Comment by charonn0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by charonn0 | Hacker News Reader

The explosion of Android as a platform has shown quite clearly both the power and flexibility of the Linux kernel, and the usefulness of hiding the complexity and providing a platform-neutral API. The VM-backed programming environment is what Valve perceive as the new gaming market here: they don't want just a console, they want their own iDevice or Kindle Fire.

Mr. Newell mentioned that Valve's games were shifting to a free-to-play scheme. The Steam Box might be something like this: a Linux-based OS, some sort of runtime/VM, a game-writing API (Source-based API?) and an online, on-console marketplace. Whether the VM is Android or even based on Java at all would remain to be seen.

The basic Source (or successor) engine might be distributed built into the Steam Box, with expansions ranging from full-on games to amusing hats available for immediate purchase and automatic delivery. Probably some back-catalog goodies will ship with the box/be registered to your Steam account, too.

Would game developers really want to make games for a VM? Don't most big games usually try to squeeze as much out of the hardware as possible? (Genuinely curious... I know next to nothing about the gaming world.)

And what would the point be? Massive loss of performance by going through a VM - only to save 30 bucks on licence cost for e.g. Windows? Any game dev wants the most performance they can get their hands on.

It all depends on the type of game.

Not everyone does AAA games.

If the gatekeeper (apple/ms/whatever) decides to tighten the screws, taking not 30% of your revenue, but, say, 70% revenue - then fsck the performance, it may be quite reasonable to do major changes in art, gameplay and coding practices just to fit to a more lucrative market model.

And, as is well known, simply the existence and theoretical threat of a plan B (in Gabe's case, Linux) ensures a much better negotiation position and a better (more fair?) plan A.

Game developers are fundamentally human. They care about people playing games, nothing more nothing less. You don't need to necessarily make your game have the latest and greatest graphical glitz. If they can make their game run smoothly on your hardware, they won't care if it's in a VM inside a Virtual Box on a cloud server, under the sea.

Minecraft is written in Java. There were games written in (at least partially) Haskell/Erlang/Ruby/Lisp. Unity3D is based on C#, etc. If tradeoffs are worth it, they'll do it.

While developers surely are, game development companies are not fundamentally human. Now that Bobby Kotick has finished running Blizzard and the FPS genre into the ground, Valve is pretty much the only major publisher left that hasn't been overrun by IP lawyers and MBAs. Minecraft is a great game, but it's not a good representative of the average successful game. Developers make games because they want people to play them, but unfortunately, the only ones who have any control over what they are doing are the indie devs.

We already have indie / casual games on Linux. That's not enough to make Linux a legitimate platform.

That usually only applies to performance-intensive code like rendering, physics, pathfinding, etc.

The actual gameplay is often implemented using scripting. For example, with Unity you write games in C# (with Mono) using their engine, and it's still fast enough to work on cellphones.

There used to be a time when game developers didn't use "high-level" languages like C++ at all. But in the end they moved to them because of other benefits they got, and most of them slowly started to realize that with the hardware getting faster and faster, it's a good trade-off to make. They might think that again.

Android NDK. http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html

There are certain restrictions thought.

If you need to interact with Android, all APIs are done via JNI and certain audio APIs have only Java APIs available.

I'm not sure if you have used that to do any kind of intensive code. I've used it for real time video processing (H264 encoding/decoding and playing from a custom protocol) and it's not a good development experience in the least. It's extremely hard to get good debugging working, eclipse is a giant pile, most of the other IDE's for Android don't support C/C++ ndk, and there a mountain of little special compiler tricks and options to learn. Not to mention the JNI tricks and hidden issues. It's far from ideal. I REALLY!!! wish google would step up and provide a real solution to the problem there. Compared to how easy the same things is on iOS, Windows mobile 8, or bb10 is fairly frustrating.

They want to maximize performance and installed user base.

A huge installed user base like Android maximizes one variable so much that the other gets a free pass.

You are correct. The mainstream gaming industry would have absolutely no interest in developing for a VM, because developing games is kind of like a nuclear arms race.

Unless someone finds a way to get Next-Gen 3d Engines to run in a VM without a performance hit of even 1%, its not going to happen.

Some of your statements pretty much contradict what Gabe has been stating in talks and interviews the last few months.

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