Why do game developers prefer Windows?

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

by siamore • 13 years ago

177 129 13 years ago

programmers.stackexchange.com

ramayac• 13 years ago

One of the most entertaining/educational answers I've read on programmers SE. Fantastic!

It's a really stupid question (but this does not take away from the value of the incredible first answer). It makes a huge, blind assumption (running on Windows means using DirectX and explicitly not OpenGL) and ends up assuming correlation implies causation.

There are many Windows-only games written in OpenGL, and the ones that are written with DirectX is not necessarily because DirectX is better but because there are more consumers for Windows.

The short and simple answer is that "real," modern games are ridiculously expensive projects. The highest percentage of PC-gamers can be found (at the moment) on Windows. Ergo, you will write Windows games and use libraries (OpenGL, DirectX, or otherwise) that are available on that platform.

phaus• 13 years ago

It was a dumb question, but if you scroll down, someone responded with an awesome history of the war between Direct X and openGL. I'm pretty sure that's why it was posted here.

siamore• 13 years ago

your'e right, the top answer provides great insight. I was actually surprised it wasn't already posted here.

blindhippo• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say it's a stupid question. It's a broad question seeking a better understanding that most of us take for granted. And it clearly was treated as a good question by the absolutely astonishing answer it garnered.

Humanity is better for this exchange on Stackoverflow - we need more discussions like this.

chill1• 13 years ago

"Humanity is better for this exchange on Stackoverflow - we need more discussions like this."

Outstanding. Made me smile. I appreciate the level of grandeur you are attempting to bring to bear on this discussion, but this is a discussion about Game Development by the way.

kristiandupont• 13 years ago

I don't see him making that assumption. It's the other way around: using DX means Windows, which is correct. Even so, he is asking if this could be the reason and I don't see how this is a stupid question.

FaceKicker2• 13 years ago

As someone who's never done any game development at all, can you give me some sense of the work that would be involved to port a Windows-only OpenGL game to Mac or Linux? What pieces of it would need to be redone or significantly overhauled?

I would have expected it would be quite minimal compared to the work involved in developing the game itself, but I guess I must be wrong if there are "many" Windows-only OpenGL games.

munchbunny2• 13 years ago

The main difficulty in porting has less to do with OpenGL itself and more to do with the number of platform-specific issues you encounter when you're trying to port code that is highly optimized for specific platforms.

kabdib2• 13 years ago

Sound. Networking. Decent async file I/O. Threading libraries. Dynamic loading of components. Anti-cheat techniques (or any other security stuff you might need). Device input. Choosing and supporting a platform (and the follow-on customer support issues). Diagnosis of customer problems (because they _will_ have them).

listic• 13 years ago

So are indie games, notgames, and Minecraft all not real for you? Reserving the term "modern games" to only "ridiculously expensive projects" and dubbing the rest "not real" is... just one point of view.

What's interesting to me is the fact that makers of indie and notgames, that do not require the enormous scale and pushing the hardware and programmers to their limits - they often make them for Windows, too!

doomlaser• 13 years ago

The highest percentage of PC-gamers can be found (at the moment) on Windows. Ergo, you will write Windows games and use libraries

Indie game developers want to reach the largest audience as well, so I don't see the difference. Additionally, the fact that Windows has such a high marketshare among consumers means that it likely has a high marketshare among indie game developers from the get go.

jpxxx• 13 years ago

..and then another decade passed and OpenGL ES won every growth market, returning PC gaming to its niche status. Massive niche, of course, but niche. More Temple Run, dears?

pjmlp5• 13 years ago

Only on mobiles and we have to thank the iPhone for that.

Before the iPhone there were only crappy 3D apis available, OpenGL done with software rendering,the J2ME 3D Mobile API and even the PocketPC had brain dead versions of DirectX.

As for the game consoles, it is a myth in the FOSS that they use OpenGL.

Except for the PS3, which has OpenGL ES + CG, most consoles not from Microsoft have an OpenGL like API, which is not the same thing.

As for the PS3, most developers actually make use of the proprietary CGM API.

bsimpson• 13 years ago

Browser-based 3d is all going to be WebGL, which is very OpenGL ES inspired.

shocks2• 13 years ago

Because OpenGL is ugly as hell. DirectX is rewritten often (with new versions) to accommodate new ideas, whereas OpenGL new features/ideas are just "tacked" onto the existing code base.

OpenGL also has a huge barrier to entry compared to DirectX.

MSND DirectX resources are fantastic, whereas resources on OpenGL are often out-dated and generally pretty crap.

DirectX requires the DirectX SDK, whereas OpenGL requires GLUT, or GLEW? I think. Perhaps FreeGLUT? OpenGLUT? Or can you just use SDL? Or none of them? What? Exactly.

gte910h2• 13 years ago

I've heard this same sentiment from numerous programmers, including many who prefer Linux. I'm thinking this is probably an informed opinion, not an uninformed one, and should probably not be in the negative in votes.

shocks2• 13 years ago

Hi there, thanks! :)

My opinion is based on my own experiences developing DirectX and OpenGL applications, as well as advice from my brother who is a games developer.

BlackAura• 13 years ago

Frankly, complaining that developing for Direct3D requires just the DirectX SDK, and that developing for OpenGL requires some combination of other libraries is a stupid complaint. It's the kind of complaint that only complete newbies might have - anyone with any idea about what they're doing will not have a problem with it.

Not that it's hard, anyway. You don't need any actual libraries to use OpenGL. You just need up-to-date headers, and a way to link to the system's OpenGL library. The easiest way to get those is to use an extension loading library, which provides those headers, links to OpenGL at run-time (same thing that Direct3D does) and makes all of the available extensions available automatically.

