John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

[Hamish Wilson]

At your suggestion, I started to. I could not make it past the 1st sentence. "I wish Linux well, but the reality is that it barely makes it into my top ten priorities (Burn the heretic!);" Screw this. If Linux is not a priority for his business model, that's fine, it's his business and his choice. But indie Linux developers will pick up the slack from big game companies that don't want to be bothered. Their loss, our gain. I don't want to be bothered with Windows *anything* anymore, it has taken me something like 15 years to finally dump Microsoft for good. I believe in control of one's destiny, and that doesn't happen when one is small and dancing to Microsoft's tune. Carmack is big and established so he doesn't have to care, he's already got money to do whatever he likes.

And I do not disagree with you, for the most part. I just think some of the language and allegations being thrown about in this thread are unfair.

Still, as a side note, has anyone else here read David Kushner's excellent book Masters of Doom? I think that should be required reading for anyone before they attempt to make a character assassination of either Carmack or Romero.

[bvanevery]

Still, as a side note, has anyone else here read David Kushner's excellent book Masters of Doom? I think that should be required reading for anyone before they attempt to make a character assassination of either Carmack or Romero.

I've read it. Nothing about that book changes anything I just said. He can make his own business decisions, but I see no reason to agree with, praise, or reward him for saying Linux is a PITA. I'm of the mind that the world doesn't need Windows anymore. It's time. Not that Windows will go away soon, but it's time for game developers to chart their own destiny and not worry about what Microsoft or anyone in their sphere of influence thinks.

[johnc]

I've read it. Nothing about that book changes anything I just said. He can make his own business decisions, but I see no reason to agree with, praise, or reward him for saying Linux is a PITA. I'm of the mind that the world doesn't need Windows anymore. It's time. Not that Windows will go away soon, but it's time for game developers to chart their own destiny and not worry about what Microsoft or anyone in their sphere of influence thinks.

He didn't say Linux is a PITA (though it is), he just said that there's no business case that can be made for porting and supporting a game on Linux. And I think for most games this is probably true.

For Linux gaming to receive equal respect it would require this Steam Box to be very successful.

[bvanevery]

He didn't say Linux is a PITA (though it is), he just said that there's no business case that can be made for porting and supporting a game on Linux.

You say tomato I say tomato. What's the difference? Programming gruntwork that you have to pay someone to do is a PITA.

And I think for most games this is probably true.

Why should Linux consumers care? The market will solve this.

For Linux gaming to receive equal respect it would require this Steam Box to be very successful.

Not really. Minecraft turned into $80 million without any portals initially. I haven't checked on whether they bother with them now, as I didn't think Minecraft Alpha was much of a game. People respect money. Indies will keep trying to crack the money problem. When one of them inevitably succeeds, all the sluggards of the world will try to jump on the bandwagon. Screw them, I don't care what they do or what they want. Bunch of whining about wanting the world to be Windows so they can do less work.

Linux gaming will happen with or without Steam. Steam is a good boost for the ecology and may catalyze things, but it is not essential. I don't know if you've noticed but computers aren't really doing anything "new" anymore. That's why Linux has a strategic chance now and it's why Microsoft is slipping.

[kaczu]

And I do not disagree with you, for the most part. I just think some of the language and allegations being thrown about in this thread are unfair.

I think they are actually kind of warranted. From a business perspective it makes no sense to target wine when 2/3 of the consoles don't and 97% of the mobile devices out there don't either. Right now there's a war going on and it's not about operating systems, but about API's. MS is losing this war in a big way because it's mobile marketshare is horrendous and no sane developer wants to limit the platforms they can sell their products on. Meanwhile gaming on mobile units is exploding. MS knows this and so does Carmack. OpenGL and it's offshoots are eating MS alive. So why target Direct X just so that when you go to port your game to a mobile unit you have to spend that much more to make it possible?

I also don't buy the source argument. Yes, source is very important. But it's only as important as the technology it relies on. Most of the gaming engines being produced / developed now support output to OpenGL/ES. This isn't by accident.

