An Attempt To Push Ubuntu As A Gaming Platform

[GreatEmerald]

Audio Support: I agree fully with what they want to achieve in this area. I would really enjoy some 5.1 and 3D positional audio in my games instead of the normal stereo output. I want true 5.1 not mixed channel to a 5.1 setup.

I usually play games while using headphones, so anything above stereo doesn't interest me. But it would be nice to finally have some good environmental audio. I haven't found a lot of information, but I wonder how OpenAL-soft is doing with EFX extensions. The thing with those is that on Windows, you can't use more than EAX 2.0-level extensions in your game unless you pay Creative. Not sure how it is on OpenAL-soft right now, though.

[Vorzard]

I play and buy games for it. It is the only platform I game on now, and I game a lot. What the hell is your definition?

You are of course right, from your standpoint Linux is a gaming platform, no doubt about it.

But as we see not everyone shares your enthusiasm when it comes to developing a video game software to Linux.

Nowadays other platforms gets all the support from the developers, Linux barely gets something aside from indie games.

A gaming platform at least should have a customer base, not to mention marketing.

The question is more like, should Linux be a gaming platform.

[finalzone]

You are of course right, from your standpoint Linux is a gaming platform, no doubt about it.

But as we see not everyone shares your enthusiasm when it comes to developing a video game software to Linux.

Nowadays other platforms gets all the support from the developers, Linux barely gets something aside from indie games.

A gaming platform at least should have a customer base, not to mention marketing.

The question is more like, should Linux be a gaming platform.

Linux operating system is a gaming platform regardless. Trying to twist that definition because of few mainstream commercial games
available is plain silly. Virtually a system can be gaming platform without the need of marketing, it is the user who decides.
Gaming companies were caught using Linux for gaming development before porting it to Microsoft. The real issue is mainly publishers
and management decision.

[Hamish Wilson]

Nowadays other platforms gets all the support from the developers, Linux barely gets something aside from indie games.

And that counts as nothing?

A gaming platform at least should have a customer base, not to mention marketing.

And now I do not count as a customer then? That is interesting to know...

[JanC]

Longevity of Binaries: This goal may be hard to achieve unless you have a set of sub directories dedicated to needed libs the games use. Or at least allow someone to recompile the games every 5-10yrs with the newer libs.

Proprietary or 3rd party applications (including games) should go in their own directory under /opt/ where they can put as many private libraries as they want. Or they can statically compile their applications. That's how commercial vendors on UNIX & Linux have been doing it for decades, so there is no real problem here (except maybe for things like the C++ runtime, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem).

Multi-Arch Libappindicator: I have no idea what this is as I have never used Ubuntu.

Multiarch allows using both 32-bit & 64-bit applications/libraries, and libappindicator is one of the libraries that helps applications integrate into the Unity UI. It seems like the 32-bit & 64-bit versions of that library can't/couldn't be installed at the same time (and they want to fix that, of course, but that's mostly a packaging issue).

Process Clean-Up Actions: Umm, why would anyone have resolution restoration problems? Why are you not starting a second X Server to run your games in?

Because Joe Random User wouldn't know how to do that.

Audio Latency: This is another interesting and sore spot for me in Linux. I honestly never had audio lag until Pulseaudio came into the picture. Or I at least never noticed audio lag in my every day tasks and gaming in Linux. I have always had multichannel sound output and input as, (I know I will be scoffed at for this but), I always use creative sound cards in Linux. I used my Audigy2zs for almost 8 to 9 years because onboard audio is ass and everyone knows it. They just don't want to admit it or care about audio enough to get a proper add on card that has hardware mixing support. I have since upgraded to a Creative X-FI titanium that also has hardware mixing support when we finally got the basic drivers in Linux for the card. There are plenty of other cards out there that have support for hardware mixing so from my point of view anyone that cares about gaming and audio in Linux will have a hardware mixing sound card wether it is from creative or not.
Now, I honestly have tried my onboard audio chip, a Realtek 892 8 channel chip, on my Asus Sabertooth P67 mobo. The audio was fine but did not sound any better than what I had out of the X-Fi. With the onboard chip I needed Pulseaudio and this in turn caused a 1-6 second delay in my games audio. So obviously I went back to my X-Fi without Pulseaudio.

