DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)

DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)

Posted Feb 8, 2008 2:09 UTC (Fri) by dhess (guest, #7827)
In reply to: DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net) by drag
Parent article: DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux (c|net)

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.

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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. :(