We usually don’t report on games, but I would like to make an exception today. Blizzard Entertainment has announced the sequel to what many see as the best realtime strategy game ever made: they announced StarCraft II. The original StarCraft, released in 1998, tops many best-games-of-all-times lists, and has sold over 9 million copies worldwide; it is still one of the most popular online games, despite its age. In fact, in South Korea, StarCraft matches are even broadcast on TV.
…For making me stop hitting the refresh button every day the last 10 years.
Er, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115 an extension has been around to do that for you for years
Nothing wrong with spicing up the news with something a bit unusual from time to time. It’s certainly tech.
Personally, I’m not that much of a fan. I just didn’t “get” it, compared to the other RTS games. For one thing, Starcraft had very “rock paper scissors” gameplay. In MP, it seemed to be a resource gathering race rather than a tactical game. I think some design decisions were made simply to distinguish it from the other similar games of the time.
Like a lot of FPS, I think that RTSes have become very application like; they are a “browser” that you use to access the content. Compared to its contemporaries, I considered it to be rather feature poor, if not actually a step backwards. I seem to remember that even Warcraft II (DOS) had some features that were missing from Starcraft such as unit repair.
It had awful path finding: having previously moved a tank slightly to the left, a minute later you’d hear the sounds of battle as your tank had decided to go all the way round the map and through the enemy base in order to move a few meters. In other games, a fellow unit would have the intelligence to move out of the way to accommodate.
It also lacked a lot of the high tech stuff that was be added to its competitors such as way points.
I seem to remember that I completed it in SP mode and then had a quick go online but I never considered it to be one of the greats, like a lot of people seem to.
The C&C games were good but Dark Reign is still my benchmark for 2D RTS games. Homeworld is another favorite.
I seem to remember that even Warcraft II (DOS) had some features that were missing from Starcraft such as unit repair.
Starcraft did have unit repair, although only the Terrans had the ability. And only on mechanical units, until the expansion pack added medics which could do the same for people. The Zerg actually slowly healed themselves over time without any interaction, and the Protoss were stripped of this ability to compensate for some of their other talents (but also had shields which regenerated much like the Zerg or could be instantly topped off by building a special structure).
It had awful path finding…
Yes, there’s no question that was the biggest problem with the game.
Starcraft had very “rock paper scissors” gameplay
Yes, that was actually one of the selling points – every strategy had it’s own weakness to another and therefore gameplay never got stale and predictable. While there wasn’t anything really innovative about Starcraft, it simply did everything in the RTS genre extremely well. Probably the biggest difference between it and other games at the time was how different each race in the game really was from the others and how you had to adopt new strategies when playing each of them.
Edited 2007-05-19 23:57
Homeworld. It played great, had an awesome story and in every way aesthetically beautiful. It was art in every way. An audiovisual wonder. A truly cinematic work, and quite possibly the best RTS ever made.
Oh…sorry…
Yet both races were the same… with different “graphics”.
What made starcraft so powerful was that there were three races that you had to play completely different.
Not to really knock Blizzard or Starcraft, but Homeworld was quite literally the game I thought Starcraft was going to be. Not Warcraft with “space” units. So I have to say that I was very disapointed with Starcraft and it’s rescource management gameplay.
Another good RTS game was Myth/Myth2. You had a set number of guys and that was it. No build a million guys and “zerg” the enemies.
That said, I really have no expectations for Starcraft 2. So it’s unlikely I will be disapointed. I’m interested to see what Blizzard brings to the market.
Homeworld is especially fun when played with some of the third-party addons out there. Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels is one of the mods I really enjoy putzing with still…
http://mods.moddb.com/3564/star-trek-sacrifice-of-angels/
Edited 2007-05-21 20:32
Props to Blizzard, they will be releasing simultaneously on Mac too (Y)
Any word on some form of linux compatibility?
I know wine has historically worked quite well for Blizzard games, but hoping for something a little more substantial than silence and presumed wine support within a year of its release.
Mac gaming is pretty barren as it is, and that’s because it’s 1) a minority and 2a) used to be an entirely different processor architecture and 2b) now you have to support two architectures!
The problem with Linux gaming support, even from companies who are great enough to simultaneously release on Windows & Mac, is that there is too much to support in Linux. Hundreds of distros, hundreds of packages and dependencies, sub-par graphics support in the majority of cases (i.e. for graphics cards that matter to gamers). Linux isn’t exactly catering for game makers is it?
The best a company could reasonbly do is to support just one or two precise distros and versions otherwise the testing and support would be through the roof. If GPU vendors start offering graphics drivers that match up to Windows & Mac standards, then you might see commercial Linux game releases.
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If GPU vendors start offering graphics drivers that match up to Windows & Mac standards
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I agree that a half dozen popular distros which release twice a year are a game company’s support nightmare.
But I disagree about graphics support for the cards that they care about most being a problem.
Those cards would be NVidias and ATIs. NVidia’s drivers are essentially equivalent to their Windows counterparts. And the ATI drivers, too, I think. Both Linux & Windows users complain about ATI driver quality.
I know that Doom3 and Quake4 run quite nicely at “High Quality” on an AMD64 2800+ and NVidia 6800GT under Linux.
