Re: Direction of Linux games...

[Erik <br0ke@math.smsu.edu>]

On 13-Nov-99 Jan Ekholm wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> <sims snipped>
> 
>>Well - this is something I know a LOT about.  I design (real) military
>>flight simulators in my 'day job'.  A typical flight simulator would
>>contain at least a million lines of code - maybe two million.  Ironically,
>>a 'game' would probably be even more complex than that.
> 
> I think open-source games have no chance to compete with big companies
> with big budgets and money as their motivator when it comes to make games
> look good and sound good. People will always buy what looks and sounds
> nice, and therefore enormous amounts of money, innovation and effort is
> put into making even the most stupid game look god on screen.
> 

I think that you're wrong on this point. There are gfx wizards who work for
free. There are audio wizards who work for free. The problem is linux doesn't
have the apps that make these folk happy. Look over www.digitalblasphemy.com
for a bit. The only tools we have to do anything like that are very difficult
to use for the lay person (povray, bmrt, and their relatives use a 'source'
file that scripts or programs the scene elements, and the renderer parses this
file much like a compiler. This is a different kind of app than the popular
windows rendering packages, which combine a modeler and renderer. Bryce2,
truespace, 3dmax, lightwave... What do we have, blender? I couldn't get
blender to do anything usefull... granted, I'm no gfx wizard and I didn't
throw a lot of effort at it. But I can make the windows packages do something
semi-amusing.
As for sound people, I don't know how advanced rosegarden is. I
think the windows super-app is called "cool edit"? Look at some of the funny
audio clips floating around the net... snd manipulation is done by people
gratis to pd... the hard part of sound I'd think would be finding people with
good voices.

> Oopen-source can compete (and will) with games where depth is premium, and
> not the gfx. Imagine something like Ultima Online. When it came out it was
> really something new, and the only thing newer games have added is more
> gfx. An opensourced game with UO-type icongfx could be done with moderate
> effort by using a lot of nice components and libs that can be found all
> over the net. A smart system would separate the logic from the actual
> vieweing, and thus make it easy to add gfx some day to _visualize_ what's
> going on. Running these kinds of 'simulations' is where Linux would excel.
> The server-like idea behind Linux would make most things easy and hard
> things possible (any Perl hackers here?).
> 
> Bottom line. What is needed is not copies of Windows games, but new
> thinking, as the original author said. the 'net' is here. Current games
> don't really use it that well. Why not try to come up with a OS-game that
> does?
> 

plenty of winblows games use the net pretty well. If you follow game
programming sites, one of the biggest concerns is multiplayer/lan/internet
capability. Having games tha work over the internet offers nothing new or
novel. It's expected anymore 

>       Chakie, rambler
> 
> ---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
>  Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |    CS at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
>     Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, no-one hears you scream
> 
> 

        -Erik <br0ke@math.smsu.edu> [http://math.smsu.edu/~br0ke]

The opinions expressed by me are not necessarily opinions. In all
probability, they are random rambling, and to be ignored. Failure to ignore
may result in severe boredom or confusion. Shake well before opening. Keep
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