Linux platform support ETA

robagar

Can you give a rough estimate of the Linux support release date? Is it likely to be more than a few weeks?

Tsutae

I would also like to know if we could get an ETA, or at least some "rough" estimate about when it will become available.

OpenGL & Open Source is the way to go.

GotenXiao

Thirding this, although I fully appreciate that Linux support is a relatively low priority compared to polishing Windows and adding Mac support. Also, it'd be nice if Linux support landed before my devkit arrived :P

renderingpipeline

GotenXiao wrote:

Thirding this, although I fully appreciate that Linux support is a relatively low priority compared to polishing Windows and adding Mac support. Also, it'd be nice if Linux support landed before my devkit arrived :P

I'm not sure about Mac support being so much more important than Linux. On the one hand you don't get fast OpenGL on Macs (slow, buggy drivers and only mid-range GPUs at best) while Linux is well supported. On the other hand the Rift is interesting for research and not only for gaming and you will find more Linux systems in research institutes than Macs (that could render more than a bunny at 60 FPS).

gnarbarian

As a developer I know how hard it is to give out accurate time estimates regarding development.

Hopefully they've kept Linux support in mind from the outset and used portable libraries. In which case the development time could be as easy as spinning up a machine, building binaries, then posting them for download.

If not it could take as long or longer as developing the windows ones from scratch.

If a time estimate cannot be given I'd be happy to know if there is someone working on it at the moment.

I'd Also love to offer my services to help get it out.

Are you guys using Subversion or Git?

gnarbarian

Tonight I'll go home and start trying to port the windows SDK over. In all likelihood nobody is actually working on it at all. It might be as simple as creating a build script. I'll let you guys know.

gnarbarian

Well OK I went and checked it out on my windows box. Unfortunately this is going to take much longer than simply recompiling it or writing a build script. It looks like everything is written against D3D instead of OGL. From what I understand every reference to D3D will need to be either replaced with the equivalent from OpenGL if it exists and re-implemented if it doesn't.

I compiled it without support for D3D and maxed out the error list in VS2010. I will go home tonight and look into porting all the d3d references over but it doesn't look good.

Pyry

The actual SDK (not the examples) uses D3D?

kojack

Pyry wrote:

The actual SDK (not the examples) uses D3D?

Nope, no D3D in the OVR library. Only the samples use directx.

The lib does use win32 apis though, so it's not going to be a simple build process (there's some linux and mac source files in there, but apparently not complete from what I read elsewhere on here).

gnarbarian

Oops. my bad. Thanks for the info kojack. I'm a pessimist at heart (it helps keep me from being disappointed). That's what I get for trying rebuild-all instead of just LibOVR. Still a lot of work though like you said.

atavener

Note that Oculus have the beginnings of Linux (and Mac) support. Their framework is also made to accommodate platform-specific implementations. I think most of the changes are to replace Win32 HID with HIDAPI (cross platform usb library). I think they're using posix threads, so that's fine... and the rest should be okay. Well, then on the graphics/distortion side, the shader is for DirectX, but translating that is fairly easy and I think there have been a few posts with GLSL translations.

There are other threads dealing with SDK/Linux in "Oculus General Development"... viewforum.php?f=20

cybereality

Yes. Linux support is on the road map. Currently we are working on OSX support, and I believe Linux will be looked at after that. I don't have a firm ETA, but I will keep you guys posted with any updates.

steeve

I built the SDK on OSX, it compiled, but from what I saw, only the display code was here (detecting the Rift), and it was crashing.
No tracker/HID code is there, yet.

But the way the SDK is written I think I won't be much time before it's here.

@cybereality could you also include command line tools for compiling the SDK when released, not only XCode? Thanks!