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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Interview w/ Dave "Zoid" Kirsch about Linux Quake 54

Dr. Blackwood writes sent us a link to a LinuxPower interview with Dave "Zoid" Kirsch where he talks about (big surprise) the Quake 3 for Linux Port. Lots of interesting bits to read.
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Interview w/ Dave "Zoid" Kirsch about Linux Quake

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  • Now now troll.
    I'll have you know that whenever all the Quakers round this area meet up Linux QuakeWorld is the game of choice. The fact that I can use GLqwcl and run qwsv at the same time on my box without any slowdown on my part or packetloss is a huge plus, as noone wants to have to use their box as a pure dedicated server. You try running qwsv on a 95/98 box and connecting to localhost.
    Doesnt happen on NT, but really, you ever tried Quakin under NT?

    Nick
  • The answer to this is simple. If you use a joystick you must be braindead and .'. cant figure out how to use Q3A under Linux anyway.
    Get yourself off that stick now, for the good of your frag count! =)

    Nick
  • It's Zoid's birthday today. Maybe we should all send our greets to him :)
  • Hrm. I have a 300a @ 450 on an asus P2B and a 12 meg voodoo2, but consistantly get ~37 fps, compared to 67 in windows... Any suggestions?
  • Hrm. No.. I am running quake 1 on a dx/4 100. runs great, and significantly higher than 10 frames a second.. too bad i don't have time to run a time demo right now.
  • I have no idea what an MTRR is. just the ref_gl.so files? Thanks.
  • by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by OGL:

    I'm running a Pentium II 400, 128 megs of RAM, Creative Blaster Voodoo2. 60fps at 800x600 in Quake2, I don't play Quake.

    -W.W.
  • Posted by OGL:

    Turn off vsync.

    export SSTV2_SWAP_EN_WAIT_ON_VSYNC=0

    -W.W.
  • I wrote an email to John Carmack about PMesa [www.lri.fr], which speeds up some OpenGL calculations up to 1.8x on SMP hardware. He said this:

    Its not going to help bandwidth limited applications. Applications with lots of evaluators and lighting probably show worthwhile speedups, but basic vertex/texcoord/color drawing probably doesn't get helped at all (unless the basic geometry code is very badly implemented).

    John Carmack
  • The sad thing, is that Linux offers even less.

    Having OpenGL support in the next version of XFree86 will help. Sound is still a problem, tho.

    TedC

  • I'm sure Brian Hook has said the Quake 2 OpenGL renderer has no assembler. It is pure C, and they don't use C++. Perhaps Quake 2 & 3 have no assembly at all.

  • So you can at least get a server going :-)

    dylan_-


    --

  • It's not restricted on SGIs... Lots of fun in the office... :)
  • I talked to John Carmack at the past Macworld Expo. He said if we get certain components like OpenGL ported to LinuxPPC, it might be possible.

    He's worried that the other smaller Linuxes (SPARC, Alpha) would then start demanding it. That would be the classic "Well if we let the PowerPC people have it, we're going to let the rest of the class have it" argument. ;)

    Our next hardware donations are going to be a Blue G3 to the kernel guys to get those running, and a fast Power Mac to a Glide developer to get that ported.
  • Take a look at the "GiveConsole" and "TakeConsole" scripts in /etc/X11/xdm - you can do a "chmod o-rwx" on any device like /dev/dsp that you don't want non-console access to, then add lines to these scripts to change the owner of these devices to the current console user.

    And if the console user wants to "chmod o+rwx" and let other people decide what he listens too, that's allowed - just make sure that "TakeConsole" sets the permissions back when he's done.
  • He said you could run a server on one processor and the client on the other... thast ought to give you a nice performance boost!
    .
  • adduser SuperDave audio

    That will let SuperDave do audio things with out changing the permissions.
  • Does Linux support USB mouses? I've heard those are much, much better than the normal mice.

    I play quake 2 only with the mouse and the spacebar.
  • Why do no programs in Linux use a standard sound server? It's a pain in the butt that I have to set all my sound devices to user write/readable or run things as superuser just to use sound. It also makes programming a pain in the ass.
  • That's my whole point. That's why we should have a semi-standardized sound server, like we have standardized video server (X11).
  • All this changing of permissions is stupid. What if I want to run multiple programs using the sound, like I use multiple programs displaying on my video screen?

    What if every program that printed something had to write directly to the printer rather than sending it to lpd? We'd call that DOS.
  • Quake 3: Arena on Linux is good and fine, but since it's hardware based, what about all us TNT users who won't be able to play it until someone writes Mesa drivers for our kick-ass cards?

    :(

  • how about you just use Win98 for the ONE thing it *is* good for? Playing games.

    I applaud the efforts of those who want to port/write drivers/etc for games on Linux. But I code all day at work. When I get home I just wanna frag some ass and go to bed.

    Linux 4 work, win98 4 play. Everything has it's place.

    :-)
  • by X-Type ( 15655 )
    PII at 300Mhz, 128mb sdram, and
    as for video: Matrox G200 8mb SGRAM
    I think that it would run fine.
  • PPro 180 MHZ
    Monster 3D Voodoo 1
    Stealth 3d 2000 PRO (S3 ViRGE/DX)

    I don't have a problem running GL or Software at 30FPS (as long as I don't push the resolution too high in software ;-) ) Seems pretty playable to me... of course if you're used to 60+ FPS itmay not seem that way...

    Quake 2 engine games start to slow down though :-/
  • by apathy ( 18081 )
    I run a PII 350 with an ATI all in wonder pro(pretty poorly configured for linux at this point) with a Voodoo 2 for 3-d accel, i get better framerates under linux for Quake 1/2 and i have even seen Q1 played well on a 486 linux box
  • by creinig ( 18837 )
    How does this relate, if at all, to PenguinPlay?

    (Im a PenguinPlay dveloper)


    I actually think PenguinPlay and that one fit together quite nicely. They are defining a standard client environment (i.e. for people wanting to play games) while PPlay is assembling/defining a suite of game *development* code/tools.


    Anyway, well talk with them.




    Cu

    Christian


    PS: Yup, I know that the PPlay homepage looks pretty dead. Our Webmaster disappeared some time ago and the new one starts to completely reorganize it. Will take some time. In the meanwhile the FAQ [sunsite.auc.dk] is really up-to-date. Promise ;)

  • Its great that there will be a port, but with what language is it going to be written in. OpenGL, C, C++, assembly. Do I have any hope of seeing it on my LinuxPPC box??
  • I suspect that most of the game is written in optimized C or C++ with the really tight parts written in ASM. A Linux/PPC port should be nontrivial but not difficult. It all depends on if id Software is willing to create and support it.

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