Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games

"Wolfgang S. Rupprecht"
<wolfgang+gnus20031006T103836@dailyplanet.dontspam.wsrcc.com> wrote in
message news:x7k77imfd3.fsf@capsicum.wsrcc.com...
 >
<font color=green>  > > <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39116947,00.htm</font" target="_blank">http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39116947,00.htm</font</a>>
  > >
  > > It's a demo of the shoot'em'up game America's Army, running on a
  > > 64-bit Linux kernel, running on an Athlon64, and booting up
  > > completely from CD just like a console game.
 >
 > Expect it to got the way of NSA-Linux. Some unnamed company will
 > protest that the government should not be allowed to use or make
 > available software that competes with private corporations.

Well, actually the game was developed by a private corporation under
contract to the government.

Yousuf Khan<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 17:53:55 +0000, Yousuf Khan wrote:

 > Well, actually the game was developed by a private corporation under
 > contract to the government.

And America's Army is also available for Windows...

I think Loki proved that it was certainly possible to use Linux as a game
platform. They developed most of the software you need to port a game to
Linux. All the native games I use in Linux work great: the new stuff like
Enemy Territory and even the old Loki games still work fine.

The question is whether there is any money in this. For now, the answer
seems to be no.

--
People are like onions -- you cut them up, and they make you cry.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

"Yousuf Khan" <removethisspam.bjsk90.removethispam.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:EAhgb.41337$ko%.4325@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...
 > This may also prove to be a generic competitor to the Microsoft Xbox
 > console. Can you imagine, everybody from white boxes to HP or IBM (but not
 > Dell, of course) putting together consoles derived from generic PC
hardware,
 > and just equiping them with nothing more than a CD or DVD drive just to
boot
 > up games? Each one would be equiping their systems with slightly different
 > video cards from ATI, Matrox, or Nvidia, and the OS just detects and loads
 > the proper driver.
 >
 > Yousuf Khan

Wouldn't this totally defeat the idea behind the game consol? One static
platform allowing game developers to take full advantage of the under lying
hardware with out fear if some version of the consol is not going to support
any particular feature...

Carlo<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 17:25:56 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<removethisspam.bjsk90.removethispam.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote:
 >The following story contains some very tantalizing combinations of things
 >that have never been associated with each other before:
 >
 >http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39116947,00.htm
 >
 >It's a demo of the shoot'em'up game America's Army, running on a 64-bit
 >Linux kernel, running on an Athlon64, and booting up completely from CD just
 >like a console game. The interesting bits here are that it's a game running
 >on any Linux kernel, let alone a 64-bit Linux kernel, since most games are
 >brought out for Windows/DirectX.

Note that simply running America's Army on a bootable Linux CD is
nothing new, it was only that it was ported to AMD64 that is new.
Gentoo Games (an offshoot of Gentoo Linux) did all the initial work
for this port. Here's their website:

<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.gentoogames.com/" target="_blank">http://www.gentoogames.com/</a>

As you can see, they have a bootable CD out for both America's Army
and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and they are working on others. SCI
just released an AMD64 port of the Gentoo Games version.

 > Demonstrates the feasibility of Linux as a
 >gaming platform. It also demonstrates a more or less full-feature Linux
 >kernel which detects and loads drivers for hardware rather than assuming
 >what kind of hardware is onboard, while still running from CD.

This also isn't really all that new, all modern Linux distributions do
just that by default, though occasionally it's beneficial to disable
some of the auto-detect features in order to speed things up.

