John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

[Mike Frett]

Goodness

This guy has clearly lost his Marbles. Wasn't he raging before about how Linux was a failure and how he hated to write his games natively for Linux?. I respect Mr. Carmack for the things he has done in the past, but my opinion of him has been quickly changing as of late.

[TemplarGR]

Carmack is an overrated developer. I remember having arguments with other CS students about this. While most worshipped him because they played Quake and Doom, i never did. Since i am now a professional developer myself, i don't consider anyone that good and deserving of such high praise.

His engines weren't even the best of their times. They were good, sure, but others were better. And the games he created were pretty boring actually. I viewed them more like tech-demos than worth-playing games.

So i don't get what the fuss is about. Why every time Carmack farts the web is filled with articles reporting it? He has become irrelevant in gaming for quite some time... Try to remember the games he produced in the last 5 years and tell me how good they were, technology or gameplay-wise...

[newwen]

Wine is only good enough for older software that would never get ported to Linux. But for new software, designing and writing code with platform independence in mind from start is a better software engineering practice.

This said, if Valve wants to be successful in their Linux push, they should integrate Wine into Steam to run older games that won't get ported. I have Windows games in my Steam library that I have to run using the windows version of Steam on wine.
They should test popular windows only games against a specific version of Wine included with the Linux version of Steam and enable running windows games that are proven to work good enough (gold) with a wineprefix that works for that specific game. That's a ton of work though and only an interim solution.

[entropy]

Carmack is an overrated developer.

This.

Carmack farts the web is filled with articles reporting it? He has become irrelevant in gaming for quite some time... Try to remember the games he produced in the last 5 years and tell me how good they were, technology or gameplay-wise...

Hysteresis effect of what he did in the past. Might never change.

Similar to AMD - they will probably never get kudos for their binary drivers.
No matter how hard they try. It's just the other way around.

[artivision]

I don't really understand what you are saying here. What do you mean by buffer management, and what instructions are you talking about ? The instructions covered by the ISA docs (Instruction Set Architecture) are the same as we use internally.

When you give target and optimization libraries for Mesa, you say that we can wrap your hardware under Mesa rasterizer with the same efficiency as under Catalyst? Its rare for you to give any real optimizations like you did with the asynchronous_DMA. "Covered by the ISA docks"??? What your target libraries for Mesa covers??? Please do not speak and act now!!! Intel's open driver has 80%+ the performance of the closed one. And Linux will prevail soon like 2-3 years, and when someone uses Linux, sooner or later understands its philosophy. And then they will remember you for what you did. Your closed driver doesn't even start Unreal_3 titles under Wine.

[bridgman]

When you give target and optimization libraries for Mesa, you say that we can wrap your hardware under Mesa rasterizer with the same efficiency as under Catalyst? Its rare for you to give any real optimizations like you did with the asynchronous_DMA. "Covered by the ISA docks"??? What your target libraries for Mesa covers??? Please do not speak and act now!!! Intel's open driver has 80%+ the performance of the closed one. And Linux will prevail soon like 2-3 years, and when someone uses Linux, sooner or later understands its philosophy. And then they will remember you for what you did. Your closed driver doesn't even start Unreal_3 titles under Wine.

(scratches head)

You do know we spent the last 18 months moving from a simple shader translator to a full-blown LLVM shader compiler based on backend code from the Catalyst stack, right ? Your comments seem to ignore that completely.

Also, I think you might be confusing shader compiler with the rest of the driver stack. Not sure though...

[Hamish Wilson]

I am sorry, but Carmack deserves a lot of the praise he gets. These claims that he does not are just plain ludicrous. No-one has pushed graphics technology further than Carmack in the gaming field, his engines were always top of the line (it is a slanderous ill-informed lie to say not they weren't), and they were in fact often the best out there at the time of their release (see Wolf3D, see Doom, see Quake, Quake II, see QuakeIII, see Doom3) at least from a graphics perspective. His work also directly created the modding community as we know it today, due to his work on Doom as well as later titles and his insistence on making it an open platform for people to develop with. And he has contributed so much to free software in his own ways besides, something which he does feel very strongly about (which is part of the reasons I mentioned the Masters of Doom citation).

This seems very much like the Linus Torvald's reactions I keep on seeing. Both Carmack and Torvalds have done great things and earned a reputation. Back when Torvald's was praising KDE and bashing GNOME so many people in that camp sang his praises, but then when he switched to GNOME many people there were singing his praises, and then he left, and switched back, and ranted, etc, etc. Now many in both camps (and now also Nvidia fans, but anyway...) constantly launch personal attacks on him because he has dissed something they are close to, oblivious to the fact that back when he was supporting what they liked they loved every minute of it and supported his attacks on others. It was only when the penny turned they started to scream he was overrated.

