Developing Games under Linux

[Norihide Kise <s100234@example.com>]

>     Craig> On Mon, 1 Jan 1996, Norihide Kise wrote:
>     >> Well, I'm a student studing Computer Science, but I'm not sure
>     >> whether I'm going to program under Linux or not. The reason why
>     >> I play with Linux is my curiosity. By the way, I'm interested
>     >> in writing computer games. Is Linux good for writing computer
>     >> games?
> 
>     Craig> Hmm, probably not, though of course this is debatable.  If
>     Craig> you use the SVGA libs, you might as well do it under DOS to
>     Craig> get a larger audience for your games.
> 
> I won't speak to the issue of X, etc, except to say that a well tuned
> game running under Xlib can be fast, fast enough to run over the
> Internet (I saw a demo of an Asteroids game run that way).  But you
> have to be both an X wizard and a graphics wizard; doing it the
> obvious way won't work.  You don't want to try a game in Motif, I
> don't think....
> 
> One possibility for games under Linux is to use the LIBGRX package
> that comes with DJGPP (DJ Delorie's port of GCC to DOS; uses the GO32
> DOS extender that he wrote).  LIBGRX is an excellent fast graphics
> package for use with DJGPP, and supposedly is being ported to the
> Linux environment.  DJGPP is not as good for writing games as some of
> the DOS environments (in particular Watcom and Turbo C both usually
> produce smaller and faster executables), but it usually is close in
> both size and speed to the best that the commercial compilers can do.
> 
> I don't know what the status of the Linux port is.
> 
> The DJGPP version of Ghostscript running under DESQview/X 2.1 is quite 
> competitive with the Linux versions running on XFree86 3.1.

Thank you much for telling me very valuable information. Is there any 
dedicated book which describes how to develop games under Linux? In the 
U.S. there are more than a dozen of books which explain how to program 
computer games under DOS and Windows 3.1/95, but I've never seen similar 
books for Linux. If anyone knows such a book, please let me know.

Kise