UT3 For Linux Is Laid To Rest By Epic's Mark Rein

[deanjo]

Android and mobile Linux probably has the better shot at being a viable gaming platform than desktop Linux at this point.

Amen, it's probably also why if Steam ever comes to linux it will probably be for those mobile platforms.

[GreatEmerald]

It has nothing to do with DRM, UT3 itself comes only with a standard CD-check, since UT series is largely dependent on multiplayer and you can't pirate that. It could have something to do with getting permission for all the 3rd party tools used in Unreal Engine 3, though.

[V!NCENT]

ROFL. You have got to be kidding. If 'regular people' cared about pc gaming, notebooks and integrated video would be much less popular.

Regular people, in computer terms, don't know anything about computers. They just want a good one. Everybody can drive from A to B in a crappy Toyota, so why do businessman need BMW's?

Next to the screen- and keyboard, people just want "the best computer for my money". Likewise most regual people want to have a Full HD screen just because it implies you are succesful.

Take a look at it from the 'get real'-perspective. The Dire Straights: "Colour teeeeveeeeeeheeeeee". If you had a color tv with a vcr back in the day you were the man, so to speak. Succesful son of a bitch. Nowadays the people in apartments all have at least a flatscreen with a DVD player, not being satisfied with what they have because the richer have "MOAR, MOAR, MOAR!!!!!".

So why settle for a girly netbook?

[BlackStar]

Everyone seems to be missing a crucial point: UT3 flopped. Sales were lower than expected and Epic didn't make the profit it wished from this game. This is likely the reason why they canned the Linux port (why sink more money on a failed endeavor?)

They've more or less announced they will be abandoning the PC platform in favor of consoles and handhelds. Funnily enough, they blame pirates for this decision, although the poor sales of UT3 are more likely the result of a subpar game.

[KeithZG]

Today we have been passed along a note from Mark Rein, the VP of Epic Games and creator of the Unreal Engine...

Err, might want to fix that article, Mark Rein is definitely not the creator of the Unreal Engine. The creator is Tim Sweeney; Mark Rein isn't even a programmer at all as far as I know, he's mostly the P.R. guy (I spent many years obsessed with the Unreal Engine, basically until this whole debacle with Unreal Engine 3 not coming out for Linux).

[KeithZG]

Speaking of iD, I wish Carmack would do Android ports of Doom in addition to the iPhone ports he's done.
Android and mobile Linux probably has the better shot at being a viable gaming platform than desktop Linux at this point.

Carmack I think mostly programmed for the iPhone first because he uses one; he's definitely interested in Android, though:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/21591033581
I need to decide if I am going to spend some quality time with CUDA or Android. Supercomputing and cell phones, about equally interesting?

You'll notice he announced his smartphone (for now, iOS) engine at QuakeCon. Notably, it was originally going to be part of Apple's Fall conference, but:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/22739785428
Apple insisted that if we wanted to be part of the keynote, I couldn?t show my work at Quakecon, so I declined.

Which brings me to:

I've always liked id. They make me feel sane.

Amen.

P.S. Does anyone know a URL where I could download the original demo release of the UT3 server? Ryan once said that if you compared it with the final, full release that you'd see which middleware was responsible, I was hoping for someone more knowledgeable than me to do it but I've yet to hear of such, and hey, one of the mottos of Open Source is "scratch your own itch"

[yogi_berra]

ROFL. You mean this? http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/0...-2-Unbootable]

FAIL.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/441941

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/551721

Oddly Grub-legacy and Lilo do not have this problem, so I'm obviously trolling

[movieman]

Oddly Grub-legacy and Lilo do not have this problem, so I'm obviously trolling

Except that appears to be nothing to do with Grub, and just another example of crappy Windows DRM trashing people's systems, in this case by writing to random parts of the disk which it isn't supposed to write to. Perhaps complaining to crappy Windows DRM vendors would be more productive?

Added to the fact that we're still stuck with crappy DOS-style partition tables which don't allow Grub to allocate its own boot partition; though crappy Windows DRM would probably still overwrite it anyway.

[Svartalf]

Amen, it's probably also why if Steam ever comes to linux it will probably be for those mobile platforms.

Which is an...odd...way of looking at this, deanjo... There's nothing really intrinsically different except for a constrained screen size for "those mobile platforms" and for X86 Linux. In fact, the only real biggie difference is that you're technically supposed to dispatch input device and sound subsystem operations through the Dalvik runtime on Android for games- if you're needing peak performance, the game's largely the same as for WebOS, MeeGo, and X86 Linux. The GL layer's OpenGL ES as the only real difference. You'd use SDL, SDL_audio/OpenAL, etc. on all those platforms.

You'd want to target the largest possible audience, one that's placed actually at roughly the same numbers as the MacOS crowd, not including all the smartphones out there.

[spikestabber]

Well thank goodness thats finally over with.

Epic drank too much Gears Of War Microsoft kool-aid, I lost hope in them a long time ago since that, not just for Linux ports, but for making any decent games anymore.

I'd kill for a new Unreal game that takes after the original game's roots, but you know its never going to happen.

Anyhow, if they really cared they would at least tell us what really happened, be it Ryan or Mark himself. Not gonna happen.