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This was written by John Reeves Hall
and given on Sat Nov 17 2001.
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Table of Contents
- Mostly console based
- BSD Games Collection ( /usr/games )
- MUD/MUSH servers
- Cheesy X11 games
- xbill, xboard (interface to GNU chess)
- Nothing requiring sophisticated graphics
- Nethack
- Possibly the most addictive game ever written
- Attempted Dreamcast port
- UNIX traditionally has not been much of a ``video'' gaming platform
- Workstation-oriented graphics, high-quality but not good for arcade-style
- PC developed a gaming scene due to commodity hardware
- Exploded with VGA graphics adapter
- Although limited, chip had lots of potential
- Smooth scrolling, decent color depth
- Linux was still in its infancy; Xlib (slow) and SVGALib (bitchy) were the only options
- SVGALib is a kickback to the mid 90's; limited hardware support
- Xlib is network-friendly and flexible, but not very fast
- Doom and Abuse ported with SVGALib and X
- Dave Taylor = Linux geek
- Ported Doom, and when his now-defunct startup created Abuse, ported that too
- Good ports, but finicky
- Much heavier reliance on driver support
- battle used to be getting vendors to supply 2D programming specs
- now 2D specs are easy; 3D specs are more difficult
- at first, few vendors supported Linux
- Programming specs are hard to acquire
- First big step: Daryll Strauss ported Glide (3Dfx) to Linux
- Brian Paul wrote Mesa, a decent software OpenGL implementation
- Mostly complete and correct, but SLOW
- Daryll Strauss convinced 3Dfx to let him port Glide
- Soon Mesa was patched for Glide output, and became viable for games
- Limited hacks to use Glide for accelerated OpenGL
- Proper integration of XFree86 and various 3D accelerators
- Glide is not a general purpose graphics API, and often doesn't play nice
- SGI designed GLX specs, but Mesa + Glide didn't really use it
- Utah GLX is a hardware accelerated GLX extension for XFree86
- Reasonably good performance, but lousy AGP support
- lacked infrastructure for modern 3D accelerators
- was still playing the catch up game
- SGI released GLX source code, leading to better compatibility
- Big publicity, not sure how much use it was, but much appreciated
- Linux became a viable target for games; Loki released Heavy Gear II, Soldier of Fortune, and other Utah GLX oriented games
- Precision Insight helped develop drivers
- Attempt to overcome intrinsic limitations in Utah GLX's design
- DRI has a lot to do with AGP memory allocation and management
- Reached a point of stability about when Loki reached a point of bankruptcy
- Loki spent a lot of effort trying to make games work on shaky OpenGL grounds
- Excellent 3D performance on supported hardware
- Support is finally getting there on many cards; still playing the catch up game
- Requires DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel module for memory allocation
- DRM is an interface for allocating necessary memory buffers, mainly also requires AGPGART driver
- Seems to have a bad case of "not invented here"
syndrome
- Xinerama (dual head support) apparently not good enough for them; on their own with TwinView
- Not really a problem, unless you want to do dual head with a non-NVIDIA card
- Drivers share a codebase with Windows drivers
- Developed in-house by NVIDIA, and reasonably well supported
- Dedicated support staff, #nvidia on openprojects, frequent updates
- It appears that ATI is sick of dealing with Precision Insight (commercial Linux video driver developer) and intends to develop drivers in-house
- Precision Insight charges an insane hourly rate
- Most of PI's top employees have left
- ATI does not have a good reputation for driver development, but hopefully something will become of this
- Radeon 8500 is reportedly "schweeeeeeet"
- Fall into three categories: ports of Windows games
( Loki , Tribsoft , Icculus ),
commercial games with Linux support from original developer
( id , Epic , Sunspire ), and hobbyist
developments ( FreeCiv , Stratagus , Worldforge )
- Porting business is on shaky grounds; IT industry crash didn't help
- Don't know if anyone is actually making money
- Porting is a viable business as long as you don't have to make money
- Commercial support relies mainly on developer sentiments and off-hours hacking
- Hobbyist development is the future
- We've built a kernel, two major desktop environments, created the best firewall system ever...
- ... why can't we make good games?
- Lack of artists, perhaps?
- Portable 2D video acceleration abstraction layer
- Pass-through support for OpenGL; still useful in 3D games for input and audio handling
- Sub-APIs for video, audio, input, threading, CD-ROM access, and file IO abstraction
- Core of SDL is simple and tiny, but much additional functionality (image loading, high-level sprite management, etc) is available as add-on libraries
- Strongest following of any multimedia toolkit
- Portable 3D audio library; a mix of Creative's EAX, OpenGL, and open source
- Was doing quite well when both Loki and Creative were working on it
- However, Loki is unable to continue support, so OpenAL has been stagnating
- Some disagree with AL's design, but I consider it clean and effective
- Corporate-backed portable multimedia library
- Lot of potential, if the corporations can stay tame
- Appears to be a bid to obsolete DirectX; if this happens, it won't be for a while
- Specification freely available
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Programming Linux Games 