Developing Games On and For Linux/SteamOS 145
An anonymous reader writes "With the release of SteamOS, developing video game engines for Linux is a subject with increasing interest. This article is an initiation guide on the tools used to develop games, and it discusses the pros and cons of Linux as a platform for developing game engines. It goes over OpenGL and drivers, CPU and GPU profiling, compilers, build systems, IDEs, debuggers, platform abstraction layers and other tools."
Article is generic (Score:5, Informative)
misses to mention popular IDE (Score:3, Informative)
Netbeans - although their focus is Java, C/C++ support is great.
Qt Creator (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You want linux gaming to go big? (Score:3, Informative)
The gaming market is already moving away from Windows and thus DirectX. There was a time when trying to emulate Windows was the most relevant approach but that time has passed already.
Re:So long as we have non-Steam games too (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I guess I didn't mention in my post that one of the unfortunate things about trying to get these older commercial Linux games to run is that they're all more difficult at getting to install or behave properly in modern Linux distros than they do in modern versions of Windows.
In your case, the Doom 3 installer normally uses a GTK 1.2-based installer but relies on system libraries. Most distros don't supply them anymore and even if you can find a way to put them on, the installer looks for 32 bit libraries in particular locations so in the end it'll default to its fallback console-based installer, which at least still works. Then you've got to deal with forcing DOOM 3 to bypass PulseAudio as it glitches badly with either no sound at all, or something like a 5 second sound lag (PulseAudio didn't exactly exist when the game was made).
Ah, good fun I guess. It's certainly more satisfying once you finally get it working as you'll learn a heck of a lot about Linux (including a broader understanding of why people get frustrated with it and go back to Windows). Having said that though, newer games are better designed for the Linux ecosystem and have FAR less issues.
Re:Is this article a joke? (Score:4, Informative)
I have to say that GDB under Eclipse is actually my preferred tool for debugging. Hell, half the time you can't even see that it's actually using GDB yet it does everything I would want in a debugger.
It's all horses-for-courses but in terms of GDB *itself* (i.e. not a frontend to it), I don't think there's much to improve except keeping up with new binary formats, instructions, etc.