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Gaming on GhostBSD

Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2017 6:13 am
by Cybermax
PC gaming is important to attract the audience.
I can think of two categories into which are games divided: proprietary and open source.
1. Linux version of Steam, and how to run it.
2. Lutris is an open source gaming platform for GNU/Linux. I created a topic on their forum, with a request to make a client for BSD, waiting for an answer.
3. Other open source games, that can be compiled specifically for BSD from source code.
So let's discuss, perhaps someone has experience or ideas.

Re: Gaming on GhostBSD

Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2017 2:00 am
by kraileth
Hi Cybermax!

You're right, this is a topic that's of importance to a lot of people. I've been a gamer myself during my youth but over time stopped completely due a total lack of time for that. Nevertheless people (rightfully) expect from any OS that it enables them to play games. So let's discuss this a bit. You already brought up some points:
  • Linux Steam
  • There have been reports of people who successfully run Steam on FreeBSD. I don't consider Steam to be evil but I won't use it myself so I cannot try it out. However if somebody from the GhostBSD community would investigate this field, I'd be happy to help with documenting this properly on the wiki.
  • Lutris
  • Didn't know about that one. The author has replied to your thread now and he's generally open towards porting of his application but he won't do it himself. He also mentioned that it's programmed in a rather Linuxy way which may make things more complicated for a native *BSD port. Yet there's one other option: We have the Linuxulator which provides emulation by translating Linux syscalls. It's by no means perfect but it will make some things run - and it has recently grown 64bit support. The show stopper is usually that it emulates Linux 2.6.18 - which is a pretty old kernel today. CentOS 5.11 (which is officially supported until the end of march) ships with that kernel and if Lutris works on CentOS 5 that chances are pretty good that FreeBSD's Linux emulation will be able to handle it. Of course work is being done on FreeBSD's side to support emulation of newer kernels as well!
  • Ported games
  • [i]ls /usr/ports/games | wc -l[/i] currently outputs [b]1.187[/b] on my system - which is quite a nice number! Most of these games should be available as packages, too. You can browse the ports [url=http://www.freshports.org/games/]on freshports[/url] if you wish. Ports for other games could be created as well if there were more people interested in gaming on FreeBSD (the common "hen egg problem"). A lot of open source games are not really Linux specific and will compile just fine on FreeBSD. Ports for these project can be created fairly easy and once there's a port, they can get packaged and distributed in binary and thus ready to install, too.
I'd like to mention one more field where gaming is already posible: We have several emulators like DOSBox which allows to play tons and tons of old games. And of course we have WINE, too. There's also emulators for some gaming consoles but I'd rather discard this as very few people have legal ROMs for those.

On, and by the way: It's a matter of fact that there are far more games running on FreeBSD every day than on Linux! Why? Simply because Sony's PS4 is based on FreeBSD (9.1 or something if I remember correctly)! A whole lot of people already play on FreeBSD - without even knowing it. 8-)

Re: Gaming on GhostBSD

Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2017 10:11 am
by ericbsd
Not to say that PS4 out sold Xbox One, also PS3 is running on a Custom version FreeBSD. for Gaming there is Wine and Linuxator, there is lot of effort put on making support of all Linux ABI, that will make it possible to run Linux software including Steam and there is also work to have Linux drivers on FreeBSD/GhostBSD/TrueOS.

Since Doom games get all ported you are sure to see it arrive soon on the ports tree.