Good News, id Tech 5 Is Likely Coming To Linux

[Apopas]

Wow, sexist tripe on a Linux forum, how original...

Sexist? The opposite. I consider the girs to be the best candidates for using Linux. That's a compliment

perhaps a mass female linux conversion campaign?

"mass" and "female" in the same sentence? L33F3R is in for it now....

You can begin from your own GF. Take it as an excercise

[Svartalf]

Phoronix: Good News, id Tech 5 Is Likely Coming To Linux

Contrary to earlier reports stating that the forthcoming id Tech 5 engine from id Software would likely not be ported to Linux due to the involved work, cost, and lackluster Linux graphics drivers (according to John Carmack), it looks like we will end up seeing this next-generation game engine running with Linux.Timothee Besset (perhaps better known as TTimo) has written a blog post that clears up the situation. Timothee is largely responsible for all of id Software's game client and server ports to Linux, like with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars...

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

Mmmkay, folks....

</I told you so...>

[Svartalf]

They probably do if you ask but that isn't going to significantly reduce the price since OEM Windows costs close to nothing.

Actually, OEM XP Home costs next to nothing. VISTA, on the other hand, is a differing story.

[Ex-Cyber]

Nope, 99% of the cases they don't, also, a good, seller should ask the customer what OS he wants in the same way he asks what VGA card he wants.
The matter is not just the price (which is still lower with Linux, in a matter someone could buy an extra hard disk) but the fact the casual John who buys a computer believes that windows and PC is one and the same. If for some reason he gets the opportunity to get a PC with Linux, then we wouldn't see the 90% of the current Desktops to run window$.

Microsoft knows there is demand for this and IIRC is said to have incorporated into their special OEM contracts requirements for:

- Not selling "bare" machines and (maybe) parroting MS talking points about how buying OS-less machines is evil. Dell apparently installs FreeDOS to sidestep this requirement.

- "Per-model licensing", which means that every computer of a given model name/number gets a Windows license as part of the contract. Thus the OEM has to set up a different "model" in order to sell the same machine with a non-Windows OS. This is what MS came up with after "per-processor licensing" (i.e. OEM pays for a Windows license for every desktop/notebook CPU they ship) was shot down by the courts as anti-competitive.

[Naib]

5% playing QL is still very pathetic

Such a number would not convince me if I was a mainstream game writer to dedicate time to linux development

[Apopas]

5% playing QL is still very pathetic

Such a number would not convince me if I was a mainstream game writer to dedicate time to linux development

Fortunately for you you are not then.
To get 5/% without the need for the amount of advertisements that the windows share needs, means easy money.

[pvtcupcakes]

5% playing QL is still very pathetic

Such a number would not convince me if I was a mainstream game writer to dedicate time to linux development

When you consider that Linux has about a 1% market share it's not too shabby.

[Naib]

When you consider that Linux has about a 1% market share it's not too shabby.

I agree it is good, but please read my post again (and Ireally think Apopas should after his rude reply)

I was posting w.r.t. Mainstream games. Take Batman Arkam Asylum, that game looks great. 5% of QL players being linux users out of... what? 1000QL players isn't that significant really

for specialist of indie games it is a nice number for them to concider investing in linux dev because it will more then likely show some financial return.

But for the big games they are not even going to blink, iD are an exception to this and it almost looked like they were going to follow the financial incentive route

[Apopas]

I agree it is good, but please read my post again (and Ireally think Apopas should after his rude reply)

I was posting w.r.t. Mainstream games. Take Batman Arkam Asylum, that game looks great. 5% of QL players being linux users out of... what? 1000QL players isn't that significant really

for specialist of indie games it is a nice number for them to concider investing in linux dev because it will more then likely show some financial return.

But for the big games they are not even going to blink, iD are an exception to this and it almost looked like they were going to follow the financial incentive route

I apologise if I was rude. It was not my purpose.
Now about numbers. It is estimated that the amount of Linux players for Quake3Arena was about 20,000 and that was almost ten years before when the Linux market was much smaller than today So if we say that a new AAA title realeased simultaneously for Linux and windows and sold lets say 500,000 copies, then 25,000 are sold to Linux users. So lets say 50$ per box, we have 1,250,000$. Do you find this number insignificant? Not at all if we consider that to port the game needs much much less money than this. And again, the cost for advertising an AAA title for Linux is much smaller in compariosn with the windows equivalent. Actually, it doesn't need advertising at all. It's enough to just say we will port this AA game to Linux and the Linux magazines, forums and sites will be on fire for free.
Also, don't forget that there is a significant part of window's users (maybe the majority) that do not care about computers and use windows because they just found PCs with them inside and the only they do with their computers is some casual jobs. Also, another part are the ones that need some proffesional application for their job etc. All these reduce the windows population who like to play games from 90% to the half. On the other hand the Linux users who choose Linux as their desktops are people who know few things about computers. But to know few things you have to love computer even a bit and for people like them, gaming is easier. Because of that we see that games sell 5%+ in Linux while Linux has lesser market share.

[Kano]

Well you should not forget one thing: writeing cross plattform games gives usually much better code as you have to fix issues which one compiler silently ignores but others will fail. ID does not only create one game, they sell the engine to others, so the code should be in really good shape. Do you remember the iPhone ports of older ID games? ID could even reuse the optimized code from the community and earn money with those games again.