Future of Torque on Linux

#21 Even financially its a benefit to have a Linux dedicated server for your Torque games. Linux server hosting is generally a lot cheaper than a Windows server and you can run far more instances on the Linux servers thus requireing a lot less hardware.

#22 :. So the conclusion is that there is no conclusion about the future of Torque on Linux. No one can (or may) say for sure, but the impression is not a positive one. You can use it, but with no promises. Is that right?

:. Of course who are already using Torque will struggle to keep it running, but are there any other options for those whom are in the very beginning of making games and want very much develop them for Linux, Mac and Win as well? Obviously that's my case.

Roque

#23 There is a conclusion, you just may not want to hear it..
Don't wait on GarageGames..
Don't depend or expect any fixes for the Linux platform from GarageGames..
If you're serious about developing on the Linux platform be prepared to do all the heavy lifting (on top of making the game) yourself.

#24 :. Great. I'll sleep better today. You're right. I dont want to hear it... :-)

#25 You can put a positive spin on it. If you decide to go down the road of linux development - chances are you won't give up as easily as most.
Let's just be honest here - most of the money made from development tools comes from people's failures.
John Q. Computerguy gets a sugar buzz about some project he thinks he can make money on and starts buying up all the tools he thinks he'll need. X amount of time later - due to whatever reason - the project slowly fades away and dies a horrible death.
Who wins? The guys you bought the tools from - everytime.

So you've got this engine and want to make it work on Linux. Taking the time to make it work will:
Make you a better coder.
You will have a much better understanding of the engine.
Will learn something new about Linux - oh yes, you will..
Will be less likely that your project will die simply because you have more invested than the hordes of other people that just had stuff "work" for them.


Guys, nothing comes easy.. Linux people have it harder than all the rest - just the way things are. Freebsd guys, well I won't go there.

#26 :. I am myself a Linux developer for quite some time. Also, I am not as young as before so, it is worthy asking questions like those I asked. The benefits as you said are great, but it is still difficult (I could say nearly suicide) to go on knowing that you may simply wake up one morning just to know that all your effort was lost and that you have to transfer your work using possibly another tool, or that the tool you are using is obsolete and the games you produce are of much less quality than the others developed in Windows, for example. It's ok if you have got the time and the money to do it, but what if you haven't got them? If you are serious about making professional games you should have those questions in mind.

#27 The thing about Linux support in Torque is that if no-one starts writing stupid [yes, stupid] platform-specific stuff [and TGE is heavily platform agnostic right now], then TGE will keep working on Linux with minimal modification.

My real worry, I guess, is that GG will take TGE the same way they've taken T2D and TSE. Instead of sticking with what works and is good for everyone, they add stuff that improves stuff slightly for one crowd, and actively decimates stuff for everyone else. It's about the next big shiny bauble, and to hell with Linux customers because their system doesn't have the correct shiny bauble receptacle.


TGB's native menus and dialogs... there was nothing wrong with them the way they used to be. The Torque GUI system is good enough to modify slightly and then continue to work fine on all platforms. Instead, GG made the decision to move to a bunch of platform-specific things that have basically made the system suck miserably for... well, for me. And other linux users.

I fear something similar will happen to TGE.

Gary (-;

#28 >If you are serious about making professional games you should have those questions in mind.

Agree 100%..
Time is money, money is time.
Most people have more time than money. Here's the thing - if you can point me to another engine that has out of the box networking like tge - can run on linux,mac, and maybe windows - and has a similar license scheme - I'll switch.

The key word to me is - linux professional games. My main target is Linux and Mac - I want to be that bigger fish in a small pond.

#29 @Gary:

Dude, you're a buzz-kill.

#30 :. I'll make games anyway. I'm just trying to see how long I can use TGE before it get lost in platform-specifics, as Gary said. In meantime others solutions like: CrystalSpace and Ogre may have their time to grow up. Right now TGE is far better and easy to use, but in the end I'll choose a tool with a great future instead of one with a great past. If it doesn't run on Linux it has no future.

#31 How much is micro$oft paying you? I'll triple it!!!

;(



Seriously though,

I'm really sad by what happened with constructor.
I've bought many things from garagegames but i'm not sure how many more things I will buy.

I was waiting for constructor - I was hording a pile of gold pieces.
Constructor would have been a tool to create level art with no alternative on linux.

