Re: [orca-list] Wine apps in Orca?

[VojtÄch PolÃÅek <krecoun gmail com>]

This discussion is very interesting.
Just several questions:
1. I understand that sounds and music all come for a price, especiall
music. I think that sounds are a bit easier to find, i mean legal ways
now, but it depends on required quality and luck.
But how do developers of regular games get their funding? They need
sounds as well, don't they? Yes, they don't have to be in such a high
quality, but.. still... I think the greatest problem is minor target
group. There are far less blind users on LInux than on Windows and it is
questionable, if they are willing to pay for some game. Maybe this will
change as time goes.
2. I am writing a simple game my self, as Tom stated, it is a "bop it"
style game with some twists. My dream is to write some kind of sudoku
game, but it is true that these games don't require 3D sounds, so this
is a bit different position. However, I will research these options more
and moree. Pygame offers some sound positioning, as we can see in Sound
RTS, I don't know what fmodx offers.
3. I have managed to run Topspeed under Wine, with some glitches. But
you can try it.
Vojta


On 28.6.2012 04:39, Thomas Ward wrote:
> Hi Kyle,
>
> On 6/26/12, Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com> wrote:
> > In my opinion, which is
> > probably shared by many people, Linux seriously needs more games in general,
> > and more audio games specifically.
> I do agree we need more accessible games for Linux. As an audio game
> developer myself I'd be willing to do it if I could raise the funds to
> make it worthwhile financially. As you probably are aware I've got two
> commercial games in development for Windows, and I've paid out several
> hundred for sounds and music. Quality sounds, music, and voice acting
> doesn't come cheap, and unfortunately most software for Linux is based
> on an open source license which usually means the developer has to
> raise the funds for sounds, music, etc through some other way than
> direct sales. That's not to say all software for Linux strictly
> follows an open source model, but I don't know what kind of commercial
> market is available here.
>
> > The problem I am seeing is that many
> > application developers feel that Wine is somehow a viable option, and
> > therefore don't feel that an application needs to run natively on Linux. Of
> > course, we know better than anyone that Wine is not at all viable, and that
> > native Linux applications are highly preferable to Windows applications
> > running under Wine, even if the end user is able to see the screen.
> Some people might see it that way, but the other issue is that most
> Windows developers use technologies not available for Linux.For
> example, Jim Kitchen has written several free accessible games for the
> blind, but they are all written in Visual Basic 6 use DirectX 8 for
> sound and input, and SAPI 5 for speech. Since those technologies are
> proprietary to Windows there is no way for him to just port them to
> Linux without a complete rewrite from scratch in a language like
> Python using Pygame for sound and input and PyTTS for speech
> output.Since Jim Kitchen is unlikely to learn another programming
> language and port them to Linux using open source APIs none of his
> games will be available for Linux users  without using Wine. The games
> from GMA, LWorks, and various other audio game developers have
> precisely the same problem of having been written in the wrong
> programming language and using proprietary APIs.
>
> I'm pretty sure Entombed by Driftwood Entertainment could be ported to
> Linux since it is writtin in C# .NET, but it would have to have a
> major over hall to work. It is based on Microsoft's XNA framework, and
> that would have to be removed and replaced with SDL .NET.  As for
> speech output it uses Sapi, and I don't know of any .NET binding for
> Speech-Dispatcher so one might have to be written. Bottom line, even a
> game that is written in a language that could be ported to Linux it is
> a pretty major undertaking to remove and replace proprietary game APIs
> with open source ones if the game isn't properly designed for Linux
> compatibility in the first place. Which is why so many software
> developers just tell people to use Wine.
>
> Cheers!
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