The Drunken Lizard Pub

As a footnote, I just stuck in a Live CD of Ubuntu Rancid Rhino, and extracted the game to a FAT32 partition I keep for swapping files between OS`s.
The game started up, but as I was chewing up most of my RAM, it absolutely crawled along, and was virtually unplayable under that situation.
But, it did prove the dependency issue, so now I know a distro will definitely work, if I decide to add yet another OS.
Much better than having to keep installing OS`s, in the hope that they will run it.

So, is it next week then? I am actually considering a distro upgrade because it is something I will need to do eventually anyway...

xolotl wrote:I'd be willing to bet that there are far more Windows and OSX developers out there than Linux, especially in the gaming world.

linux doesn't have enough developers who write software once and then forget about it as is the case with games. all the stuff linux is used for is developed for decades and has no trouble adapting to the changing needs. and that's a good thing, because it doesn't cluter the system with redundant and obsolete libraries and interfaces. if it's opensource and someone uses it, it gets ported to new interfaces.

if someone wants to release closed source for open platform then noone stops them but they have to do all the work themselves. it's their choice. if enough people are willing to pay for it then they do it and have to suffer the consequences. if not then they don't. it says nothing about how many people are developing for it. for any real work, nobody is crazy enough to use closed source on linux simply because of all the quality opensource software.

I like eschalon series but from my point of view they say they can release for linux and that's why I've paid for it. that's it. it's up to them to make good on their word and so far it has not happend.

IMHO an operating system which has this kind of problems is not very useful.

Why should a game developer be forced to either constantly modify his software after release or to distribute his source code? He should have the possibility to distribute something static and the OS should provide backward compatibility, at least for some years.

bkrueger wrote:IMHO an operating system which has this kind of problems is not very useful.

Why should a game developer be forced to either constantly modify his software after release or to distribute his source code? He should have the possibility to distribute something static and the OS should provide backward compatibility, at least for some years.

It does - the current problem is just that the release was compiled against very NEW libraries, and the engine compiler that BW uses decided to mark those new versions as required, so only the very latest distros can run it out-of-the-box at the moment. It just needs to be compiled on an older distro, is all.

xolotl wrote: It just needs to be compiled on an older distro, is all.

I see. That shouldn't be a big problem then.

bkrueger wrote:I see. :idea: That shouldn't be a big problem then. :mrgreen:

Yeah, probably not. That or the compiler has to be told (somehow) not to make those versions actually required. I think the whole thing's just waiting on BW finding some time to deal with it.

Microsoft cuts of DirectX from its own customers. Windows XP caps out at DX9. Windows Vista caps out at DX10. Windows 7 currently boasts DX11. Meanwhile, more open technologies like OpenGL support the latest and greatest even on measly Windows XP with the latest drivers.

Now, tell me why closed source is so wonderful again?

TheBuzzSaw wrote:Now, tell me why closed source is so wonderful again?

Because who really understands the alternative? Installing Ubuntu and browsing web from it doesn't allow you to understand what the opensource is about except that it looks like it's supposed to be windows for free, which it isn't.

Let's not get this thread derailed with an open-vs-closed debate, yeah? There are better forums than this one for it, and like it or not, Eschalon is closed. (Though I admit that I inadvertantly played a hand in the derailing by making a jibe and the complexity of Linux development.)

bkrueger wrote:IMHO an operating system which has this kind of problems is not very useful.

Why should a game developer be forced to either constantly modify his software after release or to distribute his source code? He should have the possibility to distribute something static and the OS should provide backward compatibility, at least for some years.

It`s really a case of how the program BlitzMax made assumptions, and compiled the code with unnecessarily high dependency requirements.
The same could easily have happened, if BW had compiled the Windoze version on Vi$ta or Win 7, and the program had assumed that DirectX 10 or 11 were necessary to run the game.
Imagine the outcry from XP users if that was the case?

Tyranthraxus wrote: It`s really a case of how the program BlitzMax made assumptions, and compiled the code with unnecessarily high dependency requirements.
The same could easily have happened, if BW had compiled the Windoze version on Vi$ta or Win 7, and the program had assumed that DirectX 10 or 11 were necessary to run the game.
Imagine the outcry from XP users if that was the case?

In fact I reacted to some posts implying that a developer had to constantly maintain her product for Linux, which wouldn't make much sense.

With other explanations, which show, that it isn't the OS'es fault, I am completely happy.

And yes I can imagine the outcry from XP users, because I am one at the moment.

On the other hand I experimented with *NIX on my PC at a time, where Linux wasn't invented (Minix anyone?).

So I agree we shouldn't have a "who has the biggest OS" discussion here.

bkrueger wrote: In fact I reacted to some posts implying that a developer had to constantly maintain her product for Linux, which wouldn't make much sense.

