Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Adventures in Linux Land

You'll need to wait a little while longer for the RC2 announcement, but it should be going up later on today. :)

Part of my stated intent with DirectQ is to have it running (or at least able to run) on a wide range of systems.  This is one of the reasons why I fret over things like Windows 98 support, and the implications of migrating to different versions of Visual Studio.  There is however only so much that can be done while keeping the program (and myself!) sane and rational at the same time.  That is one of the reasons why it doesn't run on Windows 98.

Anyway, I am by no means a "Weenix Loony", and I have a healthy disrespect for "Weenix Loonies" the world over, but there is another class of Linux user out there (who I would hope is - or one day will be - a majority among Linux users).  These are people who have truly evaluated the options available in the cold light of day, and not being tainted by subscription to any ideology, nor being motivated by what they hate (as opposed to being motivated by what they like), have made the decision that Linux is the correct OS for them (these people aren't "Weenix Loonies" either, by the way).

I think it would be cool if these people could get a decent game of Quake, using DirectQ, through Wine.

There are a number of reasons why somebody might want to use DirectQ instead of another engine, even in a case where you know that both the Windows API calls and the Direct3D calls are going through an emulation layer.  One reason is the increased capacity, another reason is it's ability to handle bigger maps and more complex scenes with ease, and a third reason is that it's so damn fast (that one maybe not so relevant on account of the emulation).  Maybe someone just likes the way DirectQ looks and the way it does things, even.

So over the next few days I intend bringing up a Linux machine and running some tests.  To begin with I'm going to run it through VMWare just to establish that the thing works, but I also have an old(ish) PC knocking around that I could even do an installation on if I needed to or wanted to.  So far I've been doing some preliminary familiarisation work, just installing and configuring parts of the OS (Ubuntu 9.10 for now), and believe it or not I'm actually liking a lot of what I see.  I'll probably never feel totally at ease with Linux (my days as a Unix admin have left deep scars) but it's certainly a lot better in terms of an OS being a means to an end (running applications and getting stuff done) rather than an end in itself than it was the last time I looked.

What a very pleasant surprise.