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.
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. Secondly, tutorials and documentation. Because DX is a combined package, there is a load of documentation for the package as a whole. Also game development tutorials can focus on the broad scope of the whole game, while there are OSS tutorials on OpenGL, OpenAL and SDL... again they are scattered everywhere. Finally, game resources. We need a central repository of 3D models, sounds, maps and textures. Think gnome-look.org for games. It's no good if you develop a cool game that looks like a train-wreck full of programmer art and sounds made by blowing down a PC mic. There are people all over the place that develop these kind of resources for fun (look at the modding community), there just needs to be a central location for people to upload to. Now, I've been thinking about this for AGES, and if it wasn't for my lack of time, there would already be such a central repository website. However, my friends and I have done *something* on the SDK front. On launchpad there is a project called "kazmath", it's a 3D math library, written in C in an OpenGL style, the aim is to fill the gap that the D3DX math libraries fill over on WIndows. At the moment the math library is completely unoptimized, (we are concentrating on making it work, before making it fast) and it is still under development. But it already has over 100 math related functions and I've been using it in my personal stuff for some time. Alongside kazmath, in the same bzr repo I've just added a folder called "kazmodel". My aim for this library is to fill the model loading gap which the DX SDK already caters for. I hope to support the Quake 3 (MD3), Quake 2 (MD2), X and OBJ model formats. It's in very early development (only basic MD3 model loading and rendering in wireframe works). The final piece of the puzzle (which I haven't even started yet) is to provide a similar library which can render 2D and 3D fonts in OpenGL - probably called kaztext to keep with the naming ;) 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. Anyway, let me know what you guys think, feel free to checkout kazmath and submit patches (we are in desperate need of unit tests), I'll keep this list updated with news on the other libraries. Luke. P.S. Basic website here: http://www.kazade.co.uk/kazmath/ _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-gaming Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-gaming More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
