IBM's Bob Sutor Questions Linux Gaming

[tball]

I intend to buy ETQW, is it that crappy?

Its not at all crappy. Its one of those games I keep getting back to :-)
I just bought the steam version, but only for the download.

[Irritant]

What Linux needs more than anything, is for more ease of use when trying to get games to run. There are many inconsistencies across distros, that almost make it a necessesity to recompile the games from source(if that source is even available). Noobs have a great deal of difficulty in many cases getting games to run. Some will argue this, but as someone who has had to support a cross platform game, I can tell you that it's a real problem that really discourages new users.

Solving this problem would encourage more gaming companies to support Linux. Right now too many see it as a lot of headache with little reward.

As far as the current selection of games on Linux, opinions may vary, but there are a great number of quality, open sourced games available now that are continuing to evolve, and close the gap between commercial products. These projects just need to stay the course, and continue to be developed, and eventually people won't be pining for the so-called "AAA" titles, half of which are garbage anyway.

[Setlec]

sounds interesting. Hows the mod community doing these days? I would fire etqw up and see for myself but unfortunately china decided to @#$% me over once again.

i don't play any mods as there so few mods anyway. what I meant in my previous post that new players are playing the normal game as it was released.

For the mod situation we might see more mod as the source code is release (IF it's released). Id tech 4 has a new game and probably new coding features with "Brink", TBR by Splash Damage. I hope Id Software, aka Beshida or whatever publisher's name is, will release the source code of the current map editor for id tech 4.

@ Irritant: you are more than right about the linux ease of use for new users. That said i still don't support ubuntu for that! It's too much windows like for my taste! Mandriva has a good Control Panel that i wished more distros to have. But Alsa need a better GUI for configuring the sounds system like the one from Creative Labs' soundcards.

[Svartalf]

What Linux needs more than anything, is for more ease of use when trying to get games to run. There are many inconsistencies across distros, that almost make it a necessesity to recompile the games from source(if that source is even available). Noobs have a great deal of difficulty in many cases getting games to run. Some will argue this, but as someone who has had to support a cross platform game, I can tell you that it's a real problem that really discourages new users.

Ahem... I beg to differ with you on that score.

If you know what you're doing, you almost don't need to care about those differences. Tools like Scratchbox/Scratchbox2, apbuild, etc. make it very, very doable without needing to resort to source code.

Solving this problem would encourage more gaming companies to support Linux. Right now too many see it as a lot of headache with little reward.

Right now, I'm working at showing people that it CAN be done and then from there, explaining how it's done.

As far as the current selection of games on Linux, opinions may vary, but there are a great number of quality, open sourced games available now that are continuing to evolve, and close the gap between commercial products. These projects just need to stay the course, and continue to be developed, and eventually people won't be pining for the so-called "AAA" titles, half of which are garbage anyway.

We can only hope. As for the ratio of crap to gems in the space...Theodore Sturgeon said it best..."ninety percent of everything is crap..."

Doesn't matter if it's propretary or FOSS.

[V!NCENT]

I intend to buy ETQW, is it that crappy?

Yes. Unless you never played a single Windows game...

What Linux needs more than anything, is for more ease of use when trying to get games to run. There are many inconsistencies across distros, that almost make it a necessesity to recompile the games from source(if that source is even available). Noobs have a great deal of difficulty in many cases getting games to run.

We need an open source engine that everyone works on and encrypted game files that the engine uses. The engine could be recompiled on all platforms and the encryption could be used for copy protection (CD key is decryption key).

Then everybody should host servers for some kind of online gaming community and open source services for recognising the game files and auto imnstalling them by just copying it to a folder.

Ram the CD key through some formula (the game files specify) that does some calculations with a few paterns that are unique on every disc and then store this is the encrypted game files that are installed in the game map and make this the players online ID. Deny every online ID that's not been pressed onto a disc.

If the result on a formula excist twice while logged in for online play then deny a person on some official server.

For games that are to be freely shared don't do this ofcourse.

Problem fscking solved...

[benmoran]

That's sort of what I was thinking.

On a semi-related note, there are quite a few projects using the cube2 engine these days. It's not really a "modern" enough solution, but it shows the creativity that can blossom out of an engine that's relatively easy to use, and not overly centric.

[L33F3R]

you dont need a killer engine to make a fun game. I just finished playing spyro for the playstation 1 and it was a blast. Yo Frankie looks very pleasant on the eyes but as far as game-play goes its a total piece of shit.

Just some food for thought.

[Setlec]

a good game is , imo, made of:

- good gameplay
- good story
- good programing
and for last an engine that has been taken care of!

[Apopas]

a good game is , imo, made of:

- good gameplay
- good story
- good programing
and for last an engine that has been taken care of!

The general rule is that for sure, but sometimes the engine is part of the gameplay. For example Myth2's engine supported so great explosions that you had to consider it during your gameplay if you didn't want to suffer from unnecessary casualties

[V!NCENT]

a good game is , imo, made of:

Stop! Whatever you put on that list is already full of shit!

There is no rule for creativity or a good game, just as you can't say: A good song should have this, this and that and do that and then it will be great.

A good game should just be a good game. Period.

In order to make it cross platform we must seperate the engine from the game data so that the game data can be copyrighted and proprietary with copy protection and an open source engine that, once installed, can run every game out there instead of needing to be compiled along with the game distribution itself.

Ditro's can bundle the engine so they can supply a platform. It's easy and cheap for developpers out there to share the development of the engine so no-one should have to reinvent the wheel twice to make a proprietary game!