Linux, AMD64, and 3D console games

The following story contains some very tantalizing combinations of things
that have never been associated with each other before:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39116947,00.htm

It's a demo of the shoot'em'up game America's Army, running on a 64-bit
Linux kernel, running on an Athlon64, and booting up completely from CD just
like a console game. The interesting bits here are that it's a game running
on any Linux kernel, let alone a 64-bit Linux kernel, since most games are
brought out for Windows/DirectX. Demonstrates the feasibility of Linux as a
gaming platform. It also demonstrates a more or less full-feature Linux
kernel which detects and loads drivers for hardware rather than assuming
what kind of hardware is onboard, while still running from CD. Also it's a
demo of the potential of Athlon64 as a full 64-bit gaming platform, not just
a 32-bit gaming platform.

This may also prove to be a generic competitor to the Microsoft Xbox
console. Can you imagine, everybody from white boxes to HP or IBM (but not
Dell, of course) putting together consoles derived from generic PC hardware,
and just equiping them with nothing more than a CD or DVD drive just to boot
up games? Each one would be equiping their systems with slightly different
video cards from ATI, Matrox, or Nvidia, and the OS just detects and loads
the proper driver.

Yousuf Khan

 

Expect it to got the way of NSA-Linux. Some unnamed company will
protest that the government should not be allowed to use or make
available software that competes with private corporations.

-wolfgang

 

"Wolfgang S. Rupprecht"

Well, actually the game was developed by a private corporation under
contract to the government.

Yousuf Khan

 

Wow... to think they have come so far and gotten to the single task
level, amazing. What's next, DOS?

 

And America's Army is also available for Windows...

I think Loki proved that it was certainly possible to use Linux as a game
platform. They developed most of the software you need to port a game to
Linux. All the native games I use in Linux work great: the new stuff like
Enemy Territory and even the old Loki games still work fine.

The question is whether there is any money in this. For now, the answer
seems to be no.

 

Wouldn't this totally defeat the idea behind the game consol? One static
platform allowing game developers to take full advantage of the under lying
hardware with out fear if some version of the consol is not going to support
any particular feature...

Carlo

 

Note that simply running America's Army on a bootable Linux CD is
nothing new, it was only that it was ported to AMD64 that is new.
Gentoo Games (an offshoot of Gentoo Linux) did all the initial work
for this port. Here's their website:

http://www.gentoogames.com/

As you can see, they have a bootable CD out for both America's Army
and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and they are working on others. SCI
just released an AMD64 port of the Gentoo Games version.

This also isn't really all that new, all modern Linux distributions do
just that by default, though occasionally it's beneficial to disable
some of the auto-detect features in order to speed things up.

As for the gaming aspect, if the game uses OpenGL, then porting it to
Linux is easy because OpenGL is an open spec and can be supported on
Linux (though until recently nVidia was the only company with any
meaningful OpenGL drivers in Linux). The problem for Linux developers
is that most people develop for DirectX, as you mentioned above, and
DirectX is neither open or documented. Implementing DirectX on Linux
has been a rather long and slow process, though progress is still
being made. WineX allows most popular Windows games to be run on
Linux, albeit often at a greatly reduced level of performance and
sometimes with a lot of bugs.

 

Yeah, nobody said it wasn't, just that usually these same titles aren't also
available for Linux. Anyways, this version of AA is also 64-bit, which isn't
yet possible with Windows.

This is a demo, you're not supposed to make money off of it. But it's a
proof of concept that this is something that can eventually be made to make
money from.

Yousuf Khan

 

I thought the only purpose of a game console was to be able to play low-res
games on a TV screen?

You mean to tell me that these console game developers were actually doing
this so they could optimize something?

Yousuf Khan

 

Well, it *was* one of the idea's behind it.... A not all too terrible one...
Halo looks just so damned good thanks to it... And damn I can't wait for
Halo 2

Carlo

 

Can you provide a couple of examples (for someone who *never* plays
computer games)? What features were the developers obviously able to
use that they wouldn't have been able to on a PC game platform?

RM

 

The XBox. Unified memory architecture allows a few tricks to get much
higher geometry throughput than on a conventional CPU<->AGP<->GPU setop.

The XBox GPU has register combiners that aren't exposed in DirectX 8.

Predictable (and repeatable) performance allows game levels to be
tweaked to always hit your frames per second target.

If you look at Halo that has just come out on PC: The XBox has a
P3-733MHz (but only with 128KB lvl 2 cache) and a Geforce 3/4 GPU. To
get the same performance level you have to have a >2GHz CPU with a (more
or less) state of the art GPU.

Cheers
Martin

 

Would that have anything to do with the fact that on Xboxes you're playing
the games at 640x400 whereas on typical PCs you're play them at over
1024x768?

