OSNews

Er, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115 an extension has been around to do that for you for years

Nothing wrong with spicing up the news with something a bit unusual from time to time. It's certainly tech.

Personally, I'm not that much of a fan. I just didn't "get" it, compared to the other RTS games. For one thing, Starcraft had very "rock paper scissors" gameplay. In MP, it seemed to be a resource gathering race rather than a tactical game. I think some design decisions were made simply to distinguish it from the other similar games of the time.

Like a lot of FPS, I think that RTSes have become very application like; they are a "browser" that you use to access the content. Compared to its contemporaries, I considered it to be rather feature poor, if not actually a step backwards. I seem to remember that even Warcraft II (DOS) had some features that were missing from Starcraft such as unit repair.

It had awful path finding: having previously moved a tank slightly to the left, a minute later you'd hear the sounds of battle as your tank had decided to go all the way round the map and through the enemy base in order to move a few meters. In other games, a fellow unit would have the intelligence to move out of the way to accommodate.

It also lacked a lot of the high tech stuff that was be added to its competitors such as way points.

I seem to remember that I completed it in SP mode and then had a quick go online but I never considered it to be one of the greats, like a lot of people seem to.

The C&C games were good but Dark Reign is still my benchmark for 2D RTS games. Homeworld is another favorite.

I seem to remember that even Warcraft II (DOS) had some features that were missing from Starcraft such as unit repair.

Starcraft did have unit repair, although only the Terrans had the ability. And only on mechanical units, until the expansion pack added medics which could do the same for people. The Zerg actually slowly healed themselves over time without any interaction, and the Protoss were stripped of this ability to compensate for some of their other talents (but also had shields which regenerated much like the Zerg or could be instantly topped off by building a special structure).

It had awful path finding...

Yes, there's no question that was the biggest problem with the game.

Starcraft had very "rock paper scissors" gameplay

Yes, that was actually one of the selling points - every strategy had it's own weakness to another and therefore gameplay never got stale and predictable. While there wasn't anything really innovative about Starcraft, it simply did everything in the RTS genre extremely well. Probably the biggest difference between it and other games at the time was how different each race in the game really was from the others and how you had to adopt new strategies when playing each of them.

Edited 2007-05-19 23:57

Homeworld. It played great, had an awesome story and in every way aesthetically beautiful. It was art in every way. An audiovisual wonder. A truly cinematic work, and quite possibly the best RTS ever made.

Oh...sorry...

Yet both races were the same... with different "graphics".

What made starcraft so powerful was that there were three races that you had to play completely different.

Not to really knock Blizzard or Starcraft, but Homeworld was quite literally the game I thought Starcraft was going to be. Not Warcraft with "space" units. So I have to say that I was very disapointed with Starcraft and it's rescource management gameplay.

Another good RTS game was Myth/Myth2. You had a set number of guys and that was it. No build a million guys and "zerg" the enemies.

That said, I really have no expectations for Starcraft 2. So it's unlikely I will be disapointed. I'm interested to see what Blizzard brings to the market.

Homeworld is especially fun when played with some of the third-party addons out there. Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels is one of the mods I really enjoy putzing with still...

http://mods.moddb.com/3564/star-trek-sacrifice-of-angels/

Edited 2007-05-21 20:32

Any word on some form of linux compatibility?

I know wine has historically worked quite well for Blizzard games, but hoping for something a little more substantial than silence and presumed wine support within a year of its release.

Mac gaming is pretty barren as it is, and that's because it's 1) a minority and 2a) used to be an entirely different processor architecture and 2b) now you have to support two architectures!

The problem with Linux gaming support, even from companies who are great enough to simultaneously release on Windows & Mac, is that there is too much to support in Linux. Hundreds of distros, hundreds of packages and dependencies, sub-par graphics support in the majority of cases (i.e. for graphics cards that matter to gamers). Linux isn't exactly catering for game makers is it?

The best a company could reasonbly do is to support just one or two precise distros and versions otherwise the testing and support would be through the roof. If GPU vendors start offering graphics drivers that match up to Windows & Mac standards, then you might see commercial Linux game releases.

