Your computer isn't the market they're targetting with their initial rollout. They're targetting the lunatics like myself who have P3 1Ghz's. Also, the GF2Go will probably be their most powerful laptop chipset for a while, as it already drains a few hours off your battery supply.
Re:Loki didn't work, but other things might:
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Buying Windows DirectX games fills Publisher's pockets with money that says "Don't bother to use anything but DirectX, I sure don't care about any platforms besides Microsoft's latest iteration of Windows!".
This is the fact: everytime a Windows game is purchased it makes the Linux gaming platform seem noticably smaller. Because we are fewer in the first place, it has an even bigger dent in what Linux market there is.
Re:Perhaps not, gaming is a business
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm a gamer, I don't buy windows games anymore unless they have native ports. I understand this isn't a widely held view, which probably contributed to the downfall of Loki.
I don't believe we will get any games (or expansions) from Maxis/EA released for Linux first until Maxis develops on Linux first. Or somebody pays them off. I've never played The Sims winelib port, so I cannot comment on the quality directly. However, I understand by way of a third party that is an okay port. From this and my own experiences with the wineX cvs ("Building font metrics, this may take some time..." ugh) don't believe any winelib port can be as good as a true, native port.
Re:Loki didn't work, but other things might:
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 1
Did you miss the part about not buying windows games? Do you really want to extend a hold microsoft has over you? It looks like you want DirectX when there are API's which are much more portable. And it will look this way to developers when you continue to purchase games which rely (in part or in whole) on DirectX.
Did you not notice the games such as Tribes 2 that were ported (with higher quality standards) and released at nearly the same time as the windows version? Not that many of the games take 6 months to port.
I don't believe there is a way to patch cd based distro games easily or permanently.
In any case. Who wants a cd-based distro game besides somebody running windows anyway?
You are correct in your observation that we need Linux exclusive releases. However I think it is more that people are terrified of anything different from Windows, and will assume that anything not exactly the same as Windows is somehow much more difficult to use which prevents them from trying Linux. For instance, Linux had the first SNES emulator with sound, and many folks tried Linux and seemed to feel it was too difficult.
Did you miss the part about not buying windows games?
Windows games DO NOT SUPPORT Linux.
Paying five dollars a month to extend the directx gaming monopoly to our platform is most certainly not supporting Linux.
Re:Delay between Windows and Linux port did them i
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're right, the few users who actually bought Linux games, and kept buying them weren't enough. As far as QuickTime goes, there isn't any native player for the sorenson (which is the popular kind) codec mov files. The only player which is available, is via the 'crossover plugin' which uses wine.
Re:I had hope for Loki Games..
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You mention a number of Libraries and I don't believe they are really that hard to get working. With one exception, MESA/DRI for X4 is extremely frustrating. Nvidia drivers however are cake to install. Most of the commercial games for Linux (http://www.icculus.org/~zakk/gamelist.php?license =commercial)
came with all the required libraries besides GL, which is up to the user or the user's distro to get working.
Re:Entertainment and limited leisure time.
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Honestly, the nvidia drivers are so easy to get set up as long as you already have a reasonably current version of X4.
Re:I'm not really surprised
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is perhaps the most true comment I've seen.
It is almost always free binaries which people want. Not just demanding them, but _Expecting_ them. Perhaps in the end, this kind of attitude from the large majourity of gamers is what killed Loki.
Well, no. The Serious Sam port most likely will not just be the first encounter. Besides that you have some okay points there:)
Re:Delay between Windows and Linux port did them i
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 1
Not _all_ the games came out that much later than their Windows counterparts. Kohan for instance, Tribes 2, Quake 3 (Which many trolls seem to believe came out next year), all came out within a decent amount of time from the Windows release. Anyone who is "Dual-Booting" is the problem, and not the solution. Personally, I own several computers, all run Linux and none have seen Windows in years. Besides this, id chooses to port internally, Loki is not internal to the companies so they usually have to go through the publisher to even get near the game, which for an unproven desktop platform would no doubt involve much time negotiating. To put this to an example, to the best of my knowledge some ports were delayed a lot because the publisher kept holding back on parts of the code/tools. Why they did this (mistakes, many of them?) I don't know. But more often than not, it seems like Loki had no choice in the matter.
