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Rationale
One of the reasons game consoles are so popular is that they provide a uniform runtime environment. Game developers have certain 'givens' that they can assume when they develop a game - system performance, graphics capability, controller availability, etc. This means that the game works the same on everyone's console.
But in the PC gaming world, the game developers must be aware of and test for many different hardware and software configurations. This makes games for PCs less reliable and adds to the expense of development.
I propose developing a sort of test suite for ubuntu (or other distros) that can evaluate system performance to determine if a specific game can work on a users machine. This could be integrated with something similar to valve's steam, but built with open source code. The goal is to make something that eases the pain of testing and distribution for game developers, smoothing the path to more commercial (and open source) games on linux.
From the user side:
- a way to evaluate system capabilities, to determine what games can work.
- a guarantee that games that qualify on their system will actually work.
- a way to install games online, for ubuntu probably just providing a front end for packages.
- a way to buy commercial games online.
From the developer side:
- ability to code to a specific performance level on the users' machine.
- guarantees of a consistent runtime environment, with much of the burden of testing resting on the community developed tools rather than on the individual developer.
- an easy way to distribute commercial or noncommercial games on linux at low/no cost.
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Developer comments
Ubuntu is not a games company. It is the wrong approach to try to establish a "game-SDK standard" specifically for Ubuntu.
Rather advertising things like libraries, headers and documentation for OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, ogg, vorbis, theora, dirac, gstreamer etc. in a more visible way to game developers (commercial or independent) is of more use. A "best practises" webpage or document in the online-manuals I regard as more viable. For example the documentation about OpenGL on http://www.opengl.org is very sophisticated and thorough. By pointing out standards like OpenAL, ogg, vorbis, dirac and theora it would also help push the awareness of these OpenSource technologies directly instead of "hiding" them behind an "Ubuntu gaming-SDK" shell. At some point the Apricot-game form the blender-foundation would be a perfect role-model/show-case to demonstrate these best practices. After all they use Ubuntu as their main development platform. That should be supported and recommended in a big fashion IMHO.
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"- a way to buy commercial games online."
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Graf
wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 02:52
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Votes -1.
(This would be a massive, bloaty addition to Ubuntu, at best it'd be Gubuntu or something.)
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Just promote opengl and SDL to the game industry, I dislike things targetting only a single platform even if the platform is ubuntu. With OpenGl (and SDL) companies could easily make games that work everywhere, apple, windows, Linux, FreeBSD, you name it.
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The test for game requirements in the system seems as a good idea. I think it should be a button in the description of a package in synaptic.
Or maybe something required to do once then the game's name shows in color red if it's not possible to play it, or green if its gonna work flawlessly, and orange if it plays but with some options trimmed down.
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This already exists. It's called "system requirements" and they usually come on the back of the products box, provided my the game developer themselves.
There's nothing you can do in code to know if you're game is going to work on X without testing it on X.
As for your other points, if you want xbox live on Ubuntu then I doubt Canonical is going to be the one to implement it.
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Ansible
wrote on the 8 Mar 08 at 18:10
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Sure, sure. The developer can make the requirements list, people can read it and ponder if their 85325GLT card has the horsepower of a 53785XVR card, if four cores at 1.6 ghz is going to be as good as 1 core at 2.6 ghz, etc etc. Is that as easy as using a game console? No.
The point is to make choosing and installing games on linux as easy as doing so on a console - or even easier. I think this is an achievable goal.
If the project was nothing more than a way of collecting system stats and comparing them with the system requirements as published on the box, that would be an improvement over the current situation, where the user must do that themselves.
But I think its possible to go much further than that - with benchmarks and checks to nail down things like:
- codec availability
- hard/flash drive space
- CPU and graphics performance/capability
- network performance
- WINE configuration/availability
- game controller availability/capability
- etc.
So that the user doesn't have to. This is probably more important with the greater diversity of hardware that is available to linux users. It would be cool to be able to see what games would work on an ultra-mobile device, or on that 10 year old laptop up being used as a server.
The other side of the coin is that a well defined benchmarking process could also help developers by showing what technologies are available, and maybe providing some use statistics for various configurations (opt-in for information gathering, of course).
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I think the most important thing that ubuntu needs is native support for usb joysticks tailored to game developers.
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Auzy, it's never going to happen unless you stop allowing people from running Ubuntu under a certain hardware specification.
You might not have noticed this but the reason they can do it on consoles is because they all have the same hardware.
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This could be accomplished with having demos for the games to test technical capabilities before purchasing and so on.
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holizz
wrote on the 23 Mar 08 at 11:26
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If a game requires something, it can list it as a dependency in the deb. If it hasn't yet been packaged for Ubuntu, they can list the dependencies in the INSTALL file.
If it's a commercial game... they can make up their own procedures. Ubuntu has everything needed to run most games that will run on GNU/Linux.
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Ansible
wrote on the 24 Mar 08 at 16:12
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Its true that you can push the testing and etc onto the developers. That means that its more work for them, and less incentive to develop for this platform. Also, the procedures are different for every developer, so there's no uniformity for the user.
This doesn't sound like a system that is as easy as a console to me, it sounds like the status quo of PC development.
Just because a game can be installed on ubuntu doesn't mean its going to run - for instance, ubuntu is capable of being installed on a much greater variety of hardware than, say, vista. As a result, not every game will be playable on every install of ubuntu. If you have an older machine (or a new ultramobile), you could evaluate your system's performance with some tests and then see which games you could play. So suppose there are 1000 games in the system, and maybe 300 are playable on your ultramobile. It would be great to be able to see that without having to install 1000 game demos, or search around on forums to see if people succeeded or failed on your particular hardware.
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Ansible
wrote on the 25 Mar 08 at 16:48
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What would be cool would be to have the install system go beyond the debian package system for native games, and into other types of games like:
- games that use WINE
- ROMs for emulators
- java based games (together with requirements for a specific java engine?)
Perhaps you could have the option to upload your system data together with your success or failure in running a game, to help build a compatability database.
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pllabell
wrote on the 14 Apr 08 at 03:39
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isn't that why games come with a "minimum system requirements" label?
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Ansible
wrote on the 29 Jun 08 at 15:09
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Hey 'Developer', did you even read this idea? Where in this idea is an SDK mentioned? Is valve's 'steam' an SDK? I don't even know who you are, there's no way to reply or debate this cursory reading of the idea. Arggh!
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Auzy
wrote on the 5 Aug 08 at 08:28
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Seems like the spammers have arrived.. Someone needs to remove kreed.
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