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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Carmack on D3 on Linux, and 3D Cards 189

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tons-of-stuff-to-read dept.
drfalken writes "Despite recent reports from id management indicating that releasing for Linux is more trouble than it's worth, John Carmack has reaffirmed his commitment in his recent .plan: "It is still our intention to have a simultaneous release of the next product on Windows, MacOS-X, and Linux." This is his first .plan update for months and coming hot on the heels of his MacWorld Tokyo appearance." Actually this part is secondary after his discussion of 3D cards. Interesting stuff.
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Carmack on D3 on Linux, and 3D Cards More

Carmack on D3 on Linux, and 3D Cards

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  • Unfortunatly, it looks like nVidia has a fast product cycle, they release a new card every 6 months.

    Only in their marketing. If that was really the case, they would have released NV20 6 month ago. Instead they released GeForce 2 Ultra which was more of the same but clocked slightly higher.

    Oh, incidentally, what is the state of Radeon drivers for XFree86? Didn't ATI release the specs for it?
    ___

  • How about a truly great, cross-platform compiler [openwatcom.org].

    Not that I'm biased or anything...;-)

  • If graphics don't matter, why is Blizzard spending so much damn time on trying to make Warcraft 3 look pretty? id's games have NEVER ceased to amaze, and I disagree completely that they are not an innovative company. Wolfenstein 3D had excellent replay value? Yeah, because every level looked the exact same (which is fine for the time), so you could, in essence, play the exact same thing over and over and over without noticing you weren't getting anywhere... look what they have done since then. Played Half-Life? Played ANY other action game in the last four years? The majoritiy of them use variations of Quake engines... THAT is the trademark of a truly amazing company. -Andy
  • The UT guy's name is Tim Sweeney, if I spell that right ;)
    I'm not exactly sure if he did the initial port to linux.
  • Well, there are sound APIs, and MS has DirectPlay which helps with network code and apparently offers voice over IP. And of course there's Direct3D as alternative to OpenGL.
  • In all these instances the Windows2000 answer could have included a reboot as well.

    I can't seem to understand where people's hatred for Win2K comes from, especially when they haven't used it. It's not *nix but there's no need to reboot after *any* of these tasks, as well as network configuration changes, disk formats, re-partitions, software installation. In fact, many programs that claim you need to reboot after installation can be ignored, the software will work.

    I get good, multi-week uptimes on my Win2K at home. In fact, I move my computer around more often then I 'need' to reset.

    I'm not saying that Win2K is the cure all, the best OS on the market, bla bla bla. I'm just saying that it's not the demon you make it out to be.

    -- jedrek


    -- polish ccs mirror [prawda.pl]
  • you christians aren't going to do shit. We pagans are going to visit each and every christian home in america and abort all possible future christians to help purge this backward idealism called christianity.

    and then whatever christians are left over will be forced to build pyramids glorifying the wonders of abortion ;)
  • Maybe UT2 will be better, but graphically UT certainly doesn't match q3a. Plus I can't strafe jump in UT :).
  • As far as I knew, Nvidia are using commercial technology in the chipset and drivers that they do not own the intellectual property on. Nvidia have to license this technology, from the relevant third parties. To open the sources, this would require Nvidia to buy the rights to the intellectual property. Why bother do this, when it already costs them enough to get the use of the technology. It does not make commercial sense to do this. It is a pity that this is the case, but such is life. Maybe they could encapsulate the proprietary stuff in a small binary, and put as much as possible into the open section? More than they do already..
  • The economic situation - maybe so. However, I know for a fact this is one of the primary reasons so many computing fans have NOT migrated to *nix systems - in the realm of good 3D support and games, Linux (unfortunate as it may be), simply gets skunked by my version of Windows 98 (icky!). New developments (at any rate) with Linux gaming is very exciting and is just the chance for many, many people (as myself) to stop pirating copies of Windoze 98, etc. and get a real OS.
  • Someone set us up the bomb!
  • That many? I'm glad I live in good old Atheist England.
  • Flexibility has the feature it can be configured any number of ways. Standardization has the feature that each system is the same in behavior and configuration. Both of these are useful and have their place.

    Because the way Unix was designed, it is designed to be as open and flexible as possible. "Everything is a file" and "tools built on other tools" design makes for a powerful environment that unfortunately means that it may spawn a million different designs(how many ways can you manipulate a file?). Windows seems to be a highly structured and standard environment which unforunately means you sacrafice a lot of free formed design to fit in "the box". Heck they make their money off of ISVs banking on this.

    Neither is particularlly good or bad but it is "inefficient" to make Linux "more standard". In essence the power of Linux and other Unix environments is the lack of "rules".

    I would rather see id and other make sane and flexible programs than have them waste their time running around making sure everyone follows some "Linux Game Platform Driver API".
  • I agree on the "comfy" front.

    Nvidia could be dethroned, but I am afraid its not very likely. I am a Matrox User myself (G400 Max, Dual Head) and yes, the 2D is great, but I am a Gamer/*Nix user, and I am kind of left with a dichotomy. I don't much like ATI, primarily because of their driver situation (and past experience). Matrox I like because of their open drivers and dual-head. Nvidia makes wicked fast cards, but you are tied to closed drivers (which I really dislike.)

    I am really left in the lurch like this. I don't want to buy a GeForce 3 when it comes out, not because it won't be any good, but because I doubt that the drivers will be open. I am one of the people that believes in voting with my dollars. Whenever there is a Linux game that also has a windows version, I always buy the Linux version. I bought Matrox because Nvidia did a 180 on their "open drivers" situation.

    I just wish more of us voted like this.
  • I dunno. Loki [lokigames.com] seems to have done pretty well, as had ID (Marketing blunders aside). And if a game writer uses SDL [libsdl.org] that really eases the programmer's problems and handles most of the cross-platform headaches and compatibility issues for them. They can even include SDL in with their game if they want (It's less than 400k for the Linux library).

    Getting games running on Linux is fscking easy. The tough part is getting people over the it-isn't-windows-it's-too-hard syndrome that holds so many of them back.