"""
If GPU vendors start offering graphics drivers that match up to Windows & Mac standards
"""

I agree that a half dozen popular distros which release twice a year are a game company's support nightmare.

But I disagree about graphics support for the cards that they care about most being a problem.

Those cards would be NVidias and ATIs. NVidia's drivers are essentially equivalent to their Windows counterparts. And the ATI drivers, too, I think. Both Linux & Windows users complain about ATI driver quality.

I know that Doom3 and Quake4 run quite nicely at "High Quality" on an AMD64 2800+ and NVidia 6800GT under Linux.

On the other hand, supporting OSS drivers can be a problem. The game companies are not going to release and support a different set of game data simply because the free drivers can't legally support S3TC compression or what not.

Edited 2007-05-19 21:44

The ATi drivers are comparable to their Windows counterpart in-terms of opengl performance. This says a lot about Ati's opengl performance which isn't very good. However, Ati's directx performance is great and unfortunately the linux crowd doesn't get to see this type of performance. Ati's has slowly been trying to implement better drivers and they have been releasing incremental changes to their driver. I'm hoping that at some point they release the code or scrap the driver and rewrite it from scrath with more focus on opengl performance being on par with their directx counterpart.

BTW, don't count out Intel which will be more than enough to run this game at a decent clip.

I'm hoping that we get full wine support this time around (cinematic and all). Having to jump out of the game to watch the cinematic brings you out of the atmosphere of the game and I think its totally stupid. If anything they should at least make sure everything works in wine or support a more user oriented distro like Ubuntu. Every major distro out there with the proper packages already support the file formats that Blizzard uses for their cinematic, they might as well have some for this in linux so that the game uses mplayer or something when it comes to playing a cinematic.

Doom3 runs just fine natively on any modern distro thanks. Too much to support? Please, that's not how Linux works.

The amount of distros available is not a problem. That didn't stop iD, BioWare, and Epic now did it? Hundreds of packages and dependencies? Is there not hundreds of packages and dependencies for Windows and OSX? Again Epic, BioWare, and iD had no problem with this. The graphics card support is solved if you use a gamer's card that has good driver support--which is Nvidia right about now. There are really only two choices (for commercial 3d games) here so this is not that much of a problem. You want to play commercial games on Linux, that requires hardware acceleration, then you either use ATI/AMD or Nvidia--driver support is available for both. Again, this didn't stop iD, Epic, or BioWare.



More like game developers need to start thinking cross-platform more instead of being tied to the Windows platform with Direct X. You see Direct X is the main reason why most of the AAA commercial games being released on Windows never make it to the Mac or Linux. Since Starcraft II is being released on the Mac, I'm sure it is probably not that much more of an effort to port to Linux if the demand is there; I for one am willing to pay as I'm sure that many other Linux gamers are two.

The amount of distros available is not a problem. That didn't stop iD, BioWare, and Epic now did it?

id released unsupported ports of their older games. They outsourced a supported version of Quake 3 to Loki, who found out Linux games don't make money.

Hundreds of packages and dependencies? Is there not hundreds of packages and dependencies for Windows and OSX? Again Epic, BioWare, and iD had no problem with this.

No, there's not. Windows and OS X come in very limited numbers of combinations. All the core libraries come packaged together in a known good combination. You don't have to worry about issues like the C compiler team being completely seperate from the C library team. You don't have to worry about what compiler version & settings were used to build the binaries. The further away from the core of the OS you get, the more variance there is, but also the less relevant it is to a game developer.

From what I've read through the years that as long as game development starts with being cross platform form in design then it is fairly easy to do. Blizzard obviously is making enough money off of their Mac development and they are the 800 pound gorilla. I think I've even seen Carmack state something to this effect as well as Ryan Gordon.

I think Apple is starting to make some stride with OpenGL, though I hear that not everything they've done has made it back into the pot on the linux side.

I do think that a lot of new Mac sales are going to young adults these days, and that you'll find more and more gamers on the platform whether they be running MacOSX or Windows via bootcamp.

As someone that uses linux for gaming, you are making it much more complicated than it actually is.

