Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

terathon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 88 posts

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#11

Post by stefantalpalaru »

stinos wrote: post #8
fit2rule wrote: post #5

What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one .. plenty of other game engines work just fine on Linux (my personal example is MOAI) and so it seems to me what was needed was to just learn a little more about how to support Linux properly, and stop complaining about it. The fact that other game engines have no problems with this speaks volumes about the author. I respect his…

What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one . Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up" Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how i…

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working

I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#12

Post by thirdtruck »

pjmlp wrote: post #4
Arelius wrote: post #2

While Linux development, especially for game development, does has it's fare share of pain points. I don't think this should be interpreted as any more than it is, a single developer deciding he wants to stop supporting, one specific platform. Eric is indeed a very skilled programmer, but this engine is very much developed to meet his whims. He hasn't yet released any games on it, and the vast majority of his engine…

I still haven't see any of the Steam machines on the wild. Frankly I doubt I will ever see them.

I was running Steam in Big Picture mode on my Linux laptop only minutes before reading your comment. It's not a true Steam Machine, but neither is it that far off. :)

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#13

Post by emsy »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #7

Whoa, blast from the past; I did a minor game design using this engine. I spent most of the time refactoring the demo game code to something a bit more OO / to my style though. I don't know if that was good for performance, but it pleased me. But yeah, as another commenter stated, it just doesn't have the leverage as the bigger engines have (U4, Unity, etc), and those have very competitive pricing for hobbyist develo…

From a consumer point of view, everything above the Linux Kernel is a mess. A mess means actually choice where the consumer doesn't need one. I had hopes that Steam Machines may leverage Linux to consumers but trying to configure my father's Linux machine to his needs brought me back to reality.

I even think that the consumer perspective is the one that hinders Linux. Want to develop something for Linux? What's the display server? Proprietary or free drivers? What Desktop Environment? QT or GTK Application? All those things are fine to develop for, but what do you develop for when you don't have time to test and support every existing configuration.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#14

Post by thirdtruck »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #11
stinos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one . Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up" Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how i…

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

Makes me wonder which distro he's trying to use. My recent install of Mint Linux (on my primary dev box) was a breeze.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#15

Post by jevgeni »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #11
stinos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one . Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up" Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how i…

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

Sooo, how about taking up the flag?

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#16

Post by Hypx »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #11
stinos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one . Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up" Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how i…

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

You've described the problem that a lot of developers I know have. Linux just isn't easy to understand, even for programmers, if they don't have a *NIX background to start with.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#17

Post by Arnt »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #11
stinos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one . Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up" Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how i…

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

Oddly enough, I had a lot of trouble getting my new laptop to boot, work and sleep properly. Not for lack of experience: I first installed linux in the summer of 1992 using hlu's floppies and have used linux for daily work for about 20 of the 22½ years since then.

I can easily believe that someone used to windows with its mishmash of installers might have an unpleasant experience. Apt-get works wonderfully on a pristine system, but not so well if the system is halfway upgefucked with tarballs and rm -rf.

And particularly if systemd on ubuntu 14.04 supports his hardware as poorly as it supports my new laptop.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#18

Post by icebraining »

emsy wrote: post #13
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #7

Whoa, blast from the past; I did a minor game design using this engine. I spent most of the time refactoring the demo game code to something a bit more OO / to my style though. I don't know if that was good for performance, but it pleased me. But yeah, as another commenter stated, it just doesn't have the leverage as the bigger engines have (U4, Unity, etc), and those have very competitive pricing for hobbyist develo…

From a consumer point of view, everything above the Linux Kernel is a mess. A mess means actually choice where the consumer doesn't need one. I had hopes that Steam Machines may leverage Linux to consumers but trying to configure my father's Linux machine to his needs brought me back to reality. I even think that the consumer perspective is the one that hinders Linux. Want to develop something for Linux? What's the d…

I had hopes that Steam Machines may leverage Linux to consumers but trying to configure my father's Linux machine to his needs brought me back to reality.

I don't see why. A Steam Machine would solve exactly the problem you point out: it would set a fixed configuration that developers could target. Then other distros would have to adapt themselves if they wanted to run those games, and not the other way around.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#19

Post by icebraining »

jevgeni wrote: post #15
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

Sooo, how about taking up the flag?

The engine is proprietary, stefantalpalaru couldn't "take up the flag" even if (s)he wanted.

Re: C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

#20

Post by Zardoz84 »

Worst for him.

I personally feel that C & C++ develop on Windows is ANAL. Installing libs and detecting isntalled libs, it's very problematic, when on my GNU/Linux desktop I only need to do a : sudo apt-get XXX or git clone XXX & make & sudo make install

Post reply on HN