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Ryan "Icculus" Gordon On The Linux Game Industry

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6A85exfRtA
Ryan Gordon has an hour long presentation on the Linux game industry full of interesting views and it makes for some good listening. Be warned though it's probably not safe for work with swearing.

If anyone has seen a show called The Big Bang Theory does anyone else think he sounds like Sheldon? Just me? Oh.

I didn't realise he has been working on ports for 15 years which is crazy to think it's taken 15 years for Linux gaming to get where it is now. The whole talk is a bit of a history lesson and it's quite amusing at times.

He mentions things like his work at Loki (an old game porting house), Linux Game Publishing (the successor to Loki) and more.

SDL what Ryan claims is the Linux answer to DirectX was created by Loki for example who he used to work for.

So, who here played xbill mentioned at the start? Hadn't heard of it myself, so I guess that was a bit before my time.

Here's to another many great years of Linux gaming. Hopefully we will still be alive and kicking and playing Ryan's ports in another 15 years. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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DrMcCoy Jun 27, 2014
I played xbill extensively back in the days, around 2000. That and Quake 2. And nethack. :)
Hamish Jun 27, 2014
Never played xbill, but I have of course heard of it. It probably is a good video for getting them youngsters up to speed on Linux gaming history.
Samsai Jun 27, 2014
I did some research about the history of Linux gaming some time ago and played a bit of xbill along with other games to get some background footage.
scaine Jun 27, 2014
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Listened to the whole thing this lunch time, then missed out posting it first on Reddit by an hour. I was the 92 viewer at the time. Fame! Er...

He's a decent talker. Great history.

I still wish he'd fix Sanctum 2 though! :D
Hamish Jun 27, 2014
Having actually listened to it the most striking thing to me was some of his more "diplomatic" phrasings about certain things, such as Humble Bundle getting more lax on what games they included, and other disappointments which at this point are thankfully mostly muddled out by the optimism.

He also gave namechecks to a lot of good things, and about the only thing that made me grit my teeth was that in his response to the free driver question at the end he mentioned the attempts to reverse engineer Nvidia hardware and the fact that Intel pays people to work on their free drivers, but made no mention of AMD, despite the fact they do the same thing. I know it is not his job to correct people's bullshit, but given the amount of FUD going around about that, I would have appreciated just that tiny extra bit of clarification.

This is not the first SELF talk he has given by the way, and I recommend people going back and taking a look at them all just to see just how much progress has been made over the past few years. There is always one bit of the earlier history he always gets wrong, but I will hopefully be able to expound upon that at a later date.
MrTennessee17 Jun 28, 2014
I enjoyed hearing this speech live! Southeast Linux Fest was another success. :D
Radegast Jun 28, 2014
What I found interesting is that he joined the growing crowd of developers who see no future in OpenGL. I don't think new API would be beneficial to linux gaming at this time with SteamOS coming and more and more game developers announcing their linux support. They might decide to stick with DirectX and wait for the new thing to take hold on linux and OS X.
scaine Jun 28, 2014
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Quoting: RadegastWhat I found interesting is that he joined the growing crowd of developers who see no future in OpenGL. I don't think new API would be beneficial to linux gaming at this time with SteamOS coming and more and more game developers announcing their linux support. They might decide to stick with DirectX and wait for the new thing to take hold on linux and OS X.

Not quite sure where you got that from. He does mention not to call OpenGL directly, but suggests the best way to do it is through SDL. And given his (and others) condemnation of the documentation, I can see why.

Why do you think he's anti-OpenGL?
Radegast Jun 28, 2014
Quoting: scaineWhy do you think he's anti-OpenGL?

Quoting: Ryan C. GordonIt's a mess. My hope is that we're about to move past OpenGL to, uh, I don't know what's to come next-gen APIs like Metal, Mantle, DirectX 12 and whatever the next version of OpenGL will look like which will probably be similiar, which basically says take all that stuff and throw it the f*ck out

Several high profile programmers have said similar things about OpenGL recently. I just think it may not be a good thing for linux gaming to move to a whole different and completely new API right when linux finally gets some attention.
neffo Jun 28, 2014
Quoting: scaineNot quite sure where you got that from. He does mention not to call OpenGL directly, but suggests the best way to do it is through SDL. And given his (and others) condemnation of the documentation, I can see why.

Not quite. SDL can't really do proper modern 3d at all (it's the equivalent of all the non-Direct3D parts of DirectX, ie DirectInput/DirectSound). From the OpenGL point of view SDL just opens a window (it has some real basic 3d functions though).
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