On the other hand, supporting OSS drivers can be a problem. The game companies are not going to release and support a different set of game data simply because the free drivers can’t legally support S3TC compression or what not.
Edited 2007-05-19 21:44
The ATi drivers are comparable to their Windows counterpart in-terms of opengl performance. This says a lot about Ati’s opengl performance which isn’t very good. However, Ati’s directx performance is great and unfortunately the linux crowd doesn’t get to see this type of performance. Ati’s has slowly been trying to implement better drivers and they have been releasing incremental changes to their driver. I’m hoping that at some point they release the code or scrap the driver and rewrite it from scrath with more focus on opengl performance being on par with their directx counterpart.
BTW, don’t count out Intel which will be more than enough to run this game at a decent clip.
I’m hoping that we get full wine support this time around (cinematic and all). Having to jump out of the game to watch the cinematic brings you out of the atmosphere of the game and I think its totally stupid. If anything they should at least make sure everything works in wine or support a more user oriented distro like Ubuntu. Every major distro out there with the proper packages already support the file formats that Blizzard uses for their cinematic, they might as well have some for this in linux so that the game uses mplayer or something when it comes to playing a cinematic.
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or support a more user oriented distro like Ubuntu
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Perhaps if desktop and gaming ISVs get frustrated enough and decide to just support Ubuntu and be done with it, some in the “CHOICE IS GOOD!!!” crowd will realize that choice actually has advantages AND disadvantages.
I doubt it though. Likely it would just spark a wave of conspiracy theories about how Mark Shuttleworth is the new Bill Gates, a few ineffectual online petitions, and several calls to boycott Ubuntu.
Edited 2007-05-19 23:07
Would be easy enough for distros to make sure they included the same versions of the important things as Ubuntu. Its not like game companies would put in a serious system check to make sure you were running the actual ubuntu.
Actually, if game companies did start supporting a single distro, it might lead to somebody releasing a specialized gaming distro, just like there are already specialized gaming hardware.
Actually all they’d really need to do is to “Support” Ubuntu and Fedora Core and then just use a universal installer. Or simply do what Ahead does with Nero and release a .deb, .rpm and .tar.gz. That would cover pretty much all the distributions.
Guaranteed that if they did release it for Linux, the distributions would make SURE that it worked on theirs. It wouldn’t even take Blizzard any extra work to make sure all the libraries are present in the distributions.
This is not true, at least in this case:
http://www.alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1690 (Nexuiz benchmark). ATi really has very poor DRI/Linux drivers.
ATI used to have really poor OGL drivers in Windows but when Doom 3 came out they got inspired by all the horrible benchmarks. It took them awhile, but eventually their OGL performance came pretty close to DX.
“BTW, don’t count out Intel which will be more than enough to run this game at a decent clip.”
Says who? Mac fanatics after the Santa Rosa “is” released for the Macbook?
“I’m hoping that we get full wine support this time around (cinematic and all). Having to jump out of the game to watch the cinematic brings you out of the atmosphere of the game and I think its totally stupid. If anything they should at least make sure everything works in wine or support a more user oriented distro like Ubuntu. Every major distro out there with the proper packages already support the file formats that Blizzard uses for their cinematic, they might as well have some for this in linux so that the game uses mplayer or something when it comes to playing a cinematic.”
Better yet put a dist on the DVD and boot it all up from there, have people reboot their machines to play the game but atleast don’t force them to install Windows. That way they can control the environment it runs in.
This is exactly a reason why an open standard like OpenGL is much preferable – it’s cross platform compatible, as opposed to a closed, monopolistic standard like DirectX. Again, I wouldn’t touch an ATI card, just based on the fact that their OpenGL performance is atrocious (not that their DirectX performance is much better imho).
As to the cinematics, at least in StarCraft and StarCraft: Broodwars, they used smack video technology, a closed, proprietary format. I suspect that they’ll [Blizard] will do the same again.
Dave
Again, ATI’s OpenGL performance is almost identical to it’s DirectX performance. Stop spreading myths.
Doom3 runs just fine natively on any modern distro thanks. Too much to support? Please, that’s not how Linux works.
The amount of distros available is not a problem. That didn’t stop iD, BioWare, and Epic now did it? Hundreds of packages and dependencies? Is there not hundreds of packages and dependencies for Windows and OSX? Again Epic, BioWare, and iD had no problem with this. The graphics card support is solved if you use a gamer’s card that has good driver support–which is Nvidia right about now. There are really only two choices (for commercial 3d games) here so this is not that much of a problem. You want to play commercial games on Linux, that requires hardware acceleration, then you either use ATI/AMD or Nvidia–driver support is available for both. Again, this didn’t stop iD, Epic, or BioWare.
More like game developers need to start thinking cross-platform more instead of being tied to the Windows platform with Direct X. You see Direct X is the main reason why most of the AAA commercial games being released on Windows never make it to the Mac or Linux. Since Starcraft II is being released on the Mac, I’m sure it is probably not that much more of an effort to port to Linux if the demand is there; I for one am willing to pay as I’m sure that many other Linux gamers are two.