Uh, driver problems are most definately your problem. You can blame Loki, but it is purely silly to. In any case the voodoo banshee is/was terribly old and wouldn't have good performance anyway. Besides that, it sounds to me like you kept trying all the wrong things. "Glide v3" sounds distinctly like glide for the voodoo 3. Or, if it was really Glide3x that you were using (which it may be), you should know that it is Glide2x which UT requires. Also, DRI doesn't support Glide2x (on any voodoo hardware), and I don't even know if they have, or ever will, support the banshee at all.
Uh, no.
Loki for instance supported multiple architechtures.
(http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/lokiarchs.
Wine cannot do this as the binaries are all for x86.
Besides that, there is still LinuxGamePublishing (.com), there are still free ports. There will still be kind companies like id that contract out ports.
You can use wine, or vmware, or whatever to install the required pk3's.
The mac version will have an uncompressed file tree so Linux users can just copy the pk3's. (Presumably the installer may also in the future have an option for owning the mac cd).
Or you can buy it from tuxgames (who will presumably have a way to bypass the installshield junk) http://www.tuxgames.com/.
Besides the humour this comment brings one valid point for most folks that don't know Linux: "Why can't I play my games?"
For a good deal of them, you can get free binaries, an open-source port, or at the least, pay for a closed source copy. Even if it means paying twice, at least this time it gets counted as a Linux purchase.
Also, I have 204 and reasons (47 of which are commercial) why you don't need Windows gaming: http://www.icculus.org/~zakk/gamelist.php
To answer the inevitable question of "Well, which games have free ports"
most of these things are answered in a faq: http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/
Anything that isn't answered there is probably answered somewhere else, like linuxgames.com.
After playing around with a couple different compiles,
ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --enable-static,
seemed to disable something that allowed plugins to work properly, at least flash, anyway.
Instead of playing the many flash files I have stored on my local apache, moz popped up a dialog asking if I wanted to download them...
Now on my forth build I will definately be leaving those two out configure options.
Thanks for the other suggestions however, I was unaware you could pass gcc flags to --enable-optimize
Like Fakk2 Kohan Mindrover
And just about everything here.
There really are plenty of non-FPS games available, like Kohan, and Mindrover.
Mindrover isn't really as silly as it sound either.
For the budding mercenery my recommendation is Jagged Alliance 2
No, Don. Hypocrisy is knowing native ports are good, and letting non-native go by as if they're fantastic gifts to our operating system. Anyone who's used one of Corel's wine based 'ports' is aware of the shoddy API emulation going on there. You sir, clearly enjoy arguing about a different subject than the issue at hand: Native ports are good, non-native ones are bad in any situation. TG must be paying you well for supporting them, I know every man has his price. If they aren't paying you, yours seems pretty low.
"Multi Player Node Locked License: $89."
^^^ What I was talking about, you charge even more than I was aware of. I believe it was in the LinuxGames.com comments that someone complained the networking wasn't working (Note that you can't have networking without the working bit).
Then you proceed to charge even more outrageous sums of money, still for the simple original Sim City.
Congratulations Don, you could have been an innovator in these times of bad sales for Linux ports, and yet you choose to be hurting the market with allowing non-native ports under your nose. Thanks for nothing.
Except if you'd bothered to read the parent instead of trolling, you'd see that the poster was previously unaware that such an independent library exists for multi-platform gaming from the start of development.
Of course you don't seem to understand that loki is still releasing games, and Don Hopkins is still charging 80 dollars for a networkable version of sim city (the original) in tcl/tk. I've heard that the networking doesn't work, and 80 dollars is a bit steep for any game. Especially when you can get Sim City 3000 from Loki which isn't using tcl/tk for less. Don Hopkins seems to enjoy lining his pockets and repeating the market speak of native ports being bad so he can draw attention to this fantastic non-native port which is ruining future ports which are actually native, and not emulating a closed source API.
Except you can't patch them, you can't save games, you cant do good copy protection (would you like to enter in the same 20 character key each time you 'boot' this monstrosity?), you can't add new drivers for new hardware, you cant....
It goes on and on, so it's not fun for anything beyond simple arcade games which will run into problems that require patches because the theoretical system of bootable cd games is too new.
