Comments on: Native Half-Life Petition

By:

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:24:34 +0000

Just go to Blues News and search on “Half-Life Mac”, and you’ll see the whole sad story of why the original HL will not come out for Linux, nor are future versions likely to, either.

Valve killed the Mac port of HL mere DAYS before it was to go GM. Why? Their strategy was to update HL multiplayer OFTEN (which they did), and they didn’t want to always have the other platforms lagging behind. This last-minute decision to kill HL Mac generated a TREMENDOUS amount if ill-will in the Mac community, and I doubt Valve is going to put themselves in that situation again.

By: rafaMEX

rafaMEX — Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:49:23 +0000

blahblahblahblahblah… just B.S.
force your sister/mother/father/friends to use linux!!!! and stfu, thats how you are going to have more comercial software on linux, with users.

By:

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 09:05:20 +0000

just thought id throw this out there, but from what i remember about it when it first came out, the original half-life was based of licensed quake 2 source, so im sure that it is legally impossible for valve to release the source without consent from id (who are proponents of linux and open source, but usually wait a while before they release the source to a game).

By:

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 05:28:49 +0000

I’ve been trying to get in contact with this guy “Ribs” who put together the hl for linux petition site.
I couldn’t register at the gentoo forums (getting errors registering)… if anyone has his email address, which is absent from the website, or can put me in contact with him let me know;

mr_dweebus AT hotmail.com

Thanks

By:

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 03:00:39 +0000

Imagine playstation users making a petition to have Apache and DB2 ported to playstation.
Well it’s just as ridiculous as linux users making a petition to port half-life to linux.

By:

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:43:27 +0000

A) I love how people are discussing the theoretical performance increase from a native port over the Wined version of a 5 year old game when you can get great framerates on archaic equipment with things the way they are now (I used to play HL mods all the time on my Linux box).

B) It seems that as time goes on the people that post the news to Linuxgames.com are getting more and more cynical. It’s only a matter of time before we see a post to the effect of “Linux geek A has started a petition to company B to open source or port their great game C. You shouldn’t bother signing it though because shit like this never gets any results and Linux as a gaming platform is dead in the water.”

By:

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 13:31:45 +0000

Wine/WineX almost always means massive performance loss.

In many cases games ported to Linux were also available for MacOS, probably because the developers of those games used open standards for their games.

It might not make financial sense to port a game after it has been developed with DirectX or other proprietary APIs. But it does make sense to base game development on open standards right from the start, because that will make porting that much easier and probably quite inexpensive.

Some open standards (like OpenGL) might not fulfil todays gamers’ needs yet, but imagine what would happen if hardware and software developers could eventually cooperate to change that …

People could develop a game which would run on a variety of platforms and operating systems with just a few changes. And thats where it might finally make financial sense, just think of a game that is supposed to be sold on the PC, Mac and Console market.

By: SQLBoy

SQLBoy — Mon, 16 Jun 2003 12:01:53 +0000

There are hundreds of thousands of Linux users and I bet 95% of them want to play HL2.

By: PJ_Hooker

PJ_Hooker — Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:13:38 +0000

I don’t really expect this petition to do much for us, even if there wasn’t the Microsoft tie-in at Valve. Nevertheless, I don’t see how signing up is going to do any harm. So, I went ahead and signed up. Indeed, if this list is embarrassingly small, it might just be further evidence to ignore us. The petition is already established and there’s nothing we can do to change that. So, we might as well build the list up as fat as we kind and not bother getting our hopes up.

By:

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 07:06:35 +0000

Game developers don’t work for OSes, they work for gamers ( and sometimes for money too ).
Bill made a platform more suitable for games, so he gets the games. It’s that simple. No time to waste.