The amount of distros available is not a problem. That didn’t stop iD, BioWare, and Epic now did it?
id released unsupported ports of their older games. They outsourced a supported version of Quake 3 to Loki, who found out Linux games don’t make money.
Hundreds of packages and dependencies? Is there not hundreds of packages and dependencies for Windows and OSX? Again Epic, BioWare, and iD had no problem with this.
No, there’s not. Windows and OS X come in very limited numbers of combinations. All the core libraries come packaged together in a known good combination. You don’t have to worry about issues like the C compiler team being completely seperate from the C library team. You don’t have to worry about what compiler version & settings were used to build the binaries. The further away from the core of the OS you get, the more variance there is, but also the less relevant it is to a game developer.
ID actually had native Linux ports of every game it released from the very launch or so. It includes quake3, doom3 and quake4. You can still download linux ports from http://ftp.idsoftware.com.
ID engines are fairly portable and do not depend on anything specific except OpenGL and sound subsystem.
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ID engines are fairly portable and do not depend on anything specific except OpenGL and sound subsystem.
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By that, do you mean libGL.so? Or LibMesaVoodoo.so? And which version of the lib?
As to sound. OSS? ALSA? Does the sound crap out trying to mmap in a forbidden (and poorly programmed) way?
Or does one just get a mysterious segfault for no obvious reason?
Keeping my Id games all running over time has required quite a few contortions. Currently, it’s Q3A that immediately bails with an OpenGL problem.
I wouldn’t be able to run *any* of them previous to Doom3 if they hadn’t been OSS’d.
Backwards compatibility for games is far from a Linux strong suit.
Edited 2007-05-20 22:23
From what I’ve read through the years that as long as game development starts with being cross platform form in design then it is fairly easy to do. Blizzard obviously is making enough money off of their Mac development and they are the 800 pound gorilla. I think I’ve even seen Carmack state something to this effect as well as Ryan Gordon.
I think Apple is starting to make some stride with OpenGL, though I hear that not everything they’ve done has made it back into the pot on the linux side.
I do think that a lot of new Mac sales are going to young adults these days, and that you’ll find more and more gamers on the platform whether they be running MacOSX or Windows via bootcamp.
“I do think that a lot of new Mac sales are going to young adults these days”
I don’t think so
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36211
And it makes sense, after all, the 3% Apple users remaining today are the left-overs from their 20% in the 80ies
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“I do think that a lot of new Mac sales are going to young adults these days”
I don’t think so
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Did you read the aricle before you posted the link? It specifically does *not* address current sales.
Edited 2007-05-21 13:26
and how does some completely unsubstantiated personal conjecture stack up against a trend at least evidenced in past market research?
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and how does some completely unsubstantiated personal conjecture stack up against a trend at least evidenced in past market research?
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The research you linked to does not address the current market and does not claim to.
I’d say that both opinions are unsubstantiated by any evidence so far presented here.
I suspect. without making s “claim”, that the original poster is correct, though.
I don’t really care that much, though. I use Linux, which is very much a young adult’s OS, even though I, myself, happen to be 44.
As someone that uses linux for gaming, you are making it much more complicated than it actually is.
Most gamers use nvidia cards, which is well supported in linux. Event the mediocre ATI drivers seem to at least handle games.
Hundreds of distros and dependencies? Give me a break. It is pretty easy to create a statically compiled game with a cross-distro installer. At most, GCC and the standard SDL library are the most you need to have installed.
And six months later a new X.org is released and the game doesn’t run correctly anymore.
I’m not sure if this has really happened before, but I can happily run X11 games that are several years old without much of a problem.
Yes, there are a couple of things in the underlying architecture of X11 that change, but afaik the API hasn’t had any major changes for over a decade now.
The only problem similar to the one you describe (or at least the only one I know of) refers to running Loki’s games, which were compiled with an older version of glibc. You need to run two commands to solve the issue.
The problem of Linux gaming is not necessarily platform-related, but, let’s face it, public-related. Let’s just face it, there simply aren’t enough Linux users who would pay to play a game — not enough to justify releasing a Linux version of the game. From a technical point of view, Linux is not a pain in the neck for developers — probably even less than Windows is. It’s just not anyone’s definition of a “market”.
[And yes, I am a Linux user]
6 months later a Windows service pack is released and the game doesn’t run correctly anymore.
Two episodes ago one of the lead developers of Intoversion ( http://www.introversion.co.uk/ ) was interviewed on LUG Radio. ( http://www.lugradio.org/ )
According to him their games were written for mac and windows, which was the major work. Porting these games with portability in mind then to linux was only a small step. Why shouldn’t this be the case for starcraft2?
“The problem with Linux gaming support, even from companies who are great enough to simultaneously release on Windows & Mac, is that there is too much to support in Linux. Hundreds of distros, hundreds of packages and dependencies, sub-par graphics support in the majority of cases (i.e. for graphics cards that matter to gamers). Linux isn’t exactly catering for game makers is it?”
Actually not totally true. A game designer does not have to support many distros, just Linux. The Loki installer is a wonderful thing. As for graphics cards, the 2 biggest manufacturers of graphics cards DO support Linux, although with proprietary drivers. Graphics cards that matters to gamers are either ATI or Nvidia, no other manufacturer actually counts for games.
