Company Seeks To Boost Linux Game Development With 3D Engine Giveaway 140
binstream writes "To support Linux game development, Unigine Corp. announced a competition: it will give a free license for its Unigine engine to a seasoned team willing to work on a native Linux game. The company has been Linux-friendly from the very start; it released advanced GPU benchmarks (Heaven, Tropics, Sanctuary) for Linux before and is working on the OilRush strategy game that supports Linux as well."
Re:wonderbar.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite as exciting as the headline sounded (Score:2, Insightful)
Bleak future of PC gaming? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wonderbar.... (Score:1, Insightful)
How is he yelling at Linux devs? He's pointing out this engine licensing doesn't do much for the main bottleneck facing 3d gaming on Linux.
Re:Bleak future of PC gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah no. You have no idea what you're talking about. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to see Steam be released for Android/iOS/mobile, and get a chunk of that market.
Re:Bleak future of PC gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not quite as exciting as the headline sounded (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what I thought. Nice advert for the company, I guess. It's going to boost Linux development by precisely one game, in 18 months time, maybe....
Mod Parent +Insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
Right on: you nailed it, clearly and succinctly and thoroughly.
Although you didn't take an outright "call to arms" tone, I hope the ideas you are propounding get the attention and action they deserve.
Re:How do they plan to make money on free? (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be interesting to see how this turns out, but it definitely could work. The downside is that since only the winner gets a free license, I'm interested to know how many people are going to be willing to work on that, knowing that they'll not be able to redistribute their game if they don't either win or pay up.
Re:A nice gesture (Score:5, Insightful)
Official Wine support would certainly be a step in the right direction. I played WoW under Wine long ago and I got the impression that while it wasn't officially supported, it wasn't such an unsavory configuration that Blizzard would tell you to bugger off if you asked for support for it. I have no evidence to back this up but, I also got the impression that the desire to play WoW on linux gave the Wine project a very tangible flagship kind of "This Must Work" application. So, while I would love to see native linux clients, official Wine support would still be amazing and, possibly more beneficial to the linux community because of the side effects of having a better Wine.
Re:A nice gesture (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What surprises me... (Score:5, Insightful)
For one most of the people that are paid have employers that want them to focus on specific things, not in detail but I doubt they'd could sit around making games on company time. The other thing is that it's much easier to envision a mod of an existing game than a new game, and on Linux you're mostly talking about a new game. There's few existing communities today. The open source model has proven much more effective when there is a clear rally flag, the way FreeCiv is a clone of civilization.
Re:A nice gesture (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A nice gesture (Score:3, Insightful)
the percentage of hardcore gamers is probably much, much higher on linux.
Hardcore gamers who (generally speaking) don't see anything wrong with pirating software. That little detail is pretty important.
Re:wonderbar.... (Score:3, Insightful)
now if video cards run under linux were more than just framebuffers we might go someplace.
Linux already had pretty solid 3D support going all the way back to the Vodoo1 days. Yeah, sometimes you needed to take a little care to buy a card that actually worked in Linux and not just the next best random piece of junk, but that isn't really that that much different from Windows where when you don't take care you might be stuck with some unusable on-board graphics solution.
If 3D hardware would be the problem of Linux gaming, it would have been solved ages ago.
Re:What surprises me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most open source projects are only developed by one person. X.org for example has only 12 main contributors even through it's a 20+ year old project.
This is why open source games never go anywhere because a game needs far more then one person working on it, people quickly get bored due to lack of progress and the project dies. I've seen it over and over again on open source games.
Also I think this is a good guide that sums up the situation too.. http://cube.wikispaces.com/How+not+to+start+a+mod [wikispaces.com]
Re:How do they plan to make money on free? (Score:3, Insightful)
There really is no down-side to them. Take more economics classes.
Re:A nice gesture (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wonderbar.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the political and other agendas that go along with Linux essentially result in it fucking itself over in this respect.
So who REALLY do you expect to care that you can't run it on a reasonable obscure OS ... with a rather obscure (these days) processor? You might care, and maybe some guy in Europe ... but no one else does, so you're not really doing anything to help your argument in the minds of people who actually want to serve the most amount of people. You want to run some odd combination, you cut yourself off.
And to ignore what every major developer complains about and uses as their reason for not developing for Linux is just utterly ignorant. If you want people to develop for Linux you have to address their reason for not doing it, not sit around and tell them they are wrong.
Really? You're using an analog tuner to receive what? Analog was done away with last year in the US, I suspect that any other major country in the world is either already there or going that way soon as well, so its awesome that you can get your old TV card working, I don't think any Windows 7 user will cry that they can't get the card they bought 9 years ago to work ... since even with drivers its effectively useless. I guess you could hook it up to cable providers until they drop analog completely.
Actually, you have that backwards. If you can't make a reasonable stable ABI, you're doing it wrong. Its just a sign of a dev who either is incapable of thinking about the future or or don't care, either way, you won't find people who bother to follow you constantly doing anything useful. The fact that you think this way shows that you have no concept of how proper software development works. Its not even unique to software development, standardized interfaces are considered one of the major innovations that brought us to where we are today as far as production is concerned.
Do you think an assembly line would work if every engine, tire, bolt, or whatever had 'improvements to its interface' every day? Oh, today we get new bolts, gotta update the engines ... oh, the engines have a change that requires transmission modifications.
The interface doesn't have to stay the same forever, and indeed can't, but consistency and stability are a good thing, even if you don't understand why. Perhaps you should try living in a world where every electric company providers their own 'optimized' form of electricity, complete with different voltages and frequencies. How well would that work out?
Re:wonderbar.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, fanboys modded you up fast didn't they?
The ABI generally maintains backwards compatibility to a good extent, but if you think it hasn't changed you're completely ignorant and blind.
If it hasn't changed ... why do drivers designed for Win7 not work in XP or Win3.1? How do applications now take advantage of more than 640k? How do these Windows apps interact with the new security bits of Windows 7. Why did AV makers shout and scream about the changes made that screwed over their 'ability' to provide virus protection?
Your visual studio statement makes it clear you're a clueless fanboy.