  • Re:Competition? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What strikes me as crazy is all the mac gamers who want the nVidea G-Force 2 for their macs - yet the ATI Radeon (esp. at high resolutions), which they've had available to them a lot longer is a better card. nVidia is doing so well because it's got the mindshare. People who want a good gaming machine think nVidia - regardless of whether it's the best solution. More power to them.
  • Hrm... Nowhere Steve said that DOOM will be Mac-first... He said that the GeForce 3 will be.
    And DOOM was first presented on MacWorld Tokyo.
    And it's pretty cool.

  • Re:Releasing on Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "apparently Linux has a bigger market share than Apple now." Yeah baby. I want Q3A for my 486 IP MASQ box...

  • Why not one box? (Score:3)

    by CiaranMc ( 149798 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:14AM (#402442)
    I wonder if the economics of the situation could be improved by at least packaging the Win and Linux versions together, and maybe the Mac version too? I can't imagine the number of CDs inside the box makes that much difference to the shelf price.

    -Ciaran
  • As much as this pains me:
    READ.
    The point was that neither Jobs nor Gates actually writes code. Just like I don't. You doofus.

    We all know Gates is Dr. Evil and Steve is only in it for the "purty of the art." Or hot Portman grits. Or whatever.
  • Although you generalize on many points, I think your statements are a well intentioned reminder about the downside to the Linux culture. I'm all for free software and I use a lot of it, but I can't imagine taking the position that all software should be free (as in beer).
  • Oh, man this was something like 9 years ago...

    I had Win 3.1 on the desktop at work and when we got internet access, we had a single-disk upgrade to add TCP connectivity. If I remember the label correctly, it was an upgrade to 3.11.

    Another post to mod down... :)

  • They don't. That's why I put the disclaimer at the end. The point I was making is that saying that Linux is hard to use is bull. I'm going to install Mandrake 7.2 with the KDE 2.1 upgrade for my dad, because he's curious about it and I'd to like to be able to answer questions with something other than 'you need to reinstall Windows'.
  • It took my a couple of hours of rebooting and retrying until it got to the partition screen, where it didn't recognise that the disk was already partitioned. I tried to put it on my second drive but the installer was having none of it. So I had to back up all my Linux data and start again. After another hour of annoyance I got to the partition screen, set up the W2K partition and off it went without further ado. As a desktop it is fine, (although I've had a couple of random crashes), but their installer needs work. It's not demonic, but it's rather pathetic that Microsoft have taken 25 years to produce a reasonable OS, and this has a lot to do with competition from Linux.

  • ...So what's the question?


    Quality without creativity is pompous; creativity without quality is infantile.

  • The people that refuse to pay for Linux software are very often those that refuse to pay for Windows software too. Can you say #warez?

    I don't agree. The #warez crowd aren't in it for any sort of "ideological" reasons - it's just a way to get software for free. For some it even seems to be a collector's mania. Your average warez collector probably only regularly uses 5% of the software he has.

    The "everything-should-be-GPL'd" people on the other hand wouldn't run Windows at all in the first place.

  • Re:Competition? (Score:3)

    by andr0meda ( 167375 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @03:47AM (#402450) Journal

    I think Matrox is a sitting duck waiting to be hit soon. 2D rawpixel performance is what 3dfx was good at, and nVidia is keeping that brandname and technology alive as well, so I suppose they have more plans for 3dfx and it`s strategy. ATI is much stronger than Matrox, because they can rely on the OEM market which is allways tough to dig into once relationships are going. They also allready have a retail history, and know how to build 3d cards for, so they have the best angle to play nVidia. I hope the can put the pressure on.

    But I agree on the self-marketting stragety of nVidia, as you pointed out. The recent Xbox deal must sound like a dream to nVidia`s PR management.
  • QNX has been around for years, not months.
  • and podbots [nuclearbox.com] and goldeneye or action [telefragged.com] mods work well
    and remember that the number one reason for "HL on linux failure" is mesa librairies conflicting with newer librairies.
  • Amen to that my brother. I just bought Quake, yes thats Quake I, for my Linux box because it runs fine in an xterm. And actually it plays very well in a full screen xterm except the mouse stuff sucks.

    I may be a software genius but I'm without clue WRT video cards and drivers and the like, and I don't have a month to search the web for obsure howto's on getting my card to run in openGL mode, or whatever. So come on ya open source zealots, make the process a little easier and they will come. Oh yeah, I need to formally apologize to the KDE people. I have been using KDE 2.0 for a week now and I have to say I like it. They de-klunked it and it actually looks a lot better than the crappy 1.0 did. So, ahem, I Bob Abooey am formally endorsing both Gnome and KDE. Thank you.


    Yours,
  • According to Apple [apple.com] it costs $599.00.

    "I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"

  • On the contrary, I've been using my Radeon for 3D under linux for close to the past two months. Aside from a problem with sourceforge's CVS server (which caused the problems with compiling) there haven't been any problems for me.

    Ranessin
  • I was realy impressed by the graphics details that were presented at MacWorld in Tokyo, but I remember you mentioned that these animation loops were created using Maya.
    Now, I know that you switched to Maya to get a better performance and quality, but what did you mean by "created" - was the presentation rendered real-time on the stage, or pre-rendered using Maya at your studios?

    And, If pre-rendered, Is it possible to create such graphics level with a GeForce 3 and a 'standart' PC, as for today ?

    I like work. I can sit and watch it for hours.
  • What you say?
  • I suspect it is a tiny minority of Linux users who will refuse to pay for software on principle.

    Most Linux users are much more pragmatic than that, which I suspect is the real reason Linux games do poorly. The vast majority og Linux users also have a MS Windows partition, and they will buy the game for the platform where they first see it, and where there are least trouble installing it.

  • You've proven your ignorance by calling the nVidia drivers a "commercialized proprietary non-open source X11 server." The Server being used is open source and from XFree86. The driver itself, however, is commecial, proprietary, and non-open source.

    Ranessin

  • TRUTH (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26, 2001 @07:54AM (#402460)
    All your Cacodemon are belong to us.
  • You can order them from www.lokigames.com.

