Ubuntu Founder On Linux Games

Lifehacker published an interview with Mark Shuttleworth on Productivity and Linux. and beside he stated his opinion about the current situation of Linux games & the game industry.

Lifehacker: The readers have also commented that they are staying away from Linux because it is missing big name software packages—especially games. Is there a strategy to overcome this traditionally unconquerable Linux roadblock?

Mark Shuttleworth: Games are a particularly difficult thing to address on Linux. Obviously that's less of an issue in a corporate environment or amongst professional developers who may well have multiple computers and have a gaming machine for their own personal use separate from their development machine. It is not something we particularly want to address at this stage. That industry has very specific economics that we can't really influence.

New GP2X F-200 is coming soon

GamePark Holding, the creator of the handheld dream for homebrew game development announced the new GP2X F-200 coming in October. The specification doesn't diverge from it's predecessor, but it will have a complete new PSP-like controller and a touchscreen.

Unix Game Development Wiki

Meanwhile the idea of a knowledge base for developers came up, and we have an agile discussion at the board. However, at some point most important things are said, and it's better to go on. Thus I created the Unix Game Development Wiki right now. Similar as with the board, it's more like an experiment at the moment and maybe it's too early once again, but I still don't care. Just like the UGD blog & board it uses a free hosting service, and to my mind there's still no need to change that. At least this guarantees continuity. However, it's there and you're welcome to use it.

Rob Myers' interesting PoV on Open Source and Art

I stumbled over an interesting article by Rob Myers, in which he states that the "Open Source" model is nothing without the ideology of Free Software - and encourages artists to use copyleft licenses for their work. A nice read.

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/rob-myers-critique-of-open-source/2007/08/25

Notes on Interviews

Hopefully, you can soon read some interviews here, we're working on this, but for now you have to settle for interviews from somewhere else. Actually, this are just some notes for me, but I won't withhold them.

Recently Linux Gaming World published an interview with Andy Southgate, the lead developer of the fourth-dimensional shooter Adanaxis ... a 4D shooter on Linux, doesn't it sound exiting? The code is GPL now!

Here is a list of some interviews, just as a note for me, but they might be interesting to you, too.

• Angband (LGDC)
• Interview of Erno Tuomainen From Legends Of Saladir (LGDC)
• Interview With Anders Moden From Gizmo3D (LGDC)
• Interview with the Icculus (LG)
• Interview with id Software's Timothee Besset at QuakeCon 2006 (LG)
• Interview with id Software's Timothee Besset (LG)
• Interview With Michael Simms of Linux Game Publishing and Tux Games (LG)
• Interview with Indrema CEO John Gildred (LG)
• A Few Words with Daryll Strauss (LG)
• A Few Words with Michael Vance (LG)
• A Few Words with Joseph Kain (LG)
• Freeciv Interview - May 1999 (LG)
• Interview With Dave Taylor of Crack.com (LG)
• Interview: Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel (FG)

Torvalds on Games

Linux Torvalds gave an interview to apc about the future of Linux. To the end of the interview they dig up Linus past as game developer ;)

APC: Before you wrote the kernel, you wrote a clone of Pacman. Do you play games at all and if you do, which ones?

LT: I don't games that much, I don't tend to find it interesting enough. And when I do play, I tend to play things that are more kids or teenager games: more of a "platformer" kind of thing. I played the original Prince of Persia a long time ago before I started Linux, and for that reason I tried out the modern versions, and liked those too ("Sands of Time" in particular, the later ones were a bit too serious).

APC: Would you write another game if you had the time? If yes, what would it be? Do you have a favourite type of game, such as adventure?

LT: I really only wrote some (fairly bad) games because I was interested in the programming, not so much the playing. I found it more interesting to just do flicker-free graphics at high performance than the actual game-play.

So no, I'd probably never do a game again. Especially in these times, when games are a lot more about the content, and less about the things I used to worry about.

Rock On!

This book is pretty outdated - Linux Music & Sound (2000) - but I think I should mention it nonetheless, because on my research for audio tools for Unix game developers I frequently came across this book.

... but let's watch for something contemporary ...

The energyXT2 music production software is a sequencer for audio & MIDI recording, similar to Logic & Cubase. The software is not free and has a price of 75$, but they offer a Linux demo. Sadly I couldn't really test it because of my sound devices, but I could start it anyway (without sound) and it looks pretty cool, and is definitely worth a try. I'll check it out on the next chance, but having any reviews would be great.

