It seems EA are doing some rather interesting things with their experimental Halcyon game engine which includes Vulkan and Linux support.
During the Khronos Munich Meetup this weekend, Graham Wihlidal of EA's SEED (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division) presented a talk about this exciting game engine. While it's somewhat surprising to see EA start to use Vulkan, it's even more surprising to see Linux actually being mentioned as a target platform:
It's not just Vulkan though, it also supports Metal 2 (early stages) and Direct3D 12. On top of that, one of their aims is to easily access multi-GPU setups. However, they do mention that they haven't implemented multi-GPU support or Ray Tracing for Vulkan yet but they say it's planned.
What's also rather fascinating about it, is that they said they can mix and match different rendering backends in the same process. They say it made debugging Vulkan easier, as one half of the screen was using DX12 and the other Vulkan. Can't say I've heard of anyone else doing that, very cool.
See the full details here including a slideshow you can view online or a PDF you can download.
To keep some expectations in check: This doesn't necessarily mean EA are going to be putting out Linux games, but if they ever do start seriously using this game engine for future games it means the barrier for a Linux port could be lower. However, it might just be a bit of fun for the engineers.
Hat tip to Janz.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoteit might just be a bit of fun for the engineers.It always starts "just for fun".
Quoting: GuestWell that's cool, if EA ever recovers from their current state of being a pure and utter garbage company that can't produce any decent games anymore......
EA have always been garbage. I had the "pleasure" of experiencing it first hand when I was in game development.
Its a shame really because they've ruined great studios over the years.
Quoting: lejimsterEA have always been garbage. I had the "pleasure" of experiencing it first hand when I was in game development.In the '80s, under Trip Hawkins? I don't know what they were like to work for, but they had a pretty good reputation among gamers back then.
Released all their internal tools, too. Not free, because that wasn't really a thing, but you could buy them: Deluxe Paint (still, to this day, one of the best bitmap graphics editors around), Deluxe Music, etc. And they were almost an unofficial first-party developer on AmigaOS. The IFF container format (on which Microsoft based RIFF WAV) was EA's work. In my Amiga days, they were genuinely thought of as being among the good guys.
I kind of lost touch with gaming during the '90s, so I don't know when or how they went downhill, but it was quite a shock to discover how reviled they'd become in the community when I got back into it 10-15 years ago. They deserved it, but it was still a shock.
Last edited by Dunc on 29 October 2018 at 1:15 am UTC
if its for their own usage, that probably means they are planing to support linux on their future games, but if they are trying to enter the marketing of seling game engines, well, i doubt they can enter this.
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