GamingOnLinux - Cheese Talks: More Cross-platform Humble Bundle Details Than You Ever Wanted To Know!

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Cheese Talks: More Cross-platform Humble Bundle Details Than You Ever Wanted To Know!

by Cheeseness December 31 at 2:37 am Editorial

Hi people. As many of you are aware, I've spent the last month or so slaving over hot research for a new article on Humble Bundle stuff.

With the recent non-cross-platform Humble Bundle promotions, now seemed like a good time to try to get a big picture view of cross-platform support across all promotions and see how everything fits together in context.

In this article, I look at platform debuts and existing cross platform titles, internal and external porting, non-cross-platform titles, and post-bundle availability.

If you've ever been interested in comparing the number of Humble Bundle Linux debuts against Mac debuts (58 vs 23), look no farther. If you've ever wanted to know who ported what, you can find that here (no surprises, icculus and urkle are responsible for porting 32 titles between them). If you've ever wanted to know how many Humble Bundle titles were ported internally (over half), that's there too.

http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humbleStats3.php

Enjoy!

Note: This article is over 7,500 words long, so it's small by my standards

I try to steer clear of pushing my own opinions, but since almost everybody I've shown this to has asked me what I thought of the THQ bundle, there's also this.

Article posted by Cheeseness View more articles from Cheeseness

Creator of the Humble Visualisations, contributor to Neverball, statewide coordinator of TasLUG, handsome admin of steamlug, and independent writer/interviewer.

I do more stuff than could ever fit into a bio.

Comment by Alex V.Sharp on December 31 at 3:10 am Link To Me
Editor	I was going to Tweet to you, but I guess posting here is just as good: An excellent article in general, sums it all up quite nicely. It was also very interesting to read more about the porting process. I always was curious about how it goes and why. It's a shame that we can still only speculate on many issues concerning the current HiB, especially about the reduced number of sales. I suppose we'd need some data directly from the users if we're to ever be able to find out the true reasons why it happened... From a technical standpoint, besides an occasional typo and missing word, only one thing bugs me some: the pie doesn't have any associated numerical value. Other than that, a very good read. Keep em coming. :cool: Edit: Oh, and Happy New Year! Quote me

Comment by Alex V.Sharp on December 31 at 3:10 am Link To Me

Editor

I was going to Tweet to you, but I guess posting here is just as good: An excellent article in general, sums it all up quite nicely.
It was also very interesting to read more about the porting process. I always was curious about how it goes and why.

It's a shame that we can still only speculate on many issues concerning the current HiB, especially about the reduced number of sales.
I suppose we'd need some data directly from the users if we're to ever be able to find out the true reasons why it happened...

From a technical standpoint, besides an occasional typo and missing word, only one thing bugs me some: the pie doesn't have any associated numerical value.

Other than that, a very good read. Keep em coming. :cool:

Edit: Oh, and Happy New Year!

Quote me

Comment by Hamish on December 31 at 6:28 am Link To Me
Editor	Thanks for the stats on who ported what - most interesting there for me. As for your little editorial there on the whole THQ thing, I agree with most of what you said even if I am a little less favourable of HB than you are, and I especially like the talk about how things went toxic and why. All and all a well rounded perspective. Quote me

Comment by Anon on December 31 at 9:05 am Link To Me
	I enjoyed reading this, but one thing - Jack Claw was never on Mac in any fashion. Quote me

Comment by berarma on December 31 at 10:25 am Link To Me
	I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read. Quote me

Comment by mongrol on December 31 at 11:40 am Link To Me
	Do you have any stats on the actual open sourcing of various games over the releases and the kind of licenses used? (crap captcha btw) Quote me

