Re: Windows Assembly

On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:08:32 -0400, Robert Redelmeier <redelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard Cooper <spamandviruses@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html
Mentions everything even remotely good, even if it's mostly
vapor, hardly touches the bad.  Then it blames what is bad
on video card manufactures with this:

It looks like a 'blog. Why do you consider it authoritative?

I _know_ it's not authoritative simply by virtue of it being wrong. I was just commenting on how no one seems to acknowledge the current state of things, instead prefering to be in this delusion that everything is just peachy.

Presumably VESA BIOS calls cause problems with Linux

Presumably little kids get cancer and die because it's part of God's glourious plan.

You can either believe that, or you can look at the facts. If presuming things makes you feel better about the death of children or the current state of graphics support in Linux, then just go right on presuming.

Linux doesn't seem to realize that it's a small time OS.

Now who is expressing overbroad optinons? 

Now who is forgetting that "small" and "large" are relative terms?

I don't think graphics vendors made video drivers for
Windows either when Windows only had 5% of the market share.

No, they didn't. MS-Win3- often had to use VESA calls.

And yet Linux expects graphics vendors to jump though hoops just to support it. They could at least make it easy.

But rather than do something like design a good Linux
graphics API that vendors can easily write a driver to slip

I think you're talking about Open GL.

No, I'm talking about an easy to implement standard. Now the OpenGL half might be well documented, but is it easy? And let's not forget the other half, interfacing with Linux. There's still no kernel graphics API, so obviously it'll have to be an X driver, and since when is doing anything with X easy?

And *** the 3D, I just want to be able to switch back and forth between 1024x768x24 and 640x480x8, something VESA could do easily, and once that VESA driver is in the kernel, all anyone who wants to write a video driver has to do is write a module that replaces the kernel's VESA module and they're done. Then X can use it, SVGAlib can use it, SDL can use it, everyone can use it.

That's where I'm at with this game I want to make.
If I'm going to sell it, then it damned well better
work for everyone.


I'm not a graphics specialist, but I think you then need to
target some common interface like OpenGL.


You're a slashdot poster, aren't you?  At least a very regular reader.

My computer doesn't support OpenGL. The computer in the other room, it doesn't support OpenGL either. Neither did the computer I had before these two. All of those X screensavers that require OpenGL, they run slower than ***. So when a game says that it requires OpenGL, I just go and look at something else.

That's why I think that game developers stay away from Linux.

No, it's about market share. I have QuakeII for Linux. 

Hmm...

Requirements:
A 100% Windows 95/98/ME/NT 4.0/2000-compatible computer system (including compatible 32-bit drivers for CD-ROM drive , video card, sound card and input devices)

Let me guess, Id released the source code and someone ported it to Linux?

There's a Quake II for OS/2 as well.

There's countless numbers of people out there willing to port anything to Linux because their time is worthless. The average Linux guru doesn't have to consider wether or not it's going to be an economically viable thing to do because he's not expecting to make any money, he's just doing it because he wants to.

My argument was that companies don't make their games for Linux because Linux is a total pain in the ass to make a game run on, and then it's not going to run reliably, and the net result is that it costs a lot to do and it costs a lot to support, and thus it's not worth doing IF your plan is to make money by doing so.

Quake II runs for you, but how many people do you think it doesn't work for? I would guess that 50% of the people who download it can't get it to work. But say I'm wrong and it's only 1% who can't get it to work. What does Id software tell that 1% of it's customer base who went to the store, picked up the boxed edition of DOOM III for Linux, and brought it home only to find it doesn't work correctly, and then sent them a hateful email demanding that they make the game work because they paid for it and so it had damned well better work? Do they tell them "Well, DOOM III for Linux isn't able to run fullscreen because your X driver doesn't support changing video modes." What do you think the response would be? "Oh, I understand." Or maybe more like "Well what the *** am I supposed to do, run this thing in a little window in X all the time? How the *** do you assholes expect people to play a game like this? This sucks!" And if it weren't an issue with X, there's a hundred other things it could be an issue with.

When open source started, people reported when software didn't work to the developers. It was just what you did. But then people started replying "well, you got it for free, what do you expect? You didn't pay anything for it, so don't expect any support." So now when things don't work, people don't say anything. It just doesn't work and they live without it. At best they ask an unrelated third party for help. So 99% of the people who download Quake II could be unable to make it work, and the people on the Quake II project may well not even think there is a problem.

In Windows they can make their games work exactly the same
for everyone,

Yes. But only by relying on DirectX.

DirectX is the Windows API for graphics. It's a collection of functions like DirectDraw and DirectThis and DirectThat. They're all standard Windows API functions, and only called DirectX instead of Windows API because all of the function names begin with the word "Direct". So that's like saying that Apache can work the same on all Linux systems, but only by relying on the Linux API.

Not quite. Have a look at svgalib or SVGATextMode. 

That's not the kernel.  I was talking about the kernel's
use of VESA.


Nonuse.  And why should it?  For something as low as 320x240
why bother?  AFAIK, bleeding edge games mostly use GPU calls.


What about the non-bleeding edge?  Or do we just forget about that?

Attitudes like that are exactly what's wrong with Linux.
That's like refusing to use DOS Edit (real mode) because
it's not Notepad (protected mode) and instead hacking
together a bunch of different things which when combined
make a system of which you can usually find one or two
members that will output the text document that you want.
That's a stupid thing to do when all you've got to do is
start a DOS session and use DOS Edit.


I'm not sure what you're saying here.  Linux is extremely good
in textmode which is what DOS (and DOS Edit) were patterned
after.  Pipelines do exactly what you want to combine utilites.
For example:

$  ls -lR | sort +4n | tail -40

quickly lists the 40 biggest files beneath the current directory. 

I don't know how to respond to that...
.