Games games games

Seen linked on Blue’s News: Kahvipapu articles on Linux gaming with first person shooters, and strategy games parts one and two.  There’s more sections promised, and it covers some games I’ve never heard of.

I link it here because some subsection of these games run on DragonFly; they can be found in pkgsrc or may compile directly.  DragonFly’s biggest hurdle for many games is the lack of 3D support through DRI.  Now that we have modular xorg, it’s probably not too complex a project.  Admittedly, I’d mostly be using it for fancy screensavers, but it’s still a project I’d like to see.

If someone wanted to fill a niche site need, there’s no site that exists for BSD games.  Admittedly, it’s a subset of a relatively small audience, with a limited quantity of games, but that just means that such a site could be built with sheer willpower, rather than funding.   Kind of like this one!

Sound and its details

Chris Turner wrote up an interesting summary of what he’s seen in terms of the need for ‘realtime’ audio and how it’s been dealt with in the Linux world as well as BSD.  There’s some mailing list links in there that can be used to eat up an hour or two of reading on a weekend…

OpenSound goes open source

“Yair K” sent along a note mentioning that, as described on the OpenSolaris forums, 4Front Technologies (also involved with XMMS) is making their OpenSound system open source as of June 14th.

OpenSound was previously available for DragonFly, though support for it was quietly dropped probably around the same time 4Front stopped supporting FreeBSD 4. In any case, it is possible it could go into contrib/ now, if it has benefits – hopefully they will make it available under a more BSD-style license.

Network driver code has been shared between the BSDs a great deal lately, with a flowering of available drivers and support.  Having a shared sound model too would also lead to benefits greater than the sum of its parts.

Stable progress, next version

Matthew Dillon wrote a long message on how things are progressing with DragonFly; some projects like improved SMP support and 64-bit processing are almost ready for prime time, and just need someone to step up and complete them. The track record so far for DragonFly has been astoundingly stable; major changes in threading and process management have gone into the tree and it’s happened completely without destabilizing the system – e.g. it’s been safe even to run bleeding-edge code.

Also: the upcoming release will be 1.10, and hopefully GCC4.x can be made the default by the time 2.0 arrives.