Fwd: RE: Game dev. for Open Source Operating Systems

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

This one is from Game developer magazine (www.gdmag.com). They really seem
to be interested.

----------  Mail forwarded (Author is Alex Dunne)...  ----------
Subject: RE: Game dev. for Open Source Operating Systems
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 10:07:09 -0700
From: "Alex Dunne" <adunne@sirius.com>


Thanks for the info Christian -- this helps a lot.

Regards,

Alex

-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Reiniger [mailto:warewolf@mayn.de]
Sent: Friday, August 14, 1998 9:37 AM
To: Alex Dunne
Subject: RE: Game dev. for Open Source Operating Systems


Alex Dunne wrote:

>Christian-
>
>Thanks for the letter. Can you tell me more about what's going on in this
>field?  I really haven't followed it.

Well, currently there are at least three portable game SDKs for Linux:
PenguinPlay (http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay/),
GAMES (http://members.xoom.com/bitwize/) and
ClanLib (http://clanlib.org/)

and at least two high level 3D engines:
CrystalSpace (http://www.grimmware.com/CrystalSpace/) and
DUMB (http://samba.anu.edu.au/dumb/).

We are now trying to merge these projects into one before the big irc
meeting, as the current situation only adds to developer confusion and
simply is a waste of efforts.

On the low level side the GGI project (http://www.ggi-project.org/) is
working hard on a portable API for gfx hardware access (including hardware
acceleration) and on an improved version of the fbcon support the Linux
kernel soon will contain. A portable Sound API (GSI) and a portable Input
device API (GII) are in the works, too.
SDL (http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/) provides a
minimalistic portable hardware abstraction layer and already supports
Linux, Win32, BeOS (AFAIK MacOS is in development).
The Mesa project (http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~brianp/Mesa.html) works on a
free OpenGL library and already has a fully functional version.

Well, that's all of an overview I can give before risking to break the
maximum email size ;)
Hope it was what you expected..

You should have a look at the projects' home pages fore detailed info and
read the summaries of our past irc meetings (see the address below) for
some infos on the current coordination efforts etc.


>Summaries and logs of the previous meetings and a document describing our
>current plans for the main meeting are at
>http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay/irc-meetings/


Cu
	Christian
--

We all live in a yellow subroutine.