Comment by Cheeseness on December 31 at 11:44 am Link To Me
Editor	Quote from "Anon, post: 7418" I enjoyed reading this, but one thing - Jack Claw was never on Mac in any fashion. Ah, my first real correction! This is what I get for forgetting to double check stuff sourced from Wikipedia against my own download page >_< I'll be making an update soon. Thanks for pointing it out. The source for the Mac port as done by Alternative Games was added to the repo though (which could potentially count as it being "on Mac"). Binaries definitely haven't been made available to Humble Bundle purchasers. Quote from "berarma, post: 7419, member: 131" I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read. Shank 2 was ported by Alternative Games president Tapio Honkonen. Icculus wasn't involved in that one according to the Humble Bundle guys (and he didn't mention it when we were corresponding about the article). Jack Claw Linux binaries are on your Humble Bundle download page if you have purchased a bundle containing it. They were added 10 days after the bundle launched. Quote from "mongrol, post: 7422" Do you have any stats on the actual open sourcing of various games over the releases and the kind of licenses used? Yeah actually, I touched on that in my shallow analysis of the first 10 Humble Bundles. It's towards the end of the "The Changing Shape of Bundles" section. Quote me

Comment by Cheeseness on December 31 at 11:44 am Link To Me

Editor

Quote from "Anon, post: 7418"
I enjoyed reading this, but one thing - Jack Claw was never on Mac in any fashion.

Ah, my first real correction! This is what I get for forgetting to double check stuff sourced from Wikipedia against my own download page >_<
I'll be making an update soon. Thanks for pointing it out.
The source for the Mac port as done by Alternative Games was added to the repo though (which could potentially count as it being "on Mac"). Binaries definitely haven't been made available to Humble Bundle purchasers.

Quote from "berarma, post: 7419, member: 131"
I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read.

Shank 2 was ported by Alternative Games president Tapio Honkonen. Icculus wasn't involved in that one according to the Humble Bundle guys (and he didn't mention it when we were corresponding about the article).
Jack Claw Linux binaries are on your Humble Bundle download page if you have purchased a bundle containing it. They were added 10 days after the bundle launched.

Quote from "mongrol, post: 7422"
Do you have any stats on the actual open sourcing of various games over the releases and the kind of licenses used?

Yeah actually, I touched on that in my shallow analysis of the first 10 Humble Bundles. It's towards the end of the "The Changing Shape of Bundles" section.

Quote me

Comment by Anon on December 31 at 12:34 pm Link To Me
	I just hope for one thing - that people start using the bloody XDG specs and stop throwing their save games randomly around. Thank god that at least Icculus, Urkle and Flibit adhere to them. Quote me

Comment by berarma on December 31 at 2:39 pm Link To Me
	I thought the Jack Claw version was a user-driven effort instead of an official port, I didn't know Alternative Games was behind it. It didn't work very well when I tried it. And for Shank 2, I was convinced Ryan's name was there somewhere. How wrong I was, I guess it was for Shank. I should have my facts. Thanks for your clarification and your excelent reports. I like to know who's doing the hard work. Quote me

Comment by berarma on December 31 at 2:39 pm Link To Me

I thought the Jack Claw version was a user-driven effort instead of an official port, I didn't know Alternative Games was behind it. It didn't work very well when I tried it. And for Shank 2, I was convinced Ryan's name was there somewhere. How wrong I was, I guess it was for Shank. I should have my facts. Thanks for your clarification and your excelent reports. I like to know who's doing the hard work.

Quote me

Comment by berarma on December 31 at 2:44 pm Link To Me
	Quote from "Anon, post: 7424" I just hope for one thing - that people start using the bloody XDG specs and stop throwing their save games randomly around. Thank god that at least Icculus, Urkle and Flibit adhere to them. There have been some complaints about the lack of standards across distributions. We should let them know these exist. Icculus is involved in developing a spec for fullscreen mode apps. That's an interesting one too. Quote me

Comment by berarma on December 31 at 2:44 pm Link To Me

Quote from "Anon, post: 7424"
I just hope for one thing - that people start using the bloody XDG specs and stop throwing their save games randomly around. Thank god that at least Icculus, Urkle and Flibit adhere to them.

There have been some complaints about the lack of standards across distributions. We should let them know these exist.

Icculus is involved in developing a spec for fullscreen mode apps. That's an interesting one too.

Quote me