Carmack says Linux very applicable to their games

id Software bigwig John Carmack recently posted a message on the Splashdot forums reaffirming that his company’s published games can run on Linux given the right amount of effort from the programming community.

“There is certainly no plans for a commercially supported linux version of Rage, but there will very likely be a linux executable made available,” writes Carmack. “It isn’t running at the moment, but we have had it compiled in the past.”

Carmack stresses that “it really only takes one interested programmer to make it happen” as he explained that running on additional platforms usually provides some code quality advantages.

The id boss further elaborates that the PC version is still OpenGL, but it is possible that could change before release. “The actual API code is not very large, and the vertex / fragment code can be easily translated between cg/hlsl/glsl as necessary,” he reveals.

“I am going to at least consider OpenGL 3.0 as a target, if Nvidia, ATI, and Intel all have decent support. there really won’t be any performance difference between GL 2.0 / GL 3.0 / D3D, so the api decision will be based on secondary factors, of which inertia is one,” concludes Carmack.

Via Splashdot

id Software bigwig John Carmack recently posted a message on the Splashdot forums reaffirming that his company’s published games can run on Linux given the right amount of effort from the programming community.

“There is certainly no plans for a commercially supported linux version of Rage, but there will very likely be a linux executable made available,” writes Carmack. “It isn’t running at the moment, but we have had it compiled in the past.”

Carmack stresses that “it really only takes one interested programmer to make it happen” as he explained that running on additional platforms usually provides some code quality advantages.

The id boss further elaborates that the PC version is still OpenGL, but it is possible that could change before release. “The actual API code is not very large, and the vertex / fragment code can be easily translated between cg/hlsl/glsl as necessary,” he reveals.

“I am going to at least consider OpenGL 3.0 as a target, if Nvidia, ATI, and Intel all have decent support. there really won’t be any performance difference between GL 2.0 / GL 3.0 / D3D, so the api decision will be based on secondary factors, of which inertia is one,” concludes Carmack.

Via Splashdot