A few months ago we ran a poll about the most important non-free Linux apps. We had over 8,000 votes in that poll and we consider the results pretty interesting. Interesting enough to push Linux's market share if a distro capitalized on them?
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Member since:2006-02-17
DirectX is simply an API. Linux does not provide the API, but WINE does. Most DirectX games (6-9 anyway) can be run on Linux today without a whole lot of hassle.
If you write for DirectX, however, chances are: you aren't looking to make the game portable in any sense of the word, and you aren't familiar with or competent with the alternatives (for which there is native Linux support).
Today, though, many game developers write for specific engines. The game itself is developed on an intermediate platform that uses DirectX (or whatever) as the back-end. The engine developer could write a separate back-end that is not DirectX based and can run natively in other environments. Epic Games, creators of Unreal Tournament, do this, for example.
Member since:2005-10-02
Actually, Wine do have an implementation of DirectX, acting as a wrapper around OpenGL. It's not complete, but it works in part. Good enough that many popular FPS can run on Linux with Wine.
And besides that many games are written to _not_ only use DirectX but also other abstraction layers, incl. cross platform abstraction layers.
So it's not really a big hurdle after all.
Member since:
2005-08-18
"there won't be any impediment to write/port GOOD games to Linux?"
There's no DirectX on Linux and since most commercial Windows games use DirectX that's something of a big hurdle.