Complaining about libraries like GLUT, GLFW, or SDL is completely irrelevant. If you were using Direct3D, you'd be writing windowing code directly on top of the Win32 API, which you can still do with OpenGL. If you want to use one of these libraries to handle the platform-specific windowing and OpenGL setup, you can. You don't have to - even in portable games, you can still just write your own platform-specific windowing and OpenGL setup code.

So the development setup and libraries are different. So what? It's fairly simple to work out for anyone but a complete beginner. On platforms like iOS or Mac OS X, OpenGL is actually trivial - everything you need is included in the platform's SDK. Same with Android. Same, to an extent, with Linux. OpenGL is only really awkward on Windows, and you can guess who's to blame for that.

But there are plenty of legitimate complaints about OpenGL.

The API is much more complex than Direct3D. There are dozens of ways to do things, with no way to tell which is the best way (short of looking at what Direct3D is doing, and copying that). Behaviour and performance is inconsistent between driver vendors, versions of driver from the same vendor, and across platforms. Some OpenGL drivers (Intel's on Windows, until very recently) are effectively unusable, or don't expose all of the hardware's functionality that Direct3D does. There are lots of legacy issues to carefully creep around, and they can still bite you even if you're not using the legacy features. The shader compilers aren't consistent between different vendors, and are often incredibly slow. Linking shaders is kind of clumsy. Since the API and drivers are much more complex, it's more common to run into severe performance issues caused by the driver than it is with Direct3D (and consoles are better than Direct3D in this regard, because their graphics drivers are so thin that they essentially don't exist).

Even picking a decent subset of OpenGL to use is a pain. Do you use OpenGL 2.x and ignore large chunks of it to get a reasonable API, and broad support? Do you go for OpenGL 3.x or 4.x instead? Which version? Which set of extensions? It's dead easy for OpenGL ES, though - 1.x (fixed function) or 2.x (shaders), neither of which carry around the legacy crap that OpenGL still carries.

Dealing with all of that is the problem with using OpenGL, not working out how to link to it.

Oh, and documentation. That really is shocking, mostly because the majority of documentation or guidelines you might find are written for OpenGL 1.x, and are completely obsolete.

There are some good beginner-level guides to getting started with modern OpenGL:

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ (OpenGL 3.3) http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Tab... (OpenGL 2.0, not using the legacy stuff)

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say OpenGL is ugly as hell. Modern OpenGL (using vertex buffers and such) isn't too bad. But politics, platform-compatibility and corporate hating aside, Direct3D is the better API.

OpenGL suffers from a lot of the same issues as HTML -- designed by a committee of mostly competitors. It should surprise no one that while systems that come out of such arrangements can be vital for the industry, they are very slow moving when compared to an SDK defined by a dictator (benevolent or otherwise) and much more hesitant to allow for the massive changes that new technology would otherwise allow.

cmwelsh• 13 years ago

> whereas OpenGL requires GLUT, or GLEW? I think. Perhaps FreeGLUT? OpenGLUT? Or can you just use SDL? Or none of them? What? Exactly.

I think SFML is in the best place to succeed SDL: http://www.sfml-dev.org/

eropple4• 13 years ago

I don't agree. SFML sounds at first like a really good idea, and at first usage seems pretty cool. But there are invisible walls and they're not hard to run into. The API reflects the developer's way of thinking and I find it somewhat odd (though, to be fair, I'm sure plenty of people would consider the API I've built for my own private library to be somewhat odd, too), and I noticed in my most recent experiments with the 2.x beta that you end up having to drop out of the friendly confines of the SFML libraries into the underlying implementations alarmingly often to do anything interesting.

There are also what I consider reliability issues. SFML 1.6 and 1.6 have reproducible startup issues on any semi-modern ATI/AMD graphics chipset I was able to test it on (2008 to 2010 vintage). The recommended solution from the developer was to upgrade to the API-incompatible 2.x alpha--which still isn't even released as a 2.0 today. It's open-source, and totally his choice whether or not to fix bugs like that (at the time I wasn't capable of doing it myself); I'm not saying "oh, he's not at my beck and call, he sucks," but I'd be very wary of going back there again and it did play a factor in me choosing not to use SFML for my current project.

mrhyperpenguin• 13 years ago

This is why I chose to learn DirectX first rather than OpenGL.

It's kind of like the Android vs iOS debate. DirectX is like iOS in that there's one main feature set which runs on a lot of devices. Whereas OpenGL was pretty fragmented because of extensions.

The only fragmentation on DirectX that I remember is the vertex-texture fetch (which was only supported by NVIDIA cards) vs render to vertex buffer (only supported by ATI cards) features in DirectX 9.0c. After that, Microsoft really started emphasizing the notion of a standard feature set.

OpenGL moved away from all of that starting with OpenGL ES which is partly why it has became so popular.

aequrl• 13 years ago

Well -- after some significant time wrestling with OpenGL/DirectX under Windows -- I got totally fed up and moved to OS X with Objective C... Objective C syntax certainly takes some getting used to -- but the iTunesU developer videos and overall documentation seems much better and more cohesive than the MSDN stuff ever did.

I guess, however, it's always a balancing act... I mean -- I thought Microsoft was supporting C# as its primary language -- however, Managed DirectX (with examples and documentation) never seemed to arrive (in fact it seemed to disappear)... C++ +MFC has to be the worst development schema ever created (luckily I managed to skip that part of the development history by ducking to VC roles)... I think the only thing that is clear about MFC is that it is a M. F. C. and anything to get away from it including Interop and switching to OS X/Objective C (even if Objective C is replete with legacy C APIs etc.)...

dualogy3• 13 years ago

> Because OpenGL is ugly as hell.

