Fwd: Re: Linux GameDev IRC meeting (fwd)

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

The full mail of a core ggi developer (see below for details)...

----------  Mail forwarded (Author is Emmanuel Marty)...  ----------
Subject: Re: Linux GameDev IRC meeting (fwd)
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 05:46:46 +0000
From: Emmanuel Marty <core@suntech.fr>


Hello Adrian, Christian,

Let me introduce myself, my name is Emmanuel Marty and I'm one of the
core developers of the GGI project, together with Andreas Beck (who will
unfortunately
be in the USA at the time of your IRC session), Steffen Seeger and Jason McMullan.

There's a summary of my work for ggi at http://www.core.netnation.org/ggi ; I also

worked for UbiSoft in the past, a games company in Europe. I worked on the title
"rayman" for PC/PSX/Saturn/Jaguar (a defunct 64-bit console from atari :)

Christian Reiniger wrote:


> Iīm a developer of the PenguinPlay project
> (http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay). We will have an IRC meeting next weekend
> and would love to see you there.
>
> The meeting is scheduled for Sat, 08.Aug.1998, 21:00 GMT on EFNet, channel
> #gamedev
>
>

I will be there. Do you have any special topics you want discussed there,
or will you just let people "in the open" ? :-)

> We'll log the meeting and provide a summary and transcript on the PPlay
> homepage about one day later. The URL will be:
> http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay/irc-08.aug.1998.html
> If you want to be notified when it becomes available (e.g. so that you can
> put a copy on your homepage ASAP) please tell me (warewolf@mayn.de)

Please notify me when it's available, yes, so I can do the 6-monthly
wakeup of the webmaster and tell him to put the log on the site..

> The Meeting will consist of two parts:

Oh, I guess this answers my question above.. :)

> We hope at least one person of each of these projects will be able to join us.
> Apropos joining: It would be nice if you could say what project youīre from
> when you join the meeting. This makes recordkeeping (for the summary) and
> communication much easier.

Agreed.

> We think it's time to get open source developers and commercial game
> developers together to learn why the game industry hesitates to make games for
> linux, to ask them what the Linux environment lacks for supporting games and
> to discuss how this situation can be changed best.

There are a lot of both technical (*nix isn't a game platform, you have to
install an extra OS..) and political reasons. None cannot be cornered, I'm sure.

> Notes:
> * The commercial people will be interested most in *portable* APIs/SDKs/...
> Itīs easier to convince them to use some new library if this lib
> supports Win32 *and* Playstation *and* MacOS *and* Linux in a portable
> way instead of *only* Linux.

Portable libraries for consoles isn't possible - a typical one has 1 or 2 MB of
memory and the game programmer is already caching there like crazy. But, it
maybe can be done so that difficulty is shifted to cross-compilation time.. ie.
libggi calls translated to psx API calls during that phase. Nothing too hard..

> * Up to now we have email addresses of developers at crack.com, Westwood and
> Activision (not sure about the last one). We need more!

Well, ID already port their games to linux so they will probably go for the API we

recommend if we are set on one once for all; you can have ubisoft' addresses
but not sure they'll want to port rayman, rayman II and tonic trouble to linux..

> please try my personal mail account (warewolf@mayn.de). Thx

There :)

> Ok, I think thatīs it. See you at the meeting :)

OK :)

--
Emmanuel