Game development on Linux has always been behind due to a variety of reasons. However in recent years the newer generations demands the ability to edit, manipulate, and add content to their games. Homebrew’s are huge now and many are more interested in game development than game playing. One website/repository stands out for Ubuntu/Linux. PlayDeb is an amazing collection of quality open source games. Many are extremely addictive and contain some exciting editing tools within.  Syntensity is an amazing new game boasting the open source engine Intensity. The SandBoxGameMaker by Platinum Arts contains a suit of tools for game creation. There are a variety of new and old games created originally from the Sauerbraten game engine. Take a look at PlayDeb and make sure to add their repository to your Ubuntu box and start gaming.

I’m not going to lie, I just about fell out of my chair when I found out the Unreal Engine is now free for non-commercial development.  More importantly here is a link to the Epic website here:

http://udk.com/index.html

The Unreal engine is the #1 engine at this time so if you run windows and want to break into game development it can only help to learn these tools.

If any of you own a Playstation 3 you may be aware of its  IBM designed Cell processor and NVIDIA based GPU. Sony Open Platform allows you to install Linux as a secondary OS on PS3 which is great. However, it is a considerable pain in the rear that you cannot access the PS3 GPU for development. This effectively  stops all real plans of Linux game development on PS3 in it’s tracks. If you have a development license with Sony you can use their version of OpenGL ES (libGCM) , Unreal Engine, their free engine the PhyreEngine or whatnot. However, if you are without a Sony developers license there is an alternative way to harness an even more powerful technology.

Enter OpenCL! Memory management, full access to your GPU, and so forth can be assisted by OpenCL.  OpenCL is a new open standard originally pioneered by Apple and adopted by KHRONOS.  One of the biggest obstacles for developers now is dealing with the massive array of different hardware and new API’s for each of them. How do you keep up?  More to the point how do you handle the new Cell processors accompanied by powerful GPU’s like NVIDIA’s Tesla? Do you want to process the code on your GPU or CPU and which GPU!!?

Get the OpenCL specification header files from KHRONOS here:

http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/

For SDK’s that include OpenCL:

For Apple Snow Leopard: OpenCL

For NVIDIA GPU users check out the: CUDA SDK

For ATI GPU’s check out the: ATI Stream Software Development Kit

For Bullet Physics developers it looks hopeful that they are currently implementing OpenCL.

For further discussion use our blog here: http://developers.cipherhive.com/course/view.php?id=3