This is pretty much irrelevant for games, as most would be distributed with their own statically-linked libraries.
Supporting various versions of Linux is not really an argument against porting games to Linux. It’s more of an issue of Linux not having directx support, and the small market share.
Fortunately, WINE-based solutions keep making strides as far as gaming is concerned – I suspect Starcraft II will be relatively easy to play under Linux.
It’s not just a DirectX issue, considering the Mac doesn’t support DirectX either. In fact the Mac more or less uses the same libraries as a Linux version would.
…and the Mac gets very little PC game ports too, which was precisely my point. (I wasn’t talking about Starcraft, but about PC games in general.)
So DirectX *is* an element IMHO.
What do you need on a linux system for a decent game?
1. 3D Graphis: Use OpenGL. OpenGL is cross-platform, and you don’t need to include any package/whatever just besides GL.h … ’nuff said.
2. Input/Output framework: Use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer). It’s the cross-platform counterpart to DirectX and it works very well and simple. It gives you keyboard, mouse, display, event loop, threading, …
3. Sound: Use OpenAL (you could use SDL, too). OpenAL is a de-facto standard, yet again. ’nuff said.
All of the three things you need I mentioned are part of every decent distro. You _don’t_ have to care about these as a game developer. They are just there, like Direct X and MS Paint is on Windows.
All of the three things I mentioned can be used for Mac games, too. And Windows games, too!
All of the three things I mentioned are used by Doom III, too. You see, I don’t talk about Tetris here.
Releasing games for Linux is no problem at all. Everything you need is there in form of a distro-independent standard. And if you really need something really special, you can just statically link it and ship it with your game – as all the Windows games do, too.
Edited 2007-05-21 00:28
“Hundreds of distros, hundreds of packages and dependencies”
Static linking.
“If GPU vendors start offering graphics drivers that match up to Windows & Mac standards,”
You know, considering the endless stream of problems people seem to have with the ATI and nVidia Windows drivers that can’t be all that hard.
I don’t give a shit to this. No Linux version, no care.
You know, they’re the ones making the game, not you – I bet they give less a shit about your opinion, then you do them.
I second that and add the following: wouldnt care even if there was a linux version
I was actually going to ask you about that, but you beat me to it. Thanks for saving me the time.
On topic, sweet. Star Craft is my favorite game of all time. Just as long as they don’t try to make it into an MMORPG I’ll be perfectly happy.
Good on you. I can’t understand why humans have such difficulties with concepts of “if they don’t support me, why should I support them?”. If people actually got off their lazy asses and boycotted companies we’d get somewhere.
Why don’t I give a shit about Blizzard? Well, if they can support the Mac platform, then they can sure as hell support the Linux platform, the numbers are similar, and it wouldn’t probably be that hard to port from OS X to Linux in all honesty.
My other views on this new game is that it looks like crap. Yuck. Plasticky looks, no thanks.
Dave
Well, so much for finishing school…
Time to say goodbye, I’ll be off playing SC for the next… year or three…
Hahaha
Don’t worry, Blizzard didn’t announce a release date yet. SC2 is still in pre-alpha condition.
You still have time to finish school.
I expected something like “I’d like to make an exception for Starcraft 2 because…”
I don’t know, I’m just curious why this particular game should be the exception.
Edited 2007-05-19 22:10
The StarCraft sequel is one of the most eagerly waited sequels in all of gaming-dom. Fans have been waiting for it for the better part of a decade, and it’s finally here. Hence the exception.
Personally, I’m looking forward to picking up a copy. I gave up gaming years ago, but the magnitude of this release is going to make me indulge in some flashbacks to high-school
I’d like to make an exception for Starcraft 2 because… it is the sequel to what many see as the best realtime strategy game ever made: they announced StarCraft II. The original StarCraft, released in 1998, tops many best-games-of-all-times lists, and has sold over 9 million copies worldwide; it is still one of the most popular online games, despite its age. In fact, in South Korea, StarCraft matches are even broadcast on TV.
well, would you care to read if the moon was about to crash onto the earth..? Or would you complain that it’s no Osnews and rather get caught out without an umbrella in the street when it happens?
Personally, I never cared about Starcraft, although even my gf was a heavy gamer. I am just too goofy when it comes to building up stuff in games – all I can handle is a big gun
But I can see why this is news anywhere – where have you been the past decade 
Starcarft announced vs Moon crashing into Earth is such a stupid comparison I won’t even comment it. But feel free to go on with that story of feeling safe from that with an umbrella. Seems to have potential.
It’s hard to say something intelligent when there is so much excitement…
Wow!, we had Doom 3, C&C 3, we’ll have StarCraft 2. Now only thing left is a Duke Nukem sequel
How does a game company go about supporting five-hundred GNU/Linux distributions?
They don’t.
What they can do is sell a tar.gz package filled with game binary and data files.
A resale program could be launched with the game company, where distributors gain rights to create and distribute binary packages of their games in the distributions’ native package format.
The distributer could then sell the games to their users and send all proceeds to the game company, minus any additional charge tacked on by the distributor.
