id Software: Linux Hasn't Produced Positive Results

[blackout23]

The only thing that could substitute keyboard and mouse for desktop use would be 100% flawless and effortless mindcontrol. Just think about what you want to type and where you want to click or scroll. Everything else ist just inferior. Guess why Keyboards haven't really changed in decades because they are GOOD.

I don't think that W8 will hurt Microsoft that much, Windows 7 will just turn into the new XP.

[finalzone]

Here is a take from Slated blog. Phoronix should post this as a follow-up from John Carmack keynotes

[madjr]

Here is a take from Slated blog. Phoronix should post this as a follow-up from John Carmack keynotes

thank you, very good clarifications !

[crazycheese]

Here is a take from Slated blog. Phoronix should post this as a follow-up from John Carmack keynotes

Great blog!

[V!NCENT]

Well if there are not enough humans who want Linux, and capitalism is in the way, then why not make the games yourself? Because no one cares.

And let's be honest here; how much of your time did you waste/spend playing videogames? I mean I like games, but do we realy need it? I know I would spend a lot more time on creating what I wanted, if I wasn't such a damn dopamine addict -_-

[Scali]

As a software dev: I exist to make my company [and by extension, myself] money. I can't compete against free, but "good enough" software packages, so I don't develop for linux.

Shocking, I know.

I think that games are in a unique position though:
The real value is not in the software itself, but in the content. Carmack clearly understands this: He releases the game engines as open source, but not the game content. So anyone who wants to play the game, still needs to buy the game, even though the software itself is free.
Likewise, many game development studios don't develop their own game engines, but license third-party middleware instead. Still, it takes them years to make a complete game, with a large team.

Games compete on their content, not on the software part. For example, Portal uses the same engine as Half-Life 2 or Left 4 Dead, but all three are very different games, and appeal to different audiences, mostly because of the different levels, storyline etc.

This also explains, at least partly, why free/independent/low-budget games tend to be much poorer in quality than the big commercial titles. Generating a large amount of high quality content requires highly skilled people, who can work on the game fulltime for an extended period. Where one or two people can whip up a 'good enough' program for DVD burning or such in a few months time, just as some spare-time hobby project, making a game with 'good enough' content seems virtually impossible that way.

If anything, competing against other games is not an issue on linux, because there aren't many big commercial titles that are released for linux. There apparently are a lot of other problems, and I wonder how many of them Valve will solve. Steam should at least solve the problem of locating, purchasing and installing the software. Other than that, what they're doing is not that different from what ID has done before (porting games to linux after they had already been released on Windows)... But ID at least designed their technology with portability in mind, using technologies such as OpenGL (Carmack actually did early demonstrations of Doom 3 on a Mac rather than a PC, let alone using Windows).

[Scali]

Linux is winning on servers, phones, embeded devices, etc.

Linux isn't winning on phones, Android is... And mostly because of the reasons he states: Android is a far more 'fixed' target than linux is. You have the standard Dalvik VM environment, with standard runtime libs etc.
A very important point: binary compatibility. People can just download binaries from the Google Play store, and things Just Work(tm). Across different vendors, different versions of the OS, different brands of CPU/GPU, different revisions of the hardware etc. To a certain extent even x86-based Android-devices are supported out-of-the-box, even though the platform was 100% ARM-based until recently.
This is a *very* different environment from your average linux distribution. Even on the exact same hardware you often can't use packages for one distro on the other, or even from a different version of the same distro. Dependency hell, lack of standardized environment etc.
(Yes, even OpenGL on Android is not OpenGL on linux. Android uses OpenGL ES, which is a much more streamlined version without legacy crud, and a much more fixed featureset than the old OpenGL).

[Setlec]

i think that game content quality is a very hard thing to judge. i mean that it depends on how the game designer sees the game while creating it. the Frictional Game devs (amnesia, prenumbra) did release good games with a damn good content quality even though it's a indie studio. there are many good looking games out there but other than graphics quality the game is bad, really bad. Rage looks damn nice but the game is rather dull gameplay/storyline wise.

[Scali]

i think that game content quality is a very hard thing to judge. i mean that it depends on how the game designer sees the game while creating it. the Frictional Game devs (amnesia, prenumbra) did release good games with a damn good content quality even though it's a indie studio. there are many good looking games out there but other than graphics quality the game is bad, really bad. Rage looks damn nice but the game is rather dull gameplay/storyline wise.

Well, content is more than just graphics quality. It also includes things like level design, which are a result of the storyline and gameplay. So implicitly the gameplay/storyline is part of the content (as I tried to explain with Portal/HL2/L4D: three games using the same engine to create quite different types of games... One is a platform/puzzle game, one is very much story-driven, and one is a co-op multiplayer shooter).

[johnc]

Linux isn't winning on phones, Android is... And mostly because of the reasons he states: Android is a far more 'fixed' target than linux is. You have the standard Dalvik VM environment, with standard runtime libs etc.
A very important point: binary compatibility. People can just download binaries from the Google Play store, and things Just Work(tm). Across different vendors, different versions of the OS, different brands of CPU/GPU, different revisions of the hardware etc. To a certain extent even x86-based Android-devices are supported out-of-the-box, even though the platform was 100% ARM-based until recently.
This is a *very* different environment from your average linux distribution. Even on the exact same hardware you often can't use packages for one distro on the other, or even from a different version of the same distro. Dependency hell, lack of standardized environment etc.
(Yes, even OpenGL on Android is not OpenGL on linux. Android uses OpenGL ES, which is a much more streamlined version without legacy crud, and a much more fixed featureset than the old OpenGL).

But Carmack is highly critical of Android and doesn't want to develop for it specifically because it's so fragmented.

Yes, if you have a Java app then it'll work across devices but once you get into the NDK and then into GLES you're in a world of hurt. Many of the top phones are smoothening some of that mess out, but it in the past it's been difficult.