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linux.conf.au linux.conf.au: Games Linux users play
linux.conf.au linux.conf.au: Games Linux users play | linux.conf.au: Games Linux users play |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 18 December 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 3 And he says that one of the reasons he started the Gaming Minconf was because until recently there were only limited places for open source game developers to come together. Gaming is often the reason why even hardcore Linux users still keep a Windows PC or a Windows partition going; Ansell says the proportion of gamers in the FOSS community is roughly the same as the general community. "Many would love to play games if they had time, but development of FOSS generally takes up their limited spare time. I am personally in this category." He does not agree that Linux will find it difficult to attract gamers because well-known games are often not ported to the operating system. "Warcraft and World of Warcraft are both available on the Macintosh, which means they both have already been ported once (and hence (would) be fairly easy to port again). When the market share of Linux reaches that of Macintosh there would be no reason for Blizzard not to port its games. "Others have already started down this trend. Eve Online, the biggest SciFi-based MMORPG recently released a Linux version of their client. Popular 3d FPS shooters have all released Linux versions, for example ID's Quake and Doom and Unreal's Unreal Tournament. Bioware ported Neverwinter Nights to Linux. Then there is, of course, Wine and Cedega, which let you play numerous windows games on Linux without change. "Lastly, there are hundreds of new FOSS offerings that are being developed. From clones of classic games, to totally new and interesting games." Ansell also points out that there a number of projects which aim to produce MMORPG like games. "One project is called Worldforge - which is one of the oldest (and one of the first open source projects I contributed to). There is also Planeshift." Even though Linux and gaming are rarely seen as blood brothers, Ansell says any game released today either contains some type of FOSS code or has used some FOSS tools in development. "It may be using support libraries like zlib for compression, ODE for collision detection, Boost for extra C++ functionality or Python or Lua for scripting various components. Tools like subversion, gcc and many others are found throughout the gaming industry. Or Linux servers run the backbones of their online gaming systems." The Gaming Miniconf will be held at the University of Melbourne on January 29.
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