Open Source Games or the Lack of Them

Wed Sep 23 10:15:56 IDT 2009

Linux game experience is affected a lot by the lack of normal graphic API
(It seems not serious engine uses opengl, even less use opengl shader
language.) Drivers for most card work slowly on linux. With the exception of
the closed source NVidia drivers.
Beside that Linux is also really lacking on the sound front. OpenAL seems
the most common cross platform api and still somehow it's complicated and
rather buggy. SDL is a solution yes, but it's still have high latency and
not so easy to use API.
At least input and joysticks seems to work fine with the SDL 1.3 svn so
that's one thing off the list :)

Of course there are some other issues, cross distribution libraries (LSB?),
lack of installer and the few other minor things.

One good thing about the future is that wine seems to work well with
directx, so maybe the future is using wine libs
for graphic and sound..

Ely

2009/9/23 Michael Ben-Nes <michael at epoch.co.il>

> For years I been waiting to get the same Windows gaming experience from
> Linux.Sadly the gap is just get wider over time and I don't think the
> increase will reverse it self in the coming years.
>
> Lucky us technology change rapidly and my expectation is that in the coming
> years gaming / application will be streamed to our computer from near
> by libraries.
> So putting it simply you will have at your disposal the choice of games /
> application of every OS. What at least render the lack of games on Linux.
> Here is pick to a possible future:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-w56hQxmnY
>
> As for the Opensource concept, I can only hope that in the coming years
> companies will benefit by using the opensource model. That might give them
> the ability to harness the community to add extra feature to their games.
> There is also the question if the result of this workflow will be better
> games ( Sell more ) or like the result of the wiki book ( lame content ).
>
> Cheers,
> Miki
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Michael Ben-Nes - Internet Consultant and Director.
> http://www.epoch.co.il - weaving the Net.
> Cellular: 054-4848113
> --------------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
>
>> Hi all!
>>
>> Someone emailed me in private and said that "you don't want to mention
>> open
>> source gaming. It's a sad joke." and other stuff like that. I'd like to
>> mention some reasons for why I think this is largely the case.
>>
>> Reason: Proprietary Games are OK.
>> -----------------------------------
>>
>> If you read Joel on Software's
>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html , you'll see that
>> commercial games play by different rules than what Joel calls "shrinkwrap"
>> software, which is software (whether open-source or proprietary) that is
>> distributed or used in the wild by many different people. A game must be
>> perfectly right the first time, most games are failures, and generally
>> games
>> require much more effort than just coding the engine.
>>
>> Richard M. Stallman was quoted as saying that "game engines should be
>> free,
>> but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be
>> separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")":
>>
>> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/09/191257
>>
>> Since a typical game nowadays costs a lot of money to develop, and
>> requires
>> the collaboration of many people, it seems unlikely that we will see many
>> open-source games that are up-to-par with commercial offerings. When we
>> work
>> on FOSS alternatives to commercial apps: Firefox, Thunderbird,
>> OpenOffice.org,
>> Inkscape, GIMP, Audacity, etc. we can expect the first versions to have
>> some
>> bugs and that some features will be missing even in the contemporary
>> versions,
>> because either they don't matter much to people or because we will
>> eventually
>> catch up with them. But we cannot afford to do it in most games.
>>
>> My hope is that eventually either game engines would indeed be open-source
>> or
>> at least close (because the amount of work done on the engine is minuscule
>> in
>> comparison to the rest of the game) so they can be ported to Linux, or
>> that at
>> least game companies will start supporting Linux better once it gains
>> marketshare, or that wine, cedega, etc. will allow better support.
>>
>> Reportedly, Blizzard has been using GNU/Linux internally to develop their
>> games (World of Warcraft, etc.) and test them, but has not released an
>> official version for Linux yet, or supports it.
>>
>> Reason: Graphic Artists are unwilling to contribute
>> -----------------------------------------------------
>>
>> For some reason or another it seems that talented graphic artists do not
>> volunteer to contribute to open-source/open-content, whether games or
>> other
>> software. You can see some discussion of it here:
>>
>>
>> http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/shlomif.html#third-sharp-perl-reich
>>
>> And scrottie later continued it in this blog comment to a post "where a
>> graphic designer expresses moral outrage at being asked by Google to
>> contribute design work to Chrome in exchange for thanks, not money"
>>
>> http://use.perl.org/~scrottie/journal/38916<http://use.perl.org/%7Escrottie/journal/38916>
>>
>> While there are probably fewer professional graphic artists than
>> professional
>> programmers (since many classes of programs require very little graphics
>> design), I still think that a much smaller percentage of them contribute
>> to
>> open-source than programmers.
>>
>> I don't know which percentage of programmers contribute to FOSS on their
>> free
>> time, and there was something that people asked after the 2001-2002
>> recession,
>> when many programmers became unemployed, why we don't see a flood of
>> Israeli
>> programmers to FOSS projects, where they can gain some esteem, experience,
>> knowledge, and also have something to do in their free time. Nevertheless,
>> there are still enough programmers to make a difference and to even pose a
>> significant competition to commercial offering.
>>
>> I don't know the reason why graphics artists are so reluctant to
>> contribute.
>> But I think we can just assume that there are probably not enough to
>> donate to
>> even one large scale open-source game, not to mention that there are many
>> fractured efforts for creating such games which fight for attention of a
>> limited mind-share.
>>
>> Reason: Web-based games are posing a significant competition:
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Recently I've noticed that there many good games on the web: in Flash, in
>> JavaScript, etc. See for example: http://www.brainbashers.com/ . These
>> games
>> are not as rich as the ones sold in stores or that run from the local
>> computer, but they are still pretty nice with attractive graphics and
>> usable.
>> As a teenager with a DOS computer, I used to play mostly puzzle games and
>> adventure games, and then could feel empathy and sadness having read this:
>>
>> http://www.logicmazes.com/s7g2k/video.html
>>
>> So playing these great web games, I've been feeling that it's a new
>> renaissance for such relatively low-budget, not too high-quality but
>> otherwise
>> great playability games. Most of the people who make these games probably
>> don't get rich, because the web has a very low revenue model, but I think
>> the
>> fun is the important factor here.
>>
>> There was also an xkcd about it:
>>
>> http://xkcd.com/484/
>>
>> Summary
>> -------
>>
>> In short, I don't see the situation with open-source games improving in
>> the
>> future, because there are good reasons for it not to. However, what can
>> improve is the availability of non-free games on Linux and other free OSes
>> and
>> compatibility with Windows-based games. Some hard-core Windows gamers may
>> also
>> opt to dual-boot, use WINE, or use other solutions if only to gain the
>> other
>> technical and ideological advantages of Linux.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>>        Shlomi Fish
>>
>> --
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
>> Why I Love Perl - http://shlom.in/joy-of-perl
>>
>> Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.
>>
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