New Comments By Ryan Gordon On Linux Gaming, Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New Comments By Ryan Gordon On Linux Gaming, Drivers

Our friends over at OSNews have written about the state of Linux gaming in a new editorial. What's interesting, in particular, are the comments by veteran Linux game porter Ryan "Icculus" Gordon...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAxNjA

[FireBurn]

The article is called the State of Linux Gaming not the Stage of Linux Gaming

Might I also add that they've written a great article

[bulletxt]

- NVIDIA is the real and only choice for Linux for anyone wanting to get full power from their GPU under linux. We know this from ,mm, 2001?

- EA, Blizzard, Activision, Capcom and Squaresoft are the real gaming companies (there are others of course). If these don't get into the Linux world, sorry to say but:

Linux != gaming

Hopefully Michael will understand this..

[AnonymousCoward]

- At the end of the day, he still recommends NVIDIA hardware and their binary driver for Linux. "If you don't have moral objections to closed-source drivers: get an Nvidia GPU."

There's also a pragmatical side to using the open source driver. As a Debian unstable user, I want to update my kernel and X server as I want, not as third party graphics drivers release schedules dictate me. And my meager AMD 890GX is enough for me, even if handicapped my Mesa.

[gbudny]

List of commercial linux games - 2011:

1. Magical Diary: Horse Hall
2. Family Farm
3. Puzzle Moppet
4. Hacker Evolution Duality
5. Scoregasm
6. Bullet Candy
7. Color by Numbers – Animals
8. Color by Numbers - Flowers
9. Color by Numbers – Halloween
10. Color by Numbers – Princesses
11. Color by Numbers – Vehicles
12. Dress-Up Pups
13. Beep
14. Atom Zombie Smasher
15. NagiQ
16. Starry
17. Captain Backwater
18. Temple Of Tangram
19. Clone Wolf: Protector
20. Inside a Star-filled Sky
21. Crayon Physics Deluxe
22. Steel Storm: Burning Retribution
23. Trauma
24. Digitanks
25. Age of Fear: The Undead King
26. Bobby
27. Monster RPG 2
28. Helena The 3rd
29. Out of the Park Baseball 12
30. Dino Run SE
31. Revenge of the Titans
32. A.Typical RPG
33. Kansei
34. Infinite Game Works
35. Super Space Rubbish
36. Project Black Sun
37. Marball Odyssey
38. Lucky Rabbit Reflex
39. Blocks That Matter
40. Cardinal Quest
41. VVVVVV
42. Deepak Fights Robots
43. No Time To Explain
44. Catch the shark
45. Klötzchen - Klassik Edition
46. Klötzchen - Kristall Edition
47. Klötzchen - Retro Edition
48. Always Remember Me
49. Love & Order
50. Planet Stronghold
51. Spirited Heart: Girl's Love
52. SpaceChem
53. Blue Libra - Strategia
54. Cogs
55. Dungeons of Dredmor
56. Hammerfight
57. Frozen Synapse
58. Thunder Fleets
59. Trine
60. 7 Wonders: Magical Mystery Tour
61. Chainz Galaxy
62. Circular chaos
63. Memory Owl
64. Midnight Mysteries: Devil on the Mississippi
65. Unlikely Suspects
66. Volley Brawl
67. Chocolate Castle
68. Jasper’s Journeys.
69. The Binding of Isaac
70. Zen Puzzle Garden

linux installer:

Myth II: Soulblighter: http://tain.totalcodex.net/items/sho...ii-1-7-2-linux

Wine:

Incognito
SickBrick
1941 DX Dual Players

[cb88]

"albeit it was never publicly released" -> albeit never publicly released

[Henri]

(Yeah, I'm obviously biased here.)

Any engineer worth his salt know that the simpler the system the better. As Gordon said: "the best game experience will always be the native game."

That's only true if such a port is actually done by skilled developers. If a port is done by people not terribly familiar with the target platform you can easily get a better experience by running the game in Wine instead. E.g. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40401.

I'd like to go one step further than that though. If the application in question is closed source anyway, you're likely to be better of running the application in Wine in the long term. You can be pretty sure that Wine will get updated to work with changes in the underlying platform (although admittedly that may sometimes take a while), while that's far from certain for random closed source ports. I.e., with Wine you're not going to have issues like applications linking to ancient versions of libstdc++ or libSDL, which then won't be available at some point in modern distributions. To put this another way, I think the goal should be more Free Software games rather than more "native" games. I don't think there's necessarily much value in running native Linux closed source games over running Win32 closed source games.

[dfx.]

(Yeah, I'm obviously biased here.)


That's only true if such a port is actually done by skilled developers. If a port is done by people not terribly familiar with the target platform you can easily get a better experience by running the game in Wine instead. E.g. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40401.

I'd like to go one step further than that though. If the application in question is closed source anyway, you're likely to be better of running the application in Wine in the long term. You can be pretty sure that Wine will get updated to work with changes in the underlying platform (although admittedly that may sometimes take a while), while that's far from certain for random closed source ports. I.e., with Wine you're not going to have issues like applications linking to ancient versions of libstdc++ or libSDL, which then won't be available at some point in modern distributions. To put this another way, I think the goal should be more Free Software games rather than more "native" games. I don't think there's necessarily much value in running native Linux closed source games over running Win32 closed source games.

well said.
but i would say that better goal would be more versatile Free Software gaming engines (something based on OpenGL >3.0, OpenAL, OpenCL, for physics and AI calculations, LUA or such for scripting and FFMpeg, for media files support, would be a good start. but more tools for working with dynamic (motion capture) and programmable animation are needed). gaming engine is a tool, everything else in the game is pure data and unlikely to be given for free or licensed on terms where every buyer can resell infinite copies of it.
the best situation we can hope to be in is when DRM-free game data packages can be bought (licensed under their proprietary license), interpreted and launched by any version of such an engine, starting from the one it was developed for. game data, for that to be feasible, should be abstracted from every other software beyond the engine (and no, virtualisation software and selling snapshots doesn't cut it, if someone was thinking about proposing such).

even though Gordon is in no way a stupid guy, he's reputation really weakened in my eyes because of shit like MojoSetup, FatELF and all those statements about "moral objections" and that distribution should not support F/OSS drivers just because they not in feature-parity with closed unstable crap.
all that is quite a bullshit, especially "moral objections" thing. i sick of people declaring that F/OSS movement is about morals, like some kind of fucking religious group. that's a load of crap. it's about [professional] ethics, those are different things. it's about being 100% assured that your interests will not be stumped or spitted upon by software vendor at will. it's about guaranteeing that you suddenly will not be dictated how to process and handle your data or get into situation where your very working tools can only be rented and not owned.

[madjr]

- NVIDIA is the real and only choice for Linux for anyone wanting to get full power from their GPU under linux. We know this from ,mm, 2001?

- EA, Blizzard, Activision, Capcom and Squaresoft are the real gaming companies (there are others of course). If these don't get into the Linux world, sorry to say but:

Linux != gaming

Hopefully Michael will understand this..

hey you forgot super mario ! ...

[spykes]

- NVIDIA is the real and only choice for Linux for anyone wanting to get full power from their GPU under linux. We know this from ,mm, 2001?

Except with their Optimus fiasco, which instantly brings their Linux support to zero.
Without Linux Optimus support from Nvidia, my Nvidia chip is a brick inside my computer, and this is a big step backward!