Software audio mixing in PulseAudio & JACK is a lot better quality than the hardware mixing in your Creative X-Fi (and hopefully the X-Fi has somewhat better quality sound than the on-board chip—but worse than a professional sound card).

And when it comes to latency, JACK should give you latency of 5ms or likely less (1-2ms?), while PulseAudio should probably be able to go down to about 20ms or less. If you have multi-second latency something is wrong; either your game (or other application that wants/needs low-latency audio) is doing something wrong, or you found a bug in PulseAudio — this is certainly not how PA is supposed to work.

[MNKyDeth]

Software audio mixing in PulseAudio & JACK is a lot better quality than the hardware mixing in your Creative X-Fi (and hopefully the X-Fi has somewhat better quality sound than the on-board chip—but worse than a professional sound card).

And when it comes to latency, JACK should give you latency of 5ms or likely less (1-2ms?), while PulseAudio should probably be able to go down to about 20ms or less. If you have multi-second latency something is wrong; either your game (or other application that wants/needs low-latency audio) is doing something wrong, or you found a bug in PulseAudio — this is certainly not how PA is supposed to work.

Well, there has been bugs filed against this issue and they were closed with the reason that Pulse is working as intended.
All I can say is try Unreal Tournament, or any of the Loki games for instance. You will see what I mean. There is a delay that you cannot fix no matter how much you play with the Pulse audio settings. But, as soon as you get rid of pulse audio, output has no delay.
I have tested the above with Rune, UT, and a few other old Loki games I have lying around. I used three different cards, the X-Fi, Audigy2zs and the onboard realtek 892 chip.
I tried with my different settings and tweaks from around the net to no avail. The solution was always to get rid of pulseaudio and run straight Alsa with oss emulation. As I recall Pulse is supposed to take alsa, oss, and any sound from a different sound server, jack, esd, etc, and route it through itself then it outputs audio.

Come to think of it, I can't say that many of the games I own, actually use alsa in Linux. Some do but most still output to oss still. I can say games that do use alsa instead of oss tend to run more in sync with the audio but anything that uses oss has a severe delay.

[AJenbo]

The way OSS is designed makes it difficult to pass it on to a server with out delay. OSSProxy though seams like a promising solution.

[liamdawe]

TF2 is coming!

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.p...on-linux.1102/

[Ishayu]

Yes, of course Linux can become a great gaming platform. The kernel is fast, it's all about the applications API's provided on top.

Audio Support - Yes, PulseAudio sucks. It did back then and it still does. Improvements need to be made to make sure PulseAudio becomes lower latency and doesn't glitch out and miss streams. RedHat needs to work more on that, but if Ubuntu has got to fork ... well so be it then.
Longevity of Binaries - Stop releasing major kernel revisions so often, stop updating to major new versions of X.org so often. Stop releasing new, half-assed, poorly tested releases every 6 months. One release a year, with every 2nd being LTS. Update applications to major new versions, but do not update important stuff like X.org, systemd, pulseaudio, the Linux kernel, etc. Only update security patches.
Graphics drivers - Don't ship broken graphics drivers. I mean really... Replacing X.org will help, but I actually think the biggest part of the problem is Unity.
Input devices - Give us the ability to remove mouse acceleration - easy, simple, fast. Hardcore gamers will flock to the platform because it's a killer feature. Better driver support is of course a must but actually... Linux is pretty good here already.

[Max Spain]

Input devices - Give us the ability to remove mouse acceleration - easy, simple, fast. Hardcore gamers will flock to the platform because it's a killer feature.

xset m 1 1

I do agree though that there should be an easier way to do this that saves across sessions. It's a huge oversight