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Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

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Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#91

Post by vectorEQ »

mrspeaker wrote: post #76
FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

The DAW isn't Bitwig is it? (just because your username has the same amount of syllables ;) If so, then PLEASE keep up the great work supporting Linux. I was only able to ditch my Mac a year ago because I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig!

renoise is also available on linux, great product works like a charm on linux :D

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#92

Post by zeroname »

rightbyte wrote: post #85
brianwawok wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?

Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?

It's a good metric to conclude that you should stop walking cats, no matter what the underlying issue is.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#93

Post by klodolph »

mitgraduate wrote: post #69
FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

Why use not Electron? Take a look at vscode it has plugins and it seems to work everywhere.

Electron is basically Node+Chrome. There’s no way in hell it’s appropriate for writing VSTs.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#94

Post by vectorEQ »

FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

biggest problem with plugins imo is that often they don't support the same things as the daw does so usually come without linux installers (even though the code runs just fine on linux... )

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#95

Post by dejaime »

zeroname wrote: post #64
rkido wrote: post #53

Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don't make these mistakes, so this isn't really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming. It's worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making L…

I think you're in denial. If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux , but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.

I agree with you that it is definitely not commercially worth it. But I guess you missed his point. He is not saying that "it was worth it for this game if well implemented", but that this game is actually a really bad example of how gaming on Linux is. It is like analyzing PC gaming by looking at Devil May Cry 3 or Resident Evil 4...

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#96

Post by FigBug »

erikb wrote: post #78
FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

I don't know why people say that. You don't support Windows XP and Windows 10 either with the same binary. In contrast to Windows you can provide or pay someone to provide libcurl3 if you want to continue to use it. MS will just say you can go F yourself. In contrast to Windows you can study the source code and write a wrapper that provides a central API point that you can use in your single code base. In contrast to…

For a 32 bit version, a single binary compiled in VS2017 could support XP to 10. For 64 bit, a single binary supports Vista to 10.

In my experience, MS doesn't say go F yourself. They go to extreme lengths to keep old software working.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#97

Post by chrisseaton »

FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

> So now the solution is AppImages where you bundle up your app with all dependencies like a container.

But isn't this what you're doing with Windows? No version of Windows comes with libcurl (as far as I know) so you put the DLL in your application directory. It's no different.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#98

Post by fb03 »

vectorEQ wrote: post #91
mrspeaker wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DAW isn't Bitwig is it? (just because your username has the same amount of syllables ;) If so, then PLEASE keep up the great work supporting Linux. I was only able to ditch my Mac a year ago because I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig!

renoise is also available on linux, great product works like a charm on linux :D

also, Renoise is frigging awesome.

it is a blessing to be able to work with a different paradigm than piano roll and with such modern tooling (renoise supports vsts, rewire integration and whatnot), being essentially a supercharged tracker.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#99

Post by shittyadmin »

detaro wrote: post #61
antris wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm... Phone games? All Android devices are based on Linux. Android is a major player in the mobile gaming industry.

What skills/tech you use for Android games is "Linux" specific and would transfer from/to a desktop Linux system or other Linux platform? (instead of being Android-specific, or specific to an engine etc)

Quite a bit actually, if you've only worked with Android Java ecosystem you probably won't see it, but if you're working with the Android NDK at least as many game developers are, you're frequently using the same libraries and compilers you'd need to get your game working on desktop Linux.

Especially when it comes to things like graphics libraries and game engines, stuff like OpenGL, SDL or even higher level engines like Unity are quite popular on both platforms. While you could say this is just due to having cross platform libraries, but the platform specific steps for them (compiling, linking, initialization) are definitely more consistent across Android and Linux than going to Windows for example.

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