Another interesting idea would be to allow the base framework of games to be freely available but require that users purchase a copy of the Windows or Mac one then copy the required, cross-platform data files to the installation directory.
Edited 2007-05-19 22:40
I guess the reason for little games support on Linux is not technical. After all, frameworks like SDL, OpenGL 2.0 and OpenAL is more than enough for most of the games. (And they come with the additional benefit of supporting a plenty amount of platforms).
On the other hand, it seems like there is little intensive of buying games by Linux users.
It does not mean all those people who prefer Linux just do it because it’s cheap, but most of the richer ones are not casual desktop users, and generally have corporate or special needs (like PVRs, firewalls, etc) which usually exclude gaming. (And most of the time they can also afford, and probably already own, a Windows license for another partition).
Until Linux is dominant (or really significant) on average desktop, I personally do not expect a large flow of games coming to us.
Edited 2007-05-19 22:51
sukru,
Yep. Thats an entirely different issue. In reality, though, it is usually a technical problem as well. Most game companies just use DirectX not OpenGL or Mesa.
But if there is a Mac version then the effort to port to any other Unix/Unix-like platform with decent graphics drivers should be relatively minor if anything at all.
Edited 2007-05-19 23:01
I don’t think this would hinder development *too* much.
You can program a Graphics Engine to accept different codepaths for different graphic susbsystems (OpenGL, DirectX9/10, Software Renderer, etc.)
Mac versions use OpenGL, that doesn’t stop Blizzard from developing for Mac. The problem, like I stated in my previous post is demand.
Actually, I would think a Linux gamer would be more than willing to spend the cash on a proper Linux version of a game.
Just because you’re running Linux, doesn’t mean you’re cheap. It means you have better things to spend your money on than a shoddy, overpriced OS.
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Actually, I would think a Linux gamer would be more than willing to spend the cash on a proper Linux version of a game.
Just because you’re running Linux, doesn’t mean you’re cheap.
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Tell that to the skeletal remains of Loki Software, Inc. Born: August 1998. Died: January 2002.
Loki was survived by a large number of unpaid creditors, and a huge pile of unpaid debt, and are the biggest gaming success that we in the Linux world have seen thus far.
Edited 2007-05-20 00:11
Loki was also terribly mismanaged and had a business model that wasn’t all that hot. A company like Blizzard, Bioware, or Id are in a much better position to provide ports and profit off of them.
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A company like Blizzard, Bioware, or Id are in a much better position to provide ports and profit off of them.
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Profit from whom? That huge mass of home Linux users who are into games and are willing to pay for them?
I’m encouraged that business Linux desktops seem to be making some progress. That’s where the Linux desktop action is. And I don’t see the fortune 500 ordering huge quantities of StarCraft II for their employees’ desktops.
Id Software has provided Linux client binaries for their games forever, explicitly because it is a cool thing to do. That is currently the best reason to support Linux clients. (Game servers are a different matter, altogether, of course.)
Id *did* officially support Linux for Q3. You could by a boxed set just for Linux. It had Tux on the front. The first run even came in the promotional tin box that Windows users got.
They discontinued support fairly early on. Their business manager stated that it was mainly because Linux was “a support nightmare”.
Basically, even though they felt Linux was way cool, and they gave it a *really* good try, Linux support was a liability to them from a business perspective.
They ended up losing a bunch of money owed them when Loki went under, too. But that was later.
I’ve been using Linux *exclusively* on my desktops since 1997. I greatly enjoy the Linux games that I have.
But it’s usually best, in the long run, to face reality squarely.
Selling specially boxed ‘linux’ versions of the game was a mistake. But making the game available for Linux obviously worked out, because Doom 3, and Quake 4 also recieved support for linux.
If a company is going to use linux for a dedicated server, its actually pretty trivial to offer a client, especially if the game is OpenGL based.
Its really a catch 22, serious gamers don’t use linux because nobody releases games for linux, and nobody releases games for linux because there aren’t any serious gamers who use linux exclusively. So the fair number of casual gamers like myself who use linux either snatch the few bones the PC gaming industry does throw our way, or we just spend our cash on console games instead.
Edited 2007-05-20 02:58
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But making the game available for Linux obviously worked out, because Doom 3, and Quake 4 also recieved support for linux.
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False. Doom3 and Quake4 did not receive support. Unsupported binaries were released by Id.
Id is a cool company. They write their games to be multiplatform, and have done so since the days of the original Doom back in the early 90s.
An Id employee released a binary for the original Doom games, explicitly because doing so was “cool”. And Id has gone to the trouble of porting Quake 1 and all of their games since then to Linux and making explicitly *unsupported* binaries available. Because it was cool.
Here is a list of Id games “officially unsupported”:
Doom 1
Doom 2
Ultimate Doom
Hexen
Heretic
Quake1
glquake (officially unsupported even under Windows)
Hexen 2
Heretic 2
Quake2
Quake3 (now unsupported)
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Doom3
Quake4
All the games through Quake3, and including the earlier Wolfenstein 3D, have had the code to their engines released as Open Source.
But John Carmack himself has come out, post-Q3a, and stated very explicitly how dismal the Linux gaming scene is from a business standpoint.