As for the gaming aspect, if the game uses OpenGL, then porting it to
Linux is easy because OpenGL is an open spec and can be supported on
Linux (though until recently nVidia was the only company with any
meaningful OpenGL drivers in Linux). The problem for Linux developers
is that most people develop for DirectX, as you mentioned above, and
DirectX is neither open or documented. Implementing DirectX on Linux
has been a rather long and slow process, though progress is still
being made. WineX allows most popular Windows games to be run on
Linux, albeit often at a greatly reduced level of performance and
sometimes with a lot of bugs.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

"Douglas Bollinger" <dcb RemoveThis @pa.nospam.net> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.10.06.21.31.38.901441@pa.nospam.net...
 > On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 17:53:55 +0000, Yousuf Khan wrote:
 >
  > > Well, actually the game was developed by a private corporation under
  > > contract to the government.
 >
 > And America's Army is also available for Windows...

Yeah, nobody said it wasn't, just that usually these same titles aren't also
available for Linux. Anyways, this version of AA is also 64-bit, which isn't
yet possible with Windows.

 > I think Loki proved that it was certainly possible to use Linux as a game
 > platform. They developed most of the software you need to port a game to
 > Linux. All the native games I use in Linux work great: the new stuff like
 > Enemy Territory and even the old Loki games still work fine.
 >
 > The question is whether there is any money in this. For now, the answer
 > seems to be no.

This is a demo, you're not supposed to make money off of it. But it's a
proof of concept that this is something that can eventually be made to make
money from.

Yousuf Khan<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

"Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:QGudnQlQGd6ceByiXTWJhQ@comcast.com...
 > Wouldn't this totally defeat the idea behind the game consol? One static
 > platform allowing game developers to take full advantage of the under
lying
 > hardware with out fear if some version of the consol is not going to
support
 > any particular feature...

I thought the only purpose of a game console was to be able to play low-res
games on a TV screen?

You mean to tell me that these console game developers were actually doing
this so they could optimize something?

Yousuf Khan<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

"Yousuf Khan" <removethisspam.bjsk90.removethispam.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:zCogb.42414$ko%.6953@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...
 > "Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in message
 > news:QGudnQlQGd6ceByiXTWJhQ@comcast.com...
 >
 > I thought the only purpose of a game console was to be able to play
low-res
 > games on a TV screen?
 >
 > You mean to tell me that these console game developers were actually doing
 > this so they could optimize something?
 >
 > Yousuf Khan

Well, it *was* one of the idea's behind it.... A not all too terrible one...
Halo looks just so damned good thanks to it... And damn I can't wait for
Halo 2

Carlo<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 22:05:08 -0400, "Carlo Razzeto"
<crazzeto DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:

 >
 >"Yousuf Khan" <removethisspam.bjsk90.removethispam DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote in
 >message news:zCogb.42414$ko%.6953@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...
  >> "Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote in message
  >> news:QGudnQlQGd6ceByiXTWJhQ@comcast.com...
  >>
  >> I thought the only purpose of a game console was to be able to play
 >low-res
  >> games on a TV screen?
  >>
  >> You mean to tell me that these console game developers were actually doing
  >> this so they could optimize something?
  >>
  >> Yousuf Khan
 >
 >Well, it *was* one of the idea's behind it.... A not all too terrible one...
 >Halo looks just so damned good thanks to it...

Can you provide a couple of examples (for someone who *never* plays
computer games)? What features were the developers obviously able to
use that they wouldn't have been able to on a PC game platform?

RM<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

Robert Myers wrote:
 > Can you provide a couple of examples (for someone who *never* plays
 > computer games)? What features were the developers obviously able to
 > use that they wouldn't have been able to on a PC game platform?

The XBox. Unified memory architecture allows a few tricks to get much
higher geometry throughput than on a conventional CPU<->AGP<->GPU setop.

The XBox GPU has register combiners that aren't exposed in DirectX 8.

Predictable (and repeatable) performance allows game levels to be
tweaked to always hit your frames per second target.

If you look at Halo that has just come out on PC: The XBox has a
P3-733MHz (but only with 128KB lvl 2 cache) and a Geforce 3/4 GPU. To
get the same performance level you have to have a >2GHz CPU with a (more
or less) state of the art GPU.