  • Because many cards now support hw accelerated OpenGL. Can the same be said for Quesa?

    Ranessin

  • Linux hurdle (Score:3)

    by Rader ( 40041 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @07:55AM (#402463) Homepage
    Does anyone have any ideas what development tools could be used to help cross platform development? Of course, I'm not suggesting some Java applet blazing at 1 mph, but with Borland's recent release of Kylix, there seems to be some higher-level tools available. What about the low level code written for speed. What about engines? How are the engines rewritten anyways for multiple platforms?

    Rader

  • That's why he donates so much cash to the FSF.
  • I hope they keep the missile launcher... I lived for that thing.... idspispopd ....
  • All I said was that, because of that last post, you're going there. Unless of course, I'm not talking to the same person, in which case, feel free to believe whatever that little, deluded mind of yours leads you to believe. It's your reality, not mine.
  • Having had a lot of work done with the q3a experience I think that a lot of the problems have been identified, and when you know tha problem, it is quicker to solve them. Here's hoping!
  • According to a conference call with Nvidia's Tony Tamasi, director of product management, it will be pretty even. Read about it here [insidemacgames.com].

    The relevant part is the second page. He says:

    We have done some comparisons cross-platform and the Macintosh does very, very well. In fact, for a lot of applications, particularly applications that we tend to like at NVIDIA, which we call graphics limited applications, the Macintosh is equal in performance related to the PC platform for a lot of those applications.

    So typically those would be applications that are running at medium to higher resolutions and have anti-aliasing turned on and/or are making extensive use of our graphics processors. To the extent that applications do that, in other words, the load of the graphics processor, then it puts less of the load on the host CPU and therefore less pressure on pure CPU Mhz.

    IÕm sure thereÕs going to be cases that come up where the PC might be fasterÉa 1.5 gigahertz PC might be faster than a Macintosh. But I know there are cases where the Macintosh is actually faster than the PC as well. ItÕs just one of those things that your mileage varies based on the application. But thereÕs no major performance delta between the two, particularly for graphics-centric types of applications.

  • As long as mavericks like Carmack don't get bought up by JobsGates they can continue to develop in linux. I don't see Steve or Bill coding a damn thing these days.

    These geeks code. The geeks buy games. The geeks drive game software / hardware market.

    I think the suits are at a loss here.
    Thank god.

  • Nothing personal, but I cannot disagree more.

    I run two machines at home - the primary machine being my Mandrake 7.1 box that I do 99% of everything (graphics editing, document writing, file sharing) on. The other machine, the P-800 "big boy", is Windows 98, and serves one purpose and one purpose alone:

    It runs games.

    Now granted, I'm a very serious gamer, writing walkthroughs, trying out the latest software, etc, etc, etc. And I don't claim to be any Linux guru at all - I just like the stability of the operating system (when editing 500+ 1 MB JPEG files, it comes in handy, even on a system with half the power of the Windows box).

    Recently, I was working on a Linux based review, where I wanted to get Quake 3 running on a Voodoo 5500 card, and review the various distributions on how long it took me.

    Long story short: never happened. I couldn't even get the game to run. My fault? Probably - I admit that. I'm not experienced enough in Linux to understand what went wrong.

    But games are an important test of an operating systems capabilities - both for how "user friendly" the operating system is, and on how "powerful" the same system is. If the "ordinary user" can't install a game on their box without having to mess with xfree86 configuration files - forget it. With a Windows box, you throw in the Voodoo 5500, slap in the CD-ROM for drivers, and you're done. Quake 3 running in a few minutes in glorious 1024x768 death.

    And I'd say we need those ordinary users to make Linux a hit on the desktop. Just because people can run games won't sully the server end of Linux. If anything, if suits who pick up Reader Rabbit for Linux for their kids can see how well it runs (especially when the kids can log into their own sessions so the suit's porn collection doesn't get messed with), it makes it that much more likely to get installed into the workplace. All of the neato configuration files can lurk beneath the surface for us "power users" to tweak if we want, but if somebody wants to change their resolution in X-Windows without going through a gigantic hassle, then let them.

    My personal dream is to have every machine in the building I work in, every desktop, server, or otherwise, running Linux to I can fix them remotely if I need to, or just rely on a stable operating system. But do to that, I have to win over the "normal" users - and to do that, they need their games.

    Just my opinion. I could be wrong.
    John "Dark Paladin" Hummel

  • Windows has plenty of games, and no one thinks it's "frivolous" (well, except for some zealots...)

    Face it, entertainment drives the computer market. Or do you think that those 3d cards and gigahertz processors are for Excel?

    Sure, we need to get our work done, and big jobs demand big iron in the server department. But we also need some Quake.

    And lastly, not every gamer is a "lame AOL'er". It's completely groundless speculation to underrate someone's technical skills simply because they like some Quake every now and then.
  • U. Existentialist wrote: "The sort of person who installs an OS purely because of the games available for the platform is just the sort of person that Linux should be shunning now as it always has in the past. The last thing Linux needs is an unearthly invasion of AOLers, which would surely destroy it as a serious platform."

    Bah! :)

    Actually, if enough AOLers wanted to use Linux, remember, people who use AOL (my mom, and a lot of other people) are willing to pay $20 dollars a month for ease of use, simplicity, etc. Multiply by how many such people there are (and we all want ease of use, it's just that people can define it in very different terms), and divide by the number of distributions who would really like to make money selling to those people, multiply by a fraction which represents how much of that money could be funneled into R&D, UI work, etc, and ... I see some nice effects possible :)

    "It has been greatly to the advantage of Linux that games have been unavailable on it. This has given it a serious reputation. Look at wjhat happened to Amiga and Workbench - the fact that the Amiga was primarily a gaming platform killed it in the business market."

