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OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/21773/Thoughts_of_a_Linux_Game_Porter Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:37:05 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Interesting article http://osnews.com/thread?371649 http://osnews.com/thread?371649 Quite an interesting read. I didn't expected that sound and network would be harder to port than the 3D engine or platform-specific code. I guess that even indie developers don't code as badly as some of my student I had to grade... Then again, I just can't believe that some developers are still using DirectPlay when it has been *removed* from the DX SDK almost two years ago!

Talking of games, this article reminded me of libSDL. It's quite a shame that development of this library seem to be on an halt. It always looked like a decent cross-platform alternative to DirectX. Perhaps I am missing something? Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Wrawrat) Comments Difficult http://osnews.com/thread?371702 http://osnews.com/thread?371702 I bought Majesty from LGP a few years ago. I believe I was on a 2005 Ubuntu at the time. The game worked perfectly and I was delighted with my purchase.

However, I wanted to play through it again about a year ago, and it wouldn't work on any distro I had to hand. I wrote to LGP and they said they were working on it.

I think this highlights the difficulty of using any proprietary software on Linux. Linux changes, the proprietary software doesn't, so it stops working. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Amiga64) Comments RE: Interesting article http://osnews.com/thread?371721 http://osnews.com/thread?371721 SDL is being quite actively developed.

If you check the mailing lists, you will see that lots of work is being put into the 1.3 release. This is going to be a major rewrite of SDL's internals, hence the slow development.

With the new backends, it will be possible to use 3D acceleration for 2D. Something which is not easily done nowadays.

The support for multiple windows is also part of the upcoming 1.3 release. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (moondevil) Comments Good interview http://osnews.com/thread?371738 http://osnews.com/thread?371738 Overall a very good interview - knowledgeable questions and insightful answers.

One subject I wish had been covered, the state of original gaming on Linux. Even though it's not Mr. Earl's area of expertise, I expect he could have provided some predictive insight. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Bobthearch) Comments Comment by diego http://osnews.com/thread?371769 http://osnews.com/thread?371769 I lost faith a long time ago on game developers releasing their games for Linux and just got a PS3 for my gaming needs.

If developers in general still think that we (Linux users) don't pay for software they are still smoking crack and living under a rock. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (diego) Comments RE[2]: Interesting article http://osnews.com/thread?371770 http://osnews.com/thread?371770

SDL is being quite actively developed. If you check the mailing lists, you will see that lots of work is being put into the 1.3 release. With the new backends, it will be possible to use 3D acceleration for 2D. Something which is not easily done nowadays.

In particular, I think (hope?) that 1.3 will fix the slowdown issue with Windows (e.g. Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, whose latest 0.5 Tiles sometimes works much better on Linux!!). Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Rugxulo) Comments RE[2]: Interesting article http://osnews.com/thread?371793 http://osnews.com/thread?371793

SDL is being quite actively developed.

If you check the mailing lists, you will see that lots of work is being put into the 1.3 release. This is going to be a major rewrite of SDL's internals, hence the slow development.

That's great to know. I was considering it for a demo, but I didn't want to cope with a dead project. However, 18 months since the last release is a lot of time in software; perhaps they should give more news, as few people are reading mailing lists...

With the new backends, it will be possible to use 3D acceleration for 2D. Something which is not easily done nowadays.

What do you mean? Unless mistaken, most 2D operations can be made in 3D. Therefore, they should be already accelerated? The only unaccelerated operation that comes to my mind is direct pixel update, like playing a movie. Still, you could use textures and PBO/FBO to make it faster than, say, a glDrawPixel() call. Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Wrawrat) Comments RE: Difficult http://osnews.com/thread?371794 http://osnews.com/thread?371794 Yeah, I bought the same game. Stopped working with Hardy which was very unfortunate. Had something to do with Xorg updates, I guess.
Just to cheer you up - it started working again with Jaunty. You just have to download a new installer from LGP's web site otherwise you won't be able to install it... Sun, 05 Jul 2009 06:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (joeprusa) Comments RE[3]: Interesting article http://osnews.com/thread?371799 http://osnews.com/thread?371799

I was also surprised to read this. In the game industry, all UIs are done with the same primitives that are used for rendering the 3D scene.

In fact, for my current hobby project, I wrote a fully hardware accelerated path shape (fully compatible with the SVG path element) that uses pixel shaders for applying solid colors, images and linear/radial gradients with an arbitrary number of stops. It also supports using a Theora movie for the fill or stroke brush and does the YUV->RGB conversion in a pixel shader. The resulting images are identical to the SVG output of Firefox (which uses Cairo) assuming that the graphics hardware offers at least 4x MSAA.

The advantages of 3D hardware acceleration for 2D elements are tremendous. My implementation is written in C# and absolutely blows Cairo away when it comes to speed. Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cb_osn) Comments RE[3]: Interesting article http://osnews.com/thread?371833 http://osnews.com/thread?371833

Well, in the case of SDL you have a library that is stable and somewhat feature complete for years now.
So it never came to a surprise for me that there are mostly bugfix releases happening, and those quite rarely.

It is very nice to know however, that great efforts are still put into SDL. We have a very stable, simple and convenient API here that is still getting improved under the hood -- great. Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ford Prefect) Comments RE: Comment by diego http://osnews.com/thread?371861 http://osnews.com/thread?371861 > If developers in general still think that we (Linux users) don't pay for software[...]

Whether they think that or not is irrelevant when there are so few linux desktops in total that the financial calculations never made it past the "are there enough linux desktops in existence to pay for this game" stage. Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Luminair) Comments RE[2]: Comment by diego http://osnews.com/thread?371878 http://osnews.com/thread?371878

Whether they think that or not is irrelevant when there are so few linux desktops in total that the financial calculations never made it past the "are there enough linux desktops in existence to pay for this game" stage.

I wouldn't want to confuse writing a game specifically for Linux and Linux alone, with writing a game and porting it to everything (including games machines, Windows, OS X and Linux).

The question is whether or not there's enough users of a certain platform to pay for porting the game (and the additional support costs)...

-Brendan Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Brendan) Comments