Linked by Steve Husted on Mon 13th Sep 2004 08:28 UTC
Linux gaming. Let's face it - it's terrible. Tux Racer? Please. Quake III, okay, I'll give you that. NeverWinter Nights? If you can get it to work. WINE? If you have enough hair left to pull out, WINE is a good choice.
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Some people say, Linux needs native games and Wine prevents that. Iīd rather doubt it, only a handful games run on wine, a few more with glitches on WineX. Wine is and never will be a serious solution for games.
We have SDL and this is an excellent base for Linux games, but why do we have so few of them. The answer is simple. It is Linux itself.
Face it, the PC is not the favorite platform for game developers, due to the fragmentation of hardware, which no driver really can abstract and no high level api either. Add to that the distro fragmentation and the neglegtence of the LSB and you have a market which is hard to target (close to impossible I must say) if you donīt want to run into a support nightmare.
Even though Linux has reached a critical mass which would make it a viable platform, if you look at the platform itself it is rather uniteresting to develop for.
You can abstract some parts somewhat with SDL, but most commercial libs the game developers use donīt have hooks into SDL and even then you run into the nightmare, of endless lib revisions which even can be broken between major revision numbers.
What we need would be a consistent and enforced linux gaming base, with defined library revisions, with defined installers and so on, but unlike the normal linux standard base, the games base has to be followed by the distro makers, otherwise I donīt see any chance to have a good gaming experience on linux.