Re: Great site-- May I ask you a question?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Deborah Quinlan wrote:

> We are planning to develop a massively multiplayer game site
> consisting of very simple 2d/3d (low bandwidth for quick download, not
> the incredible 3d graphics type) of games geared to a mainstream
> audience.  These games will be highly database driven and we were
> interested in developing this site on a linux platform but weren't
> sure if linux is at a stage to support a site like this?  What I mean
> is, are resources in place to develop strong database connectivity for
> a mmg? 

There are lots of Quake servers out there that seem to work OK.
I don't see Linux having either more or less difficulty doing this
than any other OS.

> While the games are hosted on a linux server, are there
> sufficient resources to develop a simple downloadable client that can
> dowloaded to a variety of client platforms (windows, mac) NOW?

You'd need a different executable for each platform of course, but
writing games code that ports between Linux, Windows, MacOS, BeOS,
BSD and others is remarkably easy.  My Tux_AQFH game has ported very
smoothly from Linux to all of those other platforms.  There are
hardly any code changes from one OS to the other in the game itself
because all the OS-specific stuff is hidden in the PLIB library suite.

There are any number of games libraries to choose from that will
give you portability between OS's.

> I would really appreciate any recommendations or input you may have to
> help me decide which way to go with this.

Check out my site:

   http://www.woodsoup.org/projs/plib

...it's under LGPL - so it's free.

-- 

Steve Baker                (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
Raytheon Systems Inc.      (817)619-2466 (Fax)
Work: sjbaker@hti.com      http://www.hti.com
Home: sjbaker1@airmail.net http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1