Games
While in São Paulo one developer asked me "What kind of games run on OpenSolaris?" He was specifically interested in World of Warcarft, which, as far as I know, doesn't have a client for OpenSolaris. However, I was able to tell him about the Games on OpenSolaris Community. As stated on the site's main page, the games community:
- Lists games that can be played on OpenSolaris.
- Provides extra install instructions when needed.
- Hosts games that have been packaged for OpenSolaris.
- Hosts new games that OpenSolaris contributors have written.
The games are ranked by popularity and also come with a key indicating the amount of effort required to run them - some need to be built, others just need to be installed. A popular repository for games is Blastwave, which is why I blogged about it just a couple of days ago.
Whether your a game developer of just a player, consider getting involved with the game community.
Happy gaming.
I've played Wesnoth, it was pretty fun. Took up several hours of my time while I went through a few of the campaigns. After a while, though, I started doing what I do in other games that get tough (save/load/lose a piece/reload/try again), lol. I tried to get involved with Darkstar to start Game Creation - but I was having trouble, lol.
Posted by Ryan Kopf on October 30, 2008 at 08:07 PM GMT #
Games, fun and entertainment are obviously really important if one intends to reach a broader market. IT _is_ a fashion industry and most people have a personal relationship to their computer (facebook, skype, photos) and that relationship helps them do good work.
The games list is ridiculous. You have to work pretty hard (for a gamer) to be able to enjoy what you can easily enjoy on all main stream desktops running windows or macosx.
However, I think OpenSolaris can be very well positioned for entertainment if a serious approach was taken by using a pseudo-closed source solution which Linux resists to do and Windows/MacOSX won't do because their stuck in traditional thinking.
Please excuse this sudden burst of naive optimism but:
First the sound system must be fixed (boomer!), then all media (codecs) must be available ($). The really neat trick would then be to partner up with experienced entertainment industry. Let take Sony, and make their game libraries work on OpenSolaris. Impossible? Ridiculous? Imagine how spectacular any release marketing would be like if supported by Rare libs. :) Bringing Sony around into this chocking new mind set might be less impossible than one might think.
The toys win in the end. :)
Posted by Kristofer on October 30, 2008 at 10:57 PM GMT #
SONY has their own "horse for the race", and it is called PlayStation3, which in combination with Yellow Dog GNU/Linux (a RedHat derivative), makes for a phenomenal gaming console / workstation combination, so I don't see why SONY would even be interested to work with the OpenSolaris community at this point in time.
The PlayStation 3, like her elder sisters, has a special, proprietary, SONY kernel, which is optimized for games to run more or less "on the bare metal", and other than SONY building in a provision to boot other operating systems, I just can't see SONY choosing a full blooded System V UNIX as a bread-and-butter platform for mainstream games to run on.
Where SONY *might* be willing to engage is supporting an OpenSolaris port to the PS3, which actually isn't as farfetched as one might think, since the PS3 is Power-CPU based, and there is the "Polaris" PPC port, which is currently scrambling to choose the right hardware to conitnue the PPC porting effort.
(Power and PowerPC processors share the same instruction set architecture, so carefully written code will run on both.)
That written, Solaris has lots and lots of potential to be a multimedia powerhouse, and NVidia gave us a taste of what that is like by fully supporting Solaris with drivers (and System V packages!)
The audio is currently being worked on, since the developer of the OSS (OpenSound System) has been paid to work full time on integrating OSS into (Open)Solaris.
The last building block is the SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, which currently builds and runs on Solaris (and is also available from Blastwave).
Then, there is the issue of bringing audio applications to Solaris (like equivalents of "Buzz" and "Reason"). These free/OSS alternatives currently run on GNU/Linux only, and a significant porting effort will have to be invested in order to clean them up and make them run on a true UNIX.
Other than that, Solaris himself has excellent infrastructure to be a realtime multimedia convergence and processing platform. All that is needed is some powerful userspace audio processing software (and codecs in the consumer/end user space).
Posted by UX-admin on October 31, 2008 at 07:18 AM GMT #
Oh, and BTW,
"The Ur-Quan Masters"
(a free/OSS port of the original "Star Control 2") runs like a dream on Solaris! Anybody who has played Star Control I and II knows what a major piece of art those games are.
Posted by UX-admin on October 31, 2008 at 07:22 AM GMT #
UX-admin: Porting to PowerPC platform sounds cool.
I don't think PS3 compete with a regular desktop user. Rather I think they exist in synergy with each other. Much like Suns OpenSource strategy helps hardware sales. Besides, if the rare-libs could be sold using a modern subscription based model, it might be an orthogonal revenue stream. I still think it should be explored. Not because OpenSolaris needs SONY tech, but because there is a need for _content_. OpenSolaris can be an excellent platform and infrastructure already, but if there is no content it doesn't matter. Any content provider would be ok... SONY could not launch PS3 without an expensive PS2 compatibility chip to bootstrap them into the next generation.
I love Wesnoth! :) Never played "star controller". Where is "orange box" for opensolaris?
Posted by Kristofer on October 31, 2008 at 10:04 AM GMT #
The only computer game I bother with is BZFlag, a portable open source game that does, yes, does run on Solaris and OpenSolaris.
<a href="http://bzflag.org">BZFlag</a> is very fun.
Posted by Nico on November 04, 2008 at 09:10 PM GMT #
If someone wants to try games in Solaris, then they should consider Wine which can run Windows games flawlessly with near full speed. However, an Nvidia graphic card is recommended as ATI does not have any good 3D Solaris drivers yet.
Posted by Kebabbert on December 02, 2008 at 06:01 PM GMT #
You can't expect anyone to port commercial games to OpenSolaris. There aren't even proper ports (exception some versions of Unreal Tournament and Quake) to Linux, which has the higher marketshare. Even most big wig OSX games run on WINE.
Posted by Tom Servo on December 03, 2008 at 07:35 PM GMT #