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John Carmack Shares More Of His Linux Views

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  • #11
    If Gaming companies made games that worked flawlessly with wine with an easy deployment (that installs their wine hack separately if necessary) and if they guaranteed patch and corrections and a good framerate and immediate releases.. then I wouldn't mind if the game is native or "Wined" ... and would pay for a good gaming experience.
    But I wouldn't pay if I had to hack my wine install to play ...

    But as already mentioned before : Opengl is already used in games ported to Mac, IOS.. So it shouldn't be so difficult to port the games to Linux (not to mention that lot's of games use "3d engines" that are for some already available on Linux) ...
    Id software did create a version of rage on Ipad and ported rage on the Mac... So they thought it was good for them to port games on other platform than win pc... for Linux they perhaps don't think it is worth the costs .. that is their view after their previous trials and "errors".
    For games and apps It has always been a problem of market size and distribution ... if you don't provide a sufficient market, they won't make apps or games .. if you don't provide apps and games, not enough users will come to make a potential market ... it will be a niche market.
    Even if Carmack made commercial games available on Linux years ago before the other guys, it was not "as easy as steam or Ubuntu store", for the gamers to find or install them .. And it was a different time with low bandwidth, less 'inline' payments and less Linux users ...
    Today with Steam, games are easy to find, buy and install (but there are just a very small number of games compared to windows and Mac markets)..
    Ubuntu software center should have helped game companies to port games long ago (with a "kickstarter like page" with "pre-purchase" in their store to port games or "Wine enabled them" for example - I understand that companies wouldn't want to do it for free)...
    According to steam Stats : "Ubuntu" has now 1.12 % usage of the steam platform during January 2013 (+ other distros ('other' = unidentified platforms in steam) have a part of 0.76% of steam usage) ..
    That is between +1/4 and -1/2 (if you count all the "other") of the mac usage (4.41%) on steam.. That means if not everyone, a large portion of Linux users wants to play on Linux... and Gamers are ready to pay for it. And regarding the "market share" attributed to Linux VS Mac it is in proportion a LOT of people ...

    If you care and give a good product for the users and easy access to the product, they will probably come ... Steam decided not only to port games but to "make/build the market" ... Will they succeed ? Is it a problem if the market is not big enough ? At least they have tried and they have given the linux gamers "a tool" to make their voice and money count ... If after that companies are able to make money they will surelly come like they came to embrace the MAC and IOS market...

    So "wined" or "not wined" is probably not relevant - easy access, easy deployment and good user experience are the only things that matters for games and for apps (in fact the goal of any OS should be that everything is totally transparent and works as designed) ...

    So let's think about "the future of gaming on Linux platform" ... If a steam box comes out with Linux system, what would the best option to sell it ? If I were Valve I would sell it "bundled with games" for a limited period ex: "A steam box with the whole 'half life' package (Half Life 3 included) [Half Life 3 won't be a real exclusivity but the box would be the first platform to "deliver the game" .. That would make gamers consider the box or Linux as a viable gaming option.. but that is just a "wish"

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    • #12
      Just read this:

      Update: On Monday, September 23rd, Valve announced a crucial component of its push for the living room: SteamOS. With two additional announcements teased for the coming days, we're expecting to get...


      It seems Valve will be making the "business case" for Linux, and for Carmack. If they sell millions of these Linux-based Steam boxes, then Carmack will come back to porting games on Linux before you know it.

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      • #13
        That was expected. Id is dead and he is getting old. But the funny part is:

        Back in days, he wanted to write native version of Mario on PC, but Nintendo decided Mario belongs only on its consoles.
        Today, he is asked to write native versions of his titles on Linux, but he decides his windows-only code is better run emulated/wrapped.

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        • #14
          Grandia 2 the PC port (Win 98) is going to be my dead horse here. Windows XP couldn't even run it! Betcha anything if they released the code someone would port it in days. I could give a flying fuck about most new games I just wish games that no longer sold had their source released so the world would benefit. Still, yeah Wine for old titles... like we have a choice, what logic. Someone posted it sooner write cross platform from the get go.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by elanthis View Post
            If and whwn Linux gets high uality modern APIs
            don't tell me you call windows apis anything near of high quality and modern!

            .net in its latest version is the first api wrapper from microsoft that SOME WHAT managed to provide something half way usefull.

            i've coded for over 20 years, most of my paid stuff for windows and it is ALWAYS a BIG relief when i don't have to code anything involving micorsoft api's. biggest bullshit ever designed!

            but sure, when people grow up and get educated in colleges and universities only with such stupid things they got used to and like most people think the things they already know are the best.

            if i weren't payed so well for coding for the windows plattform i wouldn't evet do it again.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by eoxx View Post
              But as already mentioned before : Opengl is already used in games ported to Mac, IOS.. So it shouldn't be so difficult to port the games to Linux (not to mention that lot's of games use "3d engines" that are for some already available on Linux) ...
              Id software did create a version of rage on Ipad and ported rage on the Mac... So they thought it was good for them to port games on other platform than win pc... for Linux they perhaps don't think it is worth the costs .. that is their view after their previous trials and "errors".
              There isn't much porting. Rage on PC used openGL too. Every PC with a Windows graphics driver has an OGL implementation included with it. When Rage came out, it was the first game in a decade to push the Windows openGL implementations graphically and had tons of bugs at launch because AMD and Nvidia stopped trying.

              Porting a game already written for openGL to Linux isn't going to be perfectly painfree (end of line characters change, case sensitivity on Linux, you use unistd.h instead of win32, you need to point to ~/.config/<dir> instead of %APPDATA%\<dir>. And there would be compilation errors on gcc vs MCVC (though I'd rather write something against mingw and forgo Microsofts bastard C compiler entirely).

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              • #17
                He's too old

                Back at one of the Quakecon's he asked for a show of hands of who had Android vs IPhone. More Android!

                See he's invested all this time into Win32/Mac OSX. But his company is in shambles.

                He works for somebody else now. They tell him to preach Win64/Direct3D/MacOSX.

                He bitched and gripped about PS3 hardware compared to 360 and everybody knows PS3 had the superior product. [g]

                His last speech went for 2.5 or more hours babeling on as to why nobody liked his 90's flat-textures.

                Rage was two steps backwards from Doom 3.

                Unless he's willing to take a chance and risk it all like Valve I'm not interested in this guy's words anymore.

                Michael Abrash, he's the man! John Romero, you get that dream team working at Valve there will be some titles pumped out.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by mike4 View Post
                  What's all the hassle? M$ market share is already down to ~70% in Switzerland and continues to fall...
                  From where do you have this number??

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by mike4 View Post
                    What's all the hassle? M$ market share is already down to ~70% in Switzerland and continues to fall...
                    So that's still a massive majority then...

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by cbamber85 View Post
                      So that's still a massive majority then...
                      Not in mobile. The largest increasing market for games is mobile right now. What's MS's marketshare in that? 2.4 %. Using Direct X today just doesn't make a lot of sense if you want to port to mobile devices.

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