Ryan C. Gordon
Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus ) is a well known American cross-platform programmer and former employees at Loki Software. He achieved fame for his leading role in games ported to the Linux and Mac platform, his collaboration with the SDL multimedia library and the development of the fat binary extension FatELF for the ELF binary format.
Life
Ryan Gordon grew up outside of Philadelphia and attended college in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he earned a Bachelor Degree in 1999. He now lives back in Charlotte.
In January 2010, he became engaged to his girlfriend Carrie, whom he also married in the same year. January 31, 2012 his first child was born.
Employed by Loki Software
In summer 1999, Loki Loki hack software starts a competition called at the Atlanta Linux Showcase, with the aim of improving the Linux port of Civilization: Call to Power. Gordon decided to participate, and took a four-hour drive to Atlanta in purchasing. Loki was impressed by his performance and offered him a job. Gordon was soon involved in important tasks in porting Loki: Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Quake III Arena and Eric 's Ultimate Solitaire. For Descent 3 and Heavy Metal: FAKK ² he acted already as a senior developer. In 2000, he also wrote several articles for the Linux information site Linux.com. When Loki Software Gordon learned that there developed SDL library and know the Loki Setup; Development tools, on which he placed later and he further developed. During this time he also founded icculus.org, a website for hosting FOSS projects, on the support for Loki Software projects and tools has also continued later.
End of Loki Software
With the closure of Loki 2002 Gordon was forced to take a job in a cyber cafe and pull back to his parents. To escape this uninspiring work, which he had adopted only for the life of financing, seized of the straw of a found e- mail address of a developer Croteam and came into contact with it. For Croteams recently successfully posted to a game Serious Sam Gordon offered a Linux port. Croteam has adopted the proposal and a first version was on 5 December 2002 available. Subsequently Gordon won repeatedly contracts for the porting of games, for example, Devastation and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for Linux and America's Army for Linux and Mac OS X. It was developed by Epic Games for the ports of Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004 hired to Linux and Mac OS X.
When Gordon heard of the release of Postal 2, 2003, he contacted the developers porting offering, since he was already at the first Postal - part (still at Loki ) have been involved in the porting. Developer Running With Scissors agreed and the final port was available on 14 February 2005, distributed by Linux Game Publishing. Soon after, he was contacted for porting Wolfire Games' Lugaru game; a contact that would later lead to Gordon's strong involvement in the Humble Indie Bundles. Also at this time he was taken for a Linux client version for the Virtual World Second Life under contract. Even Google took his services for a native Linux version of the Google Earth application, it was available from the beta version 4 on 12 June 2006.
In October 2008, Gordon made the surprising announcement that he is working on a Linux client for the first-person shooter Prey, after he had already ported the server part of the game in 2006 for Linux. Earlier speculation in this direction had previously been denied by the developers. The port was published in December 2008.
FatELF
On 23 October 2009, Gordon announced its plans to work on a Universal Binary system for Linux, called FatELF similar to that used in Mac OS X. However, the project generated considerable controversy, in which especially the Linux kernel and distribution developers criticized the concept and refused to support or integration into the Linux kernel. Gordon stopped the project then in early November, despite technically very advanced state and support by ISVs. Later, however, Gordon announced that he would take up the project with adequate support again.
The next match porting project was to Aquaria Linux for Bit Blot.
Humble Indie Bundles
In May 2010 he published together Wolfire Games the source code of its development branch of Lugaru under the GNU General Public License, and he was also involved in publishing the source code of Aquaria. Both games were part of the first Humble Indie Bundle. Next project was the porting of Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 for Mac OS X, also announcing that he could create a Linux version, if a Linux Client from Steam would be available.
Gordon generated much discussion with a presentation at the Southeast Linux Fest 2010 entitled Anatomy of a Failure, in which he openly criticized some aspects of the Linux kernel development process and but doing his experiences with FatELF also brought Con Kolivas cited as another example.
For the second Humble Indie Bundle ported Gordon Braid, Cogs and Hammerfight for both Linux and Mac OS X. Part of this work was to port the Haaf 's Game Engine for Linux and Mac OS X, which was also released under a free software license. For the Frozen Synapse Bundle ported Gordon Frozen Synapse on Linux. For the fourth bundle he ported the games Super Meat Boy and Shank.