id Software: Linux Hasn't Produced Positive Results

[whitecat]

After the disaster they call ET:QW? That game was so bad (no Joystick configuration on Linux

WTF ! How is it possible to play a FPS with a joystick ?!

, map glitches on all maps, patches that introduced more bugs than they fixed

I play ETQW since 2007, don't remember seeing bugs.

, no weapon balance...)

There is many things in the gameplay that are not balanced. This is the fun part of the game! (eg. medic Strogg vs Human)
For sure it's totally at the opposite of Q3A.

[artivision]

I don't think that's really the best way to go. People don't care about technology, no matter how good it is, until it gets applied to entertainment. That's just history. IBM has been building supercomputers for decades now, and they didn't register on the public radar until they programmed one that could beat Gary Kasperov in a chess game. More recently they managed to get one to play Jeopardy.

The point is that games are the common clay. Photoshop isn't it. Video editing isn't it. CAD crap isn't it. Those are niche markets if ever there were such creatures when compared to games. People know what they grew up with and don't like change. If you show people that you can have FUN on a Linux system without the anti-crapware overhead and things get better for everybody. The people playing games now are the ones who will be writing Photoshop's replacement a few years down the road.

Games are not only fun, they're the best PR you can get. Because if people are going to be playing games, why not Zoidb.... uh, Linux?

Conclusion1: Don't expect anything from companies, do it your self. For example a good D3D state tracker for Wine, or a D3D compiler with close to OpenGL output (Wine1.5 does the second, little by little).

Conclusion2: People will care for technology if they change motives. When they adopt Linux for example.

[MonkeyPaw]

Is what world is "4 players" now defined as single player?

I'm not the original poster of this, but 4 player MP is a joke. When people saw that, it was a huge disappointment. It might as well have not existed when you consider Q2 and Q3A were so good at MP. But yeah, it did technically have it.

[zerothis]

Isn't John Carmack the guy who said id games would never be ported to Kinux?

[9a3eedi]

Quake 3 was a very stupid, boring game. Which is why I find it so disappointing that the most popular games FOSS has been capable of creating are Quake 3 clones, and then only if id feeds them a premade engine to do it with. You people could at least be making a community Hexen 3 or something. :/ (Yes, I saw the non-FOSS mod team working on such a thing. I bought Doom3 just to try the mod's alpha. It was not good.)

While I don't find Quake 3 stupid or boring, I do agree with the rest.. I really don't understand why every FOSS FPS game I see online is just some soul-less quake 3 clone. Could someone at least make something with a decent singleplayer campaign and a story? lol.. or perhaps something with a co-op campaign, but with the gameplay style of Quake 3 and other fast-paced shooters. I realize it takes more effort, but still, you'd expect that you'd at least see someone trying to change things a little at least

I've been having ideas of making games like that myself.. who knows, it might happen someday

WTF ! How is it possible to play a FPS with a joystick ?!

Console players say hi. A lot of FPS games these days are very slow paced (and boring imo lol) compared to Quake or whatever, which makes them playable on a controller. Add things like auto-aim to that, and it really isn't that bad. Also, it's nicer to play with a controller on a couch if you hooked up your TV to the internet.

Personally, I prefer keyboard though

[AJSB]

If someone says that is impossible to configure a joystick to fly in ETQW, that person is an ETQW NOOB

It's perfectly possible....via autoexec.cfg


ETQW is still my favourite game from all FPS with vehicles....shame that devs screwed several things and let so many bugs unsolved.

ps_ ...and yes, if you also criticise someone for wanting to use a joystick in a FPS game like ETQW, you are also a ETQW noob because clearly you don't know about the flying vehicles in ETQW

[Pallidus]

just because the steam windows client has +2500 titles it doesn't mean anything for linux.

Listen, valve doesn't own those titles and do you think the vast, vast, majority of those developers will bother with porting games to linux? even if they wanted they probably couldn't, just look at the difficulty valve is having with getting linux developers. And why would they want to port them to linux? access to a OS that has 2-3% of market share at best?

If valve really cared about linux gaming and this wasn't some sort of baffling fatneck move it would port halflife 2 instead since then you would have complete access to all the thousand of halflife2 mods and that would make for good gaming.

[gilboa]

The biggest problem on Linux that I keep saying over and over again and it seems like no one listens or cares is standards, including software installation standards. If there is any chance that a particular library you are linking to isn't a solid standard and might not be on someone's installed Linux OS, you need to include the damn thing in your installer or make it easy (automatically, preferrably) to get it.

Sorry, but as someone that spent half of his professional life in developing Windows application is pure B.S.
Not only there's around 50 different installers, some completely oblivious to any Microsoft semi-official-standard, but also, the OS is *completely* incapable of insuring the any of said installers will be even capable of, hell, uninstalling itself, let alone prevent it from trashing system-wide DLLs. (And no UAC only gets users used to clicking Next, next, next. Calling it a security measure is absurd).
Far worse, not only Windows lack any type of centralized package manager *, it also lack any type of centralized library management system.
Trust me on this one, I literally spent months on debugging crashes on client systems until I found out, the hard way, that I should *always* place a local copy of all the runtime DLLs and *never* trust the junk placed in system32.

Unlike Windows, most Linux distributions have a powerful package management system. Library version management, etc.
Sure, having multiple distributions is a pain in the backside, but given sufficient know-how, it can easily avoided (LGP, Epic, Loki all solved it by using statically linked libraries).

- Gilboa
* No, MSI is not a real package manager.

[kraftman]

In any event, the idTech 4 engine supports more than 4, and the other 2nd party Raven/id titles based on that tech (which you left out of your list, along with a lot of other 2nd party id titles) all support way more than 4 players. Most of those titles have Linux ports. The usage stats for said titles exist.

Too bad Carmack bases on crappy web browser game and he's missing obvious point - Linux ports came after windows and most Linux users bought windows version just to apply Linux patches later.

* Back when I was an "er meh gerd Lernux!" zealot like most of the other Phoronix readers, I did buy the tin special edition Loki port of Quake 3. Quake 3 was a very stupid, boring game. Which is why I find it so disappointing that the most popular games FOSS has been capable of creating are Quake 3 clones, and then only if id feeds them a premade engine to do it with. You people could at least be making a community Hexen 3 or something. :/ (Yes, I saw the non-FOSS mod team working on such a thing. I bought Doom3 just to try the mod's alpha. It was not good.)

Back when you weren't windblows fanboy. Some fan made stuff like quake clones is irrelevant and doesn't represent FLOSS at all. It's like judging proprietary games by some crappy freeware.

[kraftman]

just because the steam windows client has +2500 titles it doesn't mean anything for linux.

Listen, valve doesn't own those titles and do you think the vast, vast, majority of those developers will bother with porting games to linux? even if they wanted they probably couldn't, just look at the difficulty valve is having with getting linux developers. And why would they want to port them to linux? access to a OS that has 2-3% of market share at best?

If valve really cared about linux gaming and this wasn't some sort of baffling fatneck move it would port halflife 2 instead since then you would have complete access to all the thousand of halflife2 mods and that would make for good gaming.

It means everything to Linux, because VALVe wants all of those 2500 games to be running on it. It's very realistic. Some games are already running on Linux, but are available for Windows or OS X only. Crisis, Wargame:EE. It's even possible Linux is preferred development platform for Windows games. Porting can be a wrong word in many cases, because it seems some important games are ported from Linux to Windows (but only released for the later, for now). Stop your stupid trolling about market share, because not so long ago OS X was irrelevant till it got games. Linux + games means Linux + highest market share.