Icculus Ports Prey Game Client To Linux

[Aradreth]

WEll, that is good news. I still wonder how this came about to be realized. I dont think take2 knows anything about a linux client for prey, much less gave the green light to go ahead with it.

They'll know about it, they just might not have had a say in the matter. It all depends on the contract Human Head Studios signed (and it looks like a windows only contract as they have different publishers for both the 360 and mac versions).

[xav1r]

WEll, that is good news. I still wonder how this came about to be realized. I dont think take2 knows anything about a linux client for prey, much less gave the green light to go ahead with it.

[SlackerTD]

The retail client is out! Read the news found here.

[Elv13]

That does NOT mean that he used that to port it. In fact, it's not terribly useful for much of anything, based upon my review of the source code they made available. It's got promise, but it's nothing you'd do a production port upon.

Furthermore, I know something of the actual details of what was done.
I also know that Ryan wasn't involved with Alky.

Keep in mind, the existence of a parallel effort does not lead to that parallel effort being the one that you're dealing with right now. Ryan was contracted by 3DR to do the standalone server for multiplayer on Prey. Typically (and in this case, he did this...) he does the client side port as well and tries to get them to allow it's dissemination if not publication, either on the release disk (See UT2k3 & UT2k4...) or at least as a download somewhere (see most of the other porting projects...). In this case, there's been demo versions available in a closed manner instead of a public manner like this for a while now. Take a gander at the tag for whom I'm affiliated with and consider that I kind of know something of what I'm claiming here on this and leave it at that.

I never said that -this- port was made with alky, all I said is that the previous one was. When I saw "Native prey demo come native to Linux" I said, hey, 1 second, I did play a native prey demo 2 years ago!

[Dragonlord]

What's the point? PC gaming is pretty much dead and it will continue to be dead as long as game houses program their rendering tech to depend on $1000+ video cards. Very few people have the money to toss out their perfectly functioning hardware every year just to be able to play a game and quite a few people that do have that money don't because there is no real recycling of old computer components and they don't want to add to the growing problem of carcinogens leaching into the groundwater and air from old components.

If you notice the most popular PC games are the ones that run on older hardware, like Counter Strike: Source and World of Warcraft.

PC gaming is nowhere dead... it's just dead what goes for AAA companies since they ran into a dead-end with their way of handling customers. Unfortunately graphics first is the idea today and gameplay comes next if there's time up to the deadline. That said if you want to do some HDRR and dynamic shadows for immersion you can quickly run up on a medium to higher end card to get this working. Older cards manage to work with static lighting and shadowing. Belief me I had the same idea and if my project only thought me one thing than it is that there is just a barrier under which you can't go if you want to maintain a certain graphic level. You can always go below by cutting out stuff but for many projects there's just not enough time to implement different render pipelines ( and low-spec rendering can require quite some code changes ).

[Svartalf]

The thing I believe that Svartalf was referring to is the fact that Prey on the PC (i.e for Windows) has always been OpenGL based, so there is not much to translate, except maybe the DirectInput code and maybe DirectDraw window handling code (which Wine has done just fine, by the way). Now what is actually rather interesting is to provide Windows XP users with a DirectX 10 runtime (for whatever that may mean... graphics only? Input, Play, etc?)

No, I was more indicating that there's nothing TO his claims and unless he's got verifiable proof of his claims other than the Alky project partial demo, he most likely needs to back down because I've got info (i.e. that insider stuff I keep teasing people with...) that runs strongly counter to his claims.

[yogi_berra]

Now what is actually rather interesting is to provide Windows XP users with a DirectX 10 runtime (for whatever that may mean... graphics only? Input, Play, etc?)

What's the point? PC gaming is pretty much dead and it will continue to be dead as long as game houses program their rendering tech to depend on $1000+ video cards. Very few people have the money to toss out their perfectly functioning hardware every year just to be able to play a game and quite a few people that do have that money don't because there is no real recycling of old computer components and they don't want to add to the growing problem of carcinogens leaching into the groundwater and air from old components.

If you notice the most popular PC games are the ones that run on older hardware, like Counter Strike: Source and World of Warcraft.

[Svartalf]

As I said, it is dead, but you can try it anyway http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/

That does NOT mean that he used that to port it. In fact, it's not terribly useful for much of anything, based upon my review of the source code they made available. It's got promise, but it's nothing you'd do a production port upon.

Furthermore, I know something of the actual details of what was done.
I also know that Ryan wasn't involved with Alky.

Keep in mind, the existence of a parallel effort does not lead to that parallel effort being the one that you're dealing with right now. Ryan was contracted by 3DR to do the standalone server for multiplayer on Prey. Typically (and in this case, he did this...) he does the client side port as well and tries to get them to allow it's dissemination if not publication, either on the release disk (See UT2k3 & UT2k4...) or at least as a download somewhere (see most of the other porting projects...). In this case, there's been demo versions available in a closed manner instead of a public manner like this for a while now. Take a gander at the tag for whom I'm affiliated with and consider that I kind of know something of what I'm claiming here on this and leave it at that.

[Thetargos]

As I said, it is dead, but you can try it anyway http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/

The thing I believe that Svartalf was referring to is the fact that Prey on the PC (i.e for Windows) has always been OpenGL based, so there is not much to translate, except maybe the DirectInput code and maybe DirectDraw window handling code (which Wine has done just fine, by the way). Now what is actually rather interesting is to provide Windows XP users with a DirectX 10 runtime (for whatever that may mean... graphics only? Input, Play, etc?)

[Elv13]

Excuse me, but where are you getting your information from?

As I said, it is dead, but you can try it anyway http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/