    OK, you gotta be kidding, right?! :) I'll concede that may have been a factor in the decision making of a few PHBs, but probably also one which got Amigas onto a lot of desks in the first place. Tough choices sometimes, but no one was *forced* to play games (or edit video, or track MIDI, etc, etc) on them :)

    It's to no one's advantage when a certain class of software (and "games" is pretty broad) is unavailable for a certain OS; if you really wanted 'serious' perhaps we could replace all the games that come with distros now with ... actuarial tables, chemistry tutorials and first-aid instructions with graphic pictures.

    Besides, Linux doesn't have to "welcome [anyone] to its fold" -- they can just come in for a while, dork around, leave some (GPL, as appropriate) code the way Carmac has, check what's in the fridge and drive away.

    timothy


  • I bet this new "GeForce 3" card will cost around 400$-500$.

    Later
    Erik Z
  • Most EULAs require you to have multiple licenses even if you are not running the software as simultanious instances. If you install the same software more than once, you are generally violating whatever click-I-agree-license came with said software. It all comes down to the EULA itself. There are all sorts. However, I do know that you have to have a license for each installed instance of any Microsoft product, or one all-incompasing site license. I belive that my advice to you would be to learn all the catch phrases that are hidden within most EULAs and from that point on, you can just scan the EULAs of future software.
  • Press the right or left button twice. Automatic strafe jump in UT.

  • Re:Question to JC about the video (Score:5)

    by jimdose ( 213418 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @12:09PM (#402479)
    When I originally discussed what features we wanted in the animation system with the animator, I suggested adding controls for parametric facial animation, and he was basically horrified. His response was that he could do a much better job by hand. "This (animation) is what I do.", he said. After seeing the results of what he can accomplish by hand, I tend to agree.

    I've looked into the research that's been done on parametric facial animation, and while it's impressive, I haven't seen anything that approaches the quality that an animator can do by hand. Even when the set of expressions it uses are manually created, the expressiveness doesn't compare to the subtlety an animator can put into it.

    While the generality of a parametric system would be great for generating massive amounts of facial animation, as well as animation for dynamic content (such as net-based voice communication), if the animator is willing and able to handle to workload, I am more than happy to stick with hand animation. The technical challenge would be quite enjoyable, but in the end, I'll take a limited amount of high quality hand animation over an unlimited quantity of mediocre computer generated animation.

    Jim Dosé
    id Software
  • Have you tried Loki's newsgroups? There have always been helpful people there (Loki employees and others) when I've been stuffed.

  • Re:Inevitable in multiplayer (Score:3)

    by e_n_d_o ( 150968 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @11:11AM (#402484)
    I've got an Athlon with a GeForce2, running RedHat 7.

    Steps to play Quake3 from box with blank hard drive.

    Install Red hat 7.
    Install XFree86 drivers from NVidia's site:

    rpm -ivh foo.rpm bar.rpm

    Modify a specific line of /etc/X11/XFree86-4.conf (NVidia is very clear about how to do this... it is slightly annoying) though.

    Install Quake3.

    Play Quake3 and enjoy 90+ FPS just like the windows folks do (if you don't believe it, look at how good NVidia's linux drivers are at http://www.tomshardware.com)

    This is easier than reformatting and reinstalling everything on a fresh Windows ME box when Microsoft MechWarrior 4 blows up slightly after startup because it didn't like something about the DirectX 8 that was installed. I wish all games ran on Linux, it's easier to learn to use Linux than spend hours reformatting Windows every time something goes wrong.
    ---

  • SDL & OpenGL (Score:3)

    by Tord ( 5801 ) <tord,jansson&gmail,com> on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:22AM (#402486) Homepage
    Use OpenGL for the 3D and SDL (www.libsdl.org) for everything else and you have the game easily portable between Windows, Linux, MacOS, BeOS, FreeBSD, Solaris and IRIX. SDL works perfectly in tandem with OpenGL.


    Seriously, I'm a game developer myself (more than 7 years experience of game programming and project management) and after having looked at SDL I find that it contains nearly everything that anyone would need in terms of high performing hardware abstraction for a cross platform tripple A title.

    There is also a promising alternative in ClanLib (www.clanlib.org), but I haven't tried that myself.

  • I agree (but not necessarily with the CW bit)! I was reading the Visual C++ Developers Journal... it was pushing .net so heavily. They had a whole article on managed arrays in C++. It was using re-invent-the-wheel-and-lock-you-into-MSFT-tech .net classes. What the hell happened to the STL? It already has lots of classes to do this! I worked on a project last summer and the core code was ported to the Mac. Some things (e.g. initialisation) needed to be platform specific. Most of it ported directly with just compiler differences needing to be fixed. The STL made it easy.
  • "The sort of person who installs an OS purely because of the games available for the platform is just the sort of person that Linux should be shunning now as it always has in the past."

    This means that I should be shunned, as I keep Windows just to play games. I would like to be able to ditch it though.
    Windows is a games-platform, but business users does NOT ignore it (though on servers, perhaps they should).
    Image is all about marketing. Having games DOES NOT mean that Linux will be marketed solely as a "gaming platform". Businesses have heard about Linux, they know it is Unix-like. Unix is serious. This will not change just because there are some games available.
    The only viable argument AGAINST games, would have to be that this would make the platform more widespread among newbies, and thus making virus-spreading easier.
    Amiga was killed because of lousy marketing, and weak focus on the business-users.
    I find it amusing that you use Amiga and Atari as PROOF, without even mentioning Windows and MacOS, which are both alive.
  • I have a G400 Max DualHead on my Windows box, too - it's a good card that can even game pretty well (for mere mortals like myself who get no benefit from 900fps Quake III). My Linux box has a 3Dfx 3000, and the newest nVidia card I have is an old TNT. That's because of the driver issue.

    What's interesting here is that I remember when Matrox was the whipping boy because they were aggressively closed-source, as was ATI. Today, ATI at least offers some support to the developer community, and Matrox has become a model citizen, relatively speaking.

    Meanwhile, nVidia has closed what they did have open previously. Ironic, eh?

    - -Josh Turiel

  • I'll take a limited amount of high quality hand animation over an unlimited quantity of mediocre computer generated animation.

    That makes a lot of sense, particularly for animating human faces. I would imagine that it's true that an animator can do a lot more than an automated system.

