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id Software's Rage May Not Be Coming To Linux Soon

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  • id Software's Rage May Not Be Coming To Linux Soon

    Phoronix: id Software's Rage May Not Be Coming To Linux Soon

    The good news out of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2011 keynote is that the Doom 3 source-code will be released this year following the release of id Software's Rage game based upon their shiny new id Tech 5 engine. The bad news? The Linux client for the Rage game has an uncertain future...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    so after the company behind UnrealTournament, now id software goes away from linux aswell. I wonder why they just don't say it. They are doing it like UT did it: Claiming they are working on it for a long time and then, when everybody knows it's never coming they admit it.

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    • #3
      Yeah. The Linux gaming scene is dying a horrible death. The economics are simple: not enough people use Linux exclusively for them to care. The few people who do run Linux and like to play games, are either willing to tinker with Wine, or dual boot Windows. We aren't helping our cause.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Detructor View Post
        so after the company behind UnrealTournament, now id software goes away from linux aswell. I wonder why they just don't say it. They are doing it like UT did it: Claiming they are working on it for a long time and then, when everybody knows it's never coming they admit it.
        If nothing else we will get it when Id Tech 5 is made opensource, Also given how crossplatform they're making it, I.E.: Making it work not only on windows, but on the consoles, and even phones. I find it unlikely that they wont come out with the associated mac and Linux ports, I mean hell they're already making it for Android and iOS...

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
          If nothing else we will get it when Id Tech 5 is made opensource, Also given how crossplatform they're making it, I.E.: Making it work not only on windows, but on the consoles, and even phones. I find it unlikely that they wont come out with the associated mac and Linux ports, I mean hell they're already making it for Android and iOS...
          If the UT3 debacle taught me anything it's to not purchase a game that isn't released for my platform yet. When and if id Software produces a linux binary build I'll buy the game then. Until that time - Minecraft.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Larian View Post
            If the UT3 debacle taught me anything it's to not purchase a game that isn't released for my platform yet. When and if id Software produces a linux binary build I'll buy the game then. Until that time - Minecraft.
            Yes thats good thing to do. But I think of 90% that it will come. Id soft is the linux-friendliest top-games company with longest history with support for linux.

            But Its not as easy as it was on earlier games. Id soft used long times opengl for their games so its no big thing to make a port, now they use primary the dx engine so they have to port it for mac and linux. If Mac would support Directx I think they would also stop porting games for linux at all. And maybe because of the ps3?

            So yes the pc is kind of dieing as gaming-plattform, ok most games come for it, but often with poorly ported inputs and then the graphics also most of the time badly scale up from what the old old consoles can do.

            We have dx9 gen consoles vs dx11 gen computers. So if pc is basicly a niche market, how small is then the niche Linux on it.

            So I can understand why they not invest much resources in hectic release time to make a concurrent release on all pc plattforms.

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            • #7
              This is sad news, but I'll definitely get a copy once the Linux version is out

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
                If nothing else we will get it when Id Tech 5 is made opensource, Also given how crossplatform they're making it, I.E.: Making it work not only on windows, but on the consoles, and even phones. I find it unlikely that they wont come out with the associated mac and Linux ports, I mean hell they're already making it for Android and iOS...
                While I'm not saying that Rage will not come out for Linux, I am going to say that portability between PCs and consoles has abso-freaking-lutely nothing to do with portability to OS X or Linux, and the mobile phone ports are going to basically be completely different games (they might have the same story, and the same general set of levels even, but the codebase will be incredibly different and pretty much every game asset is going to be redone by hand for scaling down to the mobile hardware limitations, and this porting is generally done by a completely different team if not a completely different company).

                Porting games between platforms is not like porting some random desktop GUI app. It's way more involved than just using some general abstract filesystem library and a cross-platform GUI toolkit. While a good game will have abstractions in all the most obvious spots, the implementations behind those abstractions can be quite complex, and they're usually not abstract enough for things like the consoles or mobile platforms. You can talk to some of the people who work at porting companies that take games to the consoles and learn some pretty interesting things. Like how some games have to have their entire lighting model rewritten (which is a huuuuge chunk of their graphics code and drives a good portion of the entire graphics architecture in the engine, and also can have a big effect on how the assets have to be made as well) because platform Foo requires deferred shading to run at playable frame rates while the game's original platform Bar just used forward lighting because it was easier and worked. Crazy amount of work goes into ports, especially for consoles and mobiles.

