The world would be a worse place if the Web used a Microsoft proprietary format over a proprietary protocol. Video would be worse if patented video formats where allowed to run wild. And so on, so on.
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Also, theres nothing bad with activisim. On my city linux groups use to give free computer teaching to group of people, so people could learn to use a computer, edit graphics, create documents, with their help. How can that be a bad thing? They help people directly. Also have a lot of fun doing it.
I never said that stuff just magically works on all platforms without any for platform-specific code.
But, again, if you do use the right libraries, then for the vast majority of your code, it does “just work”. That other part, which requires manual work per platform, is small.
That is my experience from working with 3D engines (like Ogre or the Urho renderer), input & windowing libraries (like SDL, or rather the input part of SDL), physics (like Bullet), networking (like RakNet, oh good old RakNet), navigation (like Detour/Recast), UI (like Qt or Noesis), video/audio recording&handling (FFmpeg) and other libs.
Yeah, at some point I was writing a game engine. Came quite far, but never finished it (for many reasons, one of which was my foolish insistance on MinGW. I was young!), but then proceeded working with these topics and libraries on and off in different projects.
Seriously, can you name five things in game development with an engine like Unity or Godot that will require an extensive amount of manual work to make it work per platform?
I find your insistance on that big deal of work just strange.
I am also curious what “more to the story than simply development” you mean, that I don’t assume to be part of development.
If I really missed parts, sorry. I might have just overlooked parts in the onslaught of answers.
Never say you’re done. It doesn’t usually work. When I’m really done or don’t want to any more, I just quit and ignore the thread…
This all sounds nice. But I was referring to the courage implied. I like rye whiskey, it’s a sliver of a sliver of the market. The small batch makers are not heroes.
TBaldtree: I’m not releasing on Linux any longer because I just don’t have the financial motivation and to be honest I just don’t have the skills or feel that acquiring them will have any long term benefit.
TheSHEEEEP: That’s because you’re not doing it right.
Apple’s actions disagreed when they bought CUPS and forked Darwin and KHTML. Microsoft’s actions disagreed when they called it a cancer, when they forced OOXML down ISO’s throat, when they funded the SCO nonsense and when Azure became relevant. Google was pretty happy to be able to use Linux and KHTML. Everyone relies of the volunteers who maintain the timezone database correct.
If keeping computing platforms open to all, reliable and secure (often with no reward or acknowledgement) isn’t heroic, I don’t know what is.
I guess we’ll just have to disagree on how “not that much” and “not a major amount” equals to “you’re doing it wrong”?
Especially considering I don’t think he must’ve done something wrong.
Again, nice. An endeavor done for the creativity of it, and public.
It just doesn’t meet the bar for heroism to me, that’s all. Perhaps I’m cynical. Or possibly it’s that I seldom view these companies and their frictions as angels or devils.
If you haven’t promised a Linux version, I don’t see why do it, unless you know there’s a market there, and you need it / know it’ll be profitable.
Otherwise, porting isn’t making games, it’s solving technical issues, and while that’s a part of making games, it’s not the whole thing. I assume people making games want to make games, not deal with minutiae of OS / platform issues.
You probably search it on Steam, then right click and select “Install”.
If it comes from the distro, you probably uses Synaptic or something like that (that sort of look like the apple App Store) and click “Install”.
Some users that like the command line more can do something like
Many hardcore linux users are playing Windows games in VMs, passing through their PCIe GPU to the VM. This approach offers essentially perfect compatibility and essentially no performance degradation over playing natively in Windows.
The downside is that you need a second GPU for linux stuff, as the passed-through one cannot be shared without a reboot. If that limitation was somehow fixed, all the compatibility and performance issues associated with porting games to Linux or running them in WINE would essentially go away. Pretty cool stuff.
My primary desktop has been Linux for about 20 years, and I gave up on Linux gaming about 18 years ago. Maybe if I installed Steam for Linux that would change, but I doubt it… Nothing I do on Linux really requires a fast GPU. I have a WIndows box which is essentailly an expensive console for cheap games.
Ehhhhh I spent a lot of money to do this and it never worked out. There were huge stuttering issues that I could not get resolved that made me finally go back to Windows. It’s definitely not “no performance degradation”, or at least without a ton more research after the 4 months i spent on tuning it.
Not really. The setup is very messy and fragile. Even if you got GPU sharing working (e.g. with SR-IOV), you also need to deal with similar issues with audio and input devices. E.g. a Windows 10 update in May 2018 somehow broke MSI-X support inside VMs, which is necessary for acceptable performance. Pretty much unsolvable without installing an old version and making sure it never updates.
It’s never going to be a good solution for the mainstream Linux user, just for the particularly crazy ones. (And I count myself as one of the crazy ones… I did spend a few days last year trying to coax GPU passthrough into working well with my new machine, before giving up and just building a gaming only Windows PC from the parts left over from the upgrade).
Yeah, I also had a look at that and said “haha. Nope”.
But indeed, if that became more usable, it would be awesome. A switch between the two modes to only require a single GPU would be quite helpful, too. I certainly wouldn’t want to put 400€ down for a second GPU just so that I don’t have to dual-boot to Windows if I need it…