    But it occurs to me that perhaps both systems have their place, and it doesn't have to be a one or the other situation. For a human face, small imperfections are going to be noticed. But what about facial expressions on monsters? I would say that you have much more forgiveness on some ghoul's face than on a regular human face, particularly since you probably need to exaggerate expressions anyway when the face is usually so distorted.

    Obviously there is only so much time for new features, but I wonder if the concept can be extended to a general "deformation scripting system". You could define names for particular features (corresponding to facial features in the case of a face), which are bound to particular points on the model. Then a scripting language could manipulate the symbols, and particular scripts would manipulated them for various expressions. The system could manage moving from one expression script to another.

    Once you had something like that, you could possibly extend it to things like muscle contractions or flexing.


    --

  • I have no idea why everyone claims to have such trouble installing 2k, I've done it personally a half dozen times and know people who have done another dozen, the SINGLE issue was on an ancient machine with a hard drive fubared by EZ-BIOS. That's it.

    -----------------------

  • Re:Releasing on Linux (Score:3)

    by Delphis ( 11548 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:32AM (#402511) Homepage
    The people that refuse to pay for Linux software are very often those that refuse to pay for Windows software too. Can you say #warez?


    --
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Linux Q3A outsell the Mac OS version by a fair margin? I don't really see why there was any concern for the future of id games for Linux.

    Also, as far as I know, Carmack actually built the inital Linux port. Loki published and maintains it. (And has been helping others port as well... such as Richard Hess's SGI IRIX port).

  • Re:Releasing on Linux (Score:3)

    by B14ckH013Sur4 ( 234255 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:37AM (#402516)
    OK, I'll bite...
    Apache can be produced under the open-source model, things like games cannot - you cannot get graphic and sound artists to work for free...
    First of all, who said you had to work for free for Free Software? I know a lot of people at Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, contrib.net, and even /. who are getting paid to produce Free Software; and that's only to name a few.
    Secondly, to answer your comment on games in particular, let's see, GLTron is a good, light-weight one to start with; it's hours of pure joy wrapped in a 1.2Mb GPL'd package. Getting into the heavier projects, Parsec (Free as in Beer) looks extremely promissing and will be included in future RH releases, among others.
    There's also the much-anticipated Crystal Space 3D engine and SDKs, almost to a first release, and looking incredible; I've been looking to port TacOps to it for a Free Software alternative to my favorite Unreal Tounament MOD.
    That's just a couple examples off the top of my head, a quick look at http://sourceforge.net/foundry/games/ would probably be very informative for you!
  • Sounds about right, at least for that exact job. Though Steve Jobs was an actual engineer at Atari for over a year and actually did do some decent work when he actually felt like working. Later, in the early Apple days he often said "I don't do digital" and "I don't to analog" (whichever fit the specific situation) to avoid engineering work. Not that it mattered much, Woz was truly the brains of the operation, with some cool help later on by an assortment of engineering icons (John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Randy Wigginston, and others). My favorite Randy quote was "Jobs brought back this brand new disk drive. I was soon writting a Disk Operating System even though I didn't even know what in the hell that was".
  • ...animators are not engineers. I don't think they fully understand the importance of not re-inventing the wheel in a software environment. Not the ones I have met anyway. Instead, artsy people tend to think that more automation means less quality and, above all, less work for artsy people. More often than not, the opposite is true.

    I feel that parametric would be better because the tools to automatically generate facial expressions would open up a lot of new possibilities and bring more life to the game (especially mods), at zero marginal cost.

    I don't care if it doesn't look perfect. I want id and mod-makers to be able to play voice .wavs in the game without thinking: "this would be cool, but it requires too much animation work so we gotta scrap it".

    Would half-life have had such a strong and immersive plot without facial animation at no cost? I don't think so.

    The animator wouldn't become obsolete with this! He could perfect the parametric system by doing different sets of expression templates like "scream", "normal", "whisper", "shout", "zombie", "deamon" etc, that could be used depending on model, situation or sound pitch, without losing the main generality of the system.
  • That's funny, since for Quake 3 Steed finally broke down and used motion capture.
  • When Neverwinter Nights AND the newest ID fps are both available for linux, I will buy them both and eliminate my windows partition forever.

    Bryguy
  • Perhaps because it's true. I had a hell of a job installing it, despite having installed various Linux distros and BeOS without a hitch. Not a very auspicious start for Microsoft's most reliable OS to date.
  • Hello

    I'm the president of LILUG. I noticed this too on a discussion on our mailing list. I for one, have bought lots of Loki Games but many of our LUG Members don't. So what do I do? I buy games and give em away at the meetings. Once people see that shrink wrapped box and the quality inside, they are at Loki's site buying more.

    Give it a whirl in your LUG.

  • There are a couple of solutions to this:

    1) put multiple versions in the same box. The datafiles are the same. We're not talking about adding that many more bytes to the disc.

    If that is a problem for some reason, fine. Let the Linux user buy the Win32 version and download the binaries.

    2) Sell the linux version online. My q3a tin sits on the bookshelf collecting dust. What a waste.

    Yeah, it'd be a pain and a bandwidth hog to download some new huge game but it seems like it would ultimately increase profits for the developer. They can charge the same price and don't have to outlay anything for packaging.

  • I don't recall Jobs ever even claiming to code... aside from maybe an Apple or Pixar reference -- "we've been working hard".

    AFAIK, the last time Jobs did any actual coding/designing was when he worked for Atari in the pre-Apple era. I belive his last project was "breakout" (the block game) with Woz... which leads to another story of how he kept more than his share of the paycheck...

  • Linux needs to stop fragmenting (Score:5)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:46AM (#402540) Homepage

    One of the reasons why Linux is so hard to support is that every distribution of Linux has a different set of standards. They have different directories to put config files in, and different formats for the config files. Distros come with different versions of libraries, some which break binary compatibility between versions. Different shells and window managers make it difficult to help a user install or configure something.

    Linux distros need to start following some set of standards, mainly configuration standards that will allow people to help new users better at installing libraries and configuring the system. Until then, Linux is just fighting with itself and preventing commercial software from coming in.

