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  • Carmack speaks his true mind.

    Well, just in case some couldn't read into what Carmack was saying a few years ago about iD's hesitation about bringing out Rage for linux (as if the parting of ways with TTimo wasn't clear enough), it was spelled out in Quakecon's keynote.

    John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 Keynote The beginning of QuakeCon is always started by several hours of John Carmack talking about very technical things.


    Linux development is another story altogether. Even though Valve is now actively pursuing the Linux market, iD has been there before, and just has not seen positive results. Remember how many past titles from iD actually ran on Linux, and for how long these were supported? John says that Linux development simply does not pay the bills. It creates goodwill among the Linux crowd, but that is about it.
    A new public enemy number one? First Epic and now Carmack. Hope Valve is successful with Steam.

  • #2
    Originally posted by deanjo View Post
    Linux development simply does not pay the bills.
    But is it too expensive either?

    You can be a company that does care only strictly about making money or you can be a company that cares about bettering the locked-in situation/computing/etc.

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    • #3
      Well, last year Carmack also said: "We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games."

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      • #4
        ID failed when it released Rage way later than expected, it also missed the PC game rise, it looks like their geniuses aren't so genius.
        It's not expensive to create games "for Linux" because the games are mostly created platform-neutral based on a given framework and 3D engine - which need to be ported once to Linux and maintained. That's it. Maintaining the Linux side of the framework doesn't require much work either if the framework is written carefully.
        Last edited by mark45; 04 August 2012, 02:37 PM.

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        • #5
          Just watch the video titled "Carmack plays Wolfenstein" on youtube. A year ago he was claiming that opensource was good,brilliant, wonderfull - he gave away source to engines, and people porting it to various platforms. So, when he needed iOS port, he simply took existing work by other hacker and modified it a bit.

          Now, knowing that Linux is NOT a monopoly and is not force-preinstalled on 90% of PC, trying to claim that "Linux is different story altogether" is halfarsed attitude at best.

          It is same story, Carmack - you get what you put in. What have you done for Linux development as gaming platform? Any exclusive titles?

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          • #6
            I dont see a reason in exclusive linux titles. Those games will most likely nobody want to play when you have to change the os first. The problem with rage is that id even outsourced the mac port, that was a huge mistake i would say. I dont think it would be so hard to do a Linux port when they would have done the mac port themself - then Rage would be on steam as well for mac. Basically you should know that id is now not a single company anymore, jc can not decide all things on his own anymore. What he does has to create a revenue so in that point of view Linux ports do not not create enough cash.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Kano View Post
              I dont see a reason in exclusive linux titles. Those games will most likely nobody want to play when you have to change the os first. The problem with rage is that id even outsourced the mac port, that was a huge mistake i would say. I dont think it would be so hard to do a Linux port when they would have done the mac port themself - then Rage would be on steam as well for mac. Basically you should know that id is now not a single company anymore, jc can not decide all things on his own anymore. What he does has to create a revenue so in that point of view Linux ports do not not create enough cash.
              Id was never a single company, this is the reason why they split. Exactly like I said - you get what you put in. What happened with Id is nothing more than work of this principle. They have seeded personal visions, and got their ways separated. Carmack has seeded opensource (a code, that can be ported by anyone) engines, and got various ports. He has seeded closed-source non-unique ports of existing games (often much later than by more popular, or more precisely, more monopolistic, platforms) - and got exactly same sells as he expected, exactly at the percentage which this OS has on the market. And now he plans to seed _nothing_ - he should not wonder, that he will also get nothing. You speaking of "income" and "money" is laughable at best - because linux is not operated by aliens, but by exactly same humans with valets.

              Originally posted by Kano View Post
              Those games will most likely nobody want to play when you have to change the os first.
              I will repeat myself yet again. You get what you put in. You put "don't want to change OS", you get "can't play game" out.
              If you want to play, change OS. If you and other change OS, this will change OS market balance and trigger more income in the area.

              I just hope those "speeches" of JC are not signs of his age. Getting more comfortable, stable, streamlined, simple. Doom 1 + N. That is... :/
              But if ID releases no Doom 4 for Linux, I have no problem throwing them into abyss of oblivion. They get what they seed.

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              • #8
                Look



                What did happen 2009?

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                • #9
                  Really?

                  Is anyone going to step up and say that maybe he's actually right? The driver situation is a mess, it's hard enough to target the proprietary drivers, but then you still have people complaining about Neuveau and the open source ATI driver not working. Then you have to deal with the whole packaging mess, then all the different WMs. That's actually quite a bit of work for someone going out of their way to bring a big title to Linux, and then if he's not 100% on the bandwagon forever he becomes public enemy #1? What reason is there for any other big publisher to look twice at Linux if that's going to be the attitude of the community? He still has to turn a profit in this touch economy like everyone else.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    Is anyone going to step up and say that maybe he's actually right?
                    Of course he is right that he didn't get much money for the linux versions they had. But as I said: You can either go for maximum profit or you can go to be a sympathic company.

                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    The driver situation is a mess, it's hard enough to target the proprietary drivers, but then you still have people complaining about Neuveau and the open source ATI driver not working.
                    Maybe you shouldn't target drivers, maybe you should target OpenGL. That's what they did with RAGE for windows. It didn't work well in the beginning. Then drivers got their bugs fixed. Not the other way around that you make your game broken in order to work on specific drivers. What if you accidently rely on broken driver behaviour when "targetting" a broken driver and it gets fixed? That's an ugly road to go.

                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    Then you have to deal with the whole packaging mess,
                    All of the Humble Bundle games are either archives that you just need to extract or have installers that just work. All of them. When little indie games can do it, ID software ought to be able to do it too...

                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    then all the different WMs.
                    If you rely on specific WM behaviour you are doing something very, very, very, very, very wrong.
                    If you follow the standard and it doesn't work on some window manager then it's a bug in the window manager. You don't implement workarounds for broken window managers, you report that bug to the window manager developers and they ought to fix it.


                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    That's actually quite a bit of work for someone going out of their way to bring a big title to Linux,
                    Actually all those little indie games in the Humble Bundles do exactly what you want and they have no problems with "packaging" or "window managers" whatsoever.

                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    if that's going to be the attitude of the community?
                    Please provide some argument that this is the prevalent attitude in "the community".

                    Originally posted by Geopirate View Post
                    He still has to turn a profit in this touch economy like everyone else.
                    I didn't watch it. Does he present numbers how it is too expensive? Many companies spend and donate some money for causes they deem support-worthy. You don't have to limit yourself to making money all the time. I don't say you must, you have the right and the choice to do it or not to do it. And I have the right to find your choice bad.

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