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Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Uplink - The way of the hacker...

Ok, so this is a bit of off topic, but I just could not leave it unmentioned.

Everyone is talking that Linux is crap just because there are no games that run natively under Linux and I'm not talking about the GPL-d games and the community "hacked" games. All the big game companies are wining about the lack of standard game development api-s and libraries, but they exist and they just don't have the coders to port the games to Linux as they are only built on top of the windows DirectX api-s and are not written in consideration for other rendering api-s. So its simpler to blame the Linux for lacking api-s than admit that it would take around 3 years to totally rewrite an existing game to Linux.

Well, I'm glad that one small firm has written a game that runs natively under Linux. The game is called Uplink and the company is Introversion.

This game has existed for a while (ummm 4+ years) and as I have not played games for a while I found that it had a native Linux version built also :)

Ok, the game is not really big and fancy for its graphics, but starting from version 1.3 it looks like its windows counterpart. As I'm found of my 1600x1200 resolution the 1.3 version is the milestone that proves that it is doable. Maybe it is not as simple to make a 3d FPS than a 2d strategy/RPG but it just show that the potential is there and that the big companies should stop hiding behind the "lack of api-s" and start thinking of the market share the Linux games will be taking in the near future. Especially when the "Completely Fair Queue" has been implemented in the Linux kernel starting from 2.6.23.

As a side note - an old goddy also exist "Railroad Tycoon" run through OpenTT works also perfectly :)

PS!: I love my vacation so far :)

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