Maxis Developer on Linux Game Porting 364
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.
Native ports are best! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the best current approach involves Java, which can be either natively compiled (gcc 3.0) or run on a VM (JDK 1.4 should be quite good). Check out Arkanae [babeloueb.com] for an early preview. :-)
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Its a shame. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having multiple target platforms is a serious headache, and Linux just isn't a big enough market. Most linux users are used to getting their software for free anyway, and probably have the technical savvy to score free versions of any software released. While I'm sure that there are plenty of honest people out there, the fact is that there are very few people who are going to pay for linux games.
Also considering the generally degraded performance of games under linux and the continued acceptance of DirectX as the standard for graphics, all make Linux development difficult.
I read recently that id doesn't want to release their next product under linux (historically they have been pretty good about that stuff) because its a support nightmare, and just really doesn't bring in that much revenue.
I think in order to start getting more native Linux games, Linux needs to prove itself as a consumer OS first. Once Linux starts to satisfy peoples needs easily (thats so important) then i think more people will start moving over, and once they do, then the linux games will start rolling in.
Why not games on Novell? (Score:1, Insightful)
What we really need is an open source OS written to be the perfect game platform, putting development ease, hardware support, and performance above all else. Imagin getting a game on a self-booting CD/DVD, that boots you into the a fast, BSOD-free environment. Code it to use Windows hardware drivers and various filesystems for installs, and you'd have something worth developing for.
Re:SDL and other multi-platform libraries (Score:2, Insightful)
Wine is important, but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is: at the moment, the best gaming API
is Microsoft DirectX, like it or not, and
the likelyhood of DirectX becoming a cross-platform API is zilch.
So obviously, Wine is needed at the moment, partly as a windows-simulator,
but also as an implementation of DirectX on linux.
In the long run, however, It's unhealthy to be dependent on an API dictated by microsoft.
We need a new, open, alternative.
Perhaps SDL 2.0 [libsdl.org] or OpenGL 2.0 [opengl.org] is the answer needed?
Linux needs a killer DirectX-killer-API, much in the same way DirectX was the
MSDOS-killer that moved games development to windows.
However, if wine is the future of linux gaming,
we are (indirectly) giving that future to Microsoft.
Re:SDL and other multi-platform libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
But what about a UI library that doesn't draw the controls the same as the user's operating system? Look at Photoshop for Windows.. it looks like I'm using a Mac. I don't want that! I want an application that looks and feels like what I normally use. The best libraries will work like that, even though they have a cross-platform API. Linux versions will have the window manager look and feel. Mac versions will look like a Mac application.
RealBasic for Mac does this pretty well. Using a single source tree, RealBasic will compile for both Mac and Windows. The Mac apps look like Mac apps, and the Windows apps look like Windows apps. That transparency is what will win.
Of course, to make it easier for the developer can be a good thing. But to give the user a better experience is more important. Because if a user doesn't like your product, why bother?
Greg
Re:I just don't get it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe, but their code is already written for Direct3D, and that's what their developers know. They're not going to pour the money into training developers to use totally different tools and platforms, and pay for the development time to convert everything to OpenGL/AL/SDL whatever. Your points are valid, except in a case such as this - the code is already there, and they're not going to re-write it all.
I just know somebody is going to say, "open source it, we'll port it!" or something like that. But think about it - if you were a company like Maxis, would you give away the source code to your best-selling game that you've put millions into (and received that much as well)?
slow news day (Score:5, Insightful)
Feh (Score:3, Insightful)
As an avid gamer and coder, I'd have to say that linux really isn't going to catch the gaming market in the forseeable future. Call me a pessimist if you like, but that's the way I see it. Gaming may be a large market, but right now, the market is firmly entrenched on a Microsoft codebase. As the guy from Maxis pointed out, it's not that the tools aren't there, or that they're not professional quality...
Porting games really isn't a solution, as Loki found out... any gamer that's serious about playing isn't going to wait for the linux port to maybe make the rounds, if someone decides to pick it up... so they basically exist to serve two VERY niche markets... the "I won't run anything unless it's on linux" and the "I'd rather run it on linux" groups. Concurrent development for multiple architectures is indeed expensive and carries with it a lot of overhead, EVEN if it's planned from day one! While this may have benefits in the long term, as with the Sims linux code being used as a base for the Sims Online project, I believe that this is still the exception rather than the rule.