One can hardly accuse him of not understanding the situation or the potential. It is equally hard to make a case that he was just lying to make Linux look bad.
Edited 2007-05-20 03:12
Well, when there’s a million and one distros out there, can you hardly blame them for not wanting to spend money on staffing tech support across 3 shifts? And what kind of proper linux user whines about not having a customer-support structure? What is this? IBM? Linux desktops are supposed to be for the techies, the guys who drool about compiling kernels in their wettest of dreams, not for the paper-cert toting AD jockeys that pay Microsoft’s protection money to see why the KB666 hotfix obliterated their SQL database.
Let’s not even address the equally dismal video driver scene (until most recently, that is). Again, the chipset manufacturers are mostly to blame on that front. Given that uber-clusterf**k, I hardly blame iD for going, “Ok boys, here’s the code…..have fun, and don’t say we didn’t warn ya.” How can you support something, when you haven’t got a clue to what the half-shod 3D driver that’s been shoehorned into the system is doing to the hardware? Linux is not a business model, and any attempts to rein it into one is pointless. OSS (mainly, GNU Linux, or whatever you call it) is true communism flying in the face of corporate capitalism. The models don’t apply.
Maybe there is a way to staff competent people to support the 31 flavors of Linux out there. Until then, as with everything else, the best support (most competent of people) still can be found at http://www.google.com (the search, not the company)
What the hell? Well, seriously, what the hell?
Why would you “blame iD” for releasing the source code to their engines? They do it for their fans. With the engine, not only can there be new games made (which has already been the case) but any bugs can be fixed, and they no longer have to support it themselves (good example of this is the security fixes that were done for Quake3 and Enemy Territory). Not to mention that even the Windows versions can benefit from being usable even on newer versions FOREVER. This means that when a new version of Linux, Windows, Mac or whatever else comes out, there can be a working version of iD’s games. In essence they have made their games IMMORTAL. What other companies can say that?
Compatibility with older software has ALWAYS been a problem with EVERY operating system EVER made! I can think directly of games that were made for the Atari 8-bits that didn’t work on the 800xl computers, but did work on the Atari 800! Sure there was the “Translator” program, but it didn’t always work. Same thing with my Atari Mega STe, the Amiga, etc. All of them with every new major or minor operating system upgrade caused some software to stop working.
It’s the same thing with the advancement of Linux, it’s drivers, etc. Anything that is closed source can eventually suffer the fact that it will probably stop working on newer computers / operating systems.
Besides, there really doesn’t need to be support for a million distributions! How many people using Damn Small Linux are you going to expect to be running Doom 3? Not to mention that DSL is actually using DEBIAN as it’s base… well what do you know, so is Ubuntu!
In fact if you want to come right down to it, there really is only Debian, Fedora / Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, Slackware, and Gentoo.
All other distributions derive from these core ones in some way. Unfortunately SuSE and Mandriva changed too much from the Red Hat core to still be somewhat compatible, so they count now as different ones.
Any of the other lesser known ones that don’t immediately connect with these should have knowledgeable enough users to be able to get whatever software they want to work with it and don’t really need tech support from the company.
That’s SIX. Now if we take out Gentoo and Slackware, which again, most users of those distributions will know their stuff, simply by definition of the way they work (well Slackware is really easy, but average users don’t want to compile everything themselves, hell I’m a technologically advanced user, and I don’t even like compiling things anymore, been there, done that.) so again, no real need to support those either. That brings down to FOUR actual distributions that ‘might’ need tech support.
If you replace Debian with Ubuntu (which more and more people are using as their Desktop OS over Debian) then you get four distributions that try to stay on the cutting edge of libraries / kernels. So their libraries are really all the same, and you can even eliminate that RPMs generally will work well enough for closed source software on any distributions that will utilize them (see Nero for a good example) and same with .DEBs. So that really only leaves us with TWO, but since they’ll basically have only slight differences in libraries, if any. That leaves us with just supporting Linux!
Then of course you can always just skip library dependencies and just use statically linked. But then someone who thinks that there actually are ‘millions of distros” couldn’t possibly understand that all the technical excuses for not supplying a native Linux video games is plain unfounded.
To keep it simple, if there is a Mac native version, especially now that they also use Intel chips, then there is NO reason at all that there can’t be a Linux version! They could even make it simpler and make an X11 version. That way it would work on Mac OS X, Linux, BSDs, Windows, etc.
Blizzard doesn’t supply ports… They supply simultaneous releases.
“””
Blizzard doesn’t supply ports… They supply simultaneous releases.
“””
A matter of perspective. To us, they supply “nothing”.
Edited 2007-05-20 18:17
You’re right. It’s not like Linux can’t run it, or it’s too hard. The problem is simply that there is not enough demand on Desktop Linux for commercial games.
Until this changes (Even slightly) things will remain relatively the same. This is of course with exceptions from great companies who see past numbers (id software)
Maybe this talk from Introversion at LugRadio Live will be of interest:
http://www.introversion.co.uk/events.html
“They’re [sic] talk “Playing with the Penguin: Developing Proper Games For Linux”, will discuss Introversion’s relationship with Linux, and the challenges of porting games to the platform.”
