Maxis Developer on Linux Game Porting

friedmud wrote in to tell us about a comment from a Maxis developer, Don Hopkins, who did a partial linux port of "The Sims". You can find his post here (3rd one down, comment from Don Hopkins titled "Reality check from a game developer") in a LinuxGames.com forum. I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Wine is the best way to have games happen on Linux but his comments on the economics of Linux games development and especially the costs of keeping versions concurrent on multiple platforms are insightful.

SDL and other multi-platform libraries

[geekfiend]

The process of porting a game can be much less difficult if the developer chooses a multi-platform library. For games SDL allows this and for other sorts of applications, QT can do the same. The challenge lies not in porting, but rather the developer chosing to work with a propietary single-platform library (DirectX) versus something more portable, and argueably better!

Bioware?

[mickeyreznor]

Everyone knows that Bioware [bioware.com] is doing a native linux version(and they were talking about the possiblity BeOS port as well) of Neverwinter Nights [neverwinternights.com], but has anyone actually asked their motivation for it?

I'd certainly like to know. Is it that they see a potential in linux gaming, or are they doing it out of good will? I'm unsure but it looks like they've snubbed directx and direct3d completely in favor of OpenGL.

(before anyone asks "when is it coming out?" go here [planetneverwinter.com])

Re:Native ports are best!

[psxndc]

Keep in mind that 1.4 is a long way off from being standard. It's in beta and while 1.3 is pretty well rooted among developers, the _industry standard_ is still jdk 1.2.2.

That being said, at Java One I saw a game written completely in Java. It was definitely an interesting concept and it seemed to run pretty smoothly (it was a FPS-type), but it was damn ugly. That may be just that they didn't have the artists necessary for the models, but it sure wasn't quake3. The technology is almost there, but other posters are right, Java isn't great at graphics. Almost, but not quite yet.

psxndc

More Sims porting happening

[prototype]

I'm also currently working on porting most of the Sims code as well as all of my Sims tools [simfreaks.com] to native versions for Linux and the Mac. The reason was fairly straight forward. Wine emulation can only go so far, requires a bit of a techie person to use and given the nature of most of the Sims users, it's beyond them. I know that's a blanket statement that will probably come back and bite me in the ass, but it's true.

A native version is the way to go. I'm in the same boat as Don, although he's got more access to the code than I do. I generally go through him to get the code I need. When the issue of providing a Mac version came up because most of the utilities wouldn't work under VirtualPC, I looked toward some cross-platform library rather than emulating with Wine or whatever Transgamer is providing. I settled on wxWindows (between a choice of QT and wxWindows) just because of the licencising issues around QT (I'm not in a position to release any Sims code and bound by NDA to not).

The big issue was the fact that The Sims was completely dependant on DirectX (even though they try to abstract it out in some of the wrapper libraries they have) so the first thing I did was to port all the graphics code to OpenGL. Don and I have been communicating as well and had some success with porting some of the lower level functionality of the game engine to use Python via SWIG wrappers.

I think one of the key things here with any game development is that the commercial developers should look at writing portable code. Maybe they don't have to take the effort of writing the code for those other platforms (whatever they may be depending on what you call your base platform) but at least take the effort to provide those hooks with little effort. Don't tie yourself into a proprietary API and put the platform dependant features in the platform dependant code where it belongs, separate from the main code. But then that's just stating the obvious right?

liB

Re:same old bull again

[Anonymous Coward]

(another AC)

Statmarket [statmarket.com] has some figures available... most need subscription but amongst their (older) free sample stats it shows that not even Unix is anywhere near 8%.

This is March 99, but the proportions shouldn't have changed that much...

Windows: 94.39% (and increasing)
Mac: 2.63% (and dropping)
Other: 2.54% (increasing)
Unix: 0.44% (dropping)

Even if Linux is counted as the entirety of both Unix and Other, it's no more than 3%.

According to the OS version chart, in March 99 Linux had a huge and fairly stable market share of... 0.2%.

Other online stat sites show similar amounts of considerably less than 1%, and many of these sites depend on accesses which would tend to boost Linux (lots of students on Linux machines at uni, and we might suggest that many people who are not online and hence not represented are amongst the less technically savvy, hence probably running the 'default' OS of Windows)