                Originally posted by blackiwid View Post
                But Its not as easy as it was on earlier games. Id soft used long times opengl for their games so its no big thing to make a port, now they use primary the dx engine so they have to port it for mac and linux. If Mac would support Directx I think they would also stop porting games for linux at all.
                Linux is actually a lot closer to supporting D3D than the Mac is, thanks to Gallium. Wonder if anyone is still working on those state trackers? I've been slowly tinkering with an OOP-ish C API closer to real hardware/game needs to replace GL, but just having D3D 10+ would be even better. (I was writing it originally as a wrapper around D3D11 and then planning on writing a GL backend for XP/Mac/Linux, but of course ran into the silly little problem where GL is still literally incapable of emulating D3D11 fully. Go go Khronos.)

                And maybe because of the ps3?
                Not sure what you mean by that. The PS3 uses neither D3D nor OpenGL. There's a half-assed GLES implementation for it from Sony, but I'm fairly certain that not a single major game uses it.

                You'd be surprised how few games these days use D3D on the Xbox either, for that matter. The rock-solid-stable platform has allowed for devs to start writing command streams directly to the hardware, which allows a lot of powerful optimizations. Something that is possibly (hopefully?) to be part of core for D3D 12 via a standardized IR for GPU command queues, and then GL a few years after everyone has given up on GL ever supporting it.

                So yes the pc is kind of dieing as gaming-plattform, ok most games come for it, but often with poorly ported inputs and then the graphics also most of the time badly scale up from what the old old consoles can do.
                Except for indie games, where the PC is still king because it's free to develop for it and doesn't require Microsoft's/Sony's/Apple's/Nintendo's permission to ship apps for it. Mobile is doing alright in the Indie space too, of course, but PC is still the easiest and most accessible for students, the under-privileged (people who can't afford $200 phones with $100/mo contracts), and others who only have access to commodity hardware.

                That's one of the things that pisses me off about FOSS games, btw. There is absolutely no reason in the world that a FOSS team couldn't build a damn high-quality indie-level game the likes of what you see in competitions like iGC/IGF/Indiecade/etc., but they just keep pushing out worthless retarded boring Quake3 clones (and it's generous to be calling them a "clone" when they are in reality just re-using the Quake 3 code because they can't even be bothered to engineer a unique engine just like they cannot bother to design a unique game).

                So I can understand why they not invest much resources in hectic release time to make a concurrent release on all pc plattforms.
                Yeah, it's rare to get simultaneous releases on all major platforms, actually. And id is not that big of a company in the games market, compared to some of the other giants. Their games just don't have the same budget and revenue as titles like Modern Warfare or Battlefield, and even those games rarely get simultaneous releases on three platforms (much less five).

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                • #9
                  This is sad but not entirely unexpected.

                  Like Linux, Mac has always been a non-gamer platform. Even today when Mac OSX is making progress there are very few games for that platform. I just checked an online store and there were 15 times more new commercial games for Windows than for Mac. This is the situation I also remember from the 1990's. Those who wanted to game would never buy a Mac.

                  So in that respect the Linux situation is not entirely strange. If Mac couldn't do it the chances of Linux doing it isn't that great.

                  Sadly.

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                  • #10
                    This is an absolute non-story.

                    During the Q&A session of Carmack's keynote, the Linux support for Rage was brought up. Carmack, sadly, admitted the Linux support isn't a huge priority nor even the Mac support. Right now they're working on getting Rage out the door for the PC and consoles. Carmack concedes that the Linux client is basically at the bottom of the totem pole.
                    In other words -- exactly the same thing they said about every game since Quake1. Linux ports have never been a priority.

                    What happens is that TTimo ports them when he finds time. Just like always.

                    Originally posted by ttimo
                    There has been a bit of unrest among Linux gamers about id's commitment to releasing Linux versions of the games we make.

                    I don't want to be rehashing old subjects, but I'll offer a few thoughts:

                    Fundamentally nothing has changed with our policy regarding Linux games. Trying to shoehorn the ZeniMax acquisition into this is pointless, as they are true to their word of focusing on the business and letting the studio focus on the games.

                    Linux players represent about 5% of the QuakeLive population, which is in line with the company's previous releases. Nothing new there, releasing Linux versions has always been a matter of higher code quality, good software architecture, and technical interest for the platform.

                    We never commit to releasing Linux versions for any of our titles, at least not until we are reasonably sure that we have the resources to put into it. In the past few years I am pretty much the only one who has been involved in our Linux versions, and most of that work was done in my spare time. It worked out because I spent significant time working on each of those projects to get them shipped (Doom3, Quake4, ETQW), and making sure we had working Linux builds was a natural part of that process.

                    It is unlikely the new Wolfenstein title is going to get a native Linux release. None of it was done in house, and I had no involvement in the project. QuakeLive offers a lot of challenges and eats away everything else right now.

                    As far as idTech 5 (the Rage engine), it runs on PS3 and Mac already. Setting up idTech 5 to run on those platforms early on in our development cycle was a direct result of carrying Linux/Mac support in idTech 4 beforehand. It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done.

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