So, you a cry, a killer app is perhaps warranted? Difficulties abound in this scenario as well... any game that becomes immensely successful automatically spawns imitation... play-alikes would be appearing on the Windows platform in VERY short order, capitalizing on a much greater market that has been overlooked, purposefully OR unintentinoally, by the original creators.
Realistically, there's only one thing that will make Linux a commercially viable platform for which companies can develop games: Linus' plan for world domination(tm). The game companies will go where the money is, that is the simple truth... if the gamers come to Linux, the games will follow. Loki's "testing of the waters" showed that there isn't the demand yet to justify a supply.
As for the discussion on how to get people to Linux... well, that's a whole different can of worms, and one that I won't open in this thread. I should probably (knowing /.) add the caveat that when I'm talking about games, I'm talking about modern, commercial-quality games, with Hollywoodian budgets and all the bells and whistles.
Just my two cents...
Remember Windows 95? (Score:5, Insightful)
And now everyone uses Windows.
Why?
Because it was still possible to play at least some dos games under Windows (because it was built on dos), and with for a bit of hassle, Windows would close, your game would run, you finish your game and windows would reboot.
Yeah, it wasn't neat, but it let people move to Windows 95 and still play their dos games. Once the user base was large enough, native games became available.
My point is, the argument against Wine is exactly the same.What I want to be able to tell people is
"Yeah, you CAN play all your existing Windows games under Linux! Try it and see! It's SOOOOO much better than Windows!!!".
Y'see, if we could get people using Linux more, the user base grows. Then it becomes more feasible to make native Linux games. Then the user base grows some more... See what I'm getting at?
If wine can play all windows games, we can get all those game loving people who won't try Linux because it hasn't got any games to try it and love it too.
Console vs. PC vs Multiple PC Development (Score:5, Insightful)
Consoles have a lot of advantages. They are stable same-same environments. Not a lot of variance, since there is only one manufacturer for each one. There have been some companies that have questioned making games for PCs entirely becuase of the wide variance in the hardware, let alone the operating system.
Many companies make two versions now, one for their console-of-choice and another for Windows/Intel PC platform.
Guess which one is the support nightmare. Pretty easy when you have to support several different video card manufacturers, even ones that don't exsist any more like VooDoo. Yet, the small, vocal, they-will-get-my-VooDoo-when-they-pry-it-from-my-
Different versions of Windows, cheap, God-awful systems from Best Buy and Circuit City, poor white box mail order, you name it, and its a problem on the PC platform.
So, is it a Windows vs Linux thing? Not really. Unless Linux becomes the dominant desktop environment, or at lest has double digit percentage numbers, its a useless question. Developers don't REALLY want to develop on the PC to begin with because of the high support cost, and they are certainly NOT going to develop for a low desktop marketshare OS like Linux.
Think about this anyway: If they did, they would only support it on Red Hat anyway,(market share and mind share again) and then you would bitch about that. This community will only be happy if there are NATIVE Linux games that work on every distro. Ain't gonna happen. Be happy there is still a market for PC games at all.
Re:You might be wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, no game is going to lure people away from Windows. Think about it:
There is a user that runs windows and buys games that run on windows. Now, one game is ported to Linux, but it also runs on windows! Why would they switch? There's no need, that game already runs on windows, as does every other game they own, and the overwhelming majority of games due to come out.
Really, what is so *great* about Linux that will lure the gamer from windows? The lack of games? The lack of driver support? Or maybe the fact that it's completely different than everything they know?
Now, if the Sims 2 came out *only* for Linux, you might have something!