What SteamBox, Ouya, Android, iOS are doing is providing a platform for developers to sell their content without the MS lock in. Windows 8's store by itself isn't what is pissing off developers. It's the API lock in with Metro.

What Carmack is saying that it's harder to target an executable for Linux (which he has admitted to it only taking a few months) than to chase wine versions + their platforms over time. I'm not seeing where it makes a whole lot of sense.

[ElderSnake]

I don't know what's up with Carmack lately. IMO what he's suggesting is actually kind of dangerous (if, like me, you want to push for multi-platform tech and lessen this reliance on Windows only tech)

WINE is great, for what it is. But it should never be the answer for new titles. For old existing games or games which just happen to be Windows only/exclusive, WINE can be a God-send for the Linux gamer if it happens to work okay.

I'm really loving what Valve is doing with Linux and I hope it does so well it makes JC (unfortunate initials) very very jealous.

[kokoko3k]

D3D is a shader compiler, openGL the same, CG the same. It compiles programs(shaders) to a form that a computer(GPU) can understand. Its useful because there are many different computers and you cant write code just for one. The target and optimized libraries that are required to target a specific hardware are inside a GPU driver (the same is true for OpenGL compilers). The bad thing is that wile with a new CPU they give as those libraries(BDver for example) for GCC, for a GPU they don't give the analogous MESA parts. That is happening because they don't want MESA to grow, because then other companies will come and break their monopoly (software is half the GPU). Those two evil companies (ATI_AMD and NVIDIA) instead of using only OpenGL, they co develop with Microsoft DirectX, the closed all games under Windows and they are privileged by this deal (to be the only ones for long time). Also they did attack open pc closing games under consoles, that's another crime and not for money (the profits are better if you sell more cards and more expensive cards for pc). Now as for Wine the situation is simple: Except from the compilers there is also the rasterizer inside a GPU driver. Even if we can run D3D libraries on Wine we don't have the D3D rasterizer with the Linux GPU drivers, so we need to translate and loss FPS. Some times with an Nvidia card only we can set this translation off (GLSL=disabled), that uses the old and not efficient compiler and gains some FPS. In order to solve those problems Wine started an llvm_hlsl_shader_compiler, that uses the efficient llvm to compile HLSL very close to GLSL efficiently so the translation becomes very fast. When they succeed we will no longer need D3D libraries ether.

Oh, thank you very much for the detailed explaination.
D'you have any source where i can follow the wine llvm_hlsl_shader_compiler development?

[losinggeneration]

No, I did not know that. Now I understand why the Doom 3 engine source is a complete mess.

Well, I feel I should clarify a bit. He's not a CS graduate, but he has been a professional game developer since the late 80's if I'm remembering correctly. That longevity goes a long ways.

With regards to the id Tech 4, the engine was a bit messy because it was their first mostly C++ project. My naive wc on doom3 & ioquake3 gives 578515¹ & 355606² respectively. I believe John Carmack has actually commented on this and expressed that the id Tech 5 engine is actually in better shape. That said, I don't think the engine is a mess, from an architecture standpoint. There are things that could have been done better for sure, but that could be said about pretty much every piece of software.

1. find . -iname "*.cpp" -or -iname "*.h" | grep -Ev "neo/(curl|openal|sound/OggVorbis|renderer/jpeg-6|tools)" | xargs wc -l
2. find . -iname "*.c" -or -iname "*.h" | grep -Ev "code/(AL|SDL|zlib|jpeg|libcurl)"| xargs wc -l

[madbiologist]

Carmack actually said "emulator"? I thought WINE stood for Wine Is Not an Emulator?

[moilami]

ID what?

Anyway, they don't want my money for their new games, but other companies will gladly accept my money and deliver games to me.

Times are good. There are much more games for GNU/Linux than I have time to play.

Besides I haven't even finished Quake I with both mission packs on Dark Places engine, a game I have the fancy collector's edition box. Was nice to support ID, but now it is Full Steam ahead