"Ryan C. Gordon" about Linux game development


Klumpen

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http://icculus.org/SteamDevDays/SteamDevDays2014-LinuxPorting.pdf

This is one of the guys besides Edward Rudd and Ethan Lee,
that we have to thank for regarding those fine ports from the Humble Bundles/Store.
 

MythBusting

•Distro fragmentation isn’t real
•Most hardware is supported
•GPU drivers are good
•Linux users spend money on software
•Tech you need is available for Linux
As there are some porting pros and developers here, I'd like your opinion about that. Has it gotten better?

Since he somehow seems to have told the opposite a few years earlier, I am quite surprised, although he has to motivate other developers for porting to this Steam machine.
 
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Since he somehow seems to have told the opposite a few years earlier, I am quite surprised
People are allowed to re-evaluate things as they change, or even if they don't change and the person just becomes more aware.I've been saying that fragmentation is a myth for years now. Back a decade ago when I first started using Linux there was some fragmentation, KDE vs Gnome and OSS vs ALSA, and questionable driver support (which typically meant at worst you were using old drivers), but even then it wasn't nearly as bad as opponents are saying that it is right now. I've become especially vocal the last couple years with Kickstarter, all these games claiming they want to support Linux but in order to "do the porting" they'd need a lot of money, and they mark it as a stretch goal: dude, if you want to support Linux then write your game in SDL, OpenGL, and QT (or similar cross platform tools, you get the idea), not DirectX and Windows API calls. If a Linux "port" isn't just a compile away then it's just a few tweaks and a compile away, and the resultant binary will run on any system that has the libraries you used, and if you used SDL, OpenGL, and QT (etc, the big name cross platform libs) then it's a given that they'll be available.

GoG's opposition to Linux is completely unfounded, there is not now nor has there ever been a single shred of evidence to their reasoning.

The fact that so many games "just work" is evidence: Penumbra, Amnesai, Aquaria... I could just list off all the Humble Bundle games really; Valve's recent entries; Thousands of indie games every year of varying quality. If you can't write platform agnostic code, the problem is with you, not with the platforms.

edit: and who the hell is worried about driver support? You're writing a game! You should be using a standard library! Even if you're writing Direct3D on Windows you're still not accessing the hardware, there could be just as little hardware support on Windows as these people claim there is in Linux and it wouldn't make a lick of difference because you code to the library, not the driver. Gah, that is an unbelievably painful argument to present. Why would someone do that to me?
 
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