A friend (unreliably) told me that MS plans to open source DirectX. I highly doubt that and I''ve heard these types of rumors before about MS open sourcing things. But if it were true, and directx was ported to linux, how would that affect the game development on linux? Would it be embraced as a standard game API just for the sake of cross-platform compatability? Would any of you use it? What sort of APIs help you make games now? Do you feel that any sort of lack of standards, imagined or not, is hurting game development on linux? Finally, what about indrema, any of you planning on making games for that?

BLAH! never hear of it? It''s some new, dark-horse gaming console that runs linux. I think it''s almost free to get a dev kit / license from indrema to make games for it. But it runs on generic h/w. Like a dreamcast''s cpu is only at 200 MHz, but the h/w is customized and performs better than the standard pc desktop at the same clock speed. The indrema runs only on a 600 MHz x86 processor, I have a 600 x86 processor (32 MB VRAM) and my games still jitter a little when there''s tons of stuff on the screen.

Here are some specs:
http://www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=l600e_info.html

I would really like it if they could get gcc to compile java on linux for me. Then I would make tons of games for indrema and become a master of computar knowlege.

I think it was on this message board somewhere, someone posted a link to a DX-like multimedia library for linux. But since it isn''t forced with a heavy-hand on everybody, it doesn''t have every distro of linux under it''s umbrella. I guess that''s a weak argument because making someone download libs to play a game doesn''t seem to bother most ms devs (requires Direct X 7.01a)

The problem not only in DX but in drivers. Videocard manufacturer
should produce open sourced DX driver for LINUX - I dont belive they will do it...