As the years go by and linux becomes more user friendly, more and more people are using it. However, there are some drawbacks to using linux. I am an avid linux user and it really ticks me off that I can not play my favorite MMORPG natively in linux. I think that the gaming communities should start making linux ports for their games, it is not that hard. If they did, it would also boost their profits because I know many people who do nopt buy games just because they do not run a windows system. What are your thoughts on this and are there any linux users out there with me.

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Why port games?

The problem here is the enviroment the game is build in and most of the time this is directX instead of OpenGL.

An sollution could be to make the games in OpenGL or port directX for linux so Linux also will have directX support without needing to install 3th party software like cedega.

I am not such a gamer so I wont buy cedega but it perhaps could be an option for you?

What games are you talking about btw?

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90%+ of the PC's, even higher if you just count home users, are running some kind of windows OS. Even then there are more Mac Users than Linux out there. While some companies have embraced Linux (think Doom and Quake), most do not because it doen't make business sense to spend large sums of money to develop and then support a platform that will account for less than 3% of sales.

The other thing about Linux and the Linux Community is that a large majority of the users do so because they like the idea of getting something for nothing. The goal of software publishers are to make money. Now I am not talking about coporate IT users, I am talking about the home hobby crowd.

I used to work for a software developement company. A lot of our products were for the SGI Irix platform (CGI work) and we seriously looked into porting and did port two of our applications to Linux in 1998/1999. They made up less than 8% of our sales and took up 28% of our tech support calls. Why? This was when there were basically no "standard" linux distro. Our stuff was ported and supported on RH 5, but we'd get calls from Slackware users, Turbo Linux users, Mandrake, and even SuSE folks wondering why they were getting errors like "XYZ binary not found in /var/etc/xyz.c". Most of the time it was because that binary wasn't installed on that distro or it was installed in another directory like /var/etc/video/xyz. The next versions of the software had no Linux ports.

The company then jumped on the OS X bandwagon and ported all their tools to PPC/OS 10 when it was clear that SGI was dying and Apple had turned the corner. Eventually the company was purchased by a hollywood CGi FX company and I left to start my own consulting business and persue grad school work.

 

 

 

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Most companie are using DirectX because of the ease of programming that it allows its developers. However, Microsoft will never allow DirectX to be ported over to linux. I am using cedega just fine to play World of Warcraft, however I should not have to run an emulator(which just got out of Alpha phase) to play these games. There are over 180,000 users out there who use linux and would play World of Warcraft if it was natively supported in linux. For Blizzard, that is 180,000 time 15 bucks per month which equals a signifigant boost in profits.

And it shouldnt matter what distro you are using. A kernel is a kernel and you are talking about distributions that tend to foobar and break kernels so stuff ends up not working right or items get placed in weird directories. And that is the problem with using precompiled software. The easiest solution would be to use GCC to make the binaries from source for each system. If your company would have gone that route you probably would have saved yourself that 28% in service calls. However, I know how profitable companies do not like to release their sources to anyone and that is why they release them pre compiled.

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Xfree86 is a must for linux gaming(I'm sure you already have it though... Also your video drivers... But then

wine is a great, free alternative to cedega. They have a few there, and if you're running a different distro, google for it, and you _should_ find it. I run Damn Small Linux, so I had to hop around their forums a bit, but I found it.

Usage may vary, but I opened up the file manager, double clicked an exe file, and set command for booting it as wine (so it goes "wine abcd.exe")
it may have some font issues, depending on your distro (it does on DSL, but for a very minimalist distro, what do you expect?), but other than that, it runs fine.

And WoW is listed in their AppDB as gold (no problems for running)

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I hope you have been told about xorg to?


I would not say that directX is easy to develope games for what I have been told OpenGL is easy to use to but since directX is a complete api developers rater would choose that.

btw: stlgoalie making a linux version for rpm based systems only is not a smart thing to do. I understanbd that it is lot of work to make a deb, rpm, tar etc but linux also knows .sh (independed executer/installer).

Look at Nvidia they use .sh now EA-gaming uses .sh and many more .

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Xorg and Xfree86 are very basic and broken down window managers. Of course, without any window managers you would not be able to play a game because it requires a window to run it in. They have nothing to do with how a peticular game will perform. Nvidia has native linux drivers that work very well with my 2.6 kernel and 6800 Geforce video card.

pbrugge: you sound like a linux user, but you sound like a generic user. please dont take offence to that. i would guess that you are using a distro like mandrake, suse, redhat, or debian. if you really wanna give linux a go and learn it inside and out try gentoo. it is text based install and you can completely customize your system and compile your programs for your syustem. Gentoo also uses portage, which is the biggest database of linux programs on the net. with portage, you can completely compile an entire program with its dependancies by simply typing "emerge programname" just some food for thought and you can feel free to start a post if you want help with it or have any questions. I will be more than happy to help you out.

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emulation right? just use cedega or somehting and you can play almost all games well.

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Erm yes I am a linux user and yes I use debian but erm??

Xorg and Xfree86 are no widowmanager but the X Window System on which the desktop (widowmanagers) is build (fluxbox, kde, *box etc) as a 'gentoo user you should know that' (I used gentoo for years btw lol I even did a lfs ones) but where lays the different between apt-get install "package" and emerge 'package"?

The biggest reason I switched back to debian is that a simple program installation in gentoo could took hours but it sure is good distro specialy because of the "user flags" yes so thx for the advice

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Actually, gentoo has become better in the last few months with the new release of GCC Compiler being marked stable. On my system and emerge, say firefox, for example, that would normally take about a half hour to emerge, now only takes about 3 minutes. They have really done a great job integrating this.

And yes, you are right about the x window system. I am on codine syrup because of bronchitis so my brain is not in tip top shape. It is funny because I actually switched from Debian to Gentoo about a year and a half to two years ago. I got tired of how little control I had over the distro.

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