C4 Engine Drops Linux Support, Developer Says Linux Is Inferior

I think I know what his problem was, he couldn't find 'C:\' . Let me hardly ROFL about his rant.

A day later, the comments here are still as unreasonable and it makes me sad. Liam slung the first rotten tomato at the villain and distributed more for everyone to have fun and the crowd followed with enthusiasm. How can I help you take a step back and see how bad and immature an attitude this is ?

Sadly you're you're always going to get rude people in all communities

One of the devs latest tweets was:

"It's getting Linux to run that's hard. Once that works, support in the engine is pretty easy. But Linux breaks. A lot. It's costly."

I think its partly that that bemuses most people.

I do understand that the are occasional hardware compatibility issues that can cause issues and as long as you keep to stable updates you should be pretty much a-ok.

I'm not a developer but surely the thing to do is use a virtual machine to work on or if you want to run it on a real machine. Use a disk cloning tool like clonezilla so you can restore easily.

Someone who is unable to work their way through the simple installer that Ubuntu uses probably should keep their comments out of the public eye, don't you think?

One of the devs latest tweets was:

"It's getting Linux to run that's hard. Once that works, support in the engine is pretty easy. But Linux breaks. A lot. It's costly."
.

Yup, exactly. It's why almost every company uses it for servers, to run systems, stock markets, etc. Because it's costly and breaks all the time. This guy may be on to something here.

While I understand the point of not getting stuck in unreasonable comments, this time I feel it's slightly different: the dev in question brought it upon himself with some really bad PR moves. There is a bit of joking in here, but nothing truly abusive that I've seen.

That's the problem, you don't perceive it as such but it's abusive. I'll use simple terms – forgive me – for the idea to have a chance to pass: When a foolish, hateful guy spits on you, spitting back on him with the same hate makes you a bad person too. Not exactly as much, yes, but you both have a condemnable attitude and you both have to fix it. If the guy is beyond repair or you don't know how to lead him to stop being a fool, just ignore him. But gathering with friends to spit on him en masse is abusive in itself.

Instead, try to be the wise one : condemn his attitude but do it objectively. That is, without any resentment and disdain. This is what makes you a better person than him.

And that's why Linux community is perceived badly, we're starting to behave like a pack of wolves in here and on Phoronix, "because we're right".
So much for the nice people on GamingOnLinux.

In light of that, I was thinking that we could offer how to handle things better. If someone has a problem with developing on Linux, they should definitely state what, and why, but should not resort to baseless ranting or snide comments. That really applies to anything, not just Linux. In this case, the dev couldn't personally get everything setup and working within the time and effort to justify what he perceived as worth any return on investment. No shame in that. If he'd just left it there, I think it would have all been good. But he didn't. I think we can all agree that was a bad move.

Yes, and this is the kind of comments I wanted to see. Thanks for the effort!

Meanwhile Valve is pushing their games and engines into Linux.

Wow. A lot of you guys aren't getting it.

Stop being dicks in public. The crap you're slinging is almost verbatim what the Linux world had to suffer for years.

Okay two of your posts are direct shots @ Linux users for retaliating against someone who fire the first shot. You ever go onto a hardware (graphics) site and read all the NVIDIOTS vs AMshitD nonsence? Ever go into a game forum and listen to its users blat and wail (Windows users usually)? Apparently not, Linux "fan bois" aren't doing anything any other "fan bois" don't do.

The best part about bashing this guy is that ANYONE who has installed Ubuntu can officially talk down to this guy as that is his level of incompetence (apparently).

Linux users have been crapped on so much, now that we can be serious, we are SERIOUS. I say screw it rage hard on this dick he deserves to be harassed for being a dick first (IMO of course).

I have never heard of this developer or this engine. Their childish behavior doesn't make me want to buy their product though. I know boycotting an engine could be a bad idea. I mean I would have to miss out on any game that uses it such as City Bus Simulator 2010 or Fat Princess Adventures. How can I do that to myself ?

I am with mirv on this. The snide and downright unprofessional remarks this developer made in public are not immune to criticism or jokes by the Linux community. If said developer does not want his comments ridiculed, I suggest that he utilise a small dose of tact instead of spewing vitriol out of the gate. Perhaps the community's reaction would be more forthcoming if the instigator was not being entirely obnoxious. It's as simple as treating others like you would like to be treated. As the Linux community is already fighting an uphill battle, productive criticism would have been regarded well, but all we received were insolent rants. Not the best way to make a first impression.

I once made a comment on this site about a game that had a kickstarter going and was using this engine. They said they were going to have Linux support. I stated I didn't want to support anything that used the C4 engine. I received a lot of flak for that comment. People attacked me saying I was crushing their dream. Now those same people need to look back and figure out if that game is still going to have Linux support or not.

I bought a license for this engine a few years ago. I thought it was great. But Eric is a very difficult person to work with if you don't share his views 100% of the time. Their community can be just as toxic as others.

