I gather then that XNA is some kind of framework or engine-ish thing that helps with writing games, which being Microsoft (ritually spits on ground) is Windows-only?

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI'm really not a fan of all that furry stuff,

That sounds sort of odd coming from your handle and avatar. Are you some kind of wool-only chauvinist?

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Quoting: jens

Quoting: PlintslîchoJust many people voicing their dislike of Electronic Arts, and frankly, you find enough of those in other forums as well. Has nothing to do with the operating system.

It depends on what you want to achieve. Are you happy with the status quo, 2% market share, every 6 month an AAA game? Sure, treat Linux like every other platform, voice your feelings and I guess that the current situation won't change.

If you want to bring Linux to the mass then you will need players like EA on board. The mass of people want to open their legacy documents, listen to their music in proprietary formats and play their favorite EA games. Once Linux has reached a significant market share you have a voice that counts and are able to influence the industry, but not before and not the other way around.

To word it differently:
I would prefer to swallow the evilness now with a bigger goal in the long run ;)

I can see people being of the opinion that big companies such as EA building their games with Linux as one of the platforms is important for the future of Linux gaming and possibly even Linux on the desktop period.

I don't see why that means anyone should shut up about their contrary opinions. Indie developers sometimes pay attention to the things Linux gaming enthusiasts say online. But I am 100% certain that executives at Electronic Arts who exist anywhere near that mythical thing called a "decision" never, ever do. So no matter what any Linux gamer may say to diss EA on GamingonLinux, it will have precisely zero impact on whatever EA might or might not plan relating to Linux. Zero point zero zero zero repeating. So people should say what they want.

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: razing32

Quoting: etonbearsIt is notable that any "philosophical advantage" of open development does not yet seem to have produced a significant body of high-quality games.

If I may , wouldn't this have more to do with lack of other professions joining in also ?
Sure we have coders who can script a great game.
But without artists , musicians , composers , art directors , voice actors and so on , how far can we truly get towards a great game.
Just my two cents.

Yes, that's true. For the type of game you have in mind the artistic personnel greatly outnumber the coding team ( if you assume coding is not artisic ). However, it is entirely possible to produce high quality games where most or all game assets are created procedurally by the coding team.

The real reason there are few significant open source games is simply the cost in time to organise and create them. Doing it for free in your spare time becomes a never-ending slog which, if it ever does complete, produces something that is generally out-of-date. Many people start games, but few are finished.

Indeed, aside from issues around art and so on, games are an odd combination of big project, ephemeral, and subject to rapid obsolescence. Open source projects tend to have a sort of "slow and steady wins the race" thing going. Commercial products are normally made with a big push to ship followed by some bugfixing and then relative quiescence unless they decide to release a new version, at which point they'll do a big-ish push again. With open source--sure, there will be spurts and slow periods, but basically they do well by gradual development over a number of years, starting out crappy but after a long enough time putting in a feature here and an improvement there, eventually becoming on a par with or even better than proprietary alternatives.
But with games, by the time an open source project starts to reach the "not crappy" stage, it's obsolete, either technologically or because nobody cares about that kind of game any more. The few open source games with some success tend to be in categories that are unusually stable and not very graphics-heavy.

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think mostly what annoys people about Stallman is that, while his actual analysis and positions are cogent, consistent and rigorous, he goes around insisting on actually taking them seriously even when it's inconvenient, and suggesting that other people should do the same. It makes us uncomfortable since most of us have no intention of giving up any convenience in the pursuit of liberty or any other ethical good, whether in the arena of computing or any other.

Richard was a very important catalyst in the 1980s in getting people to think differently, and in kick-starting the platforms we prefer to use today.

However, the FSF view is essentially that ALL software, without exception, should be available as source, gratis, and removing all rights of the software author to determine financial beneficiaries.

To many people in the software industry, FSF dogma was/is not much better than the being controlled by the dominant companies. By failing to balance interests among all producers and consumers, the FSF view becomes not so much uncomfortable, but impractical.

The FSF view remains a radical outlier, which is useful to have for comparison. However, much of the important open source software is developed by paid-for developers working on behalf of producers that collaborate on mutually useful code that they probably could not justify individually. Still open source, but not free in the hard-core GNU sense.

