Thanks to LinuxGames.com, I learned that you can now download the icculus UCLUG speech audio files.
If you don’t know, Ryan Gordon is a Loki alumnus who is well-known as the guy who ports commercial games to GNU/Linux. I liked hearing him on FLOSS Weekly a few years back. You can download the audio for that show at http://twit.tv/floss8.
The Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group had a few talks, and Ryan’s talk starts around 35 minutes into the almost 3 hour audio file.
How many of you think of yourselves as game developers? Alright. A lot more of you should be raising your hands. A lot more of you are game developers than you think you are.
He takes you through a very brief history of Linux-based gaming, from Cracked.com to Loki to Vicarious Visions. He talks about Loki’s business model, which was porting existing, shipped Windows titles to Linux. I wrote about the problem with this model in Why Aren’t There More Linux-Using Gamers?, and Ryan mentions how low the interest is for people to buy the games they already purchased. He describes how Linux-based game servers became popular compared to the unreliable Windows servers. He talks about APIs such as OpenAL and SDL, which is a Google Summer of Code project.
He also talks about the false perception that Linux users don’t respect intellectual property, and false impressions about Linux users in general.
He finishes the talk by asking developers to teach other people how to develop. After all, the ability to create something, whether it is a game or not, whether it is on Windows or GNU/Linux, is great. The Q & A session at the end is also fascinating.
You can find the links to the MP3 or OGG files at icculus.org.
[tags] linux games, game development, video games [/tags]