DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)
Linux (and principally Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has become the primary production platform for the animation industry, largely due to the engineering efforts of DreamWorks. Behind that effort sits Ed Leonard, chief technology officer at DreamWorks, who has been recognized for his work with an Annie Award for "promoting the Linux open system for animation in animation studios and gaming software development.""
Posted Feb 7, 2008 19:52 UTC (Thu)
by drag (guest, #31333)
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by dhess (guest, #7827)
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Posted Feb 9, 2008 12:05 UTC (Sat)
by dhess (guest, #7827)
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DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)
Funny how games and movies are made on Linux, but they generally are not legally allowed to be
enjoyed on Linux due to copyright-protection schemes.
DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)
True. but don't the vast majority of games and movies have little real enriching value to
human beings?
Consider the open-source software freely available to linux users that is of lasting benefit:
tons of development tools, educational programs, scientific programs, graphics and multimedia
software.
and particularly, regarding games:
I suggest that most of the "latest" "hottest" new software that just busted onto the market
with much ado will generally receed from the scene at the same speed.
Most of the source code for those proprietary games gets lost after a few years when the
company goes out of business/bought/merged/whatever. Most of those labors are generally lost
forever. Whereas many of the open-source written ten years ago continue to influence new
open-source projects and the way cutting-edge proprietary games are designed today.
Visual effects for movies, yes, but to my knowledge very few (if any) commercial games are developed using GNU/Linux. I used to work at a company that created both games and visual effects, and for the most part the game designers, artists and programmers didn't want to have anything to do with GNU/Linux, unfortunately, even when a particular tool was available only on that platform. Many man-years of effort were spent porting those tools to Windows so that the games division would use them.
Personally, I thought it was a massive waste of resources since running the tools on Windows provided little, if any, new functionality -- less functionality overall, in fact, since many features such as integration with the render farm and the lighting tool were very GNU/Linux-specific and could not realistically be ported to Windows. Porting really only provided convenience and comfort level for those unfamiliar with GNOME or KDE. Obviously things like the Xbox and DirectX SDKs require Windows development machines, so there was no getting around having Windows on people's desks, but there was nearly complete opposition to requiring dual desktops. And many of the games people I talked to, especially the designers and artists (less so the developers), had a pretty negative opinion of GNU/Linux and the applications available for that platform in general.
Anyway, that's just one example, but I suspect the rest of the games industry is much the same. There may be a few exceptions where some development is done on GNU/Linux if the game supports that platform, e.g., the Unreal series at Epic or any of id's games, but I'd call that a porting effort and not really development.
It's too bad, really, especially considering that GNU/Linux has been a rousing success in the visual effects industry, but then the SGI+IRIX heritage and massively parallel, batch-oriented computing nature of the work are probably what's responsible for that market not going the way of Windows.
DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)
A lot of PS3 games use Gnu/Linux somewhere in the development. Insomniac mentions it here and if you look at the "Making of" videos of Uncharted you can see the programmers using Emacs (on X).
DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)
DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)
We did a PS3 port, too. At least part of the PS3 dev toolchain was available both on
GNU/Linux and Windows. In fact, if I recall correctly, the compiler was just a port of the
GNU/Linux version (gcc, I think) that plugged into Visual Studio. I don't know if the
performance analyzer was available on GNU/Linux; I only saw it being used on Windows. But the
state of the PS3 tools at that time (summer 2006) was pretty awful, so things have probably
changed in the meantime. In any case, just as they did with the in-house tools, the game
developers I worked with chose to use the Windows versions.
It might be different if your house is PS3-exclusive, but outside of Sony I don't imagine
that's a very common situation, especially given the state of console sales. If you're
developing for DirectX and/or the Xbox in addition to the PS3, it's just hard to make a good
business case for developing on GNU/Linux, I'm afraid. :(