Linux Client/server for "Next Gen" PC game

[MiKom 0]

Because I couldn't find any topic about this issue I start it here.

What with linux client and server for the game?

As I mentioned before on AA forum, releasing only server fot linux is unfair for linux users and is just leeching on linux stability and performance. I think that if game's engine is well written it will not be too hard to make a OpenGL renderer. Many games have options which allow to switch between DirectX and OpenGL renderers (Neverwinter Nights for example). You can even sacrifice some DirectX eye-candys just to make the game runable on linux (what I think would not be necessary because OpenGL handles all sophisticated effects). If the graphic rendering part of the engine is separated enough from the rest of the game it should be quite simple to create linux client. There is also a group of programmers which can rewrite the code to run it on linux for some amount of money (this group is icculus.org). Among others they ported UT2004 using OpenGL and SDL library (for other than graphic aspects of DirectX like DirectInput and DirectSound).

I know that linux players are just a small percent of all but amount of linux users is constantly growing, some big game development studios (ID software, Epic Games, Bioware) noticed that and they create linux ports of their famous games.

What is more, linux communities are very creative because of nature of this system and you can probably expect more mods and add-ons when the game is ported.

Or maybe Microsoft pays people for making the game portless in nature?

[suma 8]

Quote[/b] ]Or maybe Microsoft pays people for making the game portless in nature?

I do not know. It is certainly not paying us.

Quote[/b] ]I think that if game's engine is well written it will not be too hard to make a OpenGL renderer.

As I think creating OpenGL renderer for our next gen game would be quite hard, by pure logic this would mean ... .... no , I cannot write what. Imagine some press people would use it as an official quote?

[MiKom 0]

Quote[/b] ]Or maybe Microsoft pays people for making the game portless in nature?

I do not know. It is certainly not paying us.

Heh, just kidding, maybe they even don't know where the Czech Republic is (just look what they did with Poland on the world map in clock settings in windows XP).

by pure logic this would mean ... ....

...that there will be no linux client.

Now my hope is lying dead on the floor. So, I'm now officialy sad because of this information and I still need this Microsoft's crap errr. Maybe at least Cedega will be able to handle the game.

[tug2000 0]

Anyway, talking about servers...

Any thoughts for advancing performance on multi-processor servers ( and ideally clients ). Multi-proc is now the way to go especially with cheap servers running dual core opterons or Athlon X2's. Also 64 bit support would be great

I've also been looking into linux clustered servers mostly using the Rocks Clusters OS and this would be awesome to host massive games from. And i have a few servers sitting around doing nothing

Sorry for the techie ramble i'm a geek by trade.OpenMosix

[andersson 285]

Quote[/b] ]As I think creating OpenGL renderer for our next gen game would be quite hard, by pure logic this would mean ...

... you need to build the engine from scratch...?

[void_false 1]

OMG. I swear placebo will come and tell dont dig old threads

Quote[/b] ]... you need to build the engine from scratch...?

What do you mean by that?

[MiKom 0]

Probably that from the very begging game was written in very DirectX-centric way, and game logics are mixed with rendering part. Now, creating an OpenGL renderer would probably mean need to rewrite the whole codebase.

I don't know why so many game developers write only DirectX games. Is it so great? If so, than why John Carmack still uses openGL? And why DirectX architecture is constantly heading towards OpenGL way of doing things (going away from COM model towards OpenGL style).

And haven't you read good old papas Kerninghan and Ritche who said that programs should be portable?

Wouldn't you like to wake up one day and find that porting game for PowerPC or amd64 is just a matter of mere recompilation?

[shinRaiden 0]

What microsoft does is provide a nice cozy api structure with the horde behind it cranking out sample code and references etc making the appearance of being a robust package. You can argue the actual functional capacity elsewhere, I'm only referring to the promotional infrastructure.

Food for thought though, WRPtool and ODOL Explorer are both OpenGL rendering applications, that render OFP data using OpenGL call's without external data modification. However, those are small-scale rendering systems, and do not approach the capacity of a robust full-scale environment rendering system.

I have my silly fetish reasons why I would like to see the OFP family ported to OpenGL and Linux owing to massive scalability on distributed visualization systems, but I also consider that the costs involved in retooling and retraining is extremely critical and impractical to a small organization like BIS.

[Kode 0]

Don't forget you can emulate games with wine or cedega. Perhaps BIS can try to make it wine compatible, that would be

[R3MF 0]

the ability to play Game2 on Linux would rock.

I would buy two copies.