Noticed a discussion on Slashdot on the state of Linux for games, spawned by a (not so good) article on Cedega.

One of the main arguments brought up which is probably true is that the PC gaming market is dying/declining, due to the increased popularity of consoles. It rhymes well with my own experience as those of my friends who do game a lot have basically switched from PC gaming to Playstation/Xbox gaming over the last two/three years. If you as a game company is moving your focus from PC’s to consoles anyway I guess looking at adding more ‘PC platforms’ to your supported list is quite far down the todo list.

That said there are still some major titles coming out with primarly the PC platform in mind and I don’t accept all the arguments made for why these don’t have a native linux port.

One argument I noticed cropping up was that of easy of porting between XBox and PC platform while the Linux/OpenGL/SDL/OpenAL port was harder. I doubt this is the real problem. For example I did expect more Linux games to come out when the Playstation 2 came out and used GCC and OpenGL due to ease of porting, but no such ports seemed to happen. Today MacOS X uses OpenGL and OpenAL on a Unix core with gcc, yet few of titles released for Apple also get a GNU/Linux port. So I think the Linux ports gets axed before the difficulty of porting question even arises.

Another question is if there are enough linux users out there to warrant a port, or at least enough linux users interesting in playing games to warrant a port. That is a hard question to answer. Loki Games did go under as many have pointed out, but in the aftermath its hard to say if it was mismanagement or lack of sales killing that company. Claims have been made in both directions. I would also hope that we have managed to grow the overall size of the linux userbase since the days of Loki which might have changed the dynamics if Loki where doing business today. There are other linux porting houses like Linux Games Publishing and Runesoft around and they seem to be surviving, even if they mostly do smaller titles. Transgaming looks like they are doing a healthy business currently, somewhat on the back of the enduring popularity of World Of Warcraft no doubt. So there definetly is a sustainable market for games and games related products on GNU/Linux. Based on some comments I saw from a Epic or Id person a couple of months ago I guess it is more of the ‘we don’t lose money on doing linux ports’ category though as opposed to ‘doing linux ports gives us a nice bundle of extra cash’. We need to get to the second of these two before the major game houses start paying attention I think.

Linux gaming is hampered still by shitty drivers for 3D, yet I am unsure about how direct impact this have on the lack of game ports. At the level the decision is taken at a company about wether to support Linux or not I don’t think there would be awareness of the state of Linux 3D drivers. NVidia’s proprietary drivers are probably the only ones out there that provides the quality and performance you want for playing newer titles. Intel’s drivers are good, but Intel is currently aiming at the low-end graphics market which kills them for a lot of the current games I think. ATI as many have pointed out provide really shitty Linux drivers. I don’t understand fully why they get away with it. I mean according to the grapevine the reason these drivers exist is due to the animation companies wanting them for their renderfarms. Well if that is true I don’t understand how said companies accept drivers which such horrid performance, being about 50% the speed of the same driver for Windows. Losing 50% performance on your renderfarm due to bad drivers would cause a lot of angry customers I would assume?

Anyway for someone contemplating a port, there might be some awareness that 3D accelleration under Linux has some kind of problems, even if the don’t know the details, which wouldn’t be helping their value estimation of the linux market of course. That said it seems to me people in the community are activly trying to buy NVidia or Intel using hardware these days, so hopefully the general image of bad 3D support will lessen over time due to that. It also has to be said in defence of ATI that it do seem like they are trying to improve their drivers currently. The release of AIGXL and XGL seems to have made them decide to put some more resources onto their drivers. Time will tell.

In regards to the general market size, I saw this
article today which is Red Hat talking about Xen. More importantly to this entry though is that it also reports both Novell and Red Hat seeing rapidly growing interest in deploying GNU/Linux destops. As a digression I wonder how important the major GNU/Linux and Solaris vendors having standarized on GNOME is for this surge in interest. The Windows games market where built on the back of home office PC’s, so maybe that can/will be our path too.

As we are preparing for the first alpha release of elisa the question of file locations came up. In a media center solution you have IMHO halfway lost if you have to expose disk directory layout through the userinterface. Cause since the primary tool for using the GUI is a remote navigating directories and choosing files based on it is simply painful. In the set-top box situation this is not to big a problem as we can enforce certain defaults. But since we also want people to be able to run Elisa on their normal server/desktop systems we need to also consider how these are laid out.

There has been some long discussions about this in the GNOME community about defining special ~/Music and ~/Movie directories for instance that all applications default to. If this was the case we could just have Elisa default to parsing those directories too. Unfortunatly the progress on this has stalled due to what I guess is a combination of issues, one is how to handle localizations (on disk or in GUI) and if the especially the first who does the work to make it happen.

For Elisa we will set specific directories for this first alpha release that can be changed in the elisa.conf file. What the long term solution will be will depend on what happens elsewhere in the community. I just hope we don’t need to have a file manager/chooser module in Elisa long term. At least not one many people would need to use.