It was heavily requested, and a Unity developer has written a blog post giving us a lot more insight into what’s going on.
QuoteAt Unite Europe this year, we at Unity released our public roadmap. And while it’s super cool to be able to share all of the amazing stuff we’re doing at Unity, one thing that is close to my heart is the Linux Editor.
The story behind Linux port of the Unity Editor is a lot like the story behind Linux runtime support, which was released in Unity 4.0. It’s basically a “Labor of Love”; some of us at Unity have been working off and on to port (and maintain the port) of the Unity Editor to Linux for quite some time (it’s pretty much the poster child of Unity’s internal developer hackweeks), and I must say, it’s coming along quite nicely. Our plan is to ship an experimental build Soon ™ to let you try it out.
Porting the editor to Linux is a lot of work – much more work than porting our runtime. This is because the editor is where the majority of our actual tech lies (including most of our complex 3rd-party integrations) and because of the asset database, it’s the place where case sensitivity problems really show up.
See the full blog post here.
It’s fantastic to see such open communication from that developer, and for them to even be allowed to talk about it so early is awesome. I know it took them a while to get here, but they are doing, and we should applaud their efforts. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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11 comments
It's about time! Next we need the unity plugin for the browser!Not sure if we need that (and I'm sure we wont see one, it's pretty much old now). Unity should just improve their webGL or something.
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Yeah, the Unity 3D Web Plug-in for Linux is definitely never gonna happen. It's been requested on their feature requests list for many years with the same answer along the lines of "There are currently no plans to make one for Linux." WebGL is a strong alternative, although it's not that great right now. "Red Crucible: Firestorm" is a game project that chose to NOT move to the WebGL form because it doesn't have the performance needed for the game, so they stuck to the Unity 3D Web Plugin and binaries (including Linux).
But the fact of the matter is, there's really not that much great about having a Web player for anything, because you're still downloading the game even with flash. It's still the same game engine with a consistent collection of libraries. The difference is that the web players can't usually be extended with extra libraries, while the binaries can include whatever extra custom libraries you want. It's still a download either way, although maybe a small size difference (smaller difference with many 3D games).
It's VERY good news about the editor. I would expect a flood of great Linux games once it's up and running well! I think many struggling older games are just gonna switch to Unity 3D instead as well.
But the fact of the matter is, there's really not that much great about having a Web player for anything, because you're still downloading the game even with flash. It's still the same game engine with a consistent collection of libraries. The difference is that the web players can't usually be extended with extra libraries, while the binaries can include whatever extra custom libraries you want. It's still a download either way, although maybe a small size difference (smaller difference with many 3D games).
It's VERY good news about the editor. I would expect a flood of great Linux games once it's up and running well! I think many struggling older games are just gonna switch to Unity 3D instead as well.
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It's about time! Next we need the unity plugin for the browser!Not sure if we need that (and I'm sure we wont see one, it's pretty much old now). Unity should just improve their webGL or something.
Something I hadn't thought about before seeing you mention webGL in your post: There is a webGL, will there be a webVulkan?
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ElectricPrism Jun 28, 2015
Awesome, now I can take Unity3D seriously as rebooting to Windows is a serious turnoff.
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Something I hadn't thought about before seeing you mention webGL in your post: There is a webGL, will there be a webVulkan?I don't think this is ever going to happen, since vulkan allows you to access hardware at a very low level, this would probably be too dangerous for web applications. Moreover, you need to be able to adapt to every supported gpu out there if you go the vulkan way ( handling different memory bandwidth, and capacity, etc, if you want to do it correctly). While this is certainly doable for big engines, I don't see every web developer doing this.
Don't quote me on this, however, I am not a specialist, and there are people better fit to answer you :-)
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Agree, Vulkan is on purpose designed for a low level access on graphics card hardware, therefore it gets a low level api therm. So, it doesn't make any sense as another high level "gl" wrapper api. I'm sorry, but it's just dumb and there will be still WebGL around.
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Regarding Case sensitivity: Isn't osX case sensitive? Since its Unix and stuff? And there is a mac editor already, so... Huh?
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Regarding Case sensitivity: Isn't osX case sensitive? Since its Unix and stuff? And there is a mac editor already, so... Huh?I think their HSF+ file system is still configured to be case insensitive by default. For historical reasons I guess. Or maybe Apple doesn't consider case sensitivity to be "hip" enough. Isn't that how they decide everything?
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It's about time! Next we need the unity plugin for the browser!That plugin is dead because just in two months NPAPI going to be completely removed from Chrome on Windows. Considering Google's ChromeOS devices now have quite big market share in the US there no way game developers going to abandon Chrome support.
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