It strikes me that there needs to be at least 2 different focuses to building a sustainable interest in gaming on FreeBSD. The two key initiatives are hardware and software. There's been talk in this (and another) thread about the software side of things, but what about the hardware?
To get a significant base of players (which would make developing game that support FreeBSD) there also needs to be hardware for them to play on. While we all do run FreeBSD today, do we have good sound support? I don't see great graphics support at the low end (Intel Integrated) but gaming may be more interested in the high-end side of things. How is high-end nVidia and AMD support these days?
For graphics, nVidia cards are still supported under FreeBSD using nVidia's proprietary driver & OpenGL. For AMD, I've been pondering whether or not to attempt to make contact with AMD developers who work on the Linux drivers to find out what it would take to get AMD to port their amdgpu-pro driver over, so I might as well look into the open source amdgpu driver to see what it would take for an individual to port that over.
Also, to expand the user base with a focus on gaming would (probably) require much more user-friendly installation options. By that I mean very easy install options that give a usable GUI. Possibly even something that has a focus on gaming by creating a console like UI so it could be connected to a TV. Sort of a DIY console.
That seems to be something that the overall FreeBSD project is against, which is why I was previously shipping with PCBSD as the preinstalled OS of my systems. Now that they've transitioned into TrueOS, I've exploring the option of rolling our own FreeBSD derivative or maybe even standardizing on GhostBSD. Sadly, such measures are what would be required to gain a more user friendly installation. It seems that the FreeBSD project only cares about the server market. And it makes sense, since most of their money probably comes from corporate entities that primarily use FreeBSD in headless scenarios.
Beyond graphics, what is the state of game controller and joystick support?
From what I've seen, the uhidd driver (
https://wiki.freebsd.org/uhidd) seems to be the only game in town. Unfortunately, it seems to suffer from the same problem that most of FreeBSD suffers from -klunky & error-prone setup that must be done manually. In that regards, it feels rather unpolished. Also is the issue that it doesn't seem to be a part of the base system, so it's not guaranteed to be on any system.
Personally, if I could (easily) install games and reliably use a bluetooth game pad (or even better 2) and hook the system up to my TV, I would consider building something as long as the cost of the hardware was on-par with consoles. Sadly, that probably means a focus on lower end hardware (Atom, Celeron, probably topping out with an i3) and integrated graphics. An entry level NUC (or other small form factor pc) would fit in nicely beside the Roku in my living room.
I've been eyeballing the NUC (& other such setups) for use in a new product line. However, the same issues that you've mentioned are what've been stopping me from moving forward with those types of plans. Undoubtedly, FreeBSD needs a massive update when it comes to drivers needed by regular users for the desktop. These types of modifications would definitely need to be applied to a more user-centric derivative of FreeBSD.
Point is, creating a developer community needs to be considered along side developing a user community.
There's also the issue that our development tools leave much to be desired. Even now, I've had to drop Code::Blocks, because the FreeBSD version suffers from a bug that's related to that project's usage of wxWidgets 2.8. The workaround listed by that project entails building C::B with wxWidgets 3.0. However, that fails miserably, because portions of the code seemly refuse to build correctly. I switched to Codelite recently, but I'm having problems getting it to even locate some of my headers (for wxWidgets & its relatives), despite creating a link to get a working wx-config (which works from the commandline). There's an enormous amount of work ahead of us, if we're going to get this thing off the ground.
Additionally, there's the OSS sound driver setup, which compiles natively for FreeBSD. I haven't gotten a chance to see if OpenAL-Soft (the only actively developed OpenAL implementation) can interface directly to it to create a solid sound stack.
And then, there's SDL, which I haven't had a chance to check it's functionality on FreeBSD. Not only am I interested in how it's sound support holds up, I'm also interested to check it's input support.
Ideally, this is what I'd like things to look like:
For gaming:
Graphics: SDL->OpenGL->accelerated 3d driver
Sound: SDL->OpenAL->OSS driver
Input: SDL->uhidd driver
For the OS:
User friendly installation (with OEM customization available)
Easy configuration preference panels (that include driver setups & tests)
Faster booting to desktop
For developers:
Solid IDE that's centered around FreeBSD's filesystem layout
Libraries that have a standard configuration for FreeBSD & don't have to be massaged into place before usage
That's just the short list.
(I probably will at some point as a way to catch bugs).