Cheers
Martin<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 22:49:02 +0000, Tony Hill wrote:

 > As for the gaming aspect, if the game uses OpenGL, then porting it to
 > Linux is easy because OpenGL is an open spec and can be supported on
 > Linux (though until recently nVidia was the only company with any
 > meaningful OpenGL drivers in Linux). The problem for Linux developers
 > is that most people develop for DirectX, as you mentioned above, and
 > DirectX is neither open or documented. Implementing DirectX on Linux
 > has been a rather long and slow process, though progress is still
 > being made. WineX allows most popular Windows games to be run on
 > Linux, albeit often at a greatly reduced level of performance and
 > sometimes with a lot of bugs.

Correction, WineX allows a very _few_ popular Windows games to be run on
Linux. From their own database, there are only 5 games (out of several
hundred in the database) that run well through Winex. One is really a
special port (The Sims) and another doesn't seem to work anymore from the
the forum posts (Kohan). I gave Winex a try; it's about completely
worthless.

Native games work fine.

--
/*
* Oops. The kernel tried to access some bad page. We'll have to
* terminate things with extreme prejudice.
*/
die_if_kernel("Oops", regs, error_code);
(From linux/arch/i386/mm/fault.c)<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

"Robert Myers" <rmyers.DeleteThis@rustuck.com> wrote in message
news:kvb4ovsiqkmfed9tjtj3slgdpcfbge0uln@4ax.com...

 > Can you provide a couple of examples (for someone who *never* plays
 > computer games)? What features were the developers obviously able to
 > use that they wouldn't have been able to on a PC game platform?

One big issue is optimization. If you're targetting a game for the PC
platform, you might be running on an Athlon system, or maybe a dual
Pentium-3 system, or maybe a Pentium-4 system with hyperthreading. You might
have 512Mb of memory but you might have 1Gb. You might optimize for an
Nvidia GeForce4, but the machine might have a different video card. And how
well will your Matrox optimization work along with your SSE2 optimizations?
In other words, you can maybe test every combination but you certainly can't
optimize for every combination.

On the other hand, when you're targetting a console platform, you know
exactly what CPU you'll be running on, how much memory you'll have and what
its bandwidth will be, and what graphics chipset you'll be using. You can
put all your tweaking effort into optimal performance on that combination,
which is less effort than just making sure all the possible PC configuration
combinations even work at all.

DS<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games 

"Robert Myers" <rmyers.TakeThisOut@rustuck.com> wrote in message
news:kvb4ovsiqkmfed9tjtj3slgdpcfbge0uln@4ax.com...
 > On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 22:05:08 -0400, "Carlo Razzeto"
 > <crazzeto.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote:
 >
  > >
  > >"Yousuf Khan" <removethisspam.bjsk90.removethispam.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in
  > >message news:zCogb.42414$ko%.6953@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...
   > >> "Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in message
   > >> news:QGudnQlQGd6ceByiXTWJhQ@comcast.com...
 > Can you provide a couple of examples (for someone who *never* plays
 > computer games)? What features were the developers obviously able to
 > use that they wouldn't have been able to on a PC game platform?
 >
 > RM

Environment Bumped Mapping. The end effect of this technology is to allow
game developers to apply more 3D, more realistic textures to any type of
surface (walls, floors even fluids such as water) there by making the
environment seem more realistic... Probably the best example of this is in
the game Brute Force which makes extensive use of the technology. It's not
that game developers can't use them on the PC platform. But they hesitate
hesitate to add these technologies in because in many cases only the small
minority of the people out there buying their products will get too see the
effects. Therefore it's not worth it for them to waste all kinds of time
adding these features when the average development time these days is
measured in months and even years (we of course are assuming the developers
are writing their own engine). Things are different in the world of
consoles... Developers can are free to go ahead and make full use of the
architectures features with out fear because they can rely on the fact that
everyone out there is running the same hardware regardless of when they
bought their particular unit.

Carlo<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games