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.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: GuestWhat the... seriously? Next thing you'll be telling me Blizzard, Ubisoft, ID/Bathesda, etc. will be tooling around with a linux-supported game and/or engine. I don't know. EA, really?Next thing you know, IBM will buy Red Hat. Wait....
Maybe I should go buy a Lotto ticket for once. This is weird.
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Have hell frozen over?
I never though EA would make any move towards Linux. Along with Bethesda and Blizzard they have been utterly hostile against Linux. For them it is all about the money.
I never though EA would make any move towards Linux. Along with Bethesda and Blizzard they have been utterly hostile against Linux. For them it is all about the money.
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Quoting: slaapliedjeSome of the EA games for the Atari 8bit / c64 were some of the best around. If only they still published the Ultima games...
After ruining Ultima VIII and IX before shutting down Origin Systems?! ... no thank you!
It's not quite coincidence that a pair of villains in Ultima VII went by the names Elizabeth and Abraham. Or that the evil artefacts resembled a cube, sphere and tetrahedron.
The final EA game I bought has been Dragon Age: Origins, and that only grudgingly because of the online activation and day 1 DLC. I've got a list of companies I don't buy from, and EA is one of them.
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Quoting: DJVikingFor them it is all about the money.That's the sad part. The original intention of Electronic Arts (and the name was carefully chosen) was to acknowledge and foster the creativity of its developers, at a time when even admitting there were real people making videogames was a rarity*. Modern EA is basically the diametric opposite of what Hawkins set it up to be.
*Of course, the founding of Activision is a similar story. And it went the same way.
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Comandante Ñoñardo Oct 29, 2018
Quoting: DJVikingHave hell frozen over?Exactly. Linux is Free of charge vs Microsoft eventually will charge companies for to be inside their walled garden:
I never though EA would make any move towards Linux. Along with Bethesda and Blizzard they have been utterly hostile against Linux. For them it is all about the money.
Quoting: MicrosoftSo.. I see You want to earn a lot money using MY POPULAR Operative System.
Quoting: EAYes... So what?
Quoting: MicrosoftSo, You have to pay Me if you want your game running inside MY POPULAR walled garden.
If You don't, your game will not be able to get installed and run..
Your game must be available for sale and download exclusively on the Windows store and you have to pay Me a big cut of the cake.
Quoting: EA#$%@#!!!!
...EA need a plan B, just like Valve did with their Proton initiative.
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slaapliedje Oct 30, 2018
Quoting: kaimanQuoting: slaapliedjeSome of the EA games for the Atari 8bit / c64 were some of the best around. If only they still published the Ultima games...
After ruining Ultima VIII and IX before shutting down Origin Systems?! ... no thank you!
It's not quite coincidence that a pair of villains in Ultima VII went by the names Elizabeth and Abraham. Or that the evil artefacts resembled a cube, sphere and tetrahedron.
The final EA game I bought has been Dragon Age: Origins, and that only grudgingly because of the online activation and day 1 DLC. I've got a list of companies I don't buy from, and EA is one of them.
To be fair I honestly think THAT is the time frame Electronic Arts became shitty. The re-designing of Ultima IX # different times was insane. The initial look of it was more on par with Neverwinter Nights, which came out years later. That one can be faulted to EA. Ultima VIII... well not sure who had the idea to use another game engine to slap Ultima into.. But Crusader games was a bad choice for it. Terrible 3D platformer is not what it should be. I actually quite liked IX, but you could tell where the story fell flat. Didn't Richard Garriott leave after 7 though? Ultima Online 2 being cancelled was the biggest EA travesty and I kind haven't really bought many games from them since then. Somehow UO is still going strong, but I recently tried it in Linux with Wine and it failed hard.