Matter of opinion. I vastly, vastly prefer it to D3D and its unnecessary OO abstractions. The GPU is not "object oriented" and the OpenGL state machine is much closer to how the GPU works. It takes some time learning to understand the underlying philosophy, but if you stick with the core profile (3.2 or newer) and ignore the legacy profile, it will prove a really quite beautiful API to work with.

> DirectX is rewritten often (with new versions) to accommodate new ideas, whereas OpenGL new features/ideas are just "tacked" onto the existing code base

What's the problem here. New functions are added, but older ones are still valid use-cases. Seriously outdated stuff that no hardware no longer really natively supports, such as the fixed-function pipeline, is clearly and most obviously flagged everywhere as outdated legacy ("compatibility profile") API and its use discouraged. However, if you really wanna fire up an old OpenGL 1.1 app you wrote as a teen some 15 years ago, you still could. Now that's actually rather neat, isn't it?

> OpenGL also has a huge barrier to entry compared to DirectX.

Nope? Don't even need an SDK for that. It's pre-installed on all major OSes and implemented by all GPU drivers for years.

Even better is, there's no need for what in D3D results in a DirectX install on client machines. That annoys me actually, whenever I install a new game with Steam, it proceeds to "install DirectX" (sometimes v9, sometimes v10, sometimes v11). Sometimes even just when I start a readily installed game after a longer period of not playing it. WTF? DirectX has been "installed" so many times by now, isn't once enough? And can't DX11 automatically provide a DX9 layer for older games? I know that my GeForce-provided GL 4.2 driver happily implements "all GL versions ever".

> MSND DirectX resources are fantastic, whereas resources on OpenGL are often out-dated and generally pretty crap.

Khronos' GL/GLSL API documentation pages are all comprehensible, accurate, up-to-date and complete, and so are their spec PDFs if that's the preferred format. Their Wiki pages also provide a wealth of absolutely current high-quality information.

As for tutorials out there, some are good and up-to-date, some not -- same for D3D I'd wager?

> whereas OpenGL requires GLUT, or GLEW? I think. Perhaps FreeGLUT? OpenGLUT? Or can you just use SDL? Or none of them? What? Exactly.

I have nothing to add to BlackAura's excellent comment on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127185

Other than: you'll just wanna use GLFW and be done with it...

ygra• 13 years ago

DirectX 10 and 11 are part of the OS and there are no standalone installers anymore. What Steam does is noticing that the game has a dependency on DirectX and it launches a stub installer but apparently cannot actually check whether it runs on a recent Windows version where that thing does essentially nothing. There is a DirectX-9-compatible layer in current DirectX.

jblow3• 13 years ago

Being a very experienced game developer who tried to switch to Linux, I have posted about this before (and gotten flamed heavily by reactionary Linux people).

The main reason is that debugging is terrible on Linux. gdb is just bad to use, and all these IDEs that try to interface with gdb to "improve" it do it badly (mainly because gdb itself is not good at being interfaced with). Someone needs to nuke this site from orbit and build a new debugger from scratch, and provide a library-style API that IDEs can use to inspect executables in rich and subtle ways.

Productivity is crucial. If the lack of a reasonable debugging environment costs me even 5% of my productivity, that is too much, because games take so much work to make. At the end of a project, I just don't have 5% effort left any more. It requires everything. (But the current Linux situation is way more than a 5% productivity drain. I don't know exactly what it is, but if I were to guess, I would say it is something like 20%.)

That said, Windows / Visual Studio is, itself, not particularly great. There are lots of problems, and if someone who really understood what large-program developers really care about were to step in and develop a new system on Linux, it could be really appealing. But the problem is that this is largely about (a) user experience, and (b) getting a large number of serious technical details bang-on correct, both of which are weak spots of the open-source community.

Secondary reasons are all the flakiness and instability of the operating system generally. Every time I try to install a popular, supposedly-stable Linux distribution (e.g. an Ubuntu long-term support distro), I have basic problems with wifi, or audio, or whatever. Audio on Linux is terrible (!!!!!!), but is very important for games. I need my network to work, always. etc, etc. On Windows these things are not a problem.

OpenGL / Direct3D used to be an issue, but now this is sort of a red herring, and I think the answers in the linked thread about graphics APIs are mostly a diversion. If you are doing a modern game engine and want to launch on Windows, Mac, iOS, and next-generation consoles, you are going to be implementing both Direct3D and OpenGL, most likely. So it wouldn't be too big a deal to develop primarily on an OpenGL-based platform, if that platform were conducive to game development in other ways.

I would be very happy to switch to an open-source operating system. I really dislike what Microsoft does, especially what they are doing now with Windows 8. But today, the cost of switching to Linux is too high. I have a lot of things to do with the number of years of life I have remaining, and I can't afford to cut 20% off the number of years in my life.

edsrzf• 13 years ago

> Someone needs to nuke this site from orbit and build a new debugger from scratch, and provide an library-style API that IDEs can use to inspect executables in rich and subtle ways.

LLDB[1] can do this, but I'm not sure how far along it is.

[1] http://lldb.llvm.org/

to3m• 13 years ago

Judging by the version that's in Xcode, lldb is not ready yet.

The command syntax is a bit inconvenient compared to gdb. Perhaps I should overlook that, because it's presumably designed to be the lowest level of the debugger, so you interact with a GUI or something rather than with lldb directly, but Xcode's expression window is such utter unreliable junk that I end up having to use lldb by hand all the time anyway.

I've had problems with variable substitution. You can (say) ask it the value of $rip to find out what the value of the RIP register is, but if you try to set a breakpoint at $rip, it doesn't know what $rip is.

I've had problems with lldb telling me that a struct is forward-declared, even though I'm trying to print a local value of that struct type.

