Linux game development
David Taylor
is prohibitively expensive for smaller game companies because of
both the OS cost (I understand approx. $300 right now) and the hw
cost (you need a funky 12-bit color video card & plenty of resources).
However, both Carmack and I would recommend Linux or FreeBSD to
anyone else that wants to develop games. It's of course perfect
if you have some UNIX background, but even if you don't, the time
you'll save not rebooting will more than make up for the time of
the learning curve.
I have recently started a small game development and publishing
company called Chameleon Productions. It is modelled after id
Software but is run on a very small budget. The programmer develops
under Linux. The game uses svgalib. He has keyboard, mouse, and
joystick supported as well. Sound isn't done yet, but will be
quite straightforward, and believe it or not, there's plenty of
sound code that can be made portable. The game looks and plays
identically to the DOS version, which is compiled under Watcom and
linked to 4gwpro. The code stresses the importance of keeping the
source as similar as possible for DOS and Linux, leaving the
differences trivial and hopefully not-too-painful to debug.
The Linux machine also acts as the NFS server. The artists use
B&W NFS to get files from the server. The coder has a second PC
also running B&W NFS so that he can recompile under DOS without
having to reboot his Linux machine. It's a 386/40. No, they don't
grow on trees, but they're pretty damn cheap, and worth the time
saved, IMHO.
The company has been operating full-steam for only three weeks,
but progress has been quite impressive. I think talent and drive
is still at least 4/5 of the product, but I'd give a healthy chunk
of the leftovers to a modern setup, including a real operating
system such as Linux and a sensible network.
By the way, there's a rumor that the X port of DOOM was abandoned.
It isn't. It's just backburnered. Jag stuff is overwhelming us
right now. It looks like the first X release will be the SGI port
'cause we've gotta return the machine soon. :) The Linux port
should be soon after. A really cool guy is sending me constant
FreeBSD updates on CD, basically guilting me into doing the FreeBSD
port. Hey, guilt works, I guess. Would be cool if there were such
a kind soul in the Linux camp. I need to be able to switch between
Linux and FreeBSD easily. Seems like booting off of CD would be
a cool way to do this. Is there a decent filesystem they can both
share? Thanks in advance. (e-mail: d...@idsoftware.com)
=-ddt->
Marius Kjeldahl
> However, both Carmack and I would recommend Linux or FreeBSD to
> anyone else that wants to develop games. It's of course perfect
> if you have some UNIX background, but even if you don't, the time
> you'll save not rebooting will more than make up for the time of
> the learning curve.
>
> I have recently started a small game development and publishing
> company called Chameleon Productions. It is modelled after id
> Software but is run on a very small budget. The programmer develops
> under Linux. The game uses svgalib. He has keyboard, mouse, and
> joystick supported as well. Sound isn't done yet, but will be
> quite straightforward, and believe it or not, there's plenty of
> sound code that can be made portable. The game looks and plays
> identically to the DOS version, which is compiled under Watcom and
> linked to 4gwpro. The code stresses the importance of keeping the
> source as similar as possible for DOS and Linux, leaving the
> differences trivial and hopefully not-too-painful to debug.
Thanks for the helpful info. Would it be possible to tell us what kind
of "support" tools you use, ie. how you design graphics, palette and
sprite management etc.. Does such tools exists for Linux/X, or do you
use your own in-house developed tools? (I have looked into several
drawing packages for X [pixel based], but it seems they have almost no
palette handling at all, ie. which colours to put where in the palette
etc.)
--
Marius Kjeldahl, student at The Norwegian Insitute of Technology and
The University of Karlsruhe - finishing MSc late autumn 1994
e-mail: s_ma...@ira.uka.de or mar...@lise.unit.no
www : http://rzstud1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/~ulh0