I’m just pondering what Haiku’s intentions are towards games. As you may or may not know a large majority of main stream end users will not (And Can not) switch from Microsoft Windows to another operating system due to the fact that their games aren’t supported.
I’d really like to know what people are doing, and what projects are around that will accomodate this problem, and also what is being done about Wine, OpenGL, etc.
Thanks,
skoe
I'm just pondering what Haiku's intentions are towards games. As you may or may not know a large majority of main stream end users will not (And Can not) switch from Microsoft Windows to another operating system due to the fact that their games aren't supported.I’d really like to know what people are doing, and what projects are around that will accomodate this problem, and also what is being done about Wine, OpenGL, etc.
Thanks,
skoe
I believe the intention is to support Mesa’s OpenGL 2.0 implementation and Rudolf is already experimenting with adding hardware-acceleration to the Mesa port in his nVidia driver.
If I understand Wine correctly, it is heavily tied to X - there was a BeWine project quite a while ago, but I don’t think it made it very far. I highly doubt Wine will ever be a core part of Haiku, however - but maybe somebody will start up the port again when Haiku becomes usable.
For cross-platform software, I think there is more hope for Java and .NET implementations under Haiku… DirectX-based games may end up requiring something like Wine to run…
But then, I don’t think Haiku is targeting people who use their computers to just play the latest-and-greates games… there’s a long way to go before Haiku will have top-notch driver and graphics support good enough to play the latest 3d games anyway.
Thanks for the speedy reply.
I am a 17 year old student programmer, new to both Beos Programming and Nix Programming, but i’ll take a look at the Wine source code. I might work on a port for Haiku then. Although, im not promising anything.
I really think Haiku will be the only real competition for Windows, and as such it will need the games, and it will need Microsoft Office etc.
There’s pygame as well.
I think that you have greater chance to port DirectX than Wine (Wine will never have native speed)
v3x have been a great BeOS supporter. I think that part of the code was ported to BeOS.
But then again OpenGL are a better and more widely spread
//Fredrik
well if we can get SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL working … I’ll be very happy
My opinion on this is the following: I don’t think we can get much of the big game companies to port directX games to Haiku…don’t think the market will be big enough…yeah we can make it easier by porting directx as you described…that would also attract some of the smaller software companies…but still I think Haiku will not attract major commercial game companies(yet).
Therefore I think we should make it easier for open source game developers to add haiku to their list of supported platforms. Open source games will have the future anyway IMHO. Most of the people writing those games are enthousiasts and want to broaden their public. Also, as being open source, they might be more willing to explore Haiku and hopefully be enthousiastic about it… to make it more easy to develop oss games on Haiku I think we should port some of the great 3d game engines around(as soon as Rudolf’s got some hw 3d running ;)), one of them I especially like is Ogre http://www.ogre3d.org
other iniatives are:
-Irrlicht http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
-Open scene graph http://www.openscenegraph.org/
once we get some of these engines running under BeOS/Haiku I think we are a more serious platform for (open source) games,
regards,
Tim
There's pygame as well.
Which doesn’t count. As its an SDL wrapper. Thats like claiming SDL-PERL is a seperate game development enviroment…
We have SDL, and Haiku should have a better SDL as bugs in the OS can be fixed without the need for SDL to hack around them.
SigmaNunki wrote:There's pygame as well.Which doesn’t count. As its an SDL wrapper. Thats like claiming SDL-PERL is a seperate game development enviroment…
We have SDL, and Haiku should have a better SDL as bugs in the OS can be fixed without the need for SDL to hack around them.
Not to mention the fact that porting an app written in python using pygame will be infinitly easier to port than an app written in C/C++ using the SDL.
EDIT: Also, this thread is about what people are doing to get games on Haiku. Not argue over whether a library is a wrapper of another or a completly different one.
The main reason I wanted SDL, OpenAL and OpenGL is because I’ve licensed a 3d gaming engine called Torque. This engine runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Tribes 2 was written on the Torque engine and such recent games like Marble Blast Gold (which ships with Mac’s) was written with Torque.
I’m working on something with a group of guys and if we could add another platform, the more the merrier I say.
For more information, check out
http://www.garagegames.com/ …
(I’m taking about Torque 3d not the 2d they released recently)
I think that you have greater chance to port DirectX than Wine (Wine will never have native speed)
FUD… pure FUD :evil:
Wine is not nothing but an API layer and there is no problems with speed in regard to the x86-platform. Wine is not an emulator and rherefore does (generally) not suffer any speedloss compared with windows. It can actually be faster on occasion. 
Wine is written for *nix’es and will require some rewriting to work on Haiku. But it’s a reasonable idea in regard to games. For applications in general wine is not needed. There are opensource alternatives to most windows apps, and these alternatives are usually rather superior
ModeenF wrote:I think that you have greater chance to port DirectX than Wine (Wine will never have native speed)FUD… pure FUD :evil:
Wine is not nothing but an API layer and there is no problems with speed in regard to the x86-platform. Wine is not an emulator and rherefore does (generally) not suffer any speedloss compared with windows. It can actually be faster on occasion.
I would tend to agree here, Wine should have no performance problems - if there’s anything slow about Wine on *nix, it’s probably a result of X - but I wouldn’t know firsthand.
The theory behind Wine is that it’s a bug-for-bug replacement of all windows DLLs, etc – and performance problems that Microsoft never fixed, could be fixed by the Wine folks… and then you could theoretically use the Wine version of a component to replace a Microsoft version of the same component. I’m not sure how this works in practice, however, as I haven’t experimented with Wine myself.
Like Win4Be?
That’s Cool.
Is anyone actually working on an OpenGL Kit?
Is anyone actually working on an OpenGL Kit?
Its done. Has been for ages. Software rendered OpenGL 1.5.
It also now has hardware rendering on some older nVidia cards.
Very cool then :).
What’s the hardest part of making something like this possible? Is it getting the hardware vendors to support the graphics cards with drivers?
Thanks.
What's the hardest part of making something like this possible? Is it getting the hardware vendors to support the graphics cards with drivers?Thanks.
Drivers, or at the very worst, good spec books. No 3D, no decent game audio lib (OpenAL already somewhat works on BeOS, so thats that somewhat done…) == no chance of games
Having accelerated OpenGL, etc, does not guarantee games, though…
I donôt think that games are that important for haiku.
For example Iôm looking for an OS to work with, I donôt play games.
Even MS starts to produce more game for X-box than PC, so games will use gameing consoles.