Most gamers use nvidia cards, which is well supported in linux. Event the mediocre ATI drivers seem to at least handle games.

Hundreds of distros and dependencies? Give me a break. It is pretty easy to create a statically compiled game with a cross-distro installer. At most, GCC and the standard SDL library are the most you need to have installed.

And six months later a new X.org is released and the game doesn't run correctly anymore.

Two episodes ago one of the lead developers of Intoversion ( http://www.introversion.co.uk/ ) was interviewed on LUG Radio. ( http://www.lugradio.org/ )
According to him their games were written for mac and windows, which was the major work. Porting these games with portability in mind then to linux was only a small step. Why shouldn't this be the case for starcraft2?

"The problem with Linux gaming support, even from companies who are great enough to simultaneously release on Windows & Mac, is that there is too much to support in Linux. Hundreds of distros, hundreds of packages and dependencies, sub-par graphics support in the majority of cases (i.e. for graphics cards that matter to gamers). Linux isn't exactly catering for game makers is it?"

Actually not totally true. A game designer does not have to support many distros, just Linux. The Loki installer is a wonderful thing. As for graphics cards, the 2 biggest manufacturers of graphics cards DO support Linux, although with proprietary drivers. Graphics cards that matters to gamers are either ATI or Nvidia, no other manufacturer actually counts for games.

This is pretty much irrelevant for games, as most would be distributed with their own statically-linked libraries.

Supporting various versions of Linux is not really an argument against porting games to Linux. It's more of an issue of Linux not having directx support, and the small market share.

Fortunately, WINE-based solutions keep making strides as far as gaming is concerned - I suspect Starcraft II will be relatively easy to play under Linux.

It's not just a DirectX issue, considering the Mac doesn't support DirectX either. In fact the Mac more or less uses the same libraries as a Linux version would.

What do you need on a linux system for a decent game?

1. 3D Graphis: Use OpenGL. OpenGL is cross-platform, and you don't need to include any package/whatever just besides GL.h ... 'nuff said.

2. Input/Output framework: Use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer). It's the cross-platform counterpart to DirectX and it works very well and simple. It gives you keyboard, mouse, display, event loop, threading, ...

3. Sound: Use OpenAL (you could use SDL, too). OpenAL is a de-facto standard, yet again. 'nuff said.


All of the three things you need I mentioned are part of every decent distro. You _don't_ have to care about these as a game developer. They are just there, like Direct X and MS Paint is on Windows.

All of the three things I mentioned can be used for Mac games, too. And Windows games, too!

All of the three things I mentioned are used by Doom III, too. You see, I don't talk about Tetris here.


Releasing games for Linux is no problem at all. Everything you need is there in form of a distro-independent standard. And if you really need something really special, you can just statically link it and ship it with your game - as all the Windows games do, too.

Edited 2007-05-21 00:28

"Hundreds of distros, hundreds of packages and dependencies"

Static linking.

"If GPU vendors start offering graphics drivers that match up to Windows & Mac standards,"

You know, considering the endless stream of problems people seem to have with the ATI and nVidia Windows drivers that can't be all that hard.

You know, they're the ones making the game, not you - I bet they give less a shit about your opinion, then you do them.

I second that and add the following: wouldnt care even if there was a linux version

I was actually going to ask you about that, but you beat me to it. Thanks for saving me the time.

On topic, sweet. Star Craft is my favorite game of all time. Just as long as they don't try to make it into an MMORPG I'll be perfectly happy.

Good on you. I can't understand why humans have such difficulties with concepts of "if they don't support me, why should I support them?". If people actually got off their lazy asses and boycotted companies we'd get somewhere.

Why don't I give a shit about Blizzard? Well, if they can support the Mac platform, then they can sure as hell support the Linux platform, the numbers are similar, and it wouldn't probably be that hard to port from OS X to Linux in all honesty.

My other views on this new game is that it looks like crap. Yuck. Plasticky looks, no thanks.

Dave

Hahaha

Don't worry, Blizzard didn't announce a release date yet. SC2 is still in pre-alpha condition.

You still have time to finish school.

The StarCraft sequel is one of the most eagerly waited sequels in all of gaming-dom. Fans have been waiting for it for the better part of a decade, and it's finally here. Hence the exception.

