mrb> You: a) don't sound like a games developer (not even a
   mrb> hobbyist one), and b) don't sound like you write any code.  I
   mrb> think the third strike is pretty obvious :P.

Guilty as charged.  However, I do try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to keep
my posts useful and topical.

so, As a real hobbyist games developer, what *you* think NetBSD needs
to be useful to commercial game development companies?


You're totally right that I don't smell like an expert.  However, a
lot of experts are doing stupid things these days, and I think therein
lies our opportunity.

A few days ago I watched my friend playing a 3D 3rd-person game on his
Mac.  He was walking, so the ground was scrolling beneath his scion or
whatever.  Every ten seconds or so, the screen would freeze for about
0.3sec, and then _jump_ to make up the ground he covered in the
interim.  This was some huge fancy bleeding-edge game requiring all
sorts of specific chipsets, and it was pathetic.  I felt like punching
the stupid thing.

This never happened when I played Zelda on N64.  This play-experience
is not captured by boastable metrics like horsepower and framerate.  I
think the NetBSD-work-in-progress I mentioned does capture this
problem.  If you disagree or see a different problem, enlighten us.

Or are you trying to demonstrate that I'm wrong w.r.t. marketing: game
developers and players are if anything more concerned with marketing
and less with gameplay, than the office ``productivity'' crowd, and
that the m4d sk1llz of the d3m0z-cl4n will never take an ``overly
complicated'' or ``too powerful for the desktop'' Unix-biggot OS
designed by non-gamerz, when they can use u-itron or WinCE or libdream
instead.

-- 
shadowy grove
outside the locked ward
a moonless night
  		-- Mark Brooks