Sometimes lldb just gets confused, as in this exchange, which I reproduce verbatim, just as it happened:

    (lldb) p this
    (const CustomTrafficStyle *) $2 = 0x200cf4e0
    (lldb) p *this
    error: invalid use of 'this' outside of a nonstatic member function
    error: 1 errors parsing expression

lldb doesn't have gdb's @ operator for printing arrays; instead, there's this separate command for dumping memory. So instead of "p x[0]@100", you might do "me r -ff -c100 `x`" - which is obviously a big pain, because it's a lot more verbose. I don't even know offhand how you'd use an expression for the count argument either (more inconvenient syntax.) (Furthermore, I don't even believe the me command does exactly the same thing, because I don't think it prints structs, but it usually does the job just about well enough.)

Finally, and most tiresomely, lldb will sometimes just print nonsense. So you might end up with something like this, which is all reasonable enough: (made-up example representative output, not a copy and paste)

    (lldb) p x
    (int *) $2 = 0x1234578
    (lldb) p i
    (int) $3 = 100
    (lldb) p x[100]
    (int) $4 = 123
    (lldb) p &x[100]
    (int *) $5 = 0x12345998

But then...

    (lldb) p x[i]
    (int) $6 = 0
    (lldb) p &x[i]
    (int *) $7 = 0xc4231777

Maddening. Absolutely maddening.

millstone• 13 years ago

I use LLDB with some regularity. The last I checked, lldb is essentially at feature parity with gdb in user space (not sure about kernel debugging), and has additional features beyond that aimed at fixing some of the mistakes of gdb.

As a small example of something LLDB got right, say I want to put a breakpoint in this C++ template function:

    template<int X>
    factorial() { return X * factorial<X-1>; }

Because it is a template, this one line in code maps to multiple program locations (factorial<1>, factorial<2>...) gdb will create a separate breakpoint for each location, and each must be managed separately. But lldb maintains a logical / physical breakpoint separation: one logical breakpoint maps to multiple breakpoint locations, so you can manage all of them as a single value, and more easily treat factorial as if were a single function.

(Maybe more recent gdbs do this too - my version is rather old.)

One downside of lldb is that, while its command line syntax is very regular, it's also quite verbose. gdb's 'attach myproc' becomes `process attach --name myproc`. gdb's `up` becomes `frame select --relative=1`.

lldb does have a set of macros and abbreviations that cut down on some of the verbosity, but they haven't always worked well for me, and I hope they overhaul the syntax.

anon1385• 13 years ago

>Someone needs to nuke this site from orbit and build a new debugger from scratch, and provide an library-style API that IDEs can use to inspect executables in rich and subtle ways.

perhaps LLDB will solve this?

the_mitsuhiko• 13 years ago

The only good thing about GDB is that it can execute almost arbitrary C code in the frames. Otherwise it suffers from the same problems as GCC in that people decided that being able to embed GDB had to be as complicated as possible and it shows.

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

Well, it wasn't deliberate. GDB is just so old that embedded it was never a serious concern when it was built. At some point, it was decided the sanest way to make it "embeddedable" would be the GDB/MI interface, rather than a library.

jevinskie• 13 years ago

GDB only presents the GDB-MI (machine interface) textual interface as an "API". LLDB actually ships a library that you can link against. When it comes to integration, LLDB is miles ahead of GDB.

kabdib2• 13 years ago

The cost of Microsoft being unfriendly to game devs on Windows 8 is likely to be the cause of other platforms getting better, NOT people running in droves to Win8.

On even days I really wish they'd get this. On odd days I hope they never figure it out.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

This is funny, one of the reasons I dislike developing on Windows is exactly because of debugging.

Sure, gdb is awful, and don't even bother with the IDEs, but in Linux you have: strace and valgrind, and they are very helpful.

Visual Studio is great (except for, ahem, having to use MFC) but at other occasions I was using MingW on Windows.

asveikau• 13 years ago

It's not very well known outside of Redmond, but windbg (provided as part of "Debugging Tools for Windows") is an excellent debugger. Steep learning curve, as the commands are cryptic to the uninitiated, but once you get the hang of it it's great. Visual Studio's debugger is absolute crap by comparison.

As for a replacement for strace: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

rjzzleep• 13 years ago

loved the first answer. I still remember the opengl 2.0 debates.

what puzzles me is the little mention of the horrible state of video, and audio in linux. alsa was an attempt to "fix" the audio sub(eco)system. the broken audio is probably one of the reasons why theres still no proper audio apps in linux.

video? well if you have a recent nvidia card on a desktop system you can at least play games. but that's about it. kernel developers make sure the closed source blobs don't use too many gpl features. nvidia blames it on the kernel devs, the kernel devs blame it on nvidia.

everyone talks about how awesome the opensource intel drivers are, and even though they got a lot faster recently with all the valve feedback, they were an order of magnitude slower than the windows drivers(i don't know if that's still the case). and mesa? well, you judge yourself.

I completely agree on your whole developer ecosystem. To me that is the sole reason why mac osx desktop utility apps strived while linux' more or les stagnated(no data just feeling, and maybe that's a bit harsh, but compared to osx apps that's certainly the case).

lloeki• 13 years ago

> theres still no proper audio apps in linux

I don't know how anecdotal that is, but I've heard about pro audio users downright loving JACK [0] (not an audio app, but they must be using this toolkit for something).

Personally I like PulseAudio which has worked just fine for quite some time here on Arch Linux, while it always seemed to be a bloody mess of an integration on Ubuntu.

[0] http://jackaudio.org

belorn• 13 years ago

Linux sound has randomly become much better for the last year, including usb headphones. Don't know if its randomly, or if pulseaudio has finally started get some order to thing.