  • John Carmack. The guy is not only an OpenGL god, but has also almost single handedly written multiple amazing 3D engines. For multiple platforms. While having time to help opensource GL drivers at the same time. And keeping us updated. And making public speeches. The guy can't even be human!

    But then I can't help but wonder, how many other "John Carmacks" are out there. Developers that really know their stuff and aren't tied to one platform. The ones we never really hear about, the ones that are quiet and contributing around the clock. I can rattle off the names of 6 folks at id, but can't even think of a single person that worked on Unreal/UT.

  • Re:Lokigames (Score:3)

    by kyz ( 225372 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:47AM (#402542) Homepage
    I'd love to see more of my fave games released for Linux, esp. Half Life.

    The Linux Half-Life HOWTO [linuxgames.com] will show you how to play Half-Life flawlessly using WINE [winehq.com]. Now, if only I could get my graphics libraries in order under Debian, perhaps I could actually get their WINE package to work and actually play Half-Life, which I bought on Saturday!

  • Re:Competition? (Score:3)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @09:13AM (#402543) Homepage Journal
    Part of the problem is where the companies focus their attention. Of the remaining Big Three (ATI, nVidia, and Matrox), nVidia is the only one who actively markets their chipsets to J.Random Cardmaker. 3Dfx started out in the same business as nVidia, then made the fatal mistake of buying a card maker (STB), and trying to leverage the manufacturing plant and distribution channel into selling 3Dfx-branded cards instead of letting others do the work for them.

    It must have seemed like a compelling argument to the 3Dfx management at the time - why sell chipsets for around $30 to a manufacturer who then gobbles up the real profit, when we can control all the money ourselves? What they failed to anticipate was that a few things would all converge to crush the life out of 3Dfx as a result:

    1- nVidia would dramatically ramp up their product line and take over the performance title.

    2- People would start clamoring for 32-bit video before 3Dfx could deliver.

    3- Competitive pressures would knock the bottom out of the low-end and midrange video card markets - no profit margin left. And 3Dfx didn't make it into that space in time.

    4- Brand-building gets expensive - nVidia doesn't have to advertise at all, really. The card makers who buy nVidia chips do it for them. ATI doesn't have to advertise as much - the retail product is only a piece of the business, they do a ton of OEM. And Matrox has the 2D performance ("business") market locked up pretty well - they aren't playing too heavily in the 3D world.

    So with all that figured in, 3Dfx, when the dust settled, had:

    A shrinking retail presence.
    No significant OEM business.
    And no 3rd party card manufacturers to consume the chips.

    Each of the remaining players plays to a different niche now - that's why there's still room for three big players. ATI has their All-in-one retail products and the OEM channel, Matrox has 2-D and dual-head for the mainstream Windows market, and nVidia has all the Taiwanese board makers and the gamers market.

    The nice thing is that all these companies have to stay on their toes, because one of their competitors could invade at any time. Remember, ATI took a pretty big bite out of everyone when Radeon came out, only to have nVidia make up for it with GeForce 2. Matrox is always rumored to be coming up with super-fast stuff in the labs. So anyone could dethrone nVidia in the future - it's just right now nVidia's sitting fat and happy. They just can't afford to get too comfy up there.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • Probably quite true. And even with Mac OS X I doubt Apple will gain any server ground. Not without "real" servers with hotswapable components and ECC RAM. A "real" server enclosure would be nice too.

    I know of quite a few folks that use Linux as their desktop workstations in very non-Linux environments, such as high performance computing centers filled with SGI Origins, IBM SPs, and huge Alpha beasts. Aside from the Darwin Suns (Ultras 5 and 10) and maybe the Ultra 60, there really are no affordable "real unix" workstations. A linux box with a couple of gfx cards an a pair of monitors works great for that desktop of 8 xterms, netscape, and xemacs. An SGI Octane or Sun Ultra would really be overkill when the real work is going on in the big iron anyway.
  • "Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, contrib.net, and even /. "

    Is even one of these companies profitable?

    If they aren't profitable, how long do you think this gravy train is going to last?

  • There is a reasonable-sized market for Mac games, and apparently Linux has a bigger market share than Apple now.

    for servers sure, but desktop machines? you're dreaming. Apple's marketshare cleanly dwarfs Linux on the desktop from all data i've ever seen. let's face it: Linux is not the machine of your average gamer. perhaps it should be, but it's not, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

    - j

  • Release != box on shelf (Score:4)

    by Matt Lee ( 2725 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @07:59AM (#402555) Homepage
    I think there was never an issue with making a linux version. They just stated that the economics of putting a linux version box on the shelf are not that good.

  • Re:Question to JC about the video (Score:5)

    by John Carmack ( 101025 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @02:11PM (#402556)
    We don't have any technology specifically directed towards character features. The animation was done pretty conventionally in Maya.

    Our new animator comes from a film background, and we are finding that the skills are directly relevent in the new engine.

    John Carmack
  • It'll certainly be fun to see how well each operating system fares in terms of performance. To my knowledge, this is the first time a game has been simultaneously released for both MacOS, Windows, and Linux that has been designed from the ground up for each OS (No x-windows etc...).

    I wonder if the Windows version will maintain it's speed advantage?

  • Competition? (Score:3)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @07:59AM (#402559) Homepage
    What worries me (and Carmack it seems) is the lack of competiton. The only viable competition to nVidia right now is ATI. I really like Matrox as a company (especially their policy on drivers and open source), and have been quite lukewarm towards nVidia due to the driver situation. (Now that they have purchased 3Dfx, maybe they will open the drivers?)

    Unfortunatly, it looks like nVidia has a fast product cycle, they release a new card every 6 months. I fear that in a year there will only be one graphics card company. Sure, Matrox and ATI will still be around in the OEM market, but the 3D world will belong to nVidia. That is not good for Linux users, and worse for BSD users.

