Hi,

If you are a gamer like myself or not, and would like to see more games like bf1942,bf2,cod,codu native for linux, please sign the petition below :-

http://www.petitiononline.com/z3roc00l/petition.html

thankyou

twirl

cod?? there's seriously a game about a a fish facing extinction? maybe that'd be quite good actually... battling against fishing trawlers in the atlantic sea...

lol that would be quite funny :-)

but i meant cod,codu as in call of duty, call of duty united offensive :-)

twirl

First of all, you've not worded that petition correctly. It's essentially a public letter addressed to somebody.

You should not say:

and you should not address it to those who sign it. You should address it to the third party concerned to whom you wanted to air your grievances.

You should probably say:

You get the idea.

When it says below:

"We, the undersigned"

You should word it as though we have all written it together. At least that's the idea...

Just my humble opinion.

Thankyou for your help, it is my first time doing a peition so help is very much appreciated. :-)

twirl

There is an issue with your proposal->Those games use DirectX with no built in support for OpenGL. Since MS controls DirectX I doubt we will see that ported ever to linux and no company would be willing to spend the moeny to port a game that potentially won't make them any money in return. Or at least enough to cover the costs.

Simply saying then games should use OpenGL instead of DirectX is not a good response (because someone was bound to say it) because frankly this arguments been going on for years and will not end any time soon. People prefer one over the other and DirectX just happens to be winning because a lot of people a) Find it easier to program b) Frankly looks pretyt good and c) Runs pretty fast. And since you can devolp for both of them free of charge it really comes down to which one will people like in the end.

Just look at UT 2004. Now that uses DirectX in Windows and OpenGL in Linux. And UT is by no means a trivial program...

It's not rocket science to understand that good games can be programmed with any underlying library. It just requires planning from the beginning. The UT programmers have showed that it can be done.

It's not as though the games programmers find it difficult to port games to Linux. As UT programmers show, it just requires planning from the beginning. It's just that there's no willingness to acknowledge the growing base of Linux users at present.

a) Find it easier to program

It's a matter of perspective. I tried a DirectX tutorial and found it exceedingly confusing. On the other hand, OpenGL API looks a lot more logical and structured compared to DirectX.


b) Frankly looks pretyt good

Again, depends on the graphics card capabilities and support for that particular API. There are many beautiful OpenGL games out there as well.

and c) Runs pretty fast.

See above.

this is great stuff, and I'd thought about doing it too, but I think this can be redone. The current form is good, but in reality do poeple wanna post all their personal info like that? Sure it may prevent duplicates, but I think like e'mail and first name would be ok.

And would it be alright if we just made a massive thread on LQ? Like post one sentence here that says you want games ported. then there is no way for duplicate entries but we get exposure to thousands of users.

lemme know it it would work...

thanks,

slackwarebilly

(this is wonderful, but we need at least a few thousand poeple )

You are right if they plan from the beginning its easier. But you still need to somehow prove to the majority of game companies that there is a reason to. And frankly there isn't. If you are going to be playing games on the computer 99.9% of the time you will be doing it under Windows. Why? Because 1) Driver support. Under Windows soundcards can be used to their full advantage, Video cards are 100% supported and once again you have directX.

2) OpenGL is good no doubt about it but DirectX is still the most popular. This isn't by some mistake. DirectX is very Object Oriented, thus programming it feels more like programming C++ while OpenGL can be compared to C. Since many programmers practically grow up using C++ they should in theory feel more comfortable with C++ thus migrate to similar style programming languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art...rticle1775.asp

Those are the technical issues that crop up when deciding one or the other.

The Unreal team built it up from the beginning however it is the exception to the case. For many smaller companies who have deadlines and release dates and already have enough to worry about simply making a game they not think it feasiable. Afterall why cater to such a small market? Games today are massive projects. People want amazng graphics, amazing stories, amazing AI, amazing animation, and solid online experiences. Making their game OpenGL portable is not high on their list. Game devolpers have a tough enough time. And have you ever tried writing a game that is a native DX9 game with the ability to use OpenGL? Its not as easy as one may think.

I am not trying to say whether or not it should be done I am just pointing out why its not so common. Frankly I would love to play WoW natively in Linux however I dobut I will see that happen.

I agree that developing for multiple platforms look very daunting to smaller companies, but then again, what should really happen is that there should be companies that develop games exclusively for Linux.

Let's put it this way. If tomorrow a company announced a game specifically for Linux, it would bring together the whole Linux community and they would probably sell a lot of copies on that alone. At the current stage, the Linux market is not highly fragmented. I also think that Linux users would be a lot more loyal buyers of Linux games at this time, if only to show support to Linux game developers...

Commerical quality gaming in Linux is a huge potential market waiting to be tapped.

If you announce a Windows game, it's just another Windows game. Sure, the market will be there, but so will the competition. It's a highly fragmented scenario there... nothing new...

I think the Linux gaming market just needs somebody to come in and get it going. I think once a company proves that they can make money in Linux games, there'll be a lot more companies rushing in to tap the gold mine.

Possibly but I think they need better hardware support in linux first. Also I don't know how well a commercial linux product would work out. I mean has there been any big ones? Besides Distro's I cannot think of any major commercial software with the exception of perhaps the WineX stuff that has really been a good linux commercial software.
And how many linux users are really gamers?

However the opening may be here sooner then I thought:

http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=1068

Apparently the Quake 3 code will be made open hopefully someone will pick this up and run with it.