There is however a different way to look at the issue of sound support. Problems in linux tend to only stay unsolved when too few people care about fixing it. The few attempts made like alsa and pulseadio has been constantly criticized to have bad designs. One could then truly wonder why we don't see proof of concept design that is superior.

pekk2• 13 years ago

Perhaps the random factor is which devices you have tried. I haven't had a problem with this for literally years, though I don't dispute that some people have problems, this is because of the state of the drivers for the specific device.

When Microsoft owns the vast majority of the desktop market forever, and vendors do not make it a priority to support Linux, it shouldn't be a surprise that new hardware is being sold which is not well supported on Linux.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

>I really dislike what Microsoft does, especially what they are doing now with Windows 8.

Are you referring to the Store, Metro, secure boot, or something else (curious if 'something else' not currently on my radar)?

green7ea3• 13 years ago

I'm a linux developer who's had an internship at a game company a few years ago. I had the opposite experience.

During my internship, there were problems with visual studio. Intelisense made everything so slow we had to disable it. VS was pretty slow and was hard to use without being fullscreen on a big monitor.

I use emacs and the gdb intergration is excellent. It's never slowed me down. I've customized it and find it painful to use another debugger (or an unconfigured gdb) so please don't have it nuked. When I develop under windows (without cygwin), I miss many tools I use when programming: valgrind, objdump, grep, sed. I also miss having more control over the compiler and linker. Makefiles seem to be much more powerful and flexible although more complicated then most IDE's projects. SVN and git are more complicated to use without the command line.

The game I worked on (deus ex human revolution) was being developed for PC, xbox360 and ps3. Developping for ps3 means that the code goes through gcc. This caused a few headaches for my colleagues as it is more rigorous with standards (new line at end of file gives a warning, templates need to have class or typename, etc). I was used to it and actually like the fact that it respects standards.

I've had to install windows 7 on a computer recently and was baffled by the fact the realtek ethernet, USB3, video drivers weren't included in the base windows 7 CD. Had I used the manufacturer's recovery option it might have helped but my computer would have been loaded with crapware. Ubuntu longterm support works like a charm on that computer.

From what I've written so far you might conclude that I'm a FOSS fanboy and dismiss everything windows has to offer. That's not it, I'm used to my tools and everything else seems slightly quirky to me. My tools aren't terrible and don't need to be nuked.

Most game developers have had many years experience developing for windows and use windows as their primary platform. Programming for linux is different, strange and possibly frustrating. I don't think the biggest issue with linux game developement is the quality of the tools available under linux but the fact that most game developers are used to using tools only available for windows.

The one thing I think is lacking for linux to be a viable game platform is quality graphics drivers but this seems to be improving with Valve's recent efforts.

TLDR: Using windows is just as quirky as using linux. The biggest difference is that you are used to your quirks as I am to mine. Most game developers are used to windows and switching to linux is hard and uncomfortable.

Taylorious• 13 years ago

Thanks for giving your insight, I found this post really interesting. Without going too far off topic, I was just curious, what kind of work did they have you do there? It just seems like the game industry doesn't get a lot of interns due to the complexity, cost, and time constraints of making major game like Deus Ex Human Revolution.

revelation• 13 years ago

GCC doesn't "respect standards"; it has lots of own features and extensions that will make you stumble when actually writing code for a fully compliant compiler (not that there is one). You can still have makefiles on Windows; it uses the same toolchain setup internally that we are so used from the Unix world. And frankly, the debuggers on Windows are just completely.. ahead.

The Visual Studio debugger can step from managed code, into C++/CLI semi managed code, into native code. It automatically downloads symbols for all system APIs you are ever going to encounter, providing symbols for internal functions, too. It has expression evaluation on all these layers. Theres also the standalone WinDbg debugger that most importantly does kernel mode debugging but is designed similarly to gdb.

Also, of course - edit and continue. The way that GDB is decoupled from the compiler means that they probably won't ever be able to do that without major pains. Its a great design decision for when you need to debug unknown or hostile programs, but thats not the use case for most developers.

maximilianburke• 13 years ago

I've spent the last seven years working on video game middleware and have had plenty of experience to many development environments. I've spent years developing for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, and worked on every console that has been available on the market in that time.

GDB is different, but it's different in a bad way. Jonathan is completely correct in that it's a much worse experience because it doesn't easily give you the information you need to consume in order to find the problem you're looking to solve. Using the text user interface helps considerably but it still gets in the way. Sure, seeing source is fine, but what if you want disassembly too? Mixed source/assembly? Register view? Watches? Switching between threads easily? Viewing memory? DDD is an improvement but it still feels like it's 8 years behind. I'm glad to hear you're productive in that environment, most people (especially most game developers) aren't, and based on my experience getting people up to speed and fixing problems it's easier to get them going on Windows than on Linux.

That said, it's not the worst though. Green Hills takes that crown by a country mile.

The SN Systems debugger for PS3 is the best one I've used, bar none. It gives you all the data you need, is responsive, and has a few really nice features (write memory region to disk).

Not quite sure why you used gcc for PS3, SNC is far superior. It's faster at compiling and generates both faster and smaller code.

Both sed and grep are available for Windows and are definitely part of my toolkit. Visual Studio comes with an objdump substitute (dumpbin). Valgrind isn't available but DrMemory (http://code.google.com/p/drmemory/), Insure++/Purify (expensive, but useful), Very Sleepy (http://www.codersnotes.com/sleepy), CodeAnalyst (http://developer.amd.com/tools/heterogeneous-computing/amd-c...), VTune (http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-vtune-amplifier-xe), XPerf, and for video games especially, PIX, are all available.

nimrody• 13 years ago

Can you share some of your more generally useful gdb settings / macros?

I've been working with linux/gdb for years and while I do agree it is powerful -- I don't find it very convenient.

