Shlomi Excellent analysis. Right on.
I will add one more point from personal experience. People buy games with their eyes. A couple years ago I was experimenting with Croquet and Small Talk (both OSS tools) for a virtual world application and I had the opportunity to learn more about Microsoft DirectX Being a major game developer - Microsoft developed DirectX with the needs of high performance 3D graphics/game developers in mind. DirectX and XNA Game Studio are tremendous productivity boosts to game developers - Microsoft understands what developers need and also the extreme importance of how good the graphics need to look I suggest comparing the open source Croquet project with any DIrectX project - Croquet looks pathetically primitive and clunky by comparison. -- Danny Lieberman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.dannylieberman.info Twitter: http://twitter.com/onlyjazz Skype: dannyl50 Warsaw:+48-79-609-5964 Israel: +972 8 9701485 Mobile: +972 - 54 447 1114 2009/9/23 Michael Ben-Nes <mich...@epoch.co.il> > For years I been waiting to get the same Windows gaming experience from > Linux.Sadly the gap is just get wider over time and I don't think the > increase will reverse it self in the coming years. > > Lucky us technology change rapidly and my expectation is that in the coming > years gaming / application will be streamed to our computer from near > by libraries. > So putting it simply you will have at your disposal the choice of games / > application of every OS. What at least render the lack of games on Linux. > Here is pick to a possible future: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-w56hQxmnY > > As for the Opensource concept, I can only hope that in the coming years > companies will benefit by using the opensource model. That might give them > the ability to harness the community to add extra feature to their games. > There is also the question if the result of this workflow will be better > games ( Sell more ) or like the result of the wiki book ( lame content ). > > Cheers, > Miki > > -------------------------------------------------- > Michael Ben-Nes - Internet Consultant and Director. > http://www.epoch.co.il - weaving the Net. > Cellular: 054-4848113 > -------------------------------------------------- > > > On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlo...@iglu.org.il> wrote: > >> Hi all! >> >> Someone emailed me in private and said that "you don't want to mention >> open >> source gaming. It's a sad joke." and other stuff like that. I'd like to >> mention some reasons for why I think this is largely the case. >> >> Reason: Proprietary Games are OK. >> ----------------------------------- >> >> If you read Joel on Software's >> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html , you'll see that >> commercial games play by different rules than what Joel calls "shrinkwrap" >> software, which is software (whether open-source or proprietary) that is >> distributed or used in the wild by many different people. A game must be >> perfectly right the first time, most games are failures, and generally >> games >> require much more effort than just coding the engine. >> >> Richard M. Stallman was quoted as saying that "game engines should be >> free, >> but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be >> separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")": >> >> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/09/191257 >> >> Since a typical game nowadays costs a lot of money to develop, and >> requires >> the collaboration of many people, it seems unlikely that we will see many >> open-source games that are up-to-par with commercial offerings. When we >> work >> on FOSS alternatives to commercial apps: Firefox, Thunderbird, >> OpenOffice.org, >> Inkscape, GIMP, Audacity, etc. we can expect the first versions to have >> some >> bugs and that some features will be missing even in the contemporary >> versions, >> because either they don't matter much to people or because we will >> eventually >> catch up with them. But we cannot afford to do it in most games. >> >> My hope is that eventually either game engines would indeed be open-source >> or >> at least close (because the amount of work done on the engine is minuscule >> in >> comparison to the rest of the game) so they can be ported to Linux, or >> that at >> least game companies will start supporting Linux better once it gains >> marketshare, or that wine, cedega, etc. will allow better support. >> >> Reportedly, Blizzard has been using GNU/Linux internally to develop their >> games (World of Warcraft, etc.) and test them, but has not released an >> official version for Linux yet, or supports it. >> >> Reason: Graphic Artists are unwilling to contribute >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> >> For some reason or another it seems that talented graphic artists do not >> volunteer to contribute to open-source/open-content, whether games or >> other >> software. You can see some discussion of it here: >> >> >> http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/shlomif.html#third-sharp-perl-reich >> >> And scrottie later continued it in this blog comment to a post "where a >> graphic designer expresses moral outrage at being asked by Google to >> contribute design work to Chrome in exchange for thanks, not money" >> >> http://use.perl.org/~scrottie/journal/38916<http://use.perl.org/%7Escrottie/journal/38916> >> >> While there are probably fewer professional graphic artists than >> professional >> programmers (since many classes of programs require very little graphics >> design), I still think that a much smaller percentage of them contribute >> to >> open-source than programmers. >> >> I don't know which percentage of programmers contribute to FOSS on their >> free >> time, and there was something that people asked after the 2001-2002 >> recession, >> when many programmers became unemployed, why we don't see a flood of >> Israeli >> programmers to FOSS projects, where they can gain some esteem, experience, >> knowledge, and also have something to do in their free time. Nevertheless, >> there are still enough programmers to make a difference and to even pose a >> significant competition to commercial offering. >> >> I don't know the reason why graphics artists are so reluctant to >> contribute. >> But I think we can just assume that there are probably not enough to >> donate to >> even one large scale open-source game, not to mention that there are many >> fractured efforts for creating such games which fight for attention of a >> limited mind-share. >> >> Reason: Web-based games are posing a significant competition: >> --------------------------------------------------------------- >> >> Recently I've noticed that there many good games on the web: in Flash, in >> JavaScript, etc. See for example: http://www.brainbashers.com/ . These >> games >> are not as rich as the ones sold in stores or that run from the local >> computer, but they are still pretty nice with attractive graphics and >> usable. >> As a teenager with a DOS computer, I used to play mostly puzzle games and >> adventure games, and then could feel empathy and sadness having read this: >> >> http://www.logicmazes.com/s7g2k/video.html >> >> So playing these great web games, I've been feeling that it's a new >> renaissance for such relatively low-budget, not too high-quality but >> otherwise >> great playability games. Most of the people who make these games probably >> don't get rich, because the web has a very low revenue model, but I think >> the >> fun is the important factor here. >> >> There was also an xkcd about it: >> >> http://xkcd.com/484/ >> >> Summary >> ------- >> >> In short, I don't see the situation with open-source games improving in >> the >> future, because there are good reasons for it not to. However, what can >> improve is the availability of non-free games on Linux and other free OSes >> and >> compatibility with Windows-based games. Some hard-core Windows gamers may >> also >> opt to dual-boot, use WINE, or use other solutions if only to gain the >> other >> technical and ideological advantages of Linux. >> >> Regards, >> >> Shlomi Fish >> >> -- >> ----------------------------------------------------------------- >> Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ >> Why I Love Perl - http://shlom.in/joy-of-perl >> >> Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Linux-il mailing list >> Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il >> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > >
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