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posted by martyb on Saturday August 12 2017, @08:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-the-fat-out? dept.

Doom 3: BFG Edition, the remastered version of Doom 3 (id Tech 4) which had its source code released in November 2012, has gained a Vulkan renderer (Vulkan is a graphics API successor to OpenGL that can better utilize multiple cores and GPUs):

Dustin Land of id Software has been working on the "vkNeo" project in his spare/personal time as a Vulkan renderer for Doom 3 BFG / idTech4, which was open-sourced a few years back. This is along the same lines as the vkQuake open-source port of the original Quake to running on Vulkan.

Doom 3 can easily run on nearly any modern PC these days with its classic OpenGL renderer, but now with Vulkan the game can run at 500+ frames per second in simple areas or 150~300 FPS in the more demanding areas of this first person shooter.

The Doom 3 Vulkan code was open-sourced over night via vkDOOM3 on GitHub for those interested. Land commented, "It was written as an example of how to use Vulkan for writing something more sizable than simple recipes. It covers topics such as General Setup, Proper Memory & Resource Allocation, Synchronization, Pipelines, etc."

This new build of Doom 3 is Windows-only for now but the code will be added to RBDOOM-3-BFG soon which does support Linux.

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  • (Score: 1) by redneckmother on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:14PM (4 children)

    by redneckmother (3597) on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:14PM (#552903)

    I'm not a gamer, but it seems to me the most popular excuse (among young folk) for using MSWin is "games".

    It would be interesting if a major game development company released Linux versions first, then "backported" to Windows.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:31PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:31PM (#552906) Journal

    I think it's a lot easier to make cross-platform games than it was 10 years ago. If your company uses Linux internally for development, you might just do that.

    Worst case scenario, offer a less stable Linux version.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:07AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:07AM (#553077)

      Nothing. Ever.

      It's all a matter of abstraction.

      It's just that game programmers aren't interested in cross-platform compatibility; rather, they're interested in MONEY! Their software isn't beautiful; it's functional for making money.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:27AM

        by jmorris (4844) on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:27AM (#553113)

        Don't be a tard, K? Game studios, unless they are Id software or something, are not all that great at programming. They license an engine and shovel content into it until it is deemed shippable, then a point release or two to fix the worst day zero bugs, a few expansion packs and then onto the next game. A game studio these days has a lot of artists, modelers, level creators, writers, and all those creative types but not a lot of Mt. Dew swilling code jockeys anymore. What programming they do is more likely to be Python or Lua to drive the internals of the game engine. If they license an engine that is cross platform they MIGHT give enough of a crap to bother getting a Mac and Linux box and building those versions and they might not. If the engine they license (the key devs having prior experience with it being the primary reason to pick one over another) is Windows only or Windows and XBox only, that is what they use and they DO NOT CARE. They are in the entertainment business, not tech.

        Do I like that? I don't own a Windows PC so you figure it out. Thankfully Steam is starting to make some inroads in that thinking.

  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:50PM

    by ledow (5567) on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:50PM (#553302) Homepage

    That may be true at home. But it doesn't really matter what you use at home. Most people still buy Office "because I need it" rather than them actually needing it. But they have an Android tablet, an iPad, an iMac, etc. as well as several games consoles, too, so it's not that ONLY Windows will do in the environment.

    Windows survives because of business apps, and ease of management (you may snigger now, but it's true). Setting up a network is literally "Boot Server, run a couple of wizards, add users, now starting joining shop-bought PC's to the domain". Everything from Hyper-V to DFS to AD to DHCP failover to WSUS to Group Policy is all there ready to go. Even Exchange, the bane of most of our lives, is very simple to get up and get running and do some quite complicated stuff on it.

    Now the business apps, they are going the way of the dodo and everything is going "web". That's a good step. But still that web step often involves Windows Server, SQL Server and IIS. We have to ask ourselves why that is. It's nothing to do with technical ability of the OS or the application. It's to do with setup, management and availability of that knowledge in the workplace.

    I once set up an entire school, on fresh hardware, from scratch, 150+ machines, single-handedly unboxing them and configuring them, in the space of a summer holiday with PLENTY of time to spare. It wasn't difficult. However I then spent a week getting 50 netbooks on Ubuntu booted, configured, using Likewise Open (called something else now) to access files and authenticate against the network. I'm sure if I paid a fortune for Red Hat something-or-other, I could make it simpler, but it still wouldn't be as simple as it was on Windows. I've done the same with MacOS (which I hate) - all the golden-triangle authentication junk just to get it to join a network, let users log in and access their files. Is it because MS make it obtuse? It doesn't appear so. We just don't have the kind of integration necessary. MacOS eventually got it (was it Sierra? From then on, you just forget all that old junk and join the machine to the AD LDAP and off you go). Linux hasn't.

    Windows discovers devices on the network and sets them up. Joins domains and sucks down their settings, software, etc. Linux doesn't. I can provide a billion good reasons WHY it doesn't, but it doesn't.

    So the Linux machines I see deployed are nothing to do with games or not (RetroPie is fabulous if you haven't tried it, SteamBox has 1/3rd of my 1200 games on it, etc.), they are the black boxes that just work. Unfortunately, there's no black-box desktop that just works. Deploy Ubuntu on a Windows network, it honestly couldn't care less and doesn't help you join anything at all. There are good reasons, yes, but to a user or even an admin who's been tasked with managing it as part of their job, they want simplicity and hand-holding. "Hey, we detected this domain... do you want this computer to join in so users can login to this machine?". There's nothing like that on Linux.

    As such, I can create a virtualised, failover, resilient network from a handful of server GUI installs, with hundreds of services capable of servicing hundreds of users and doing things like resilient DB backends to a public mail server in a matter of minutes on Windows. You can't on Linux. You can do it all. You just can't without knowing the whole process inside out. I literally learned how to do VM failover, file system distribution, mailserver database mirroring, etc. "on-the-job" with Windows. Never done it before. Read up a bit about it. Clicked the buttons. Voila.

    On the other hand, it took me hours to set up a proper DRBD setup for one test loopback file system across two servers, after I'd spent days updating them to the same versions on two different distros.

    Linux has billions of advantages, and it does great things. But it's still not user-friendly. Go set up a VM in Ubuntu to boot Ubuntu. From a fresh install. No knowledge. Off you go. Now do the same in Windows Server using HyperV to boot Ubuntu (which should be a lot harder!) or Windows. Or even - nowadays - a Server VM virtualised in a Server VM virtualised on a physical hypervisor. Or things like remote desktop services with VM's that auto-create from template and destroy themselves on disconnection.

    Windows, believe it or not, wins because its easier. If you look at Windows processes and laugh "How is that easy?", just imagine what someone booting up Ubuntu or similar for the first time feels when they just want to put the close button on the right of the window, or get rid of the side-bar. I'm not saying Windows is any better, but there's a reason it wins in commercial space, and people take that home and it means it wins at home too.

    Unless it's in a device so simple to operate that they don't even know its Linux (e.g. a satnav, a games console, a Kodi box etc.)