Double Fine On Linux Support

QuoteThe big thing with supporting Linux is making sure your game uses OpenGL for rendering and as the years go by this is becoming more and more difficult as the DirectX and OpenGL APIs grow further apart. Fortunately for Spacebase we went full OpenGL from the start; Double Fine goes to great effort to ensure the highest compatibility for easy porting instead of requiring platform-specific features like you might use if you were only targeting DirectX 11.

That said, Linux has its own set of challenges. There are many many many different combinations of OS flavor and software configuration that go way beyond what we see on Windows and OSX. Graphics card drivers vary wildly (Nvidia has at least done a great job recently getting its Linux OpenGL drivers into shape), but you can still see things like “on this machine entering fullscreen just displays graphical corruption” or “on this machine moving the mouse causes significant slowdown” that can result from fundamental differences in different Linux flavors.

On sites like Stack Exchange you’ll see people suggesting complicated shell scripts to fix some of these problems, which is generally very different from the user experience of buying games on steam for Windows.

Debugging ranges from slightly more difficult than on Windows and OSX to impossible; there are command line tools you can use to track down crashes and runtime issues but there’s nothing really out there that compares to the graphics debugging capabilities of PIX for DirectX.

But especially with a game like Spacebase, we really wanted to support Linux from day one. We worked alongside the Broken Age team to make sure we had baseline ports ready to go, but even with that we were originally not going to support Linux until Alpha 2 (November).

We worked on nights and weekends to ensure it was close to the same quality level as the Windows version to make sure Linux folks could play it as soon as possible; we think that a game like Spacebase aligns really well with typical Linux gamer sensibilities and so far they have responded favorably!