ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8 June 2011 23:45, Romain Failliot <romain.failliot@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Maybe you could talk about how to develop games on Linux and how to
> simplify the process, because to me that's the big problem.

The problem isn't so much the process of installing a few packages, as
anybody competent enough to develop a game should be capable of that.
The problem is simply that Linux still isn't stable enough  to
actually be of much use as a mainstream game platform. For example
OpenGL graphics driver break on a regular basis, almost any
dist-upgrade I do leaves one of my systems in a more or less broken
system. There always some way to make it sort of work again (switching
to proprietary drivers or the Open Source ones or whatever), but that
is really something that a user should never ever have to worry about.
The user should be able to get maximum performance out of its graphic
card without ever having to think about anything. And that is simply
not the case.

The depressing part is that the situation is essentially the same as
in the Voodoo1 days some 10 years ago, 3D, when it worked, worked
actually quite well in Linux, but never really good enough for more
then a bit of experimental use.

That's of course not all, there are other issues such as the chaos
that are Linux sound APIs, they change on a regular basis, sometimes
even just completly break (had a ton of issues when pulseaudio got
introduced and OpenAL stopped working).

So essentially we don't need yet another package, yet another piece of
software, we simply need that the stuff that is there actually works
and not just sometimes, but always. That is of course not an easy
thing to accomplish, but that is really what would help Linux.

Those fundamental issues aside: SDL1.2 is really out of date by now
and doesn't support a lot of basic stuff, such as multiple monitors,
force feedback, multiple windows, clean window resize, etc.SDL1.3
fixes a lot of those, but so far it is not available in Ubuntu and it
would hurt to make it easily available to more people.

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