For example, up until gdb 7.4 (pretty recent) there was no way to automatically skip certain functions -- the 'skip' command added to gdb 7.4 is almost a must for debugging heavy C++ code (and you still cannot add it to your .gdbrc file...)

ekianjo3• 13 years ago

Jonathan, thanks for the post. Did you do the Braid Linux version yourself by the way, or did you get some external help in order to produce it ? From there on, based on your sentiment, does this mean that your upcoming games will not support Linux, or that you will let someone else take care of it ?

sontek2• 13 years ago

I recently asked Jon about getting Braid on steam and he said it being listed as Linux compatible was an error. So I think someone at Humble Bundle did the port for him.

pekk2• 13 years ago

Why isn't it important that you can't really sell games on Linux too well? Even for a free game, this affects popularity greatly.

It seems incredible that you would not even mention this for the entire post?

shadowfox• 13 years ago

Perhaps he is focusing on development issues?

fghh45sdfhr3• 13 years ago

The main reason is that debugging is terrible on Linux. gdb is just bad to use

I am a cross platform developer. I have spent years developing on Windows, Linux, and OSX. (Also on other OSs, but what ever.)

Debugging with gdb is very different from debugging with a GUI IDE like Visual Studio. And if you are coming form Visual Studio to gdb, then debugging with gdb might seem down right impossible.

However, if debugging with gdb is so terrible, that means that each and every UNIX and all the software which runs on them were developed with this almost impossible to use debugger.

And Linus and the entire Linux dev. community, who rolled out Git almost on a whim, are stuck with gdb and can't come up with anything better.

Can that be true? Or is gdb in fact a great debugger, but with a very steep learning curve?

In my not so humble opinion, gdb is much harder to intuitively pick up than Visual Studio. But if do take the time to learn it, it is just as productive.

Actually in my experience, it is slightly more productive, because it forces you to work slower and think more. This go slower and think more strategy has also made my Visual Studio debugging better. Although if I spend too much time in Visual Studio I can slip into a pattern of less thinking and more break point setting.

tl;dr:

It's good that you are a very experienced game developer, but being a single platform developer kind of sucks. Become the kind of developer who doesn't care what platform they get to develop on.

jblow3• 13 years ago

I started on gdb in college in 1989-1993, so I have experience in both worlds. gdb is not a very good debugger.

jblow3• 13 years ago

Also, re this: "but being a single platform developer kind of sucks. Become the kind of developer who doesn't care what platform they get to develop on".

I agree with this in principle. But in practice... I invite you to develop large and complicated projects (like non-small games) and see if you retain this opinion. I find that work environment matters, a lot.

The thing that's a little sad is that developing on Linux could be great, if only open source developers had a culture of working a little harder and taking their projects past the 'basically working' stage and toward hardened completion. When things are solid and just magically work without you having to figure out how to install them or what config file to tweak, it drastically reduces friction on your productivity. So there's a productivity multiplier that open source developers are not getting, thus making all their work harder; because hardly anyone works on the basic tools, everyone else's development is more painful and takes longer, but nobody realizes this because everyone is used to it.

If someone made a debugger that let you inspect/understand programs 2x as efficiently as gdb does (I think this is not even an ambitious goal), how much would that help every open source developer? How much more powerful and robust and effective would all open source software become? (At least all software written in the languages addressed by said debugger...)

Locke16892• 13 years ago

Linus very famously does not use a debugger, so I'm not sure if you're as in touch with the Linux dev community as you think.

dottrap• 13 years ago

Thanks Jonathan for telling it like it is (and enduring the flames). As much as I hate Windows and like Linux, I agree on all your points. (Audio sucks ass on Linux!)

gcc/gdb tools suck because Stallman wants it this way. See Chandler Carruth's talk "Clang: Defending C++ from Murphy's Million Monkeys". Apple wanted to make gcc/gdb more modular, but Stallman doesn't want gcc/gdb to be modular and allow better tools because that would allow those tools to be non-GPL. So Apple spearheaded LLVM to ditch gcc.

LLVM/LLDB might be the way to improvements, but you are also right that the skills in building these higher level tools are not the strength of the current open source community.

So I don't end with a completely negative post on Linux development, Valgrind rocks!

stuaxo• 13 years ago

I wonder if something like llvm + clang could be better?

Clang seems to provide a much more API like experience for building compilers, so something similar for debuggers is definitely needed.

Cushman• 13 years ago

> Old John Carmack at Id Software took one look at that trash and said, "Screw that!" and decided to write towards another API: OpenGL.

"Old John Carmack" makes me think he's some sort of half-myth crazy coot mountain man, which made me realize something: There will some day be mythology about computer programmers.

Whoa.

Turing_Machine• 13 years ago

There already is. Stories about Seymour Cray building (and then burning) a boat every year, tons of stories about Woz, tons of stories about rms, tons of stories about any number of the other greats, some true, some embellished, some made up from whole cloth.

knome• 13 years ago

If you mean one day people will remember the names of programmers in a mythological manner, I doubt it. If you mean there will exist a mythos of programmers. Their persons. Their ideals. Their exploits.

There are books: "Dealers of Lightening", "What the Dormouse Said", "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution"; and beyond them a large amount of information available only online ( textfiles.com is fantastic ). Things like 2600 and phrack. All of the old 'zine releases made by various cracking groups, like "Legion of Doom", where at this point all that remains are various communiques thanking lists of pseudonyms that will likely never be linked to actual names. Older stories, like Mel. The Woz's hacks and Gates' angry letter to early software copiers. The lexical analysis to pin n3td3v as Gobbles Security ( still unconfirmed afaik ). Some of the older bits by related groups, such as phreakers, aren't necessarily programming mythos, but fall into the same crowds and history folders, individuals like Captain Crunch. There are Torvalds and Tanenbaum's humorous exchanges. The first worm. utf8's placemat birth. Larry Wall's idiosyncrasies. Well, all programmers idiosyncrasies. esr. rms. dmr. ken. Anyone else that can be identified by a tla, plus or minus an underscore prefix. Hacker ethic, free software and open source manifestos, deconstructions, apologies, rebellions and dismissals aplenty. Hackers v crackers and demoscene's birth from the latter. Spacewar, nethack, rogue and a thousand MUDs to idle your time away. Many other things that haven't popped off the top of my head.

