ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

[Philip Wyett <philwyett@xxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 08:15 +0100, Luke Benstead wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I just stumbled across the Ubuntu Gaming team via the news post over
> at Phoronix. The goals of the team are very similar to what I have
> been thinking about for some time. My name is Luke Benstead, I'm a
> co-maintainer of NeHe (the OpenGL tutorial website). Some friends and
> I have been considering what it is that is preventing an open source
> games "industry" from developing. I've come to the conclusion that
> there are several areas that need attention from a developer point of
> view.
> 

Nice work with NeHe. It has been a good resource over many years for
those wishing to start and advance in graphics and game related
development.

> Firstly, the game-related APIs. Developing games on Windows (from
> scratch - not using a pre-developed engine) is much easier for several
> reasons. DirectX is key here. DirectX provides a consistent API for
> graphics, sound, input and networking. We have OSS equivalents
> (OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL) but they are scattered, it's not a "standard"
> toolkit. Devs mix and match with other libraries there is no "Game
> SDK". Also, the DX SDK provides functionality that is difficult to
> find in open source libraries, model loading (X files), 2D and 3D font
> output, D3DX math functions - again, there are libraries and code
> snippets lying around the OSS world, but you have to find them.
> 

Certain pre developed engines and SDK offer the same consistent API's
and ease the pain of reinventing the wheel when writing game code. A
review of such libraries and engines is something that I hope would be
looked at over time.

<snip>

> 
> My eventual plan is to add a gamedev-sdk.deb meta package, which
> downloads and installs libsdl1.3-dev (when 1.3 is released),
> libopenal-dev, libgl1-mesa-dev, codeblocks (awesome IDE), libkazmath,
> libkazmodel and libkaztext. Creating a full cross-platform game SDK
> which is in a consistent style.

I would never put an IDE in a package like this. An IDE is a personal
preference and one should never be forced onto someone.

Due to certain mesa packages not being required when developing with
nvidia etc. This is something that should be thought out and discussed.

Regards

Phil

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