ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

[Tim Wells <timnwells@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree. If these problems can be addressed at least in Ubuntu then Ubuntu
could be a more attractive platform that commercial game dev companies might
consider.

Maybe there needs to be a "gaming" version of Ubuntu that is based on the
LTS model. Release a version where the graphics and sound works as good as
possible and don't mess with that area of it until there is better support
that works and isn't going to break. In the mean time software that isn't
dependent on these libraries can be updated to new versions. Just leave the
hardware api's the same.


On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.
>
> --
> Blog:     http://grumbel.blogspot.com/
> JabberID: xmpp:grumbel@xxxxxxxxxx
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>
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-- 
Tim Wells | Software/Web Developer
timnwells@xxxxxxxxx