It's called SDL, it works on many platforms already including Linux, Windows, PlayStation 2, and more. It should be easy to port to others as well. It's LGPL'd I believe, and documented well.
Slashdot Mirror
Your computer isn't the market they're targetting with their initial rollout. They're targetting the lunatics like myself who have P3 1Ghz's. Also, the GF2Go will probably be their most powerful laptop chipset for a while, as it already drains a few hours off your battery supply.
Buying Windows DirectX games fills Publisher's pockets with money that says "Don't bother to use anything but DirectX, I sure don't care about any platforms besides Microsoft's latest iteration of Windows!".
This is the fact: everytime a Windows game is purchased it makes the Linux gaming platform seem noticably smaller. Because we are fewer in the first place, it has an even bigger dent in what Linux market there is.
I'm a gamer, I don't buy windows games anymore unless they have native ports. I understand this isn't a widely held view, which probably contributed to the downfall of Loki.
I don't believe we will get any games (or expansions) from Maxis/EA released for Linux first until Maxis develops on Linux first. Or somebody pays them off. I've never played The Sims winelib port, so I cannot comment on the quality directly. However, I understand by way of a third party that is an okay port. From this and my own experiences with the wineX cvs ("Building font metrics, this may take some time..." ugh) don't believe any winelib port can be as good as a true, native port.
Did you miss the part about not buying windows games? Do you really want to extend a hold microsoft has over you? It looks like you want DirectX when there are API's which are much more portable. And it will look this way to developers when you continue to purchase games which rely (in part or in whole) on DirectX.
Did you not notice the games such as Tribes 2 that were ported (with higher quality standards) and released at nearly the same time as the windows version? Not that many of the games take 6 months to port.
I don't believe there is a way to patch cd based distro games easily or permanently.
In any case. Who wants a cd-based distro game besides somebody running windows anyway?
You are correct in your observation that we need Linux exclusive releases. However I think it is more that people are terrified of anything different from Windows, and will assume that anything not exactly the same as Windows is somehow much more difficult to use which prevents them from trying Linux. For instance, Linux had the first SNES emulator with sound, and many folks tried Linux and seemed to feel it was too difficult.
Did you miss the part about not buying windows games?
Windows games DO NOT SUPPORT Linux.
Paying five dollars a month to extend the directx gaming monopoly to our platform is most certainly not supporting Linux.
You're right, the few users who actually bought Linux games, and kept buying them weren't enough. As far as QuickTime goes, there isn't any native player for the sorenson (which is the popular kind) codec mov files. The only player which is available, is via the 'crossover plugin' which uses wine.
You mention a number of Libraries and I don't believe they are really that hard to get working. With one exception, MESA/DRI for X4 is extremely frustrating. Nvidia drivers however are cake to install. Most of the commercial games for Linux (http://www.icculus.org/~zakk/gamelist.php?license =commercial)
came with all the required libraries besides GL, which is up to the user or the user's distro to get working.
Honestly, the nvidia drivers are so easy to get set up as long as you already have a reasonably current version of X4.
This is perhaps the most true comment I've seen.
It is almost always free binaries which people want. Not just demanding them, but _Expecting_ them. Perhaps in the end, this kind of attitude from the large majourity of gamers is what killed Loki.
Well, no. The Serious Sam port most likely will not just be the first encounter. Besides that you have some okay points there :)
Not _all_ the games came out that much later than their Windows counterparts. Kohan for instance, Tribes 2, Quake 3 (Which many trolls seem to believe came out next year), all came out within a decent amount of time from the Windows release. Anyone who is "Dual-Booting" is the problem, and not the solution. Personally, I own several computers, all run Linux and none have seen Windows in years. Besides this, id chooses to port internally, Loki is not internal to the companies so they usually have to go through the publisher to even get near the game, which for an unproven desktop platform would no doubt involve much time negotiating. To put this to an example, to the best of my knowledge some ports were delayed a lot because the publisher kept holding back on parts of the code/tools. Why they did this (mistakes, many of them?) I don't know. But more often than not, it seems like Loki had no choice in the matter.