I don't think Stallman cares much about the software industry. His position as I understand it is more or less that by far the majority of people connected to software are end-users and, given the freedom to share and improve, a large enough proportion of them will contribute that ultimately a separate paid industry is superfluous (and, if superfluous, then also parasitic). So the GPL-oriented position is more that what matters is all the other industries and activities, not the software industry, and that all those other industries and activities would be better off controlling their own software.
Now indeed, this may be impractical. And it's certainly not something that people in the software industry should be expected to be happy about. But if you conclude that it is practicable, the objections of the software industry are kind of like the objections of guys collecting tolls on a toll road that if you get rid of the toll they'll lose their jobs--nobody else has a reason to care.

Again, games are somewhat different for a number of reasons, and even Stallman is on record saying this is so.

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Quoting: abelthorne

Quoting: GuestDo remember though that Icculus has also done Mac work.. so it's possible this is a Mac only port he's doing

No, the Mac version has been made by the developer (it was planned from the start). But he didn't want to do a Linux port because there's too much support to do afterwards.

Wonder if he figures with someone like Icculus doing the port, it will have fewer issues and so need less support than if they tried to do it in house.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: razing32

Quoting: etonbearsIt is notable that any "philosophical advantage" of open development does not yet seem to have produced a significant body of high-quality games.

If I may , wouldn't this have more to do with lack of other professions joining in also ?
Sure we have coders who can script a great game.
But without artists , musicians , composers , art directors , voice actors and so on , how far can we truly get towards a great game.
Just my two cents.

It's easy to contribute code under permissive licence, because it's usually only useful in that one place anyway. Artists can have a bigger dilemma, because once they create a sprite or a tune for an open-source game, they're likely to see it floating around the web, reused 100 times without as much as attribution.

Indeed, despite the tendency to caricature Stallman's positions, in real life he himself draws significant distinctions between the kind of thing he considers code to be and the kind of things he considers art, music, or fiction writing to be, and the kinds of approach to copyright issues that are appropriate. Stallman does not advocate GPLing things like art or music, and as a result has a somewhat different take on games than on most programs. I think he would be satisfied with open game engines and ideally code generally, but copyrighted artistic assets like art, music and story.

I think mostly what annoys people about Stallman is that, while his actual analysis and positions are cogent, consistent and rigorous, he goes around insisting on actually taking them seriously even when it's inconvenient, and suggesting that other people should do the same. It makes us uncomfortable since most of us have no intention of giving up any convenience in the pursuit of liberty or any other ethical good, whether in the arena of computing or any other.

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Free? Well then, what's theirs is mine.

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Quoting: Doc AngeloWow... is this for real? Playdek collected the money and did not even develop an alpha or something? It would be only fair to give the Kickstarter money to the new developer. But as I understand, the money is already "spent". But on what exactly?

How is it legally? If the Kickstart project literally doesn't do anything, can he be sued? Or is every developer completely free to do as they like with any amount of money?

I suppose nobody will fund their next kickstarter, but if I had 600 grand for nothing I think I'd be able to console myself about that.

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It seems to assume that synthetic empires will always be hive minds. But I don't see why that should be the case. Most stories involving sentient robots or AIs don't feature them being hive minds. And I don't see why they should have to be something that somehow went wrong, either. They could have been perfectly ordinary sentient robots, serving or living in harmony with their builders, when said builders got annihilated in some way that didn't kill synthetics as hard as organics--warfare with bioweapons, for instance, or even plain old nuclear war (certainly not good for robots, but lingering fallout, nuclear winter and so on aren't as big a problem for survivors). Or their old bosses could have transcended this plane of existence, given them a handshake and said "good luck!" on the way out.
So you could perfectly well have a civilization full of individual droids a la R. Daneel Olivaw, R2D2 or whatever, which could be anything from democratic to a military dictatorship run by General Grievous.
Meanwhile, if you're going to have a mech hive mind, why all these humanoids? If you're a hive AI, why not just have sentience in all the mechanicals? Not ships with robot crews, just sentient ships and trains and forklifts and factories.

Still cool. I'm just saying some possibilities are being left on the table here.

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