Comments on: Boston Globe on Linux Gaming

By: salsadoom

salsadoom — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 09:26:57 +0000

I know from experience, that a lot of linux gamers tend to play their games in windows. They have a linux copy they install and play once and a while, but most of their gaming gets done in windows since they just have more games now. Thankfully, this is actually not much of a problem for me now, with games like UT2004 and NWN for linux…

But the problem is dual-booting. We want games, so we keep windows around for them, but the game companies see us using windows and assume that there are few linux gamers because of that. If there is a linux port of a game, we should all be making a point of only using that linux port — otherwise we are damaging our cause. UT2004 especially!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:12:34 +0000

A few notes, a few people here are a bit naive about ports. Not only do you have to pay for the ports of your game, but there are marketing costs, support costs (even if you say you don’t support the Linux version, you’ll still get Linux people asking for support and that will mean time spent handling that), and then things like testing, to be sure that the version that goes on the disc is working fine. This means you could potentially delay the game until all the ports are ready to ship.

Delaying a game is possibly the most expensive thing you can do, as the advertising campaigns are set up months ahead of time (print mags especially can have months of lead time).

It also means any patch you release has to have an equivalent amount of work put into them, as you have to release patches for every platform and then test them to make sure they’re all co-existing well for multiplayer games. This is very expensive and requires a lot of coordination between all the involved parties.

Finally, talking about writing “portable code” is a bit of a silly topic nowadays. D3D code is portable to the Xbox (where you can’t use OpenGL). Would you say that writing your engine to support D3D is not writing portable code? You could equally say the same about writing an OpenGL engine. So really if you want to do a console version, Windows version, and Linux version, you have to now add the cost of supporting both D3D and OpenGL to your engine.

So while I obviously support Linux gaming, you really have to consider the business aspects of this. For Savage I put my ass on the line with our publisher and promised to have a Linux build ready for the gold master so Linux gamers could rejoice at having linux support on the disc, but we almost had huge problems fitting both versions on the CD while we were crunching at the end of the project. There are very real business costs to consider, so it’s not purely a “it costs them $20k to do a port, so it’s definitely worthwhile” kind of argument.

Jon (Slothy)
(the guy who did the Linux port of Savage)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 18:37:21 +0000

Epic is right about be obligated to port but there’s a common flaw in the reasoning of numbers. %1 is only people playing online. I’m sure there are many people like my sister and I who only play single player games and play UT2k3 offline. And Linux is a mass market OS now and the numbers are anything but miniscule. The number of users are very large, at least three times the size of any estimates and the current estimated market share based on pre-install sales is very large when you take into account how tightly MS tries to control the desktop.And Loki didn’t go out of business because of the market, it was poor management.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 12:36:41 +0000

Methinks a big problem is that people don’t KNOW it’s been ported. Hopefully the fact that Linux will be mentioned as supported on te UT2004 box will help remedy this problem.

By: RobSeace

RobSeace — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 07:28:10 +0000

Epic rocks for their support, no doubt… I’m very glad to have UT* available on Linux… But, I must say I was rather surprised to see no mention of id Software in that article… When I think of one games company that has supported Linux longer than anyone else, I think of id… The original Doom was ported to Linux, then Doom2, then Quake, then Quake2, then Q3A, then Q3TA, and by all reports I’ve heard, Doom3 will be ported to Linux when it’s done, as well… I’m not trying to start a holy war between id fanboys vs. Epic fanboys, but I just think they both are great, but when it comes to best history of strong Linux support, I think that award has to go to id (and, specifically John Carmack)…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:34:28 +0000

I was a big fan of UT and played it to death. UT 2k3 didn’t really float my boat, but UT 2k4 is freaking awesome! I’ll buy it the first day its on tuxgames.com! The Onslaught mode is definitely a “good thing” ™. Epic people: If you’re reading this, thanks!

-Mr. Lizardo

By: utgamer

utgamer — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:59:33 +0000

Hi,

I still play the original UT online and have no problem with UTpure. You can get the linux version of UTpure from http://www.unrealadmin.org.

Happy Gaming !!!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:09:54 +0000

I preordered UT2004 as well. The chances that I would have even considered buying that game if there was no linux support? Exactly 0.00% I have so many problems with my windows partition that I never use it at all, even for games.

By: zealotasd

zealotasd — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 14:59:34 +0000

And what about all the users that don’t ever register on Epic’s network, including the *gasp* pirated *ungasp* ‘ware? ;-) Yea, you forgot that statistic, didn’t you: the ratio of pirated Win32(…and win64) UT* users is astronomically higher than the ratio of ELF *BSD/Linux UT* users.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 14:38:08 +0000

There’s something about the gameplay of the original UT that I prefer strongly to the nerwer versions. Unfortunately, I can’t play it online because of all the servers running the UTpure mods that effectively lock out Linux clients, so I need to get in the 2k3 habit.