Since I have been around for almost 24 years now, I will tell you a story about games on home micros (Spectrum/CBM64/CBM128/Arcon/Atari/Amiga) / consoles (Atari 2000/Sony etc)/ Personal Computers (such as AMSTRAD CPC/Commodore+ /QL+ etc) / IBM Compatible Personal Computers (today's P.C.s)
It was back then (mid '80) that home micros got to the point when they could support 4 colors out of a palette of 16 and offered the possibility to game developers to create titles that could be acceptable by the market. Back then the publishers had to maintain more than one development team programming for different hardware platforms mainly under some assembler. Each of the home micros had it's own capabilities and used a set of special routines stored in ROM to expose functionality (sound/graphics/input/joystick/midi etc) not to mention the full incompatibility of file systems.
Back then it was just a dream to have an "engine" available for more any platform that would enable developers to create games; it was all from "scratch" for each hardware platform. By the time, developers managed to create a functional code base (please do no think of objects) that enabled them to include already tested code to perform some standard operations (kind of functional functions library) creating a layer of abstraction that could be used to create the "back-bone" for the titles, but again had to be either compiled or cross compiled for a specific target hardware. The process was hard and costly. This was the reason that some publishers targeted one or two platforms leaving the rest.
At later stages when the home micro category died, consoles was revived together with IBM Compatible PCs. Some of us remember our first EGA video addapter that actually supported 32 colors from a palette of 256 then came VGA (256 colors and 640X480 resolution yeeeey), now first video cards supported 2 colors (Hercules) or 4 colors (CGA) , but with 256 colors on screen, it was a revolution so the developers that supported Amiga/AtariST/CPC 64/CPC 128 found a new platform (with more RAM but less hardware capabilities) that offered a common API available under a lot of different languages and manufactured by various manufacturers all over the world.
At the same time all the prices was dropping creating a potential large market for software.
Since it is all about cost and ROI, it was more or less "default" to release titles for Microsoft DOS (or IBM DOS initially) since this was the operating system that IBM and other vendors include in their packages. Some of the vendors still preferred to sell boxes without any operating system (you could buy and use SCO unix, Thoroughbred and other strange acronyms).
When Linux came to O/S world, it was mainly a "toy" for hard-core programmers / unix users / students / universities. It was OPEN, something you really could not find in other O/S. If something was broken, you could take some time to fix it and then publish your fix for comments to the rest of the world.
Through the time, Linux became a real desktop operating system (if I may, I would say that Fedora together with Ubuntu and Knopix was the distros that made that happen) .
All the above just to make a point: If we can convince Publishers to hire some developers to port their engines to Linux, this would enable all the rest of developers that use the engine to create a Linux release in a very short time.
But then again it would not be open.
Maybe if the community could spin a project to provide a game engine that would be open sourced and scriptable supporting open 3d graphics models etc. Basically the same with Java or Flash based games but more close to the hardware (imagine a full 64 bit game that could allocate and use more than 2 GB or RAM and "talk" to your GPU directly for rendering/pre-render etc).
Just a thought (and a lot of history)
Cheers
Sakis Samaras
On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 6:11 PM, sai ganesh <ganesai@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 01/11/2010 8:21 PM Nicu Buculei wrote
Note he said *favorite* game, not *some* game or a *casual* game. There
is this category of users (I am part of it) for whom a Windows PC at
home is pretty much a game console (but with better games than an
ordinary game console).
absolutely true i am a part of that league too.
Unfortunately here we can't do much beyond getting an as good as
possible Wine, is all about 3-rd party entities porting their games to
Linux (some argue this will happen when Linux will have a large enough
market share).
--hope the days are not far away where 3-rd party entities are releasing games for linux. i think quake 3 is already a member of it.and what about cedega? may that can help a little.i think this is the only area of concern for marketing linux to students who happen to be gamers.the first thing they ask is "can i play call of duty 4 in linux".hopefully a solution will be found in the years to come.
--
s.saiganesh
“The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it
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