Open Source 3D Games

[Justin Dugger]

As long as you've got nvidia, you should be fine. I've only heard
mediocre things from ATi.  It can be a bit tricky to get nvidia
working if your distro upgrades kernels faster than they provide
precompiled interfaces.  On the other hand, their configuration tools
are quickly approaching Window's click and point interface.

There is a company that is supposedly tailoring to linux, but it
appears they're totally half-assing 3d. From what I gather, they're
taking MesaGL and slowly moving the fragment generator over to an
FPGA. FPGAs are appreciated for letting engineers quickly create a
test version of their circuits, but they're simultaneously cursed for
being slow.  And you know they're not planning to bring anything to
the table from the last five years because the   card will initially
be PCI. Not PCI express, mind you. PCI--133 Mbyte/sec PCI.  I'm not
entirely sure what the goal here is, aside from beginning a legacy of
an open source driver.  The group has made no concrete plans to open
the hardware implementations, but clearly this card needs to be the
first in a line of iterative improvements if it plans to be of any
value to the community.

Of course, I'd appreciate being proven wrong.  But 3d math and
hardware accelleration aren't simple tasks. But if you were expecting
something more useful than the already open sourced Intel Extreme
Graphics hardware and drivers, then you'll be sorely dissapointed.  At
best, these will be great for providing an old computer with enough 3d
accelleration to handle the upcoming 3d accelerated desktops in OSX,
GNOME and Longhorn. Remember that these projects aim to use the GPU
because it's there and its not being used.  Apple plans to continue
offloading more to the GPU, so the requirements here are only going
up.

If you're still interested in what the group's doing, they're called
the Open Graphics Project. I think their site just got hacked though,
which is a bit unprofessional.  I hope it doesn't put them at a
serious risk of making their november deadline...

Justin

On 8/5/05, Josh Charles <josh.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
> One problem that has kept me from playing good games on linux is the
> continuing lack of decent 3D acceleration support.  I've had 3d cards
> that work on some distro's, but not others, even with the same
> configuration.  This isn't so much a linux problem as a hardware
> vendor problem, though.  I hear that there is a video card vendor that
> is tailoring directly to linux now, so that's a step in the right
> direction.
> 
> On 8/5/05, Justin Dugger <jldugger at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There's lots more to open source 3d gaming than just First person
> > shooters. Most of them also have a linux version, provided the
> > developers didn't choose directX for their game.
> >
> > There's crack-attack, a tetris attack clone that plays well.  There's
> > also Glest, which looks something like Warcraft 3 from the
> > screenshots.  Kenta Cho has some great 2d shooters that use 3d
> > graphics. There's also Armegetron, a neat Tron lightcycles game with
> > decent multiplayer aspects.  GL-117 is an okayish air force game.
> >
> > If you know where to look, you can find a lot of good open source
> > games.  I think one of the remaining barriers to Linux gaming is a
> > decent website that focuses on open source games.  Happypengiun is
> > neat, but the web design needs... a makeover.  The whole site looks
> > like it was designed using placeholder art and then decided to go live
> > with what they had when they heard what artists charge for that stuff.
> >  The ratings system is a bit strange, not becaues it uses 5 starts,
> > but that the ratings aren't tied to any specific version. If a game
> > doesn't run, it gets one star, even if the bug is fixed the next day.
> > And hardly anybody posts or reviews.
> >
> > So yea, the games you mentioned are okay, but they kinda suck for
> > similar reasons to the ones that plague happypengiun.
> >
> > Justin Dugger
> >
> > On 8/5/05, Josh Charles <josh.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I haven't been much of a gamer, but I recently purchased Allied
> > > Assault and have become quite addicted to it.  I was amazed to find
> > > that there are completely open source FPS out there, though from what
> > > I understand, the quality isn't up to current proprietary standards.
> > > >From what I can see of the movies, though, the gameplay isn't too bad.
> > >  Here are some links to check out if you are interested:
> > >
> > > http://www.nexuiz.com/ - a FPS
> > > http://www.planeshift.it/ - More of a RPG than a FPS, but looks neat.
> > >
> > > Enjoy!
> > > Josh
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> > >
> >
>