Re: Direction of Linux games...

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Steve Baker wrote:

<sims snipped>

>Well - this is something I know a LOT about.  I design (real) military
>flight simulators in my 'day job'.  A typical flight simulator would
>contain at least a million lines of code - maybe two million.  Ironically,
>a 'game' would probably be even more complex than that.

I think open-source games have no chance to compete with big companies
with big budgets and money as their motivator when it comes to make games
look good and sound good. People will always buy what looks and sounds
nice, and therefore enormous amounts of money, innovation and effort is
put into making even the most stupid game look god on screen.

Oopen-source can compete (and will) with games where depth is premium, and
not the gfx. Imagine something like Ultima Online. When it came out it was
really something new, and the only thing newer games have added is more
gfx. An opensourced game with UO-type icongfx could be done with moderate
effort by using a lot of nice components and libs that can be found all
over the net. A smart system would separate the logic from the actual
vieweing, and thus make it easy to add gfx some day to _visualize_ what's
going on. Running these kinds of 'simulations' is where Linux would excel.
The server-like idea behind Linux would make most things easy and hard
things possible (any Perl hackers here?).

Bottom line. What is needed is not copies of Windows games, but new
thinking, as the original author said. the 'net' is here. Current games
don't really use it that well. Why not try to come up with a OS-game that
does?

	Chakie, rambler

---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
 Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |    CS at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
    Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, no-one hears you scream