zBeeble
Amarr
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Posted - 2007.11.05 19:37:00 -
[1]
First of all, I applaud this step away from the evil empire and I want to emphasize that the following is not critical of that brave step, but offered as a starting point for further improvements to the eve client.
I run EVE primarily on FreeBSD using wine. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is that FreeBSD is my primary OS for doing work and EVE requires that one logs in more often than just playing the game --- one has to login to set the next skill to training. Being able to queue several skills to train would be a valued improvement here.
Currently, on FreeBSD with wine, the major bugs are the audio (inoperable) and some graphics bugs that mostly show up after one has been playing for some time --- I think there might be a memory leak related to this. Eve Voice is also not supported.
Let me emphasize at this point that EVE working under FreeBSD with wine (even unofficially) was key in my decision to join EVE. Had it not worked, I would not have purchased an account.
I do have a copy of XP for my laptop (a Dell XPS with a 7800 GTS in it)... and I do use it for gaming. Neverwinter Nights II and Oblivion don't work (at least not well) under wine. PvP and fleet play still require that I use windoze. Sound and eve voice are important there. For standard mission running and mining, however, I run without sound. It works well enough --- although for background mining, sound would be nice so I know when the rats arrive.
I have, in one of my many jobs, been tasked with developing and maintaining code that runs on more than 20 architectures including DOS, Windows, UN*X, and (open)VMS. There are many challenges to this task. Most of those challenges are moot with python. In fact, I would bet the only significant challenge to a full native port of the eve client is DirectX vs. OpenGL.
Now... my knowledge of GL comes from the time before "open" was added to it when I had a 4D-35 beside my desk with the optional 3000 watt video card beside it. At 5000 watts (total) and about 200 lbs, it was about as capable as my laptop is now. It was certainly noisier (although a good chunk of that was the 5 1/4 full height 1G disk it came with). Anyways... it impresses me that on-the-fly DirectX to OpenGL translation is possible without significant degredation in performance (although other people have mentioned pauses as new model items are added --- I do see this). Most amazingly, I am led to understand that this includes on-the-fly translation of pixel shader code.
Finally, to my point: Eve does not stress the performance of graphics cards. My laptop's fans do not appreciably spin faster when playing eve and the heat coming from the laptop seems normal (unlike NWN2 ... where you can cook things back there and the fans spin up to "hover" mode). I appreciate that the new DX10 and DX9 code in the upcoming release will look "prettier" ... but It's still unlikely to stress modern hardware. For this reason, I feel safe in saying that an OpenGL engine will give identical performance to a DirectX engine. Take that a step further, and given that OpenGL is available on all platforms, an OpenGL client should have no problems running natively on all systems --- even those not directly supported (like, say, a sun or even an OpenVMS alpha (heh))
It's great to see some support for Linux. Unfortunately, linux is not a single item... but a class of systems. I would really like to see an OpenGL native client. Maybe if CCP open sourced the client, someone would help :).
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