Romløk's page

FWIW, I neither demand nor expect Linux support in PFO, I just feel it could be fairly low-hanging fruit for GW. So I just wanted to throw my voice behind the idea.

The problem is one of support and testing.

And no gaming community is better at self-support and voluntary testing than the Linux gaming community. ;)

My point about Unity wasn't that is was just easy to compile, but that it's already shown to be well used and well tested on Linux. Of course, any GW-specific (or third-party) extensions would need to be tested on each platform though, hence my advice about starting early being cheaper in the long run.
That said, nobody will know how much extra work it would be but GW, and likely not even them at this point.

Bear in mind also that Linux is an operating system with many different builds from Debian through Ubuntu to Suse. All of the variants will need a certain amount of testing work.

Not necessarily so. Case in point: Steam.

Steam, and all the Linux-compatible games therein, are designed to work on a single version of Ubuntu Linux. Yet to every distro you turn, Steam and Steam-games are found to be up and running. It seems to me that the difference between distros is greatly exaggerated by those with at most historic experience. If games are statically compiled, or include all libraries (as Steam games do IIRC), any modern Linux distro is much like any other AFAICT.
Distribution format is another question, but as long as you cater to Ubuntu users, everyone else is usually able to work it out for themselves. ;)

I can't argue about the size of the Linux gaming userbase though (yet! ;), but I can still pout. :P

Just as a pendandtic note, WINE Is Not an Emulator.

On a similar note, "Wine" is no longer an acronym, either!

Hi, I'm a 100% Linux gamer. I've been idly watching PFO for a while now, but will not make any kind of financial investment unless and until Linux support is explicit (and preferably demonstrated). I've seen too many game developers "nope out" of Linux support after providing numerous "maybes", "we'll try"s, "we're working on it"s, and "stretch goals".

By all accounts, providing Linux support with Unity is pretty much a one-click "export to Linux" operation, if you've been doing things properly. All that's usually needed is just to test that the thing runs at all.
Even that aside, IME the sooner one starts with a Linux build, the less work it will be overall - before any platform-specific shenanigans get too deeply embedded in the codebase.

To clarify the EVE Online situation; for a time they had an "official" client for Linux, yes, but it was NOT a Linux client - it was just their normal Windows client with a (pretty crappy) Wine wrapper. I used it for a while. AFAICT, the reason it was cancelled was that, in short order, stock Wine could run the Windows client far better than the "official" client did - even with the new (at the time) improved graphics, which weren't even available in the "official" Linux client.

IMO, Wine is no longer a reasonable solution for any new project - especially not one using a game engine with such good Linux support already built in.

Also; what are they planning on running the servers on? Windows?