Killer Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux is good for server applications, but *really*, what can it do that Windows/Mac cannot do, other than not crash as often? Very little... Why is this? Between platforms, Linux does little more than ape most of what anyone running Windows/Mac can already do, and far FAR simpler... Can Linux be used optimally for graphic design and video production without any hassles of hopping between CLI and GUI? Nope... Can Linux be used for mainstream business applications and gaming without doing the same, or relying on emulation? Nope... Face it, Linux relies on a few adequate programmers attempting to reinvent the wheel, or emulating an OS that already exists with far less BS to fight through to get the job done...
THIS is why Linux fails... This is why Linux isn't replacing 100% of Windows desktops...
This is not a flame, this is constructive cricism... The problem with Linux is that there are plenty of people willing to rally around the banner, but very few willing (and able) to actually go to war for it... Linux, in order to fight against the two big shots, is to make some applications that are COMPLETELY unlike what is already on the market, and unique in what it can provide... Make something, ANYTHING, that can either (a) supplant existing applications (make a graphic editor far superior to what can be found on Windows or Mac platforms, with a GUI to allow you to use it, artists traditionally don't LIKE to have to haggle with CLI's just to draw, I'm an artist, I KNOW this), and (b) provide a program that is completely unique, anything that the existing Windows/Mac scene has completely overlooked... Use your imaginations, you want the OS to succeed, then FIGHT so it can, instead of pretending that just being crashproof is the lone cause for it's acceptance...
What good does a bulletproof jacket do you in a world where everyone fights with rocket launchers?
Fixing a weak spot (Score:2, Insightful)
So how do we push Linux (and unix in general) as a usefull game platform? Obviously we need to present game programmers with a programming interface that they can use to port games to (or ideally write original games for). Like GTK+ is for GUI applications (or Qt, depending on your religion), we need the "GTK+" of the game world. Some kind of library that:
1. Is portable
2. Is extendable
3. Can make use of hardware acceleration
4. Can grow with future graphics/sound technology
5. Is based on _some_ kind of industry standard
Number five is VERY important. A standard has to be agreed upon or developers are just going to shrug Linux off as a bunch of non-standard API's each evangalized by their own creator but no one else.
What we have been seeing lately, is too many chefs spoiling the soup. Everyone and his uncle has their own API they are trying to push, and no one is working together to agree on a standard.
You aren't going to like this but I'll say it anyway. The reason Windows has caught on as a game playform is because of DirectDraw and DirectSound (and to a lesser extent hardware-accellerated OpenGL). Simply, developers don't have to worry about writing their own routines to allocate video memory, access the sound card's dma buffers, etc. etc., because Microsoft for once provided a pretty decent standard API to write to, that everyone could pretty much agree on.
Everytime someone announces his own "KICKASS GAME API" we (the Linux/unix community) actually suffer a set-back. We slip farther from the goal of having a single, open, standard API for mainstream developers to rely on.
Fortunately we have things like Mesa, which seems to "Get It". I'm not going to advertise Mesa more than I have to, suffice to say it meets all of the five criteria I mentioned above. Personally I believe time spent on writing APIs that essentially do what Mesa already does is time wasted. LOOK INTO MESA before you decide to write "Yet Another Graphics API".
On the other hand, we have sound support on Linux. Currently it's a mess. Basically application writers need to directly access the sound driver in order to get any kind of noise working. We currently have no standard _OPEN_ API to work with, and for the most part sound capabilities under linux are limited to a single process using a sound card. This will not fly with game developers.
Like the graphics world, we need an sound API that:
1. Is portable
2. Is extendable
3. Is hardware-independant
4. Allows more than one process/thread access to sound hardware simultaniously (a mixer)
One thing I have seen that looks promising is eSound. Do your own research on it but it looks pretty nice, and it will get the job done if its developers continue to do "The Right Thing".
It is important for us small-time game developers to look for APIs like Mesa and eSound, which are implemented properly and have potential to become some kind of standard, rather than latching on to one that has cool screenshots but only had a single game written to them--or worse, just writing our own game API.
Re:SDL and other multi-platform libraries (Score:3, Insightful)
An interesting point. Take me, for instance. I have bought a lot of windoze software (mostly games), but never any software for Linux, although I use Linux for everything but a few favorite games.
Why? Maybe it has to do with economy of scale. Since commercial Linux software sells less than windows sw, it is less tested, therefore potentially more buggy.