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Quoting: DuncBoth EA and Activision (and many more) . . . It's almost as if there were some sort of economic system pushing people to go that way.Quoting: DJVikingFor them it is all about the money.That's the sad part. The original intention of Electronic Arts (and the name was carefully chosen) was to acknowledge and foster the creativity of its developers, at a time when even admitting there were real people making videogames was a rarity*. Modern EA is basically the diametric opposite of what Hawkins set it up to be.
*Of course, the founding of Activision is a similar story. And it went the same way.
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Quoting: GuestThis isn't a game engine as such, it's a render experimentation engine. It's intended to allow them to play around with rendering techniques, data sets, etc, and figure out how they want to do certain graphics before trying to plug it into their game engine(s).They also may be investagating an option of a game streaming service for their future products. (Though that's just me speculating)
This makes sense to support GNU/Linux. It probably has some server backends where that's useful, or at least automation that's very likely easier with GNU/Linux, and they won't need Windows licenses for every machine where this is run too.
Doesn't mean there will be full game engine support, but it can diffuse into driver testing, Vulkan feature development, etc, where it will be of use to the GNU/Linux graphics ecosystem. So good things overall any which way you look at it.
I also like the mention of DX12 and Vulkan being pretty much on-par for performance, with the delta being basically because they just need a little more work on the Vulkan side of things.
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Quoting: slaapliedjeI actually quite liked IX, but you could tell where the story fell flat.I think both VIII and IX were rushed out the door way before they were ready for release. So definitely EA to blame. As a result, VIII feels like they cut most of the content, just to get it done, while IX was decent enough, but with a terrible story.
Quoting: slaapliedjeDidn't Richard Garriott leave after 7 though?From what I remember, Origin Systems was acquired by EA after the release of Ultima 7. Garriott didn't leave until they shut down Origin. Sometime after Ultima IX. I'm pretty sure he was involved with all the Ultimas.
Quoting: slaapliedjeUltima Online 2 being cancelled was the biggest EA travesty and I kind haven't really bought many games from them since then. Somehow UO is still going strong, but I recently tried it in Linux with Wine and it failed hard.I'm not into online games, so can't really comment on anything going on with UO. But I'm glad I didn't put any money into Shroud of the Avatar when it was on Kickstarter. Though at least that one runs natively on Linux.
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slaapliedje Oct 30, 2018
Quoting: kaimanQuoting: slaapliedjeI actually quite liked IX, but you could tell where the story fell flat.I think both VIII and IX were rushed out the door way before they were ready for release. So definitely EA to blame. As a result, VIII feels like they cut most of the content, just to get it done, while IX was decent enough, but with a terrible story.
Quoting: slaapliedjeDidn't Richard Garriott leave after 7 though?From what I remember, Origin Systems was acquired by EA after the release of Ultima 7. Garriott didn't leave until they shut down Origin. Sometime after Ultima IX. I'm pretty sure he was involved with all the Ultimas.
Quoting: slaapliedjeUltima Online 2 being cancelled was the biggest EA travesty and I kind haven't really bought many games from them since then. Somehow UO is still going strong, but I recently tried it in Linux with Wine and it failed hard.I'm not into online games, so can't really comment on anything going on with UO. But I'm glad I didn't put any money into Shroud of the Avatar when it was on Kickstarter. Though at least that one runs natively on Linux.
Ultima IX was delayed and the engine redone like 3 or 4 times, it has almost as bad a development history as Duke Nuke'em Forever. It was though one of the early 3D accelerated titles (so early it originally only worked with software rendering or 3Dfx, and Direct3D was added in a later patch.) I thought the game was amazing, but yeah there were parts where the story was just missing the things they wanted to do, but ran out of time.
Ha, I recently watched a video about UO. They had planned out this full ecology for the world. Rabbits for example would eat the plants of a region, but be slowed down due to the wolves eating the rabbits, etc. But then when they let players get online, they just instantly went out and slaughtered everything, making all that work of making the world realistic completely pointless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
I bought Shroud of the Avatar, haven't had much time to play it, but the online seems much like UO, especially the houses everywhere so you can't move bit.
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