stick with java for my project for the time being.
Its not for windows.
GCJ doesn't do awt or swing yet.
I think gcj is a a really cool project, but there doesn't seem to nearly as much momentum as with the mono stuff.
Does kaffe have swing implemented? And a windows port?
You know Miguel, you've honestly ticked me off in the past with your anti java sentiment.
That said, this is the first time I've seen a post of yours that has some merit.
I've been coding in Java for more than 6 years now, and I guess I've just gotten really comfortable with the language. I've also been using linux for several years now. The last few years has seen good JVMs & IDEs available for linux, so I've kept developing with it.
Recently I've become involved in setting up K12LTSP networks. I started a project that's windows companion CD of software the students will be using at school on linux.
I wrote the graphical installer in Java and it took me no time at all. Its XML based and exactly what I wanted.
One problem, I have to bundle a vm to make it autorun.
Your mono stuff looks like it can do this and totally open source. I'll have to get use to some new libraries and what not, but if this works out, I'd be really psyched about your project.
Anyway, keep up the good work, and congrats on 1.0 !
Absolutely.
But for things like application icons, no raster graphics would be necessary. Just colored polygons.
Lighting effects and smoothed surfaces can be caculated. Things can be anti-aliased mathematically.
This is no different than SVGs.
true enough.
I'm just not sure you'd SVG if you have 3D models for everthing.
Most of the SVG stuff I've seen on desktops, while cool, doesn't compare the amount of data in say a player model in Unreal Tournament 2004.
Let's say you have twenty quick-launch icons on your 3D desktop. At most what would those have in terms of polygon count? 100? 200?
Now add to that 50 items floating on your desktop. For the sake of argument, none of these should need texture mapping, just colored polys. It wouldn't be apples-to-apples to introduce any raster graphics where SVGs are being used on some desktops currently.
Anything better that a TNT2 should have no problem.
I honestly think the processing of the XML for SVGs is probably one of the smaller CPU intesive parts of the process. As bulky and overly verbose as XML can be, most of the icon xml files would be relatively small and the ojbect representations in memory would probably invoke some sort of caching mechanism. Heck, even in Java you can breeze through several megs of xml parsing with something like xerces almost instantly.
huh?
Aren't all the 3d models already scalable vector graphics in a sense?
When you move about in 3d space, you are rendering the models with relation to a camera. The actual 2d pixels being displayed are scaled based on the distance and angle of the camera. If the overhead was too high there would never be any OpenGL or DirectX based games.
The trick is to only render what's actually viewable to the camera. Also you can use less complex models(lower polygon count) when they are far away enough to not need the detail.
As far as the textures on the models being SVGs... kinda seems redunant when the model could just use the extra memory for that data in a more detailed model. Then again I'm sure someone's found a reason to do such.
Any idea what language that word is derived from?
Pronouncing a short 'e' as 'ay' is something I've seen many times, but its usually just when someone is butchering a language like Spanish, French, or Italian. Not saying you're wrong, just curious.