The solution would be for software sellers to include both versions in the same box. The largest parts of any software are data files. Including an additional set of executable files wouldn't take that much space on a CD-ROM. I would readily buy software that gave me a choice of operating system.
Re:same old bull again (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no way anything close to '10% of [the] computer world' runs Linux. The most optimistic estimates of Linux's share relate to server installations, and often to websites run under Linux (the count of which can vastly exceed the number of actual machines running Linux). Since the vast majority of Linux machines are actually installed in offices/ISPs/server farms, this hardly seems like a market worth targeting by a gaming company. Maybe one day it will be, but it sure does not make sense now.
And just because Linux users are 'enthusiastic' does not mean they are any more likely to buy a game, any more than enthusiastic Solaris users are going to be more likely to buy a game that happens to run on Solaris. The few remaining Amiga users, for instance, are evidently very enthusiastic, but it would be a very poor business plan indeed that proposed catering to this enthusiastic market.
Commercial Game Attitude? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm doing the Linux port because I prefer to develop in Linux and the libraries are all cross-platform, but I don't really expect the Linux port to sell well. I also expect to get flamed for not releasing source.
It occurs to me that startup companies could offer a great deal to Linux, but the community seems only interested in giving money to established companies and complaining that the new guys want to charge money. Almost every commercial/shareware game on happypenguin for example has a comment saying "it would be better with source code" or "I refuse to use it because its not free".
Re:I just don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
People said the same about windows games. "Why develop for Windows when everyone has DOS?". Well, corporate IT was moving towards windows, so the savvier game developers saw that people would soon have windows everywhere - and if there's one thing that people always do, it's play games when they should be working. Now corporate IT (at least in here in Europe and (according to reports) in Asia) is moving toward linux on the desktop and server.
OpenGL develops slowly and requires proprietary extensions for the newest video cards.
OpenGL development did slow down a bit. It's speeding up again now, thanks largely to Mac OS X. There may sometimes be extensions, but that's still better than the whole bloody thing being proprietary and at the whim of MS, like D3D is. There's a well-defined process for folding such extensions into future revisions of the OpenGL standard. OpenGL was designed to be extensible.
Also, the Direct* APIs are a bitch unless you code in MS-mutilated C++ - OpenGL has well-defined, easy to use, pure C and fortran bindings, as well as decent bindings for many other languages. - That's one of the reasons OpenGL is used for high-end applications, like CAD and scientific and engineering visualisation (my specialty). DirectX truly, deeply sucks for anything like that. OpenGL is also designed for very high poly-count stuff encountered in visualisation. OpenGL on linux is being developed enthusiastically, from the industrial side - visualisation front ends for $50000 numerical simulation software that used to run on SGI IRIX systems are now being run on Linux boxes. OpenGL isn't going to fade into obscurity anytime soon - the profits from a couple of licenses for the sort of software that really uses OpenGL can outweigh the profits from the sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of weenie windows games.
Re:Remember Windows 95? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You might be wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
>The freedom. The lack of crashes. The configurability.
I think of them, then I realize that linux DOES crash (often in really archaic ways)... I think about how much I really care to configure my game machine, and I configure about the "freedom" of not being able to play games because I'm using linux.
IMHO linux is as robust as it is because it lacks a lot of the little touches that windows has. If all you want to do is program and run servers, use linux... But if you want a user friendly environment that plays games well, use windows.
Re:Fixing a weak spot (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a Windows user. Windows 2000 specifically, because of its more powerful command line interface and more crash-resistant GUI, but still a windows user.
The problem in my eyes is that Linux has no central figure directing development. For those who would jump up and yell "Linus!" think again - he's doing the OS core but not terribly much else in this area. In the Windows world, where Microsoft is on 80-95% of desktops depending on how you count, MS drives the entire industry. DirectX is *the* API. It killed off Glide, and OpenGL doesn't seem to be doing terribly well either now. Why? Because it's standard. It comes with the OS and it comes preconfigured to *work* with the OS.