Uh, driver problems are most definately your problem. You can blame Loki, but it is purely silly to. In any case the voodoo banshee is/was terribly old and wouldn't have good performance anyway. Besides that, it sounds to me like you kept trying all the wrong things. "Glide v3" sounds distinctly like glide for the voodoo 3. Or, if it was really Glide3x that you were using (which it may be), you should know that it is Glide2x which UT requires. Also, DRI doesn't support Glide2x (on any voodoo hardware), and I don't even know if they have, or ever will, support the banshee at all.
Uh, no.
Loki for instance supported multiple architechtures.
(http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/lokiarchs.
Wine cannot do this as the binaries are all for x86.
Besides that, there is still LinuxGamePublishing (.com), there are still free ports. There will still be kind companies like id that contract out ports.
It does indeed come down to money, it does not however legitimize piracy.
You can use wine, or vmware, or whatever to install the required pk3's.
The mac version will have an uncompressed file tree so Linux users can just copy the pk3's. (Presumably the installer may also in the future have an option for owning the mac cd).
Or you can buy it from tuxgames (who will presumably have a way to bypass the installshield junk) http://www.tuxgames.com/.
/cg_drawFPS 1
in the console
Besides the humour this comment brings one valid point for most folks that don't know Linux:
"Why can't I play my games?"
For a good deal of them, you can get free binaries, an open-source port, or at the least, pay for a closed source copy. Even if it means paying twice, at least this time it gets counted as a Linux purchase.
Also, I have 204 and reasons (47 of which are commercial) why you don't need Windows gaming:
http://www.icculus.org/~zakk/gamelist.php
To answer the inevitable question of "Well, which games have free ports"
most of these things are answered in a faq:
http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/
Anything that isn't answered there is probably answered somewhere else, like linuxgames.com.
After playing around with a couple different compiles,
ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --enable-static,
seemed to disable something that allowed plugins to work properly, at least flash, anyway.
Instead of playing the many flash files I have stored on my local apache, moz popped up a dialog asking if I wanted to download them...
Now on my forth build I will definately be leaving those two out configure options.
Thanks for the other suggestions however, I was unaware you could pass gcc flags to
--enable-optimize
Like Fakk2
Kohan
Mindrover
And just about everything here.
There really are plenty of non-FPS games available, like Kohan, and Mindrover.
Mindrover isn't really as silly as it sound either.
For the budding mercenery my recommendation is Jagged Alliance 2
No, Don. Hypocrisy is knowing native ports are good, and letting non-native go by as if they're fantastic gifts to our operating system. Anyone who's used one of Corel's wine based 'ports' is aware of the shoddy API emulation going on there. You sir, clearly enjoy arguing about a different subject than the issue at hand: Native ports are good, non-native ones are bad in any situation. TG must be paying you well for supporting them, I know every man has his price. If they aren't paying you, yours seems pretty low.
"Multi Player Node Locked License: $89."
^^^ What I was talking about, you charge even more than I was aware of.
I believe it was in the LinuxGames.com comments that someone complained the networking wasn't working (Note that you can't have networking without the working bit).
Then you proceed to charge even more outrageous sums of money, still for the simple original Sim City.
Congratulations Don, you could have been an innovator in these times of bad sales for Linux ports, and yet you choose to be hurting the market with allowing non-native ports under your nose. Thanks for nothing.
Except if you'd bothered to read the parent instead of trolling, you'd see that the poster was previously unaware that such an independent library exists for multi-platform gaming from the start of development.
Of course you don't seem to understand that loki is still releasing games, and Don Hopkins is still charging 80 dollars for a networkable version of sim city (the original) in tcl/tk. I've heard that the networking doesn't work, and 80 dollars is a bit steep for any game. Especially when you can get Sim City 3000 from Loki which isn't using tcl/tk for less. Don Hopkins seems to enjoy lining his pockets and repeating the market speak of native ports being bad so he can draw attention to this fantastic non-native port which is ruining future ports which are actually native, and not emulating a closed source API.
Except you can't patch them, you can't save games, you cant do good copy protection (would you like to enter in the same 20 character key each time you 'boot' this monstrosity?), you can't add new drivers for new hardware, you cant....
It goes on and on, so it's not fun for anything beyond simple arcade games which will run into problems that require patches because the theoretical system of bootable cd games is too new.
It's called SDL, it works on many platforms already including Linux, Windows, PlayStation 2, and more. It should be easy to port to others as well. It's LGPL'd I believe, and documented well.