AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide

[Ex-Cyber]

personally I dont think it is a good idea to release closed source games for linux at all.
I mean in linux everything assumes everything else is open source so they break ABI/ API quite often and it is a pain in the ass to keep an ancient version of libstdc++ or sdl just to play a commercial game.

Actually, the way it works on Windows is precisely that the needed versions of libraries are kept around, usually installed inside the application's directory. For example, I have a Sun JDK installation with 3 copies of msvcr71.dll (the libc DLL from Visual C++ .NET 2003).

[ap90033]

Dude who cares about having to keep an extra library? I have (2) 750 Gig drives so space is not a concern as it isnt for most. Drives a cheap.

I am trying to do what i can. Its like the political arena in America, both parties suck and want you to feel that you have no chance in changing the crappy politicians minds. BUT if Everyone would quit fighting about Democrat versus Republican and we all agreed on the core principals this country was founded we would be united (they dont want that) and could make a difference. I mean isnt it funny that both parties claim they wont raise taxes then when elected thats the first thing they do.

[monraaf]

Dude who cares about having to keep an extra library? I have (2) 750 Gig drives so space is not a concern as it isnt for most. Drives a cheap.

Well, extra libraries will also be eating up extra memory.

[ap90033]

Got 6 gig and can get 12 for it... Not a big deal again. I am not saying become bloated like windows but sheesh we have hardware now that should be taken advantage of... lol

[duby229]

Got 6 gig and can get 12 for it... Not a big deal again. I am not saying become bloated like windows but sheesh we have hardware now that should be taken advantage of... lol

taken advantage of and wasted are 2 very different things. I run some pretty heavy terminal servers that get alot of traffic. I use nx to share desktops to many different thin clients. In this configuration all of the processing and memory is on the server. Imagine running every version of every lib loaded into main memory for every single session..... We absolutely must keep it thin. Ok, so maybe you wont have every single version loaded into memory, but you may well have 2 or three versions loaded for some libs. If everything used the same versions then we would only need 1 version of each lib.

Running a Windows terminal server on 2008 server I can at most about 40 active sessions on my best server and that is pushing it a bit.. Using Linux with nx I can have around 150 active sessions and still run each well.

Thats a testament right there

[ap90033]

Well considering the current lack of games in linux couldnt you live with a little bit of waste for us gamers? Besides you dont have to have the extra libraries. So how about you dont have them, I will and I will waste an extra gig of memory, I dont care but I do care to be able to play my games LOL.... That way we all win...

[nanonyme]

Well considering the current lack of games in linux couldnt you live with a little bit of waste for us gamers? Besides you dont have to have the extra libraries. So how about you dont have them, I will and I will waste an extra gig of memory, I dont care but I do care to be able to play my games LOL.... That way we all win...

And if someone bothers reading up on libstdc++ ABI changes, they realize that this in fact happened already once, pretty dramatically. It was afaik around GCC 3.3 and GCC 3.4. Backwards compat libraries are still getting shipped for applicable programs in some distros.
Edit: I'd note though that it's a normal package that's marked as dependency for programs that need it. Most users don't have it or need it.

[elanthis]

personally I dont think it is a good idea to release closed source games for linux at all.
I mean in linux everything assumes everything else is open source so they break ABI/ API quite often and it is a pain in the ass to keep an ancient version of libstdc++ or sdl just to play a commercial game.

Windows breaks backwards compatibility too. There are a ton of older games that I cannot for the life of me get to run under Vista or Windows 7 but which work perfectly fine in XP. That in turn is partly why Wine has such a difficult time of things: it's not just the API that programs use, but the bugs in APIs and system behavior. Simply changing the way memory address space gets assigned can cause a program to start crashing if it happened to have a bug that nobody noticed before.

The advantage of Open Source is that those bugs can get fixed, yes.

The disadvantage of Open Source is that most commercial games won't ever use it because it annihilates almost any chance of recuperating costs, much less making a profit. Games are one of the largest and most complex types of software to develop these days, and there are two big reasons why many games can even exist: companies can recuperate costs by selling engine licenses to other game development houses, and game development houses can buy high quality engines and game development toolsets that simply do not exist anywhere in the Open Source landscape at all (and once those tools are used, open sourcing the resulting game in a remotely usable state is near impossible due to licensing restrictions).

I think the best you can hope for in the games industry -- ever -- is that most companies will eventually release their older IP under an Open license after it has ceased to be commercially viable. Kind of like what id does with its older tech engines.

It's kind of pointless to even talk about commercial or Open Source games on Linux though, because Linux is a horrifically bad gaming platform all around.

Our video drivers still suck way too hard to make gaming with modern technology feasible. It's currently impossible to do on Linux without closed source drivers, and the ATI folks have even stated that they don't expect the OSS drivers to reach feature/performance parity with the closed drivers.

Installing software is also an absolute nightmare on Linux. Even if a game developer were willing to package the same fucking binary 50 times for multiple versions of multiple distributions of the same OS, NONE of the current packaging tools are capable of handling games with 8+ GB of game resources in a sane manner due to a combination of a lack of authentication against repositories (even if an engine is open source, the game data will not be free) and a lack of standard support for delta-updates across all major distros. And honestly, in the end, developers want to write one installer -- uno, ichi, eins, ishte -- and have it work everywhere (and that means works for everyone, so no needing to open a terminal, copy the installer to the hard disk, set executable bits, install dependencies for the installer binary, and manually running the damn things -- it means double clicking the icon on the CD auto-run or on the website Download Link and just having it work always). Even if all the distros standardized on RPM that still isn't possible because every RPM-based distro introduces a billion other artificial incompatibilities on top of otherwise identical binaries thanks to using different package names, putting files and binaries in different roots, changing the names of binaries to resolve conflicts with practically irrelevant software that happened to be in the distro first, and so on.

A real market for commercial games -- be they Open Source engines or not -- simply cannot materialize on Linux in the near future. The platform necessary for that market simply does not exist in any way on Linux, and the driving forces behind the desktop experience on Linux have zero interest in fixing the deficiencies, largely because a great deal of people either don't think games are important ("all people need on their computer is a browser, man, that's the future!") or think that the central-repository-one-umbrella approach is the only true way to deliver software ("it has to be in our repo for testing and QA, man") even though the central repositories and their mirrors would never be willing to host dozens of 4GB+ games.

[Ant P.]

A real market for commercial games -- be they Open Source engines or not -- simply cannot materialize on Linux in the near future. The platform necessary for that market simply does not exist in any way on Linux

Typing `emerge ut2004` works just fine on my machine, and it doesn't download 4GB of data files from a distro mirror either. Was your post written for 1999?

[MartjeB]

@Ant P.: Oh come on! Please! Have you ever compared UT2004 to Crysis? Or even Far Cry 1?

I agree with elanthis for a large part. Except the following:

Installing software is also an absolute nightmare on Linux. Even if a game developer were willing to package the same fucking binary 50 times for multiple versions of multiple distributions of the same OS, NONE of the current packaging tools are capable of handling games with 8+ GB of game resources in a sane manner due to a combination of a lack of authentication against repositories

What about the following:

1. You click on your DEB/RPM/Whatever on the DVD of your game
2. The deb-scripts (post-install, etc.) copies all the files needed to /usr/share/<game>
3. Launch the game!

Even if your platform is not supported (you don't use DEB or RPM) you can launch a small script which asks for your password and lauches a terminal, which copies the files.

All the dependencies of the game will be included in the game-data on the dvd.