Personally, I'm looking forward to picking up a copy. I gave up gaming years ago, but the magnitude of this release is going to make me indulge in some flashbacks to high-school

I'd like to make an exception for Starcraft 2 because... it is the sequel to what many see as the best realtime strategy game ever made: they announced StarCraft II. The original StarCraft, released in 1998, tops many best-games-of-all-times lists, and has sold over 9 million copies worldwide; it is still one of the most popular online games, despite its age. In fact, in South Korea, StarCraft matches are even broadcast on TV.

well, would you care to read if the moon was about to crash onto the earth..? Or would you complain that it's no Osnews and rather get caught out without an umbrella in the street when it happens?

Personally, I never cared about Starcraft, although even my gf was a heavy gamer. I am just too goofy when it comes to building up stuff in games - all I can handle is a big gun But I can see why this is news anywhere - where have you been the past decade

Starcarft announced vs Moon crashing into Earth is such a stupid comparison I won't even comment it. But feel free to go on with that story of feeling safe from that with an umbrella. Seems to have potential.

I guess the reason for little games support on Linux is not technical. After all, frameworks like SDL, OpenGL 2.0 and OpenAL is more than enough for most of the games. (And they come with the additional benefit of supporting a plenty amount of platforms).

On the other hand, it seems like there is little intensive of buying games by Linux users.

It does not mean all those people who prefer Linux just do it because it's cheap, but most of the richer ones are not casual desktop users, and generally have corporate or special needs (like PVRs, firewalls, etc) which usually exclude gaming. (And most of the time they can also afford, and probably already own, a Windows license for another partition).

Until Linux is dominant (or really significant) on average desktop, I personally do not expect a large flow of games coming to us.

Edited 2007-05-19 22:51

sukru,

Yep. Thats an entirely different issue. In reality, though, it is usually a technical problem as well. Most game companies just use DirectX not OpenGL or Mesa.

But if there is a Mac version then the effort to port to any other Unix/Unix-like platform with decent graphics drivers should be relatively minor if anything at all.

Edited 2007-05-19 23:01

I don't think this would hinder development *too* much.

You can program a Graphics Engine to accept different codepaths for different graphic susbsystems (OpenGL, DirectX9/10, Software Renderer, etc.)

Mac versions use OpenGL, that doesn't stop Blizzard from developing for Mac. The problem, like I stated in my previous post is demand.

Actually, I would think a Linux gamer would be more than willing to spend the cash on a proper Linux version of a game.

Just because you're running Linux, doesn't mean you're cheap. It means you have better things to spend your money on than a shoddy, overpriced OS.

"""
Actually, I would think a Linux gamer would be more than willing to spend the cash on a proper Linux version of a game.

Just because you're running Linux, doesn't mean you're cheap.
"""

Tell that to the skeletal remains of Loki Software, Inc. Born: August 1998. Died: January 2002.

Loki was survived by a large number of unpaid creditors, and a huge pile of unpaid debt, and are the biggest gaming success that we in the Linux world have seen thus far.

Edited 2007-05-20 00:11

Loki was also terribly mismanaged and had a business model that wasn't all that hot. A company like Blizzard, Bioware, or Id are in a much better position to provide ports and profit off of them.

You're right. It's not like Linux can't run it, or it's too hard. The problem is simply that there is not enough demand on Desktop Linux for commercial games.

Until this changes (Even slightly) things will remain relatively the same. This is of course with exceptions from great companies who see past numbers (id software)

Maybe this talk from Introversion at LugRadio Live will be of interest:

http://www.introversion.co.uk/events.html

"They're [sic] talk "Playing with the Penguin: Developing Proper Games For Linux", will discuss Introversion's relationship with Linux, and the challenges of porting games to the platform."

I don't buy those rumours. There was the World of Warcraft Linux petition, which had thousands of users pledging to buy the game and a subscription if they ported it to Linux.

If they had a port from day 1 it would have been free money. I signed the pledge, and would have bought it (I bought Doom3 as soon as the Linux port became available). I try and let my wallet speak. Granted, it's not a very loud voice, and the windows gamers who severely outnumber me make sure of that, but at least I know I'm standing up for what I believe in.