    Here is hoping someone else has something hiding in the wings.
  • I'm so glad. I enjoyed q3 for linux a great deal, at least up until the 1.27g patch -- which has horked up my video a fair bit, and email to Loki went unanswered. Also, with X 4.0.2+, getting it running ought to be a great deal easier -- I needed a special 3dFX written X server -- not that shouldn't be necessary.

    I wouldn't normally have played q3 at all -- I bought it only because of the penguin sticker on the box at Frye's. Now, I'd probably buy the windows release of their next game if there was no linux (although I can wait for a slightly-delayed linux release). So id has gained a customer for many products by having one on linux.

    Has anyone else had experiences with Loki they can share? I'm going to contact them again as soon as I find the time, since nothing really changed on my machine from release to release, but I'm hoping they're normally more responsive.
  • To keep this in perspective, I submit this item that I spotted in another forum [infopop.net] recently:

    Reality "101" (whatever the hell that is)

    Add a printer under Linux.
    Add a printer under Windows 2000.

    Install a game under Linux.
    Install a game under Windows 2000.

    Connect to your ISP under Linux.
    Connect to your ISP under Windows 2000.

    Download and print your digital camera pictures under Linux.
    Download and print your digital camera pictures under Windows 2000.

    Change your screen from 640x480 @ 256 colours to 1024x768 16.7 million colours under Linux.
    Change your screen from 640x480 @ 256 colours to 1024x768 16.7 million colours under Windows 2000.

    Note that these are typical things that tech support techs deal with all of the time, walking people through things, etc.

    And yes, I am a long time member of the "I Hate Bill" Club. but we got to look at what this means when it comes to mass market items like games, etc.

    Just how much expertise do we assume on the part of the typical user for each of the operating systems? And what about for those who are command line impaired?

  • I have a Radeon DDR/32. The 2D works just fine with DRI and XFree86-4, but don't expect to use any 3D acceleration just yet. The CVS code from dri.sourceforge.net goes from
    • not compiling to
    • segfaulting to
    • snow on the screen
    • and back again
    In short: Don't get one unless you want to wait a bit more for 3D support. My TNT2 and GeForce2 both work flawlessly under XFree86-4 (I don't use Windows at all on these boxes -- just Linux). I want to like ATI, and I bought their card -- but they haven't provided just yet.

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • is put it all on one or two cds. Thinks about it you could just download the tarballs to make Quake 2 work under GNU/Linux they same thing for UT. I seem to remember Carmack saying that Q3 could have done the same thing but they wanted to release a version to be able to track the GNU/Linux adoption. IMHO this was a mistake put it all in one box and make and put a install script on the net (Just like UT has done.) No fuss no muss no overhead added and we GNU/Linux gamers don't have to pay through the nose. This is one of the reasons why I have and enjoy UT and only have the demo for Q3.

    It may not have been the case for the initial release (I didn't have linux gl drivers back then), but now, all you need is the latest q3 patch. that contains the executable you need to play the full version. then just copy the .pk3 files over from your windows install of quake, or from the cd, and all of a sudden all the maps and bots are available to you.

    So it's the ideal situation that you'd wanted (and I agree is best), albeit maybe not as early as it should have been.

    --ck

  • fltk (Score:2)

    by joss ( 1346 )
    www.fltk.org is not much use for games, but bloody handy for regular applications. It has good OpenGL integration, and it's LGPL too. So, if you want to write a CAD system portable across w2k/unix, it's the way to go. 2nd best is Qt, which works on windows too, but the windows version costs a bit, (an irrelevent amount for commercial developers) I find fltk faster (both in terms of performance and development time though.)

  • The base for the product is obviously established enough to allow for a rather large penetration on servers alone (check the included server scanner in Half-Life sometime, about half the servers are running on Linux) so why not develop clients?

    well, one quite obviously reason would be that the dedicated server requires considerably fewer resources. i have run Quake servers on Linux in the past, but they were all done on an old Pentium 200 at a friend's co-lo.

    i have a few boxes that have the hardware (processor speed and video) necessary to run a 3D-game client, but i'm not running Linux on any of them. why? because the 3D graphics drivers on Linux are lousy, X86 is a pain and a bottleneck, and all in all the hardware is completely crippled by the sub-standard driver and API support of Linux. add this to the reasons that Carmack has given (that there's no easy way to port this stuff over to Linux) and you'll realize that it just isn't worth it!

    it amazes me how many people on slashdot think that Linux' desktop marketshare is so large: it's not. the majority of Linux users i've met use Linux on their spare equipment, not on their primary desktop machine. it's just not cost-effective to write games for Linux right now. it's a sad fact, but true. sure ID is doing this, but it's really just an experiement. however i believe that the success of D3 on Linux will have a great impact on other game developers' oppions of the platform.

    but despite all this, i strongly believe that most of those Half-life servers are on somebody's spare PC, and that the vast majority of those people would never use Linux as their Desktop machine.

    - j

  • I was really curious about something in the video, and I hope John will take the time to answer. It must be a double-edged sword showing that video; on the one hand, it's probably cool to let people see what you're working on. On the other hand, it probably generates a lot of e-mail traffic!

    I was really impressed with the mouth movements on the animated faces. I was wondering if you were building in an "expression engine" that could be used on any model, or if those expressions had to be manually animated for each model.

    I was thinking that if you specified points on the model face that correspond to the various facial muscles, it would be possible to do a generalized expression engine. For example, specifying the corners of the mouth, cheeks, eyebrows, etc.

    I bet that would really save a lot of animating time, and make it extremely flexible to add dramatic expressions.


    --

  • Releasing on Linux (Score:4)

    by Ananova ( 255600 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:00AM (#402586)
    It is said that Linux games are 'more trouble than they are worth'. I think this might be right, but there is a deeper issue here. There is a reasonable-sized market for Mac games, and apparently Linux has a bigger market share than Apple now.

    The problem, which hasn't really been discussed properly, is that a minority of Linux users seem unable to recognize the value of software - that some software costs money. The prevalence of free software means that many linux users refuse to pay for software. For many this is an ideological belief - according to the biggest advocates of the GPL, GPL should render software that you pay for obsolete.

