Games doesent work in Fedora test 3

Mike A. Harris mharris at redhat.com
Fri Oct 24 06:49:49 UTC 2003


On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Bjorn Andersen wrote:

>>Oh we can care, but we can't do much about it, since we don't write the 
>>nvidia binary drivers.  Nvidia has never supported beta releases of 
>>Linux distributions.  Fedora Core is still in beta.  Once Fedora Core 1 
>>is released, then you can expect some support from Nvidia, and have a 
>>better argument when you contact nvidia for help.  Until then, tough.
>
>Hmmm, its 75% of all OpenGL games that doesent work. I dont think thats 
>an Nvidia problem.

I'm not sure spending resources on making video games work in 
Linux is the most useful use of Red Hat engineering resources.

Video games will work better in Linux when there are more people 
interested in video games working better spending their personal 
time to volunteer to debug video drivers, etc. so that the games 
run better.

Alternatively, a company who thinks that video games in Linux are 
a viable and attractive business model might decide to invest 
money into making video game infrastructure better.

Until either of those things happen, video games in Linux are
nothing more than an extremely small hobbiest/enthusiast niche.

That's the business reality of things anyway.  I'd love to see 
video games work rock solid on all video hardware in Linux, but 
that's not going to happen without a large number of volunteer 
programmers getting their fingers dirty with gdb and debugging 
DRI problems when they have them with OpenGL games, and 
submitting patches.

As for the proprietary driver side of things, well 3D games in
Linux wont be much of a reality until both video game companies
and video hardware companies both decide to improve the situation 
because they see a viable business opportunity.  To date that 
hasn't happened, and every single video game company that has 
produced Linux versions of their games, has done so either at a 
revenue loss, or has done so more or less as a charity thing 
because they think Linux is just too cool to not make their game 
available for.  id Software, and Crack.com come to mind 
immediately for the latter category.  I believe both companies 
have stated publically they've never made enough money off of 
Linux games to cover the costs involved with producing the game.  
Someone would have to search google for quotes however.

Games are cool, but not essential to business or the enterprise.  

It's up to computer geeks such as ourselves to fix the problems 
ourselves with our spare time as volunteers who care about games 
working in Linux, if we want the situation to change.

Personally, I'd love to spend a week or 2 nonstop hacking on 
various DRI problems I see reported in games, but I can only 
really justify doing that in my own personal spare time, and I 
don't really have very much personal spare time.  The DRI project 
is always looking for new volunteers however, and anyone who 
thinks they can contribute is welcome to come and join our Monday 
IRC meetings on #dri-devel on irc.freenode.net and to lurk in the 
channel the rest of the week asking questions when developers are 
around.  Usually myself, MrCooper, anholt are there, and 
sometimes "idr" and others.  If we're not too busy, we're often 
happy to lend a helping hand to an enthusiastic positive minded 
person who has their X server sitting in gdb, and is poking 
printk()s in the kernel DRM driver.  ;o)

Also, I posted recently to xfree86-list that I spend some of my 
spare time unfortunately having to vacuum my house, do the 
dishes, and other cleaning tasks/chores...  If someone were to 
come over on Saturday/Sunday and do this for me, it could free up 
hours and hours of DRI debugging time.  ;o)

/me runs

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat





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