I have psuedo-Linux (Cygwin/XFree86 running KDE 1.1.2) installed and am learning how to use it. I hope to one day shed my chains of Microsoftness and become Enlightened, but I'm struck by the complexity of it all. I just learned how to mount drives. I still don't know how to install software. Every time I try it tells me my GCC can't produce executables. No mention on how to fix this, however.
Linux is, for many average *gamers* too difficult of a market to bother wasting time on. 9/10 of games are for a gamer, not a *geek gamer* which the Slashdot community is. With the exception of hard-core simulators (NOT the porn kind to all trolls), everyone the game company cares about is running Windows. Why spend $$$ porting to another platform?
I don't agree with that personally, but it makes sense in a business way.
JKoebel
Re:I just don't get it... (Score:2, Insightful)
My previous post was countering stupid arguments like "people are using Direct3D for Games, therefore OpenGL is dead, therefore Linux is dead." - OpenGL isn't dead. I was attempting to illustrate that more powerful forces than the games market are keeping it alive - and as European governments start to use open source OSes on desktops (and they are doing so), then european games developers who want to make money will follow with linux games. The presence of OpenGL on Linux makes it very easy for them to do so, since chances are they already know OpenGL anyway.
There have been an amazing number of illogical attacks on OpenGL on
Re:SDL and other multi-platform libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really only true for Valve (Half-Life, Half-Life GOTY, Half-Life Gold, Half-Life Platinum, Half-Life You'll Buy This Too, Even Though It's The Same As What You Already Have, etc). Most other publishers might make a GOTY edition and leave it at that. However, if by wringing "every penny out of what they have" you mean making sequel after sequel, I don't see what your argument is. Especially since the good sequels do add innovative new features or items (let's ignore the Tomb Raider franchise, shall we?). As far as not porting to other platforms, I don't see how that's really an issue. Most game houses don't seem to have problems porting back and forth from consoles (PS2, PSX mainly) and Windows. They're not going to bother with Linux because it's such a marginal market. There's no money there, so why bother? And ignoring a valueless (monetarily) market is not going to kill a company. In fact, porting to that market just might kill them instead.
Note that
Because we all know that only poor, stupid programmers use IDEs ... (btw, all the Visual Studio compilers (for C++, VB, C#, Jscript, and so on) can be used strictly from the commandline, using makefiles or build scripts, and you can use any editor you want to write the code they compile -- vim, emacs, notepad, Source Insight, Visual Studio, or whatever)
Red Herring. It's not a University's job to produce automaton that can write a makefile or compile the latest 'sploit by hand. If that's what you expect from a CS program, you'd do better to save money and go to a tech school (or alternatively, save money buy hiring a student out of a tech school). A properly educated CS student may not know how to write a makefile or use gcc from the commandline right out of college, but I can guarantee you that s/he will be able to learn how to do that quicker than your average self-taught or tech school programmer can learn to analyze the performance considerations of various search algorithms (for instance).
Re:Its a shame. (Score:2, Insightful)
1. There are tons of games that are never ported to Mac
2. It is probally easier to port games to mac because of the limited number of hardware configurations to support.
Re:same old bull again (Score:3, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. This always cracks me up when people say things like this. Servers are one thing, but there is no way in hell that Linux desktop marketshare is even remotely close to that of the Macintosh.
Articles like this prove it: The Sims has been available for the Mac nearly as long as it has for Windows, but where's the Linux version? I still have yet to see any credible evidence that Linux has any more than a negligable desktop market share, and I think your guess of 0.1% is generous. I use Linux on all of my low-end servers, but there's no way I'll waste a perfectly good desktop machine with it.
- j
Re:Where do you get all your incorrect information (Score:2, Insightful)
^^^ What I was talking about, you charge even more than I was aware of.
I believe it was in the LinuxGames.com comments that someone complained the networking wasn't working (Note that you can't have networking without the working bit).
Then you proceed to charge even more outrageous sums of money, still for the simple original Sim City.
Congratulations Don, you could have been an innovator in these times of bad sales for Linux ports, and yet you choose to be hurting the market with allowing non-native ports under your nose. Thanks for nothing.
Re:Where do you get all your incorrect information (Score:2, Insightful)