GarageGames Starts IndieGoGo Campaign To Port Torque 3D To Linux

Open source (as Torque 3D recently became) is one thing; cross-platform is another. Now, reader iamnothing writes "GarageGames is heading to IndieGoGo to port Torque 3D to Linux. The campaign is centered around hiring a dedicated developer or team to port Torque 3D to Linux. The primary target is Ubuntu 32bit with other flavors of Linux as stretch goals. All work will be done in the public eye under our Github repository under the MIT license."

Why 32bit?

[Bradmont]

Why is 32 bit still the target platform for so many software projects? My computer is 5 years old, and has been running 64bit linux that whole time. Are 32bit PCs even sold any more?

I already donated a few years ago...

[borfast]

Crowdfunding to port Torque to Linux? Interesting... but I'm not falling for that one again. I already "donated" a few years ago, when I shelled out over a couple hundred dollars for both Torque3D and Torque2D under the promise that they worked on Linux (they actually sold three versions: Windows, Mac and Linux), only to have all my requests for help completely ignored when I complained that neither of them worked, and see the whole Linux ball dropped a few months later. So GarageGames: screw you, you're not getting my money again.

The year of Linux Gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't help but notice all the gaming-on-Linux news popping up recently with Steam coming to Linux, the first Unreal Engine 3 game for Linux and so on.

Re:Why 32bit?

[miknix]

64bit binaries are also larger, meaning that for the same hardware configuration the CPU can cache more 32bit code than 64bit. 64bit binaries also take more RAM, increasing swap times.
This is why I'm running a 64bit kernel with most of the userspace being 32bit, the exception are numerical computation tools (numpy and friends) which live in a 64bit chroot. This is my personal laptop, office computers are fully 64bit.

If you want "the best of both worlds", you have the new x32 ABI which gives you 32bit pointers and the extended 64bit CPU register set:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI [wikipedia.org]
Gentoo is already publishing release candidate stage tarballs [lwn.net] for x32, official support should be coming pretty soon..

PS: Parent is also me, I forgot to login.. sorry about that.

Re:I already donated a few years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought Torque and Torque2D before they were IAC [according to my GG account, I purchased it on 2004-10-19]. Linux support was the reason I bought Torque, and T2D was filthycheap and could be built into Torque [it made an awesome overhead map widget]. Looking at my GG profile, I also purchased TGEA on the promise that Linux would be supported eventually.

Then they summarily dumped Linux support; the code already existed and mostly worked, and GG made the pre-meditated decision to expel Linux, despite it taking genuinely minimal effort to make it work [I even submitted patches but they were never accepted]; that was when I quit using Torque. There's something immensely infuriating about someone having a great, portable codebase, and instead of just keeping it cross-platform, continuously making decisions that led to massive platform-dependence. Even back then, it was obviously a bad decision.

I also successfully had the Linux/X11 codebase building and running on OSX back in the day. That was kinda fun to actually make work. [ooo ! screenshot: http://icculus.org/~chunky/stuff/x11osx.png ]

Nowadays there's so many perfectly viable options. Going back to a company that deliberately gave me the finger in the past just feels like asking for more pain, especially when they're asking the community to pay money, when the past the community offered *code*. Turns out I can hold a grudge like nobody's business.