From what I remember his build scripts were setup in a very complicated manner. I spent a long time trying to understand where everything is and how to build it all so I could use it properly. To me it looked like Linux was an after thought. He hacked his VisualStudio builds to work as best as he could on Linux.

Eric is a very stubborn and arrogant person from what I remember. It doesn't surprise me that a few issues with Linux and he goes on a rant saying it's crap. Also his idea about SteamOS is horrible. SteamOS is debian based, same as Ubuntu. If he thinks it's a completely different OS he is in for a surprise. You can install Steam on any distro. There is no way he can keep his engine from being used on Linux in general if he plans to support SteamOS. He could add a complicated license into the engine that states that any game supporting Linux can only be sold through Steam, but then who really wants to deal with that kind of mess when trying to make money on a game.

Either way we look at this, the comments toward him won't mean anything. He will ignore it and continue to believe he knows everything. At this point in time his engine isn't going to get very far. Look at the big players that adjusted their licensing fees. There is no reason to use the C4 engine when better options are out there.

Linux users have been struggling with smear campaigns, false facts, arrogance and ignorance since 1991, does he think that people who have used Linux for a long time, and experienced this all the time will pat him on the back?

Don't be silly. You reap what you sow. If these people had approached Linux users with honest criticism and actual facts they would be welcomed.

If you can't take criticism for your opinions or your behavior you shouldn't be in public.

I've been using Linux since 2006, and my bucket of "be nice to ignorant & arrogant assholes" is all but empty.

I won't buy any games using this engine because of his attitude. Had he said that he won't support Linux in a professional way I wouldn't mind.

I have a few questions....

1. What distro of Linux was he using before he failed to install Ubuntu 14.04?

2. Why did he try to change to Ubuntu if he already had a working distro?

3. In what way did the install fail?

4. What is this well known bug that caused the failure?

5. Why didn't he go back to the original distro & still continue support for Linux?

6. Why did he NOT ask for assistance on public forums if he was having problems instead of just moaning about it & ripping out the code for Linux, possibly causing more problems in the process?

@lucifertdark, He has given a little more info on forums:

it would periodically start failing to boot up. Either the boot loader would give me an error message, or the screen would just stay black without anything happening, or I would get to a solid purple screen that just froze. No mouse cursor, no response to keyboard input, nothing. This happens for no reason whatsoever. I never made any hardware changes or did anything out of the ordinary like tinkering with the hard drive partitions. It just spontaneously breaks. So I reinstall. Again and again, every time this happens.

I know what your thinking but…

And btw, I don't have a hardware problem. Don't even mention it. It's new, and it's high-end.

He has also been trying to use the Wubi installer on other Windows 8 machines, which is not supported.

Possibly a combination of a graphics card issue (*cough cough* AMD *cough cough*) and the Secure Boot bull$%&t?

A "new, high-end PC" running Microsoft Windows 8 or Microsoft Windows 8.1 will have a UEFI with Secure Boot enabled by default; under a dual-boot configuration, most "mainstream" PCs have issues starting-up and it's common that they will not start-up at all...

This was the reason I gave-up and decided to single-boot Ubuntu on the family PC (my laptop is a much older model with a BIOS, so when I used to dual-boot, I had no problems).

I just reformatted the "new" machine, and I have Windows 7 installing. We'll see if that makes a difference...

Strange approach, but at lease with all the frustration and (apparently) negative feedback he is still attempting once again to resolve the problem.

Strange approach, but at lease with all the frustration and (apparently) negative feedback he is still attempting once again to resolve the problem.

Um no, I'm pretty sure he's not... He said he's installing Microsoft Windows 7, not a Linux-based operating system.

Though that may shed some light on his problems - he's using a "new, high-end PC", so I think it's pretty safe to assume he's dual-booting and his computer has a UEFI, which as some of us know, is a pain in the a$$ under a dual-boot scenario...

Eeeeeh... I really don't understand such developers.
Is it just me who sees developing for Linux support in gaming such a way - you take the latest Vanilla Ubuntu LTS release (fresh install) and then you port your game/app/engine/whatever to work with that (including the necessary libraries with the packet so it would not f**k up the whole system and would be separate just for this application). Later on expanding your test rig with nvidia/ati/intel whatever graphics settings are missing and adapt the app.

I am no developer, but this seems logical and not such a big deal.
You might give me flack for putting vanilla Ubuntu up there and not Arch/Manjaro or Suse, etc. But the way I see it, Ubuntu and its derivatives are the most solid choice when it comes to developing gaming on linux. (you always have one base, backed up by Canonical, on which to build)

When it runs on Ubuntu, I am 100% sure that the community takes care of any issues that might arise with other OS' like Arch. (ok not dev issues but generally speaking)


If someone has any more experience with this topic, please, elaborate on it... is my way of thoughts generally correct or am I way off?