In the case you don't like using priority software and overleap, you missed a cool link about Linux VST plugins, where the creator of energyXT2 collect stuff about VST plugins for Linux, where you could also find free plugins.

I'd also like to present Hydrogen, an advanced drum machine, which aims to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming. Indeed they created a very cool program which is very close to that aim, and it's already possible to compose & arrange complex drums with lots of drum sound.

Nevertheless, the most interesting thing about music making software is the progression of Ardour's MIDI integration, what's also their project at Google's SOC.

Open Game Console

Ever thought about a Unix Console like Wii, XBox, or PS would be cool?

So did others, and founded the Open Game Console Consortium, an independent, non-profit organization made up of various companies, individuals, game developers, publishers and hardware manufactures. It is dedicated to the development and maintanance of an open standard by which multiple hardware manufacturers can release their own videogame console that can all the same exact games without modifications.

The OGCC project is creating a console with usual PC components, what also makes it a PC somehow. Actually they don't build the console, but standardize the specifications, so anybody can build the console oneself. The underlying operating systems should be a special Linux distro, but at the moment this is very sketchy. The OGCC is not the first and only project aiming for a Linux videgame system, but what makes this project special is the complete openness.

There is also the OpenMoko project, creating a free smartphone platform using Linux and other free software components, which is also able for gaming.

And also another project called Gamix, is developing open specifications for a gaming console. Indeed, Gamix and OGCC have very similar goals, but somehow it seems a (liberal) company is behind Gamix, while OGCC is totally open for community development.

To make this complete, I refer to the previous GP2X article, the Linux handheld.

Next Round for OpenGL

The last weeks OpenGL comes out with some good news. At first the announcement of OpenGL 3.0, which will drop backward compatibility to get better performance of modern hardware and makes development easier.

The second thing is the Linux release of the gDEBugger, a high quality OpenGL debugger and profiler. This tool will help to make your applications faster by letting you trace for performance killer and bugs.

The last thing is the release of the glslDevil, a tool for debugging the OpenGL shading pipeline.

OGRE 3D Programming

The OGRE 3D graphics engine has become real popular in open source game development, and meanwhile is an alternative for some commercial developers, who already using it. A notable thing is the good documentation about the engine, a friendly community, and even now a book - Pro OGRE 3D Programming (2006). In my opinion this makes the position of OGRE very clear as a constant among (FOSS) 3D graphics rendering engines.

Graphic Artist Gluttony

A quick search about books for graphic artist astonished me to find so many results for Blender and the GIMP, but only few are up to date. To my surprise a new Blender book will be released next month - The Essential Blender.

I acknowledge to not have read one of these books, but as proposed in the forum we'll create a database of game development books, and this is just for completeness. Of course you're invited to give a review or a comment about any of this books, either here or in the forum.

Books about the GIMP:

• Beginnig GIMP: From Novice to Professional (2006)
• GIMP 2 for Photographers (2006)
• GIMP Pocket Reference (2000)
• Grokking the GIMP (2000)
• GIMP for Linux Bible (2000)
• The GIMP for Linux & Unix (2000)
• Guerrilla Guide to Great Graphics With the GIMP (2000)
• GIMP - The Official Handbook (1999)
• Sams Teach Yourself GIMP in 24 Hours (1999)

Books about Blender:

• The Essential Blender(not out yet - 9/27/2007)
  
• Introducing Character Animation With Blender (2007)
• The Official Blender GameKit: Interactive 3D for Artists (2003)
• The Official Blender 2.0 Guide (2001)
• Blender Book (2000)

Free Game Development

I just discovered another game development forum, which focuses on free game development. Earlier, it has been about free games only, but it seems the team recently got new ambitious, and want to start a free game development community. As a matter of fact freegamedev.net is also very Unix friendly, and they have analog ideas about FOSS game development.

John Carmack on the Future of Linux Gaming

John Carmack, the lead programmer of id Software (Wolfenstein,Doom, Quake, ...), gave his statement about the future of Linux gaming on the QuakeCon, and that he will continue to publish his sources of Doom 3, but read the complete article at United Underground.

Problem on Linux FOSS Game Development

Here is an article written by another one, who thinks about how to improve game development for Open Source and Linux/Unix, coming to the same conclusion to create a knowledge base and community for game developers & artists, etc.

Linux GameDev Part III - Installers

Troy Hepfner is busy as a bee and released his third article about Linux Game Programming. This time it's about installing your game with an installer, and not by the distributions. I wont repeat is article so better read it yourself, it's better anyway.