For the gamers

[Hades]

I've never really bothered with games on Linux. On the rare occasions I want to play them I dual boot into Windows. Tonight I fancied playing Quake4 and thought I'd have a go at installing it. Well it works perfectly almost first time (I needed to add some command line parameters to stop some sound corruption: quake4 +set s_driver oss +set s_numberOfSpeakers 2). It runs just as well as my Windows version although it doesn't seem to support dual core.

Well done ID. It shows that there really is no reason for games to not be ported to Linux.

 

[Inquisitor]

Shame not many other games work on Linux without something like Cedega. It's one of the main reasons I don't want to use Linux as my primary OS.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

It's not Linux's fault that game developers don't frequently choose to develop for it. The lack of an ActiveX-like API is not an excuse.

 

[eatmuchpie]

If anyone is interested, you can also get native linux versions of doom3 an unreal tournament

Doom 3

Unreal Tournament

They should definitely do more native linux games. Cedega is fine, but there are sometimes stability problems, not all games work, and there is a slight performance hit.

 

[Caged]

It's not Linux's fault that game developers don't frequently choose to develop for it. The lack of an ActiveX-like API is not an excuse.

Sorry, what? Games developers are companies, therefore looking to maximise profits. Using an easy-to-code-for API (compared with OpenGL) like Direct3D and targetting the most popular personal computing platform are two ways of doing this. I'd say it would be highly unlikely that a Linux port of a game would make back what it cost to produce in the first place.

 

[Una]

As Caged says the reason we don't make our code cross platform is because windows has the greatest market share. Its really not that hard to write two lots of rendering code (One DirectX and one GL, or write a wrapper) its just time consuming, and if your working towards a strict deadline you go for rapid development.

 

[cb_linus]

It runs just as well as my Windows version although it doesn't seem to support dual core.

The latest patch (even Linux version) should support dual core (managed to find a link here).

 

[lovedaddy]

Developers

SDL + OpenAL + OpenGL = no excuse.

Warsow / updated Quake3 engine / UT2k4 etc

 

[mortals]

It runs just as well as my Windows version although it doesn't seem to support dual core.

you should be able to use dual core

r_useSMP "1"

doesn't seem to make much difference tho

I re-installed yesterday and updated to latest patch but I still think it's as bad as it was when it was released .