There won't some day be a mythos such as this. It is here now. And it will only grow further.

jere• 13 years ago

There has, is, and will continue to be. Seeing that Carmack practically invented the FPS genre over 20 years ago and he's still writing games today, I view him as a mythical figure.

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...

pablasso• 13 years ago

I know he has contributed a lot, but I didn't know he started OpenGL, neither could find a source on that.

EDIT: Oh, disregard that, it seems that I can't read. He "wrote" for OpenGL, not wrote OpenGL itself.

sehugg• 13 years ago

I think of him also as the first programmer to start a public blog (via his .plan files - http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html)

bitL• 13 years ago

Mac has outdated OpenGL. Period.

pjmlp5• 13 years ago

Full with Apple specific extensions.

derpmaster2• 13 years ago

Games are already being ported to other operating systems because of microsoft greed.

MS wants to copy everybody with an app and game store, which will be the only authorized way to download and install anything on to windows 8+

They also want to charge 30% to any vendor that wants to sell in their store. Since game makers like Steam have their own content delivery system which will be blocked by MS they already panicked and announced a new linux client and have claimed to be committed to switching everything over the next few years and dumping windows

pjmlp5• 13 years ago

How is this different from how consoles work?

They are no short of games.

AnthonyMouse4• 13 years ago

I don't think the console makers take a 30% cut.

nivla2• 13 years ago

"which will be the only authorized way to download and install anything on to windows 8+"

No, you can install any windows application on Windows 8. Windows 8 != Windows Store. The desktop is only click away from the Start Screen (which can be completely removed, if needed, using a free application) and remains as flexible as on Windows 7.

ie. Steam will work fine on windows 8 as on Windows 7.

derpmaster2• 13 years ago

The CEO of Steam Gabe Newell disagrees with you. They (and Blizzard) are moving away from Windows 8 entirely.

Steam is coming out with it's "steam box" which is a linux run gaming and home entertainment system. You can also run windows on it if you want it's not a proprietary console device apparently.

There are articles everywhere how Windows 8 completely killed the PC gaming scene

novamantis2• 13 years ago

Yes, Steam works fine. However, Steam games are patchy. I've got at least half a dozen which no longer work because of W8. I tried all the fixes drummed up by the Steam community all for naught.

Reinstalled Windows 7. BAM everything works exactly how you'd expect. Hell, it's refreshing not having a fullscreen start menu which takes 2 seconds to start using due to the fade in effect and disorientation you get from transitioning to "Metro" from "Aero."

I whole heartily believe Windows 8 is a waste of money and time for desktop. It should've removed Aero and been Tablet only.

J_Darnley• 13 years ago

Sure. Windows 8 for x86 allows you to install anything you like but we have all seen the future in Windows 8 for ARM.

Someone• 13 years ago

I would think the answer is a mix of "because that's where the money is" and "because that is the OS they run themselves"

d0m• 13 years ago

One reason is just that since game development is mostly all windows based, new programmers learn to use windows tools.. and thus become more experienced with them and not wanting to switch to something completely new which would require a loss of productivity.

Also, and that's really only based from my experiences, it seemed to me that game developers aren't that much into "hacking" linux. Things should just Work. The terminal is a deprecated tool compared to new intuitive IDE. Most of you won't agree with these statements (And I clearly don't) but that's really what I've felt every time I'd talk with a game developer friend or colleague. And, this mentality goes back to when I was an engineering students.. While I had fun learning linux and Python, friends graduating in video gaming would laugh of Python for being a "scripting non-performant language" or they would play around in visual studio with C# and making forms or build some games with XNA.

So, sometimes I think it's not that much about linux not being "good enough" but more about video game developers' mentality to not fit with it. Man, I won't lie, I'm an experienced Linux developer and user and I always have to lurk in all kind of forums and RTFM on every small things that needs to be installed (which is not in the standard library). And, it often happens that I break stuff and spend countless hours trying to fix it. Hell, even last week, I've upgraded a server on Archlinux and it totally broke my system without any warning. I really needed help so I went on #archlinux and I've been told that I should have read the archlinux news before tempting an update. Fair enough, I guess.. but I can understand that on a extremely tight schedule, games developers can't waste time on stuff like that. Compared to say, [next] [next] [finish] windows install where everything just Work.

Please, don't down-vote me if you don't agree with things I've seen from my experience. I don't agree with it neither, but I thought I'd share it here. It's really something I see coming again and again from all kind of different video games programmers.

gizmo686• 13 years ago

>Hell, even last week, I've upgraded a server on Archlinux and it totally broke my system without any warning. I really needed help so I went on #archlinux and I've been told that I should have read the archlinux news before tempting an update. Fair enough, I guess.. but I can understand that on a extremely tight schedule, games developers can't waste time on stuff like that. Compared to say, [next] [next] [finish] windows install where everything just Work.