    This then is the problem for companies considering developing under Linux.

    Many Linux users refuse to recognize intellectual property, and so won't pay for games under Linux. This means that the market is fatally undermined - you are attempting to sell to people who won't pay for software, or even believe that paying for software is wrong.

    Until people can recognize that software does cost money - that while long-term projects such as Apache can be produced under the open-source model, things like games cannot - you cannot get graphic and sound artists to work for free; then non-free software on Linux will have an unhappy time.

    I think this is sad, since there can exist a harmony between the two, but at the moment a minority of unrepresentative bigots, who don't seem to believe that hard work in producing software deserves reward, are holding the two worlds in a deathly battle.
    --

  • All they need to do..... (Score:3)

    by SquadBoy ( 167263 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @08:02AM (#402587) Homepage Journal
    is put it all on one or two cds. Thinks about it you could just download the tarballs to make Quake 2 work under GNU/Linux they same thing for UT. I seem to remember Carmack saying that Q3 could have done the same thing but they wanted to release a version to be able to track the GNU/Linux adoption. IMHO this was a mistake put it all in one box and make and put a install script on the net (Just like UT has done.) No fuss no muss no overhead added and we GNU/Linux gamers don't have to pay through the nose. This is one of the reasons why I have and enjoy UT and only have the demo for Q3.
  • Oh, that's ok, then. I never run the box that the game comes in, so it doesn't really matter if that's Windows specific.
  • Yes SuSE is. The previous poster should have mentioned Sun, IBM, Compaq, HP and even AOL as they're not going away any time soon.
  • Games are not very well suited for the open source /free software model. They are *very* specific, they entail a lot of art, etc., things that would otherwise be considered IP, and require a lot of development over a short period of time, after which they are blessed "finished" and never (hardly ever) thought about again. The only exception is in cases of very general "engines" (Crystal Space?), which can be reused over and over, and contributed to over time. However, I think these will still always be behind the behind-closed-doors-with-truckloads-of-coke type games.

    In short: all you open source hipsters riding the wave...take that fat wad of cash you get from twiddling with your Linux boxes and spend some of it on Linux games (even if they are made by proprietary companies...Microsoft excluded ;).
  • 1) put multiple versions in the same box. The datafiles are the same. We're not talking about adding that many more bytes to the disc.

    If that is a problem for some reason, fine. Let the Linux user buy the Win32 version and download the binaries.

    Unfortunately, the end-user is expected to understand that everything that comes on the CD with a game is "blessed", and therefore eligible for phone tech support. If the linux binaries are on there, and someone has problems with installing them, then one phone call alone is enough to erase the profits from the box -- even if the phone call is along the lines of "that's not supported, goodbye."

    So, in the end, the best deal is to offer the binaries for download. Anyone running Linux should be able to figure that out anyways...

  • The issue is not with Debian or RH for that matter while I'm sure both would prefer to see the drivers opened (and so would I) they can not ship them why you ask read the license.
    2.1.1 Rights. Customer may install and use one copy of the SOFTWARE on a single computer, and except for making one back-up copy of the Software, may not otherwise copy the SOFTWARE. This LICENSE of SOFTWARE may not be shared or used concurrently on different computers.
    Which means you have to go to Nvidia's site and download them. The issue is Nvidia now granted I use the drivers and they work fine and I have accepted that they will not open them but someone could still make debs of the drivers (and I'm sure would and that they would be put in non-free or just on another apt mirror) but because of Nvidia they can't. And while I kind of undrstand why they don't open the drivers all the way I really don't understand why you can only download from them.
  • Add a printer under Linux

    Ignoring the fact that printer support under BOTH OSes is not perfect, open up DrakConf and select 'Configure printer'. Choose local and choose your printer. Done.

    Install a game under Linux
    Got me there, I've not tried yet.

    Connect to your ISP under Linux
    Click on the Internet Dialer, enter userid, password and telephone number. Click Connect.

    Download and print your digital camera pictures under Linux
    Use GPhoto.

    Change your screen from 640x480 @ 256 colours to 1024x768 16.7 million colours under Linux.
    In DrakConf, select 'Change screen resolution'

    In all these instances the Windows2000 answer could have included a reboot as well. All these answers are as simple as their Windows2000 counterparts thanks to Mandrake 7.2. You might say, 'well what if I'm using SuSE, RedHat or Caldera (or others)'. Chances are those distros have a similar mechanism, although I'm sure someone will tell me otherwise.

  • A linux release is almost always inevitable in any game that becomes a solid and lasting multiplayer hit. The usual problem is that such a release is often limited to a dedicated server, rarely a client. However it would be foolish not to take advantage of this. The base for the product is obviously established enough to allow for a rather large penetration on servers alone (check the included server scanner in Half-Life sometime, about half the servers are running on Linux) so why not develop clients?

    I'll agree that it's nowhere nearly as simple to port a client for a game and attempt retail sales while as it is to release a free server. Who says, however, that it needs to be retail though? I'm willing that bet that there is not a single linux user that does not have sufficient internet access to order the game online, direct from the company if need be. This would allow for a smaller run if nothing else as the product does not need to be shipped out to every retail location.

    As to the task of developing the ported client itself? That's where the problem I feel lies. Outsourcing to a company like Loki that deals primarily in ports of game clients to Linux would be helpful, but in-house solutions will be necessary to achieve wide-spread releases of games under Linux.

    Maybe the best we can hope to achieve is Mac-like integration, but the installed base willing to run servers and (presumably) buy Linux clients ought to be large enough to warrant more consideration.

  • Alot of new coders come from guys who first got an appetite for this stuff by editing/creating new levels etc. Obviously, those guys are fairly sharp since they figured out what to do, even if undereducated.

    Sad to say, not every one belongs in that league. I can remember ages ago in retail talking to folks who wanted to by a cheap machine for the kids, y'know, just to do homework, and play a few games. I can't imagine it has changed all that much in this regard.

    for that crowd, sadly the bucks are in the Windows programs.

    Remember, mad scientists are a distinct minority of the population. Even if highly valuable.

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