AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide

[energyman]

Not to mention, do you have the benefits yet? I'm currently running nVidia with the proprietary drivers, and I see absolutely no reason to buy an AMD card in order to run Catalyst. Not unless you're really trashing nVidia in Windows game performance, but there you're usually competitively priced anyway (margins are another matter). I want to choose open source, but I'm fairly pragmatist.

well, without the open source initiative, I wouldn't have bought the 3870 I own now. Or a friend of me would not have bought his 4850 ...

some time ago, people were saying 'I buy intel mobos. Because they have open source drivers for their onboard graphic'. Before that it was 'I buy ATI because the Radeons have open source drivers'. Ok, thanks to ubuntu the 'free drivers are a great thing to support' mindset suffered. But hell... I support that.

A company acts nicely? I buy their stuff. And all of my linux using friends think similar.

[elanthis]

Well we have OGRE and the Blender Game Engine is in coming. Probably these can cause some unemployment among game developers

Not really. Most game developers are the exact same as the OSS developers: they reimplement crap from scratch due to NIH syndrome. How many OSS 3D engines are there? Irrlicht, CrystalSpace, Blender, and OGRE are just the four "big" ones, on top of the Quake3 tech mods. And so on.

And honestly, those tools are NOT game engines. They're 3D engines. A full game engine is far, far, far more than those things. As with all programming, games are dependent on the quality of the tools used to make them. The mapper tools used by level designers. The scripting tools used by AI designers (who are often not trained programmers). The reporting tools used by the game designers. The in-game event systems and analysis tools used by the logic programmers.

A 3D engine is just a tiny, tiny part of what a game engine needs, and honestly, it's the easiest to replace. 3D engines are commodities these days. There are tons of companies selling 3D engines, not to mention those Open Source engines you brought up. If that's all a game engine needed, Open Source would have actually come up with a game worth more than $5 already.

[elanthis]

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.

Because that is impossible on current distros. NWN did that, as well as a number of other commercial Linux games. None of those installers work anymore without manually patching them.

If nothing else, there is no way to run a script that can ask for a password in a cross-distro compatible manner. Somem distros use sudo, some don't. Some have GTK frontends for su, some for sudo. Some use KDE frontends. Some don't have a graphical frontend at all. Whether or not the distro even allows the script to run is indeterminate, because osme distros mark the CD as noexec while others don't, some distros allow you to double-click an executable to run it and others don't.

Without a standardized installer, it WILL NOT WORK. That means a single installer format that some preinstalled-on-every-distro program can recognize, open, and process to copy files from one (or more) discs (or the Internet, even) onto the computer, either in a single user's home dir or on the system. Integration with RPM and DEB and such would be a (welcome) bonus, otherwise it requires a standardized update and uninstall tool as well.

There are several such tools available. Few of the distros want to even offer these in their repos, and none want them in the default install, making the projects all entirely wasted efforts.

[Pfanne]

Well we have OGRE and the Blender Game Engine is in coming. Probably these can cause some unemployment among game developers

the interesting thing is that the blender game engine is now being developed with the help of a game company called twilight22 or something.
they work on improving the speed as well as the workflow.
the bge is one hell of a powerful tool, though it lacks certain features to make it useful in the commercial way.

[madman2k]

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.

Well we have OGRE and the Blender Game Engine is in coming. Probably these can cause some unemployment among game developers

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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...