As much as I’d like to see a linux native version, I’ve got my doubts that we’ll actually see one. Even though Linux has practically the same market penetration that Apple did in the mid-90s when StarCraft was released, Blizzard doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to support Linux like they did Macs.
World of Warcraft, even though it has supposedly been ported to linux, perhaps even having a linux-native client available from day 1 according to some rumors, has never been made available for linux. Blizzard might be all for it, but I think the problem in this case lies not with the development company but with the accountants of the parent company not wanting to support a platform they know nothing about.
Its really too bad that game companies don’t support linux. Of the circle of friends I played with back when the original starcraft was released, only one still uses windows and only one uses a mac, and even then its only his laptop and not his main machine. Its not that we don’t still play games and aren’t willing to spend $50 on a new game, there just simply are so rarely any games for us to buy, and so we buy consoles and console games.
I don’t buy those rumours. There was the World of Warcraft Linux petition, which had thousands of users pledging to buy the game and a subscription if they ported it to Linux.
If they had a port from day 1 it would have been free money. I signed the pledge, and would have bought it (I bought Doom3 as soon as the Linux port became available). I try and let my wallet speak. Granted, it’s not a very loud voice, and the windows gamers who severely outnumber me make sure of that, but at least I know I’m standing up for what I believe in.
It’s in my best interests to not have a Linux port anyway I guess. Gaming is not real life, and I really should be going something constructive instead.
Yeah, but even thousands of users are not really a lot when you have 6 million subscribers.
And, seriously, supporting a non-open-source game on linux is a lot more of an effort than on more standardised platforms like Mac or Windows.
Edited 2007-05-20 12:38
There was the World of Warcraft Linux petition, which had thousands of users pledging to buy the game and a subscription if they ported it to Linux.
How many of those thousands broke down and bought the windows version (possibly running it under wine) when the Linux version didn’t show up? The problem, as it where, is that there are very few linux users who are interested in buying games and don’t have access to a windows machine. And many of them when faced between the choice of the windows version or no version will chose the windows version. So there really is even less incentive to port to linux than it might seen.
<ingore this…. …. …. please>
Edited 2007-05-20 22:18
Before anybody bitches about how news about Starcraft don’t belong in OS News, just think about all the kernel code for many OSes that *won’t* get written because devs are too busy spawning more overlords
Hey, I can hope!!!
So how long until after the game is released that an open source project tries to create a server for it, or clone it then Blizzard can send a Cease and Desist letter to them?
I don’t buy any Blizzard games anymore because of this. Not that I would buy StarCraft 2 anyhow. I probably would if there were a Linux version for it, which would show that they have changed their attitude. From what I’ve seen StarCraft is possibly the #1 game that people run in Linux using Wine.
Oh and if we want to get into other reasons why I don’t like Blizzard… World of Warcraft supposedly did have a Linux client during the beta, but now instead of supporting a native version, they just give patch information to Transgaming so that Cedega works properly with it! Here is a perfect example for all those naysayers that said that Cedega doesn’t prevent native ports. It apparently does.
You must be refering to FreeCraft…
I don’t understand your point of view. Freecraft was copying Warcraft. Even the graphics were “horrible but similar”.
I know. I coded for Freecraft (tho very little).
Yeah, FreeCraft and the bnetd projects. FreeCraft simply changed their name to Stratagus, which from last I checked looked to be working on getting StarCraft’s data files to work with it so Linux users can enjoy StarCraft natively.
It doesn’t make sense at all why Blizzard would even bother with trying to hurt projects like this, since it would still require people to buy copies of WarCraft and StarCraft to be able to get the data files. Considering by this point anyone who has Windows that wants these games already has them, yet all those Linux only people would not.
“So how long until after the game is released that an open source project tries to create a server for it, or clone it then Blizzard can send a Cease and Desist letter to them?”
Why would you run your own server? Access to bnet is why you buy the game in the first place and it’s their best copy protection and I like it, because it makes it so that “everyone” actually BUYS the game if they are going to play it. I’m more than willing to pay for Starcraft II and I will, it will probably be awesome, I’ve played so much Warcraft III ROC and TFT and I bought those to.
It’s another issue with small shitty games which I play rarely, say on consoles and so. But the kick ass title of the year? No problem.
Just buy the game and use bnet, use a proxy/tunnel/vlan/.. or whatever if needed.
Why would you run your own server?
I guess you should ask that of the developers of Neverwinter Nights, Battlefield (1, 2, 2142), half-life, counter-strike…..etc.
There are so many dedicated Linux game servers out there (and not so many game clients) that it’s ridiculous. Yet you wonder why anyone would want to run their own servers?
How about because you want to tweak some of your own settings, maybe make it so only warriors can join. Well I don’t know, I never used bnetd, but still just because you have no idea why you’d want to do it, doesn’t mean others can’t figure out a way.
Not to mention people DO need to still buy it for the CD-Keys, etc. The only copy-protection here is for people who actually play online as well.
