Re: Business models

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Steve Baker wrote:

>Jan Ekholm wrote:
>
>> My Myth2 only runs accelerated with the obsolete Glide API, and software
>> is not an option, so yes, it does not work for me. I'd be happy to be
>> proven wrong on that one, since I never completed the game and I'd still
>> like to play it.
>
>Myth is an unfortunate exception (because of Glide) - I think that's the
>only Loki game that has that problem.  All the others ran happily on my
>kid's old 133MHz Voodoo-2 machine - and still run OK on my 900MHz GeForce-2
>box.

Yeah, well, it doesn't help me that much. I got a bit disillusioned after
that, so I definitely won't buy any more Linux games unless I can verify
they work perfectly on my machine first, and get some guarantees they'll
work after a year too.

>> And what do you think big game companies like Loki would do to support one
>> single fscking customer in a remote small market area such as Finland? :-)
>
>Yes - well, that's economics I'm afraid.
> 
>> So, the point is that if I want something I want to play on Linux I have
>> to write it myself.
>
>Or play non-commercial stuff.

Sure, but there aren't that many free games for Linux that interest me.
One is FreeCiv, but the original Civilization is the only DOS game I own,
and I've played it *a lot* since it was new, so I'm kind of fed up on it.
:-)

There really aren't that many game that are in a playable state right now,
if we don't count in the Tetris clones and other small games. Writing
games is harder than writing an email client, I think.

What would be a nice thing if it was available is a few books on
libs like SDL/PLIB that teach you how to do games using those libs. I
assume game programming books for Linux so far have been more or less
normal programming books (shell, C/C++, make, etc) with a small added
appendix saying "hey, there's this OpenGL thing too, and I think you can
do sound too".

On Windows if you want to do a game you buy some book called something
like "DirectX Programming", follow their tutorials and start your project
by copying one of the more finished samples from the book CD. I don't
think we have something like that yet? Everyone always has to learn
everything from scratch, there is no "stored" knowledge yet.

--------------------+--------------------------------------------------------
Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |     Balrog New Media    http://www.balrog.fi/
   Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, nobody hears your screams


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