Yousuf Khan

 

Correction, WineX allows a very _few_ popular Windows games to be run on
Linux. From their own database, there are only 5 games (out of several
hundred in the database) that run well through Winex. One is really a
special port (The Sims) and another doesn't seem to work anymore from the
the forum posts (Kohan). I gave Winex a try; it's about completely
worthless.

Native games work fine.

--
/*
* Oops. The kernel tried to access some bad page. We'll have to
* terminate things with extreme prejudice.
*/
die_if_kernel("Oops", regs, error_code);
(From linux/arch/i386/mm/fault.c)

 

You are missing my point. Loki games was the porting house for linux, they
created the gaming infrastructure in Linux, ported solid games that worked
well, and went bankrupt. Linux gamers are cheap and practically
non-existant; they would rather dual-boot than wait a week or pay a few
dollars more for a native port. I read a quote from a game publisher who
said they made more money from the Amiga port(!) than the Linux version.

Nevertheless, a popular game that needs a dedicated server almost has to
have a Linux version, and sometimes the company will throw in a native
client if it's not a uphill battle (heavily DirectX). I'm happy for the
few crumbs thrown my way, like et, Savage and the upcoming Doom game.

Anyway, my point being that I don't think bootable Linux CDROM games will
takeover the gaming world. Heck, last time I was in the store, it looked
like PC games in general are on life support with console's taking the lion
share of the gaming market.

--
/*
* Oops. The kernel tried to access some bad page. We'll have to
* terminate things with extreme prejudice.
*/
die_if_kernel("Oops", regs, error_code);
(From linux/arch/i386/mm/fault.c)

 

It could _potentially_ make tech support and development easier - platform
differences are limited to hardware differences rather than driver or OS
or dependency problems or conflicts etc etc.

Of course the flip side is that is then becomes a lot harder to distribute
updates for improved drivers or game bugfixes etc.

Maybe it could be split into 2 disks - a standard industry wide freely
available platform disk that boots into a game loading menu (an open
source console almost) and then commercial game disk(s). That could also
be too complicated I suppose.

Cheers
Anton

 

Yes, but you're also missing my point here. This is not a game aimed at the
Linux crowd, this is a self-booting game that happens to use a Linux kernel.
The game doesn't even have to be installed on the local PC's hard drive it
runs entirely from removable media (though it may need to cache savegame
data to a local hard drive). With such a game, you don't even need a PC to
run it, you can run it from a generic game console set-top box. You might
even be able to play it on a PC by rebooting into the game, but you won't be
able to install the game directly on the PC. You can create an appropriately
closed file system that can't be read by any standard PC operating system
which contains the game. It could be a new era of console games that are
playable on either PCs or set top boxes, but when you play it on a PC you
pretty much make your PC a set top box.

Do you see the potential now? You won't need a company like Loki porting
games from other operating systems, because the game developers will be
targeting this common platform primarily, and not for any particular set top
box or for a PC, but both. The only way to play it though is to boot into
it.

Yousuf Khan

 

message

Not Nessesarly.... The X-Box (and Halo I beleive) supports the full range of
HD reselutions... So you could be playing Halo at Max HD reselution assuming
you have the component A/V out pack and an HD TV.

Carlo

 

Environment Bumped Mapping. The end effect of this technology is to allow
game developers to apply more 3D, more realistic textures to any type of
surface (walls, floors even fluids such as water) there by making the
environment seem more realistic... Probably the best example of this is in
the game Brute Force which makes extensive use of the technology. It's not
that game developers can't use them on the PC platform. But they hesitate
hesitate to add these technologies in because in many cases only the small
minority of the people out there buying their products will get too see the
effects. Therefore it's not worth it for them to waste all kinds of time
adding these features when the average development time these days is
measured in months and even years (we of course are assuming the developers
are writing their own engine). Things are different in the world of
consoles... Developers can are free to go ahead and make full use of the
architectures features with out fear because they can rely on the fact that
everyone out there is running the same hardware regardless of when they
bought their particular unit.

Carlo

 

One big issue is optimization. If you're targetting a game for the PC
platform, you might be running on an Athlon system, or maybe a dual
Pentium-3 system, or maybe a Pentium-4 system with hyperthreading. You might
have 512Mb of memory but you might have 1Gb. You might optimize for an
Nvidia GeForce4, but the machine might have a different video card. And how
well will your Matrox optimization work along with your SSE2 optimizations?
In other words, you can maybe test every combination but you certainly can't
optimize for every combination.

On the other hand, when you're targetting a console platform, you know
exactly what CPU you'll be running on, how much memory you'll have and what
its bandwidth will be, and what graphics chipset you'll be using. You can
put all your tweaking effort into optimal performance on that combination,
which is less effort than just making sure all the possible PC configuration
combinations even work at all.

DS