Ryan Gordon, about porting UT200x

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KeithZG

KeithZG

will forever be nostalgic
Oct 14, 2003
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Just noticed icculus, A.K.A. Ryan Gordon, A.K.A. the guy who ported the UT2K series to anything other than Windows, post a link to this interview on his twitter feed. The mention of the UT2K games in brief, but very interesting to me, at least, and I figured some folks might find it likewise:

Ryan Gordon said:
UT2004 took a few weeks, but most of the work was done for UT2003, which was a much more intense effort. For UT2003, I found myself asleep under desks in Epic's offices, working for stretches of days at a time, living off microwave meals and take-out food, hacking all night and then breathing the morning air off the building's balcony as the sun rose.

It was some of my best work. I lived in that codebase; it became part of me, and I became part of it.

There's an enormous personal cost in this sort of development, which I can't begin to quantify here. Everyone should work on a project like that at some point in their lives, when they have nothing to lose except their own sense of self. And after that, never again.

So, to answer your question: UT200x took a few months. And a few decades.
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The full interview is over at http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovor-ryan-c.-gordon-icculus?page=1
 
Arnox

Arnox

UT99/2004 Mod Crazy
Mar 26, 2009
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Epic had better keep that guy employed or better yet, promote him. That's some fine work he did there.
 
Sir_Brizz

Sir_Brizz

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He never worked for them, that was a contract gig as was UT3. Just too bad all his hard work on UE3 is going into non-Linux ports of the engine :(
 
M

MrMaddog

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Jul 13, 2002
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Thank you for the link, it was a very interesting article about what all goes into porting an existing title to Linux.

Even though it's a shame that UT 3 didn't have a Linux version (runs good in wine with a couple tweaks), the other UT titles* run very well natively and I thank him along with the other stuff he's done.

* If you can get the Loki launchers to run in Ubuntu that is...
 
IronMonkey

IronMonkey

Moi?
Apr 23, 2005
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MrMaddog said:
Yeah, it's fixed but you ain't gonna get it running out of the box for a noob-friendly distro ;)
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How hard would it be to write a wrapper script that did a wget of the gtk deb files and then installed them before calling original installer?

Maybe when v11 comes along (in beta at the moment?), as I'll need to test the compatibility of the current instructions, I'll see if I can throw that all together as a script and then we can point the less experienced users ("noob-friendly" is so not PC:)) at the script to sort out the install.

I installed Fedora 15 Alpha yesterday (and filed my first F15 bugzilla report:)) so I'll had better see how it does with the original installers (F14 is fine).
 
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