I know I'm probably going to get a lot of abuse for programmers for publishing this, but what the heck.

Since downloading Mandrake 9.2 around christmas I have been on the look out for some really great Linux games, and I ain't having much luck finding any.

I had a very unreliable installation of WIndows 98, which, luckily, is now updated to XP. The reliablility problems now no longer occur. The fact is I am not willing to abandon the Microsoft monopoly just yet because few games developers make games for Linux. Ok, there is Unreal and the port that Loki did.

I believe that Linux can handle nearly all of the games that Windows currently has, the problem lies with the compatibility with individual distrobutions. As a fix, why can't they publish specialised libraries with each game, so everyone runs the same versions and improves compatibility. There are enough coders and artists out there I reckon to be able to make something that would compare to Half-Life 2, take the Tenebrae team that can implement Doom 3 effects into the original Quake engine. Or the people behind the crystal space game engine, which could give any commercial engine a real challenge. Not forgetting Vega Strike either.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is why can't everyone pull together to make a large gaming collective. Coders, artists, script writers from the open source community and concentrate on a large scale development to rival Half-Life 2 or Final Fantasy 11, rather tham all working on small projects, most of which never get further than the alpha stages.

http://www.transgaming.com
and
http://www.winehq.com

Most games use directx which is a microsoft api and only available on windows. These games would have to be re-written almost entirely to port to linux

Games that use OpenGL can be ported to linux and it won't be such a huge undertaking.

I believe what you are talking about already exists (see the two links above)

I know about the Wine based applications as I do play Half-Life under Linux. What I'm trying to say that with all the talent in the open source community, is it not possible to make an open source game on this kind of scale.

yes it is entirely possible to make a game of this scale but probably unlikely to happen. Creating a game from scratch like this is a huge undertaking and given that the people working on it would be hobbyists, they wouldn't have 40+ hours per week to work on it. By time it was complete it would be obsolete

and don't forget that the majority of games are not open source, so if you are talking about porting one to linux, it would be just a little difficult to do without the source code

and If you are talking about taking a game's engine and creating a MOD for it, this is quite possible and is done quite freqently (look at counterstrike).
But if the engine isn't written for linux then you can't make a mod for linux.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=98504
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=115356