I don't think Arch is a fair comparison to make. The Arch wiki describes it as: "Arch Linux is an independently developed, i686/x86-64 general purpose GNU/Linux distribution versatile enough to suit any role. Development focuses on simplicity, minimalism, and code elegance. Arch is installed as a minimal base system, configured by the user upon which their own ideal environment is assembled by installing only what is required or desired for their unique purposes. GUI configuration utilities are not officially provided, and most system configuration is performed from the shell and a text editor. Based on a rolling-release model, Arch strives to stay bleeding edge, and typically offers the latest stable versions of most software." [1]

I use Ubuntu primarily, but use Windows exlusivly to use LabView for a local robotics team. I have had issues with both systems. The difference for me is that when the issue was with Ubuntu, I can norally get it back to a workable state withing 10 minutes, or if desperate do a full reinstall in under an hour after which point I have all of my same programs installed, and my configurations/user data restored. When my problem is with windows, solving it is a full days work (or more). [1]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux

DanBC• 13 years ago

> I've upgraded a server on Archlinux and it totally broke my system without any warning. I really needed help so I went on #archlinux and I've been told that I should have read the archlinux news before tempting an update. Fair enough, I guess.. but I can understand that on a extremely tight schedule, games developers can't waste time on stuff like that.

"Be careful with updates, they might break things" is common advice. "Let other people apply the service packs, and see what the problems are, before you go ahead" was (is?) common advice for people running some MS server stuff.

NickPollard• 13 years ago

As a games programmer with coming up to 5 years experience, I can attest that this is largely true. At every studio I've worked at, I've been given strange looks for even opening a terminal, and half of them haven't even heard of Vim. Regardless of what the actual strengths and weaknesses of the tools are, most game developers are so heavily wedded to VS and Windows that there is a huge inertia on that side.

Personally, the mobile game that I'm developing now is being developed entirely under Linux with GCC and GDB, and although GDB has a bit of a learning curve I now find it easier and quicker than VS.

meaty• 13 years ago

pkg-config and autotools!

gcr• 13 years ago

Just pkg-config for me, thanks.

netcoyote• 13 years ago

As someone who has worked extensively in the PC games industry (programming lead on Warcraft, Warcraft II, Diablo, StarCraft, Battle.net, Guild Wars) the reason is quite straightforward: that's where all the users who buy games are. During my time at Blizzard the Mac versions of our titles sold ~4% of the PC numbers, though I expect those numbers have changed with the rise of Apple and, to a much lesser extent so far, desktop Linux.

Even with the rise of Linux -- and my belief is that it will rise very rapidly with the advent of Steam for Linux -- PC game developers have years and years of development experience advantage on the Windows platform.

When I and my two co-founders (all of us programmers) started ArenaNet to build Guild Wars in 2000 we considered *nix vs. Windows for the server platform and decided that we'd be more productive continuing to build on Windows based on our previous programming background. All of us had extensive experience with low-level coding on Windows (device drivers, async coding with IOCompletion Ports) and knew that it would take time to replicate that expertise on another platform.

Beyond the learning curve we knew it would be more convenient to be able to run the game server and game client on the same computer. During development I ran two copies of the Guild Wars match-making server, and two copies of the game client, on a single desktop box to test the matching algorithm code. Having to manage that process across multiple computers would have been more of a hassle.

On a personal note, I've been spending a lot of time working on building/using Linux in a virtualized environment (https://github.com/webcoyote/linux-vm). Linux is an awesome development environment! While I much prefer doing C/C++ development using Visual Studio, Linux is better for other programming languages I use or have tried: Ruby, Python, Go, D, and Erlang. And the ecosystem, with projects like Redis, ZooKeeper, Postgres and a slew of NoSQL servers makes it incredibly powerful because it isn't necessary to write everything from scratch (except SQL), as we did for Guild Wars.

RobotCaleb4• 13 years ago

Thanks for your insights, Patrick. I've heard nothing but good things about working at ArenaNet. Nobody has every mentioned whether that's due to your guiding hand or the fact that you left

RobotCaleb4• 13 years ago

Ugh. I'm getting downvoted for a tongue-in-cheek joke. :(

eksith• 13 years ago

Game developers target Windows because it's(was?) popular. They'll target mobile devices more and more alongside consoles more and more (although, that line is already starting to blur).

Users gravitate toward what's available, what's usable and if possible what has the most vibrant ecosystem of apps. Games, if the developers want to make any money, will target that platform. If the apps are common on a specific platform, then it stands to reason tools for developing other apps/games will also be common on that platform.

Tekker• 13 years ago

As 2D video game developer with many titles under my belt, I can assure you it's simply a matter of market share. The general rule (before hybrid CDs) was write it for Windows and if it sells, then write it for Mac (later we would release both Windows and Mac on a hybrid CD).

Traditionally Linux was all over the map in terms of graphics, and market share was nil. Nowadays, Linux is prevalent among computer geeks, but in the general population (that have the real $) it's effectively nonexistent.

TL;DR - Follow the money.

PeterisP• 13 years ago

Well, most game development happens for consoles - so if the question is "Why game developers use Windows" not "Why PC game developers use Windows", then it still is an interesting quesion.

If you're coding for PS3 or Wii, why is Windows better than Linux or Mac? Marketshare doesn't explain that.

eropple4• 13 years ago

The tooling is generally better on Windows, or was. A buddy of mine who does some pretty intense PS3 work switched to a Mac about a year and a half ago and said that it was rough going when he'd tried a year or so before that.

tonetheman• 13 years ago

its all about the benjamins...

huherto• 13 years ago

They closed the question. It irritates me that the self appointed stackoverflow police are very quick to close questions. They barely give them a chance to see if something good or creative comes a long. (Such as the first comment)

godDLL• 13 years ago

One of my friends is a gearhead, this is what he had to say:

"...Shader Model 1.1, which basically was "Whatever the 8500 does."" Correction - it was Shader Model 1.4 The GF3 already did 1.1, and the GF4 Ti (3 years later) did 1.3.

A very good read though. A decade of drama put into simple words.

Why do game developers prefer Windows?

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