The fact is, for the Free Craft project, they didn’t even say “Stop programming that, you bastards” ’cause they don’t have the rights on ALL RTS games. The only thing they complained about is that they had the trademark for “Craft” which is incredibly stupid. So they had to change their name.
bnetd on the other hand is still available as a download, but it hasn’t been developed on since February of 2002. It’s not as if they were outright encouraging people to pirate Blizzard’s software. But I’m sure there are those that decided to pirate their software just to spite them for shutting down a non-profit software development group.
Personally I think the only games that Blizzard has even made that are good were the Diablo games, but all the developers of that left long ago and are making Hellgate London. But then again, I don’t play a lot of RTS games to begin with. Though Dark Reign was cool.
“I don’t buy any Blizzard games anymore because of this. Not that I would buy StarCraft 2 anyhow.”
Btw, I guess Blizzard will care very much about your opinion then, yours and all the other (probably) pirates which in the end just don’t wanna have to buy the game and run it anyway.
Personally I have always despised these “RTS” resource gathering games, especially when they are referred to as strategy. There is no strategy to these, it is just gather lots of resources quick, build big army, go destroy..over and over and over. The only games I ever found that require any thought or strategy were Heroes of Might and Magic and the Close Combat series. There, using actually true “strategy” you could win with an inferior team. To truly be successful in these games you had to know what the hell you were doing. Starcraft, Warcraft, AOE, etc.. are just mindless arcade games.
Sad because this is the one game I did NOT want Blizzard to announce, I was hoping for Diablo III, which I suppose Blizzard will get around to about the same time I am ready to head out to the retirement home.
Sad because this is the one game I did NOT want Blizzard to announce, I was hoping for Diablo III, which I suppose Blizzard will get around to about the same time I am ready to head out to the retirement home.
You do know the origial Diablo team left Blizzard right? They are working on Hellgate London http://www.hellgatelondon.com/
Ok so Linux sucks at gaming for now but its good for pretty much everything else that I know of. So basically a very small percentage of people need to buy Windows in order to play games or else they need to buy a console. Personally I prefer Civ 4 to RTS games but that’s a personal thing. I do look forward to playing C&C 3 and StarCraft 2 upon my return to the states and my (aging) gaming PC.
Also as X.org is finally really getting into gear a lot of hardware and graphics issues with Linux will finally be solved I think. Also I still think that they should combine Open GL, Open AL, and SDL into an “Open X” API FOSS gaming, 3D, and media platform. It’s just a opinion though.
These series were good because there was no resource gathering and no building. You start with your forces and may get reinforcements, but that was it.
You choosed linux and there is almost no games on it so stop crying now.
Nobody forced you to choose linux, assume your choice now.
Actually, there are a lot of games on Linux, only most of those games aren’t commercial ones.
Before acting all high and mighty, please do some research. And no, most Linux users aren’t even crying about this one. Such false generalizations, and such erratic grammar.
It seems also to be a point of freedom here.
I would think that a gaming company could very very easily find someone who wants to do their development on Linux (or BSD). In fact, the perspective that would bring would very likely lead to a higher quality and faster developed game.
Unless I’m wrong the game companies are forcing or hiring developers that only use windows & perhaps mac. That really is a shame.
Nice poem there, all I have to say is:
Your grammar sucks, please correct it NOW.
Well, nobody forced you to show off your ignorance in public either.
“Just because you’re running Linux, doesn’t mean you’re cheap. It means you have better things to spend your money on than a shoddy, overpriced OS.”
I agree. One eample is nurse-maiding our remaining McSoft servers.
I’m so happy
…only old people play the original Starcraft.
I guess it’s a worldwide reality, the new wave of gamers cannot play anything without a fire button.
we have to be realistic here. Blizzard 1997 != Blizzard 2007. While I do believe that Blizzard put much effort into making this Game, remembering that the key-developers of the [S|W]C & Diablo-Universes have left the Building, I have sincere doubts that SCII will be even half as good as the original.
I’m ecstatic! I used to sketch plans and strategies during english class
I don’t think we’ll see a port though. Per the FAQ:
Will StarCraft II take advantage of DirectX 10? What other graphical goodies are included?
The game will be compatible with DirectX 10, and we’re still considering whether there will be exclusive DirectX 10 graphic effects, but the graphics engine will also be very scalable to ensure that a wide range of different systems will be capable of running StarCraft II. The new engine is also capable of rendering very large units, as well as large numbers of units on screen together. Havok physics have been integrated into the engine for added realism as well.
the INQ reports that they aim to make this also run on modest hardware in order to reach a wide user base. Both excludes a DX10-exclusive titel, because both precludes Vista, which is the only OS capable of DX10 support. Probably there will be DX9 and DX10 variety, as are popping up for many games these days by a subsequent patch release, for example.
If I need to run Vista to experience Starcraft II in it’s fullest I’m going to be extraordinarily pissed off at Microsoft – and I’m not usually a fan, to say the least.
I suppose I’ll have to be pissed at Blizzard all the same.
At least it won’t be required to PLAY – yuck.
is that sure it is starcraftII? not diablo3?
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It could be argued that a modern StarCraft was the awesome and terrific Warhammer 40k – Dawn of War. Its going to be interesting to see how StarCraft will be different and if it can be any better! More involved storyline is the only thing I can think of.
i thought Blizzard already have announced a release date…..
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