Quote:
Original post by BenThereDoneThat
On a related note, what are some good libraries to look into for gamedev on Linux? My language of choice is C#, so I'll probably downloading Mono & MonoDevelop. Has anyone heard good things about Tao or MonoXNA, or have any libraries/engines you prefer to use?
Um, as far as I have heard if you want speed you'll have to stay away from C# and Mono. Those few programs built around Mono I have been forced to endure were quickly replaced with something that did not bring my quad-core 3GHz machine with 4 GB RAM to its knees.
I work at a Linux desktop distro, and we spend a lot of time getting games to work right. The best ones are all written around SDL and OpenGL, which on Linux means the Mesa libraries. If you target OpenGL for graphics and a framework like SDL or Qt to handle interaction, you end up writing something that will be portable to most other platforms (but you need to take care with Microsoft's broken OpenGL implementation -- it reinitializes the entire context on a window resize, which means all your textures need to be reloaded).
There are a number of frameworks, such as Ogre3D, that are built on top of SDL and OpenGL.
For rapid prototyping, there are SDL, Qt, and OpenGL bindings available for languages such as Python, and well as gaming frameworks readily available.
So, my suggestion is you use C++ or Python as a programming language, OpenGL/Mesa for graphics, and SDL or Qt as a framework and just concentrate on game development from there.
--smw