Oh, so you paid for your private use Linux operating system? I would love to know what that is called.
Yeah, exactly. But do you think people that spend a lot of energy on setting up an OS to get it for free would then go out and pay maybe $50 for a game PLUS maybe spend hours to make the system accept it?
Plain talk:
What is wiser:
To make a game for, say, 1,000,000 Windows users that is at quality level 95, and no Linux port.
OR
To make a game for 1,000,000 Windows users plus probably MAX 5,000 Linux users that is at quality level 80-85, because of the manpower to do the Linux port.
OR
Making the Linux port with new personnel, increasing its price, making it just as good an idea to actually just grab a copy of Windows, which WILL run E: D without any driver/lib hiccups.
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If you look at Linux Mint 17 Mate edition and Windows 7 with classic theme and install Steam on both there is hardly no difference. Right now there are of course less games under Steam... from my 100 titles only 70 are available for Linux... I do got most from humble bundle sales and that explains why so many work on Linux. But technically and speed/performance speaking there is no reason that one or the other is better. The only thing Windows has is a much larger market share. I personally like Linux better because I like to hack and be able to alter every little aspect or looks at the source code and learn something if I want to. Right now I didn't alter anything with Mint 17 yet it looks very good so far. My wife and both my boys have no problem using Linux - start Chrome or Firefox and maybe Thunderbird and Steam or play Minecraft. There is no reason to spend several 100 dollars for Windows license for our family, but I did spend $120 for one update from XP (OEM) for one PC with dual boot so I can play some games like ED or try the Rift. The other 3 PC and 3 Netbooks have Linux Mint or Ubuntu for one converted Chromebook.
Anyway I did help Kickstart this game and I would love to not have to boot to Windows to be able to play it. I think if the developers make/keep their code portable today it will not be a big task in the future to have it running on other OS or consoles.
People have been paying for Linux distro's on disks for years, I have a subscription to Slackware to get it on dual DVD's everytime it releases.
Does this answer your question?
Plain talk?
Cobra engine is set for easy porting and once the Mac port is done the Linux version is even closer. Where do you get this "power level 95" vs "power level level 85" rubbish from?
Do you have any factual examples to back up your claim?
Nice interview with David Braben here.
As stated many times its best to aim for one flavour, other flavours can adjust settings to get things to work when necessary.
I have just paid for 3 liscenses for Zorin 9 as the princely sum of £8 each.
It is well worth that as it gets me full support on each of my computers and my wife has taken to this distro so well that she has dumped windows completely (I don't consider her a tech head or IT person) and I only use windows for 2 legacy applications and non-linux games.
It does seem odd though that a windows zealot seems to want to derail a linux thread with their own narrow mind opion of what they think linux is.
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Sounds like you know quite a lot and knowing ALL implications is something I'd never dare to say personally.
Hint: Others have some experience as well - maybe even organizing a few thousand software developers in a globally distributed enterprise ;-)
I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second ("simply not economically viable"). There is a reason why there are more and more games published for Linux. I guess this depends if your engine is prepared for OpenGL or Linux and if your libraries are ported to Linux as well.
In the end most game companies run their game servers on Linux. So a lot of game code already runs there for a long time.
Anyway as I said: Let's not worry where Frontier should spend their money. Let's just tell them there are potential customers for a Linux port.
I'll stop here because I think I made my point. End of thread for me here
Wow, you are so full of nonsense. Operational system is a *commodity*. Office package is *commodity*. You get both for free - and as with every software you can choose to pay for support if you want so. That doesn't mean there's no software I will happily pay for.
And ohh yeah, giving back to developers with little pledges, bug reports and bug fixes.
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Please dear Frontier, I cannot stand this monster on my machine! It takes ages to start up, keeps asking if I really really really want it to shut it down, but even when I told it repeated that "Yes. Yes! YESSS!!!" it just won't. It hangs when I start the game, it hangs randomly like for minutes -- what is it really doing?? Nobody knows! Eats up all the memory and won't yield when running out of it, it rather crashes.
Please, I cannot bear with this monster with all the different fonts and colors and icon sizes and window borders and layouts and driver installs and antivirus programs and the constant fighting against it! This and that did work yesterday but refuses to run today, only God knows why. I want to play this awesome game on my sane OS that gets out of my way and does these things right. It's not perfect, but still better in my view.
Please consider making us a Linux version, after all your work is done on the Monster version and the Mac version! I put my faith into you, cheers, and thanks for reading my rant. Peace!
Please, I cannot bear with this monster with all the different fonts and colors and icon sizes and window borders and layouts and driver installs and antivirus programs and the constant fighting against it! This and that did work yesterday but refuses to run today, only God knows why. I want to play this awesome game on my sane OS that gets out of my way and does these things right. It's not perfect, but still better in my view.
Please consider making us a Linux version, after all your work is done on the Monster version and the Mac version! I put my faith into you, cheers, and thanks for reading my rant. Peace!
I would like to point out that Friday's Eurogamer interview with David Braben contains question and answer about Linux port. He's still evading to promise anything, but he's not ignorant.
But now let's get game finished first.
But now let's get game finished first.
That's at least a beam of light in the end of the tunnel! Can you post a link of the interview, please?
Linux is a PC operating system.
Just not a widely used one.
According to Wiki (which of course is never wrong!) Linux user comprise of around 2% of the desktop users:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
I can believe those figures in all honesty. So why would FD rush out to support such an OS?
Linux will come eventually, probably around the same time as the console versions, but you are looking at around at least a couple of years I would have thought.
Well apart from the PC market has billions of PC's in it of which is mostly enterprise ones sitting in offices we don't know the market share of home use PC's.
Couple with the fact that Mac OS is based on linux makes the lack of commitment to linux when they will be doing Mac OS quite strange.
There are a lot of developers who think that the linux market is mature enough for them to get a version as well as windows.
Also the upsurge in Android also would make sense to convert the cobra engine to there. The unity engine is on Linux as well as Android.
And finally to your comment to why FD would support linux, why did FD rush out and support the Occulus Rift then?
In the latest Eurogamer interview David said that during alpha the percentage was almost 10% of the playerbase but now the actual numbers have increased but the overal percentage has probably dropped.
So what that means that they spent time and money developing for the OR for a couple of thousand people?
It does sound like he is being evasive about OR as well as linux as it seems that he could have possibly sold more boxes concentrating on moving the engine over to other platforms rather than developing VR support.
But anyways, if a game comes out with linux support I will play it on linux and if not I am using win 7 for legacy, I am not going to move to 9 or later anyways.
Mac OS is most certainly not based on Linux. It is based on BSD UNIX, which works a lot like Linux, but was written by different people (and has a good few additional years of heritage). Porting from Mac to Linux is easier than porting from Windows to Linux, but Mac and Linux are not the same and are not based on each other at all.