Originally posted by: Nothinman
I'm thinking it'll either be on the same CD or a free download at the same time, I'm 99% sure it won't be a seperate retail box.
It won't be released at the same time that Doom3 hits the retail shelfs. It will be a point release installer and won't be out at the same time as Windows.
The Linux and Mac ports will be delayed slightly, but it shouldn't take long for it to hit ftp.idsoftware.com. Id has publicly stated such.
UT2004 has a nice Linux installer on it's retail CD and it works very well. Easy to use, easier actually because it doesn't require the CDROM in the drive to play the game. Ut2003 had a Linux installer hidden on the installation cdrom, but it didn't work to well sometimes.
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As for the overal state of Linux Gaming?
It's so-so.
As far as
native commercial/high profile games I have installed are: Ut2004, Quake3/2/1, Never Winter Nights, Wolfenstien (and the multiplayer version).
That's off of the top of my head. I have several small games installed that I bought, from places like
Garage games (marble madness and especially Orbz is fun. Plus VERY kid freindly. Fun for kids, challenging for adults)
Then of course their is WineX, apperently they changed their product name to Cedega or something stupid like that.
list of supported games (5=good, 4=good with querks, 3=iffy, 2=crap, 1=crap)
So pretty much combined 7 out of 10 of the top most popular games for any given time are installable and playable on Linux.
Then there are great free games that are aviable on Linux because they are open source.
FlightGear. Vegastrike. Freeciv. Are some of the big fun games for Linux. (Flightgear and Vegastrike are waiting for me to get a joystick right now)
Then there are about 20000000 billion little puzzle games like breakout1/2 and frozenbubble.
So it's SO-SO. Linux as a gaming platform is not going to have the sex apeal that Windows gaming offers, but it's more then enough to consume whatever free time I have that I wish to spend on gaming. (It's nice feeling though when your playing online and people go "ah crap I need to reboot now", "damn virus scanner is going off!", etc etc)
Then on top of that I have a GameCube that I have plugged into one of my computer's TV capture cards, that I play (my computer monitor has displaced the TV in my enternament center.), so that I sort of play those games on linux, but I dont' think they realy count.
3 major things stand in the way of Linux gaming:
1. Drivers for video cards.
2. Drivers for Sound cards (although it's MUCH better now that Alsa is standard.. HINT: if you have a crappy sound card that can't do hardware mixing then check out the dmix plugin for alsa stuff. (Linux Ibook users, too) Its a software mixing plugin that works out much better then the arts and esound stuff. But it's not always working with OSS applications)
3. Most games are DirectX, and DirectX is Windows-only.
There is very little that is inherently BAD with Linux in terms of gaming. Most technical issues have been solved a while ago, it offers good performance, possibly better then Windows in many ways. It's robust and it's nice not to worry about worms and viruses and such. But it's still 2%-3% of the desktop market, and until it gets more market, then it's just not going to be that profitable for gaming companies.
We have SDL (and windows has that too, it's cross platform) that adds abstractions to OpenGL, 2d, and Sound for cross platform gaming and is actually pretty nice. More and more commercial games are using bits and pieces from it. But it's not overall solution compared to DirectX.
Luckely for Linux geeks OpenGL is still the standard in big things. Movie production for example, 3-d modelers, too. Doctor stuff, CAD, anything to do with 3-d imagining.
So it's still well supported and commonly used, hell even most games that on the box "directX is required" uses DirectX for sound or just for the installer/menus, but for the actual game engine it's OpenGL all the way. Thats why some games actually run very well in WineX, because the OpenGL stuff in them runs almost native speed.
This is because, of course, DirectX doesn't run on Unix. So still Unix=Serious. Windows just isn't good enough, even the NT platform for a lot of people's tastes. OpenGL was created by extending 3-d stuff that SGI developed for Irix unix OS.
But it doesn't help much for Gaming support. Oh well. OpenGL released a new specification not to long ago, so maybe we will see more games in it. Especially with Doom3 and all the games that ID liscences the platform out too.
Windows is still the king of Gaming by a long shot, but it doesn't mean that you can't have fun on Linux.
Some sites to check out:
http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.linux-gamers.net/
http://www.happypenguin.org/ (especially; it has links to thousands of games. )
(above is just generall information for curious peeps)
Halflife2 will probably never be Linux native game. Only thru WineX.
The company is run by a Ex-Microsoft execuative... Of course he got nailed by using Outlook (and got hacked by a trojen inside a worm that was crafted especially for him in a desceptive E-mail) and that's how the got into his computer and got the passwords to steal the Halflife2 code. You'd think he'd know better then that.