So on the one hand you say that a developer doesn't have to maintain a product for Linux. On the other hand you expect some other developer to maintain their obsolete libraries used by the first developer? But why should he do that if your attitude is that developers do not have to maintain their products? What you write makes absolutely no sense because it falsifies itself.

Somebody somewhere has to put time into it one way or the other and it simply is the one who needs his product to work. And if someone sells his software then it's his livelihood and he should be interested in making it work.

How could this possibly not make a sense to you? It fascinates me how some people think that linux distributions just fall from the sky for free like mana from gods without considering the effort from thousands of people working on them. If you can't keep up the pace then you either open the source code so others can do it for you or you don't release for Linux distributions.

Tyranthraxus wrote:As a footnote, I just stuck in a Live CD of Ubuntu Rancid Rhino, and extracted the game to a FAT32 partition I keep for swapping files between OS`s.
The game started up, but as I was chewing up most of my RAM, it absolutely crawled along, and was virtually unplayable under that situation.
But, it did prove the dependency issue, so now I know a distro will definitely work, if I decide to add yet another OS.
Much better than having to keep installing OS`s, in the hope that they will run it.

So, a friend needed some help repairing a borked winders machine the other week. So I went and burned a new Live CD. This time I thought, hey, why not Ubuntu? Well, when I popped the thing in, it ran abysmally slow. His machine is a 2.4 GHz Pentium-D with 512MiB of RAM. Nothing to write home about, but if it cannot run a Live CD, there's something horribly wrong with the Live CD.

It turns out there is. The Ubuntu disk had partitioned half the RAM into a RAM-Disk, formatted it as type swap and ran swapon /dev/ramdiskwhatever on it! The Linux RAM disk driver allocates the RAM it needs for the disk on initialization of the disk and then never gives it up. Turning it into a swap drive marks it as backup RAM, but with the property that nothing there can be directly used.

So, the leftovers after the swap-drive and the RAM disk the CD image was running out of ate up the RAM was the only RAM the kernel would use directly. When it needed more (which thanks to Gnome was right away), the kernel would carefully shuffle RAM pages between the active remainder area and the swap area when trying to switch between programs or run anything. It thrashed badly, even though it didn't have to go to disk.

If you hadn't figured it out, simply not making the RAM disk and turning it into a swap partition would pretty much fix the entire problem. This is the most horrible boot script design I've ever seen. They went to a lot of trouble just to make the machine run badly (mind you, this likely isn't going to be as noticeable with 2GiB of RAM, which might explain how it could have gotten by any testers). For the record, my eee runs with 512MiB of RAM and no swap, and it runs like a champ. Not having swap is not a big deal. There is no technical reason to do this.

I'm going to bet that you, Tyranthraxus, are having the problem that the game needs most of your RAM, and the kernel has less than half to run the game directly, and is playing a cup game with that portion and the other half.

To the guy responsible for this miscarriage of boot scripting: don't ever admit it to me. You might get smacked. No, seriously, it's that bad, and I would anti-recommend Ubuntu on this fact alone. It indicates a deep lack of understanding of Linux internals. This is the Ubuntu team's job, so you don't have to do it.

-- Jeff

Jeff, unfortunately, that is how most Live CDs work, and there are reasons why they have to work that way. Admittedly, Canonical made a pigs ear of the setup, but their own ethos has led them down this road.
Because they are attempting to ape Windoze in a lot of ways, by creating a Linux based distro that is "plug and pray (sic)", it is bloated, and for the purist, having so much closed source content is anathema.
Don`t get me wrong, Ubuntu has good and bad points, personally I think it is not the right way to go, but it will suit a type of user: ie the type who expects to install it once, and have their choices made for them, so they never have to get their hands dirty with shell commands.

My machine too only has 512Mb Ram, and the Athlon just a bit slower than your P4, and I knew the limitations before I began. It`s run since I built it 8 years ago, and apart from a failed battery, has never let me down, mainly because I didn`t let it do what Windoze expected me to do, I partitioned my hard drives instead of having one huge C: drive, I moved the paging file to my 2nd hard drive, I removed clutter frequently, and ran 3 Linux variants alongside `doze (plus 2 more on USB sticks).
I only used Ubuntu as a test, as it was the distro which Book II was compiled upon, and the only one which came with glibc 2.11 libraries as standard. Now I know that Book II will run upon it, I am safe in the knowledge that I can make a partition for it, install and run the game, this time with swap in its rightful place, and all my RAM available to the system, not holding the disk image in memory.
Hopefully, this will not be necessary, and when BW recompiles against a more standard system, I`ll happily be playing on a more favoured distro, this is not his fault, but a bug in the program Book II was created with.
For the record, my preferences would be Debian stable for its stability and unbreakability, or Mandriva for its simplicity.
If the recompilation goes the way I hope it will, I`d be fascinated if I could run it under Damn Small Linux, using only 45 Mb of disk space, or even a Ram Disk!