It's in my best interests to not have a Linux port anyway I guess. Gaming is not real life, and I really should be going something constructive instead.

Yeah, but even thousands of users are not really a lot when you have 6 million subscribers.

And, seriously, supporting a non-open-source game on linux is a lot more of an effort than on more standardised platforms like Mac or Windows.

Edited 2007-05-20 12:38

There was the World of Warcraft Linux petition, which had thousands of users pledging to buy the game and a subscription if they ported it to Linux.

How many of those thousands broke down and bought the windows version (possibly running it under wine) when the Linux version didn't show up? The problem, as it where, is that there are very few linux users who are interested in buying games and don't have access to a windows machine. And many of them when faced between the choice of the windows version or no version will chose the windows version. So there really is even less incentive to port to linux than it might seen.

<ingore this.... .... .... please>

Edited 2007-05-20 22:18

You must be refering to FreeCraft...

I don't understand your point of view. Freecraft was copying Warcraft. Even the graphics were "horrible but similar".

I know. I coded for Freecraft (tho very little).

Yeah, FreeCraft and the bnetd projects. FreeCraft simply changed their name to Stratagus, which from last I checked looked to be working on getting StarCraft's data files to work with it so Linux users can enjoy StarCraft natively.

It doesn't make sense at all why Blizzard would even bother with trying to hurt projects like this, since it would still require people to buy copies of WarCraft and StarCraft to be able to get the data files. Considering by this point anyone who has Windows that wants these games already has them, yet all those Linux only people would not.

"So how long until after the game is released that an open source project tries to create a server for it, or clone it then Blizzard can send a Cease and Desist letter to them?"

Why would you run your own server? Access to bnet is why you buy the game in the first place and it's their best copy protection and I like it, because it makes it so that "everyone" actually BUYS the game if they are going to play it. I'm more than willing to pay for Starcraft II and I will, it will probably be awesome, I've played so much Warcraft III ROC and TFT and I bought those to.

It's another issue with small shitty games which I play rarely, say on consoles and so. But the kick ass title of the year? No problem.

Just buy the game and use bnet, use a proxy/tunnel/vlan/.. or whatever if needed.

Why would you run your own server?

I guess you should ask that of the developers of Neverwinter Nights, Battlefield (1, 2, 2142), half-life, counter-strike.....etc.

There are so many dedicated Linux game servers out there (and not so many game clients) that it's ridiculous. Yet you wonder why anyone would want to run their own servers?

How about because you want to tweak some of your own settings, maybe make it so only warriors can join. Well I don't know, I never used bnetd, but still just because you have no idea why you'd want to do it, doesn't mean others can't figure out a way.

Not to mention people DO need to still buy it for the CD-Keys, etc. The only copy-protection here is for people who actually play online as well.

The fact is, for the Free Craft project, they didn't even say "Stop programming that, you bastards" 'cause they don't have the rights on ALL RTS games. The only thing they complained about is that they had the trademark for "Craft" which is incredibly stupid. So they had to change their name.

bnetd on the other hand is still available as a download, but it hasn't been developed on since February of 2002. It's not as if they were outright encouraging people to pirate Blizzard's software. But I'm sure there are those that decided to pirate their software just to spite them for shutting down a non-profit software development group.

Personally I think the only games that Blizzard has even made that are good were the Diablo games, but all the developers of that left long ago and are making Hellgate London. But then again, I don't play a lot of RTS games to begin with. Though Dark Reign was cool.

"I don't buy any Blizzard games anymore because of this. Not that I would buy StarCraft 2 anyhow."

Btw, I guess Blizzard will care very much about your opinion then, yours and all the other (probably) pirates which in the end just don't wanna have to buy the game and run it anyway.

Sad because this is the one game I did NOT want Blizzard to announce, I was hoping for Diablo III, which I suppose Blizzard will get around to about the same time I am ready to head out to the retirement home.

You do know the origial Diablo team left Blizzard right? They are working on Hellgate London http://www.hellgatelondon.com/