I need to design games in Linux, where should I go?
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I need to design games in Linux, where should I go?
I like to design games by hobby (www.oriontide.com) and I've been designing games for Windows users for quite some time.
The program I used was Game Maker. Recently, I got fed up with Windows and wiped it from my drive, now I use Fedora 3 exclusively. Fedora does everything I need an OS to do, except Game Design. The only regret I have with my switch is losing the ability to use Game Maker. I really like that program.
Anyway, I'd like to find a good programming tool to make games in Linux. I'd also like to start programming in 3D. My 3D programming skills are severely lacking, so what I need is basically something that is insanely easy to learn but also produces great results. Either that, or I would need to find a way to run Game Maker. I've tried Wine and even Cedega but it doesn't work well, I even have VMWare installed but it doesn't have hardware acceleration so it's pointless to use vmware for game design. The games I have designed for Windows run terribly slow in VMware.
If worse comes to worse, I might have to install Windows again, probably Windows 2000. I have one hard drive in my PC, with a 40GB drive sitting on my shelf not doing anything at all. I know I probably could not plug in my 40GB drive as a secondary drive and install Windows on it without distrubing my Linux install. I worked very hard setting up my Linux install, I don't want to start it over, plus I have 11GB of personal files in my /home directory I don't want to lose and I can't imagine how many cd's I'd have to burn to back it all up.
So I'm pretty much torn right now. What should I do?
Have you tried searching Freshmeat.net or sourceforge.org?
Here is the results from one search I have ran Freshmeat Search
I hope this helps I look forward to seeing the results.
There are a couple of game engines mentioned in this link .
There is also the Linux Game Programming Webring .
Perhaps one of the links found here would be of interest.
Or, perhaps this one from the Linux Games Wiki .
Basically, I used www.google.com/linux, and entered the search words 'linux games programming', and turned up these links on the first page (of 445,000 hits).
Last edited by bigrigdriver; 04-23-2005 at 07:50 PM.
I've jused (and still use) Game Maker in Windows, and I can tell you now that you will be very hard pressed to find anything remotely similar for linux.
Game Maker doesn't let you "program" games - it lets you create "games" under a strict set of rules. Even when you shun the iconified approach and purely code, you are still writing in a closed language which no-one else but Game Maker users know how to use.
All Game Maker then does is create an executable using these rules to create your game, so you are still stunted.
The author mentions on his website and in his tutorials that his creation is primarily for scrolling shooters and platformers, and whilst they are fun and entertaining, your skills can be put to much better use if you branch out more and learn an open language to write your games.
Don't get me wrong, I think Game Maker is excellent, and my current work in progress is an RPG (the likes of which have not been seen before using Game Maker) but i'm strictly limited by the time I have available (not much), plus i need to drop it's memory requirements under 200mb (hits 213Mb at the moment when first loaded) because it uses some very detailed rendered sprites, each one averaging anywhere between 100 - 2000 frames of animation.
A noble cause too, as we need more good home-made games for linux as the big companies aren't exactly doing much for linux gaming (not counting "after-release" patches for things like Doom3).
Try a bit of C++ or look at some of the game engines already out there like the old Quake engine and see what you can do with it.
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