Originally posted by CNCFarraday
View Post
OpenGL - well, the only bad side is speed of improvement, since all members have to accept the changes. But the payback is thats acknowledged by all. And documentation. Although I dont really think documentation is that bad. It is open, consistent, independant to platform, hardware and OS. It is also easier to program, because its a system, rather than an interface. But I want to ask you to leave it as is, because it is the only and the best counterpart to Direct3D. Unless MS desides to open DX(which it will never will). Ask yourself why does MS keep ignoring OpenGL to large extend and instead puts money in DX, not even a fork, but complete different system. Its called lobbing.
Gstreamer - an equivalent of DirectShow, makes installing and using codecs a fuzz. Play, record stuff easy. Very mature.
Bullet - the open physics engine is present.
Network stack is one of the best in the world.
OpenCL - is here already.
Udev and evdev - are here for input hotplug detection and xorg supports various input devices.
SDL - for writing crossplatform code, including engines. Takes care of dependencies to OpenGL and sound systems well(OpenAL,Gstreamer,Alsa,Oss).
HTML5 is coming, willing to replace flash(as much as adobe fears it). I think it is the right way. Flash-like technology should really be open, because its enriches www to great extent. Adobe should at least open the specs and provide own implementation if they want. Flash-nonfree is present in repos as well as gnash and swfdec. But HTML5 is really the correct way.
I really dont know with java, maybe oracle will give some chance..
There are several great opensource engines and even game-makers present for linux.
Compiling against next version isnt bad, if you know what "DLL hell" is. Additionally you dont have to recompile every time, you just call for somelib.so, which is a link to somelib.so.4 or so.6 and so on.
It isnt a issue for opensource projects, proprietary have their own ways(why protect the code and not the title(the purchase) in the first place?) Im not the fan of proprietary anyway, because chinese earn somehow different amount as swiss. And security is crap. And others cannot contribute to the same extend as vs GPL. Forcing to pay is not a right option, making people invest for the options they want is much better IMHO(in the case they aint programmers and dont want to implement them themselves). But thats offtopic. UrbanTerror for example uses a precompiled binary that run (for me) on several different Ubuntu versions(8.04-10.04) and both x86/x86_64 without issues.
To my knowledge only graphic pipeline is a problem.
Currently the most complete OpenGL stack is provided by nvidia(which is the only single positive point in their drivers, sadly).
But because its restricted, barely any distribution ships with it, even gentoo has it hard and keyword masked.
If AMD provides OpenGL 3.2 opensource stack with at least 50% of closed source driver perfomance together with optional videoacceleration, that case would be closed.
And I share your points on XCOM and Fallout, XCOM1 has is really in need for soldier stat overfollow patch(ie TU 254>>255>>0). But no one can patch it since its closed and license is hold by Take2(to my knowledge). And someone should really be both skilled at programming as well as overall logic and be able to keep whole game consequent to write something like XCOM. This is HARD even if you(as in "any man") have rights on title. Technology develops, people knowledge regresses.
Comment