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C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

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

#51

Post by Arnt »

fit2rule wrote: post #25
Arnt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prist…

I'm with you - been running Linux since those days too, and I also think that the problem is entirely political in this case - he's already admitted that its not for any problem with the Linux host for C4 in particular, just that he's a frustrated Linux desktop user and wants nothing to do with Linux. But the Linux support is there and the C4 engine works on it .. so this is more of a political rant than anything els…

In that case I expressed myself badly (possibly due to systemd-induced gritting of teeth). Sorry.

I think it doesn't have to be political. The tiniest bit of ill will towards linux, a bit of windows-like behaviour (tar xf, rm -rf), and a bit of badly-supported hardware is quite enough to end up with an unworkable system and difficult-to-diagnode problems.

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

#52

Post by flohofwoe »

mhd wrote: post #46
emsy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that Windows is a similar mess. From the very beginning, you had plenty of different GUI libraries - MFC, WTL, WinForms, Delphi, Xwt, wxWindows etc. (let's not even mention Java, the perpetual red-headed step child) Every office version introduce some new "default style" that everybody had to emulate (flat toolbars, ribbons...), resulting in a plethore of subtly different applications. Does your menu have icons?…

For games you don't care about the window system, what's critical is a 3D API, input and sound. MS got this right early with D3D, DirectInput and DirectSound. And MS forced hardware vendors to commit to these APIs which was a good thing.

The problem with Linux (above the kernel) is that everyone is pulling into a different direction.

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

#53

Post by jevgeni »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #44
jevgeni wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that. But, say I propose to stefantalpalaru to write an engine supporting Linux from scratch. And if that's too hard, wouldn't it be fair to say, that it is also a problem between the chair and the keyboard?

If I ever complain about needing weeks to do something as simple as installing a Linux distro and creating a development environment, feel free to say it.

I'm just curios, how would you imagine the dev environment for C4 would look like?

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

#54

Post by jevgeni »

wtf_is_up wrote: post #40
jevgeni wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that. But, say I propose to stefantalpalaru to write an engine supporting Linux from scratch. And if that's too hard, wouldn't it be fair to say, that it is also a problem between the chair and the keyboard?

It depends if (s)he abandons the project because installing a distro is too hard or (s)he had a legitimate roadblock.

I'd guess installing a distro and installing a distro with all dependencies for developing a complex game engine might be different things.

If they say it's a legitimate roadblock for them, then I tend to believe it.

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

#55

Post by pja »

flohofwoe wrote: post #33
pja wrote: post #26

The answer to this developer's install problems are a VMWare virtual machine running on his usual Windows setup. By his own account his actual Linux code works just fine - the only thing that was in his way was his inability to install the OS in the first place. It seems a shame to throw out all that working code over such a trivial & easily solvable problem. Wrestling with weird stability problems (which might be a…

VMs just add another dimension to the pain of incompatible or buggy components. I don't know if VMWare provides modern OpenGL support (3.x or better). I have only experience with Virtual Box, and only ever got OpenGL 2.1 (8 years old) without extensions running with hardware acceleration, but with bugs (e.g. vsync never works). Right now I can't update to the latest VBox version because its display driver is incompat…

Ah, fair point - VMWare only gets you OpenGL 2.1 & given that the guy is writing a games engine he probably wants 3.x at least.

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

#56

Post by bmn_ »

unsigner wrote: post #41
Zardoz84 wrote: post #20

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

"Easy to pull 3rd party libraries" is not particularly positive for a engine/library developer; ideally, you should incur as little dependencies on your users as possible.

Why?

There are outstanding ecosystems for packaging and dependency management in place. That makes it easier to embrace than to avoid dependencies as a library developer.

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

#57

Post by vetinari »

stinos wrote: post #43
vetinari wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there can be some trivialities that waste huge amount of time on every OS, however, installing Linux and setting up dev environment is not one of them. Certainly not compared to Windows, where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs. It gets into "really not funny" territory when they have conflicting requirements. Compared to that, Linux development environment is a piece of cake…

Sort of agree, the benefits of most linux' distros package managment system combined with lots of open source and gcc binaries being compatible with a quite few versions back are obvious. But that doesn't mean they don't exist partly on Windows. " where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs. " is a bit too narrow: that is (afaik) only the case if you use binary distributions of 3rd pa…

We seem to agree together :).

It may be or may be not easy to rebuild everything with the same VS version, especially open source packages. Many maintainers do not care about VS at all (e.g. xz/liblzma - use mingw, VS is not C99 anyway... but mingw links agains msvcrt.dll, which is a no-no) or have some crazy build system, that is supposed to work cross-platform, but really works only on Linux and maybe OSX (I'm looking at you, py2cairo). Some of them do care and building is a piece of cake (curl). Or they are somewhere in the middle, where will make their own build system, that defies all your expectations and does it's own things ignoring your vcvars (Boost).

When we get out of the C/C++ realm, it gets easier everywhere, whether C# or Python.

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

#58

Post by vetinari »

flohofwoe wrote: post #52
mhd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Windows is a similar mess. From the very beginning, you had plenty of different GUI libraries - MFC, WTL, WinForms, Delphi, Xwt, wxWindows etc. (let's not even mention Java, the perpetual red-headed step child) Every office version introduce some new "default style" that everybody had to emulate (flat toolbars, ribbons...), resulting in a plethore of subtly different applications. Does your menu have icons?…

For games you don't care about the window system, what's critical is a 3D API, input and sound. MS got this right early with D3D, DirectInput and DirectSound. And MS forced hardware vendors to commit to these APIs which was a good thing. The problem with Linux (above the kernel) is that everyone is pulling into a different direction.

Of couse games do not care about UI toolkits, but the excuse against linux was always Gnome-KDE or Gtk-Qt-Motif-Athena-whatever, even through games do not care about these things (see also your grandparent post).

In Linux, there is glx[1]+OpenGL and SDL. The problem (quality of OpenGL implementations) is not unique to Linux.

[1] - yes, soon to be EGL.

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

#59

Post by vetinari »

zamalek wrote: post #24
Arnt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prist…

apt-get also only works extremely well for FOSS releases. If something is closed source (reality check) the developer will need to maintain the a build for each distro+release. The user will also need to add that apt repo and click through Linux's warnings about that. > What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one. Ironically, it's the political (rather: religious) position…

If you build your binaries against Ubuntu 12.04 (=glibc 2.15 symbols), chances are, that it will be extremely compatible with many distributions for years to come. Just make sure you know, what API you are really linking against.

The resulting package can install the repo by itself - i.e. user downloads the package, install it and suddenly, he has repo for updates installed. Google Chrome does it, for example.

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

#60

Post by jokoon »

flohofwoe wrote: post #50
jokoon wrote: post #47

My 3 cents: Maybe a possible alternative would be to focus on one particular linux distribution, like ubuntu or debian, with certain dirty intall scripts ? Or go all the way and just deliver a bootable CD or USB drive that install the games somewhere, and then boots up a certain linux kernel configuration with specific, working nvidia or amd drivers. Honestly if I had a successful game I could sell, I'd try to sell i…

Unless SteamOS and Steam Boxes becomes a thing releasing native games on Linux doesn't really make sense unfortunately, cost of customer support alone would be prohibitive, and the negative backslash from the Linux community if Linux distro X on hardware Y is not supported would do the rest to drive devs away. The most realistic distribution platform for games on Linux (unless SteamOS takes off) would actually be HTM…

I don't know if you can make a serious game with js though. ASM.js might help, the 3D demo from the unreal engine showed a decent framerate, but I don't know if it can go from the neat demo to something that can be sold.
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