Same thing here in many ways. For years people were saying that Carmack was a Linux supporter and that his work was gold in the community, but now that he has gotten a little less favourable we are spewing bile so fast it is embarrassing. I can understand the notion of feeling betrayed (I have felt it to), and of feeling close to a community and movement and not liking what is being said, and I agree his comments on WINE are ill-informed and not the best way for anything to go forward, but I think people are going to have to get some perspective here, and stop with the personal bashing. I do not agree with him, you should go out and definitely disprove what is being said, and yes you should be loud enough that people can hear you. But trying to minimize him in this way simply stinks.

Especially with this lofty talk about not supporting cross-platform development when source code releases ARE the best ways for this to be done. I agree they are infinitely more useful to the community than some un-maintained release on an id Software FTP server in the long run. Once the source code is out the system can be ported and maintained for eternity, not just Linux but any other system I may be using in the future. And it keeps it from being stuck in a closed box like Steam is (yes, Steam has legitimate issues that make them not the total saviour that some make out) as I am still not getting my hands dirty with that and am glad that we can already now play Doom3: BFG without it as well as Rage someday.

The source code releases were always the closest to his heart so it it makes a lot of sense that this is what he himself would be pushing the strongest - especially since he personally has never enjoyed making ports (another little gem from Masters of Doom). And they actually are more important than Linux releases as we know them. His WINE comments are bunk, but he still has a lot to contribute and I think this is mostly just him being misinformed rather than the almost malicious intent some are ascribing to him.

The odd thing is I agree with you most of you almost implicitly - just not the way you guys are handling it.

[losinggeneration]

Carmack is an overrated developer. I remember having arguments with other CS students about this. While most worshipped him because they played Quake and Doom, i never did. Since i am now a professional developer myself, i don't consider anyone that good and deserving of such high praise.

His engines weren't even the best of their times. They were good, sure, but others were better. And the games he created were pretty boring actually. I viewed them more like tech-demos than worth-playing games.

So i don't get what the fuss is about. Why every time Carmack farts the web is filled with articles reporting it? He has become irrelevant in gaming for quite some time... Try to remember the games he produced in the last 5 years and tell me how good they were, technology or gameplay-wise...

I think their most innovative engines where between Doom & Quake1. (Wolfenstein3D gets an honorable mention, mostly because it was faster than other pseudo-3D engines of the time.) Quake1 was the first game (that I can think of at least) that officially supported community modding. It a lot of ways, id dawned the era of the first person shooter.

After that though, the engines kind of kept with the curve usually being at least on-par with what else was out there around the same time. Doom3 had early tech demo's using vertex shaders in/around 2002-2003, but by the time it was released (2004) it wasn't alone.

IMO they're probably going to have to start to move away from engine development & focus on solid games if they want to stay relevant (since they're not licensing their engines outside of ZeniMax.)

[Kivada]

I probably wouldn't pay for software if it was wine-only. That's kind of silly.

Exactly. If it's not native I'm just going to pirate it. Why perpetuate the Windows only stranglehold on the gaming market?

So far I've bought every single native game for Linux and did the same when I ran Macs. But if the title was Windows only, it was off to the torrent site.

[Kristian Joensen]

I think their most innovative engines where between Doom & Quake1. (Wolfenstein3D gets an honorable mention, mostly because it was faster than other pseudo-3D engines of the time.) Quake1 was the first game (that I can think of at least) that officially supported community modding. It a lot of ways, id dawned the era of the first person shooter.

After that though, the engines kind of kept with the curve usually being at least on-par with what else was out there around the same time. Doom3 had early tech demo's using vertex shaders in/around 2002-2003, but by the time it was released (2004) it wasn't alone.

IMO they're probably going to have to start to move away from engine development & focus on solid games if they want to stay relevant (since they're not licensing their engines outside of ZeniMax.)

Shader support isn't what made idTech 4 special, it is the unified rendering paradigm. The same unified rendering paradigm that Epic and CryTek are selling Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine 3 on in 2013, id launched in 2004, sure there are some better rendering algorithms available now but nothing id couldn't have implemented had they stayed on that path, the workflow and consistency benefits to unified rendering are exactly the same for Crysis 3(CryEngine 3) and Fortnite(Unreal Engine 4) as they were for Doom 3. So they were 8 - 9 years ahead of their time on that. That is just the tip of the ice berg with regards to their tech innovations and they have plenty of game play innovations as well. I love Rage.