Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Fri 3rd Jul 2009 20:56 UTC, submitted by Michael
The folks over at Phoronix had an interesting interview with Linux game porter, Frank Earl. Despite the apparent decline in PC gaming, Earl has worked for Linux Game Publishing for several years and was seeking input from the community at large for game suggestions at Phoronix. He's also done work independently on porting various software over from Windows. The interview covers work that Earl has done, difficulties that arise in porting commercial games to Linux, successes they've had, his views on Linux in general, and his thoughts on the future of gaming in Linux.
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Member since:2005-07-08
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.
RE[2]: Interesting article
by Rugxulo on Sat 4th Jul 2009 20:48
in reply to "RE: Interesting article"
Member since:2007-10-09
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!!).
RE[2]: Interesting article
by Wrawrat on Sun 5th Jul 2009 05:28
in reply to "RE: Interesting article"
Member since:2005-06-30
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.
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.
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Member since:
2005-06-30
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?