After I saw that there isn't a linux constructor I went out and put my gold pieces
in nvidia's bucket and bought a 8800gtx - thanks for swaying the decision.

After all If you haven't got crossplatform from the start who/when will it be added?

Is it really a big problem that we can't have linux constructor?

Can you provide the source for constructor for the linux community?

Who's pocket do I need to put the brown paper bag filled with money?


Why can't you guys just contract icculus for small patches for linux?
http://icculus.org/~icculus/resume.txt

#32 There may yet be a port as they do have someone with access to the code. Check it out in here.

#33

Quote:Why can't you guys just contract icculus for small patches for linux?
icculus.org/~icculus/resume.txt

Click that link. Then, remove the /~icculus/resume.html part and go to the site's index. Look under "Homepages listed here." See Chunky? Yes, it's the homepage of Gary.

I'm pretty sure the talent required is already here.

#34 Synapse Gaming isn't developing any linux based games, but we are working on a lot of Torque server backend systems - and I can say that the lack of linux support hits us hard. I don't want to get into the numbers, but setting up and supporting linux servers is much cheaper than the alternatives.

However I certainly understand GG's perspective, the cost of developing user apps against linux can be high - not necessarily higher than any other OS, but development on other OS's net some return on the investment, and unfortunately we (SG) haven't seen that on linux user apps (server systems are another story - linux is an excellent platform for backend products). Constructor illustrates the problem with user apps; a lot of time would go into a linux port, but how many people would ultimately use it? Not enough to justify the cost.

So my perspective is this; yeah it sucks, but yeah I understand why, and would have made the same decision.


Seeing as linux support is on the community, how can we do our best to keep support alive? I have a couple of questions and observations...

I think GG would be more likely to adopt the linux changes if they were limited to the linux platform code (this is only my opinion and not an official comment). I mean that code is already unsupported and doesn't work as expected - what's the harm in updating it so it runs.

Why are the linux changes bleeding into the main code base? The changes I've seen were related to poor syntax, but the same code compiles on Xcode (also GCC), why not change the build files to mimic the Xcode errors and warnings? Maybe this isn't possible, but I though I'd throw it out there.


If it's possible to contain the linux changes to the linux platform code maybe the changes will get rolled into head - at the very least it would make for a small and easy to maintain resource.

#35

Quote:Constructor would have been a tool to create level art with no alternative on linux.

Same argument as has been around for a while. Torque's missing a single coherent structured art workflow for buildings, and constructor is the answer. But there was nothing stopping you using radiant before. Or blender. Or wine+quark. It wasn't ideal, but it also wasn't a blocker.

If I ever got to the point where I'm'a make money or not based on using wine or not... I'm not that much of an idealist :-)

Quote: How much is micro$oft paying you?

There is no conspiracy.

Microsoft are more friendly to indie developers than sony or nintendo are. And if you're not talking about consoles, then Microsofts tools are arguably more featureful and friendly to rapid application development.

Personally I think it's all tosh, and GG have just made some wrong decisions to the detriment of the part of their community. But it's not my place to make those decisions, so what do I know.

Quote:Why can't you guys just contract icculus for small patches for linux?
http://icculus.org/~icculus/resume.txt

Heh. Ryan's a good guy, but he has a lot of work on his plate. He does have a torque license, I know, since we've talked about it in the past... But don't anticipate much in the way of awesomechanges coming from that direction.

Quote: Click that link. Then, remove the /~icculus/resume.html part and go to the site's index. Look under "Homepages listed here." See Chunky? Yes, it's the homepage of Gary.

I'm pretty sure the talent required is already here.

My homepage is hosted on Ryan's site, but I don't feel like I'm even in the same league as him. On the other hand, I do definitely feel that the talent required to make torque continue to run on linux is present, seeing as how.. you know.. I have torque running on linux.

Quote:I think GG would be more likely to adopt the linux changes if they were limited to the linux platform code (this is only my opinion and not an official comment). I mean that code is already unsupported and doesn't work as expected - what's the harm in updating it so it runs.

Ah, yes. I've always assumed that. All of my patches are always against just the platformX86UNIX tree, except stuff that's explicitly needed outside of the tree. Things like this, which make a difference to all platforms.

