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From: Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com>
To: segaloco <segaloco@protonmail.com>
Cc: "tuhs@tuhs.org" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:51:28 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CALMnNGjiz=UdEESuhueunE7F2tAr-5vo0415kqCq0HHww=Sw8A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <sgJhkmXbAnD_3JLUj0_MUbBGzA_ia3QRfjDAKK-bDIMeDr4Eyuykiio-CbQlFu-kmJrcNIYOomHnVmV92Ggs0R58ZoU07p1aMmyBiVh-4Hs=@protonmail.com>

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On Thursday, January 26, 2023, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> We benefit from a general culture of openness surrounding UNIX these
> days.  We see no such openness from Nintendo, Sega, Sony, nor Microsoft in
> their video game offerings, neither current nor former, and similar for
> publishers and studios for the most part.  Anecdotally, when SquareEnix
> went to reissue Final Fantasy 8, they had to rewrite it from scratch as the
> original PS1 source code had been lost.  Apparently this is a pretty common
> problem plaguing efforts to roll older titles forward to modern systems,
> and is one of the reasons shoddy emulation seems to win out over
> intentional ports of anything.
>
> UNIX experienced the rather unique phenomenon of being able to grow legs
> in academia for many years before some legal types tried to put the kibosh
> on that.  Super Mario Bros. was a closed code base from day 1 with a tight
> deadline and little to no reason for it to be shared outside of its own
> development group.  The circumstances are just so wildly different.  UNIX
> is a bit of an anomaly as far as being an iconic, ubiquitous, still
> appreciated design that succeeds in academic *and* commercial spheres and
> also has ample source code and documentation history not only available but
> not constantly being torpedoed by lawyers.  I don't know that we'll see a
> willingness to open up the history of video game development like that in a
> timeframe that sensitive source codes and documents could still be properly
> preserved.
>
> Plus, to the defense of these studios, some algorithm or technique
> developed for management of game resources may still be very much relevant
> to modern engine designs in ways that OS code from the 70s simply wouldn't
> even have a place in modern design.  I wouldn't be surprised if there are
> scene graph and asset manager algorithms and such down in, say, the Zelda
> 64 engine, that the big N is *still* using in comparable engines and
> considers a trade secret.  Hard to say.  But anywho, just to draw some
> comparisons to the preservation state of UNIX vs other technological
> innovations.  We have decades of quality OS code to study, research, and
> expand upon as hackers, but we have no such wealth of real video game
> source codes to educate the masses on game design, especially embedded
> console/bare metal approaches.  This is where the crossroads lies for me
> between my UNIX and game development interests, I would LOVE some day for
> there to be as accessible and quality of resources for those studying the
> history of game design/development as there are for those studying OS
> design.  After all, the way I describe old games to people in a technical
> sense is its just a specific type of OS.  That programmer had to abstract
> all that hardware into concepts like button triggers movement of VDP
> scrollplanes and emission of commands to the FM synth chip.  The thing
> you're using is just a Dpad instead of a mouse and you're moving a silly
> little character instead of a window across the screen.
>
>
The closest I can think of in the game industry to the open source
community of Unix/Linux is Doom/Quake. Doom source code was opened in 1997
and Quake in 1999 and since then we have experienced a whole generation of
programmers and artists playing with, porting and enhancing the codebase. I
don't know of any other game development project that has as much longevity
as those two; and all of it happened because John Carmack made the decision
to open source it based on the popularity of open source Linux at the time.

--Andy

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  reply	other threads:[~2023-01-26 22:53 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 40+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-01-25 20:38 Noel Chiappa
2023-01-25 21:25 ` Clem Cole
2023-01-26  6:30   ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-26 10:56     ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-01-26 12:01       ` arnold
2023-01-26 13:25         ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-26 15:28       ` [TUHS] " josh
2023-01-26 16:07         ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2023-01-26 16:48           ` emanuel stiebler
2023-01-26 21:19             ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-01-26 22:51               ` Andy Kosela [this message]
2023-01-27  0:48                 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-01-27  4:07                   ` Will Senn
2023-01-27 14:08                     ` Chet Ramey
2023-01-27 14:49                       ` Ron Natalie
2023-01-27 15:53                     ` Dan Cross
2023-01-27 16:12                       ` [TUHS] NEXTSTEP 486 [was " Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2023-01-27 14:17             ` [TUHS] " Ralph Corderoy
2023-01-27 13:56         ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-01-27 14:54           ` Ron Natalie
2023-01-27 16:10             ` Larry McVoy
2023-01-28 22:15               ` Dave Horsfall
2023-01-29  0:31                 ` Kevin Bowling
2023-01-29 11:07                   ` emanuel stiebler
2023-01-27 21:42             ` Tom Perrine
2023-01-28  2:18               ` Larry McVoy
2023-01-28  2:49                 ` Tom Perrine
2023-01-26  6:32 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-26  9:45 ` emanuel stiebler via TUHS
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2023-01-25  1:46 [TUHS] " Will Senn
2023-01-25  7:45 ` [TUHS] " segaloco via TUHS
2023-01-25  8:00   ` Lars Brinkhoff
2023-01-25 16:41   ` Rich Salz
2023-01-25 19:53     ` Theodore Ts'o
2023-01-25 20:04       ` Dan Cross
2023-01-25 20:23         ` Larry McVoy
2023-01-25 20:27           ` Chet Ramey
2023-01-27  4:49         ` Theodore Ts'o
2023-01-27 18:05           ` Henry Mensch
2023-01-27 18:24             ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2023-01-26 13:17       ` Marc Donner

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