Only other patch I've ever suggested that I'm pretty sure is unlikely was a change to rename GameInterface::main to GameInterface::mainGI so that you can compile platformX86UNIX on the mac [SDL does some clever witchcraft with main(int argc,const char **argv) on some platforms.]. Would love love love for that one to go in, but I'm not holding my breath :-). Every other patch needed for that was just against platformX86UNIX.

Quote:Why are the linux changes bleeding into the main code base? The changes I've seen were related to poor syntax, but the same code compiles on Xcode (also GCC), why not change the build files to mimic the Xcode errors and warnings? Maybe this isn't possible, but I though I'd throw it out there.

Apple's compiler is heavily modified. But you raise an interesting idea.

Gary (-;

PS I'm honored that you'd compare me to Icculus, but I don't reckon I'm even in the same league :-)

#36 From Bob:

Quote:
but development on other OS's net some return on the investment, and unfortunately we (SG) haven't seen that on linux user apps (server systems are another story - linux is an excellent platform for backend products). Constructor illustrates the problem with user apps; a lot of time would go into a linux port, but how many people would ultimately use it? Not enough to justify the cost. So my perspective is this; yeah it sucks, but yeah I understand why, and would have made the same decision.

If SG didn't support linux you wouldn't have got my money.

Somebody doesn't think there is enough money and yet these guys with 1/10th the staff of garagegames can support linux:

RakNet
Fmod
Newton game dynamics
blitzmax
ogre 3d
Irrlicht Engine
blender3d

Quote:
Seeing as linux support is on the community, how can we do our best to keep support alive? I have a couple of questions and observations...

How can constructor linux be on the community if we don't have the source code?

We are not asking for a full time linux only guy, we are just asking that in your mind you keep cross-platform
thoughts in there so we can continue to give you guys money.

I was in a meeting with the CTO of a company with 3,000+ employees and worldwide offices and he sat there and told engineers - we use opengl and we keep the code crossplatform. This is what garagegames is missing. This CTO understood that if we put forth a little effort, there were good benefits.

#37 If you think that we don't continue to support cross-platform in regards to the underlying engine technology, then no disrespect intended, but you are very far off the mark.

I'll give a very strong example: TGE-A.

I cannot count how many times that people have said "windows only!!!", which cannot be farther from the truth when it comes to underlying technology design. What people really mean, even if they don't understand it, is that the current release has a fully platform abstracted GFX layer, with an example DX9 device implementation.

Note what I said about fully abstracted: In my humble opinion, it would take a small dedicated team (1-3 developers) experienced with OpenGL programming less than 2 months to produce an OpenGL device for the GFX layer....yet not one as far as I am aware have even begun such a project, even though GFX has been part of the design for more than 2 years, and we've been describing how building a new rendering device would work for more than a year.

I would even be willing to state that the latest version of our engines (TGE-A vs TGE for example) are more cross platform than any previous Torque technology--if you look closely at TGE's D3D implementation, you'll note that it's actually a wrapper around OpenGL, and there is OpenGL code scattered all throughout the code base....not particularly cross-platform friendly at all.

What people are still not listening to is the fact that GarageGames has always been a cross-platform supporter. Since the beginning, all of our engines are designed with cross platform capability built right in to the fundamental design requirements, and being able to purchase the source code (Constructor not withstanding) gives you the developers unparalleled flexibility in your target platform(s).

What GarageGames understands that the CTO of your 3k employees does not is that at this time, for games and game development software products, funded support of the various linux platforms is a short and long term net loss. A 3k employee company with worldwide offices may be able to write off those losses, but we as a company cannot. Your 3k company is making a bet that for their product line, linux will be a profitable market.

What GG has done is proven that for our product line, it is not a profitable market. It's still however a desirable market, and one that we feel is important for moral reasons, so we continue to ensure that to the best of our ability, our engines support and enhance cross platform compatibility.

#38 One other note:

None of the "engines" listed above are even close to being game engines, with the only exception being Blitz3D.

The rest are at most task focused "engines" (more correctly, API's) that perform single task requirements such as sound, rendering, physics, or in your last example, building models. Comparing them, or throwing them up as examples against any of the Torque products is comparing apples to horses, and does not make any convincing profitability statements.

#39 Stephen: still waiting on a reply to that email I sent you.

#40

Quote:comparing apples to horses

:)