I'll be honest, I'm not too bothered about Project Contingency [Official Site] deciding not to support Linux because I've only just heard of it, it's still in the early stages and Installation 01 [Official Site] will support Linux.
I'm highlighting this, due to what the developers of Project Contingency said in a recent news post about why they aren't going to support Linux.
There are a few issues with Linux. For one, there are an absurdly small amount of people that actually game on Linux. Because of this, the amount of work that we would need to put into developing for Linux would not be worth it.
The amount of people actually using Linux for gaming is always a difficult topic to address. If you're comparing it with Windows, sure, Linux gaming is a lot smaller. I don't think there's a real reliable way to actually check how many people are gaming on Linux. I just don't think it's worth arguing over and considering this is a fan-made project done in their spare time—fair enough.
But there are other issues as well. Writing a reliable anti-cheat for Linux is not easy and cannot be enforced. What with Linux being open sourced, it's extremely difficult to write an anti-cheat for that platform because anybody can make any changes they want to the OS. That means easily tricking an anti-cheat into thinking it's working when it's actually just counting time and taking up memory.
This is one I'm personally not too sure about. I've read a lot of mixed feelings about anti-cheat on Linux, I'm sure plenty of you will be able to clear that up in the comments with your thoughts. It might be harder, it might not be, I think it all comes down to how well you know the system, like everything else doesn't it? BattlEye came out with Linux support, so it can't be impossible to do.
Aside from anti-cheat, there aren't any clear options for a graphics API. Windows has support for both DX12 and Vulkan. To my knowledge, at this time, neither of the developers for those API's have released official implementations for either and using unofficial wrappers, emulators, etc.. could end up leading to weird and unfortunate bugs that we wouldn't have any control over.
This is the bit that really got me. To me, this shows their inexperience with graphical APIs and it really sounds like they don't quite understand what they're talking about. Not that I claim to understand all that goes into making games, however I feel like I have a reasonable grasp on things now to at least say this: Unreal Engine 4 supports OpenGL and Vulkan on Linux (they didn't even mention OpenGL at all), it has issues for sure that we've seen, but it is getting better and there's a few good games out there using UE4 on Linux that work reasonably well like: Everspace, Helium Rain, Astrokill, All Walls Must Fall, >observer_ and more. The way they've written that is very strange indeed.
As far as I'm concerned, nothing to see here, moving along!
Thanks for the tip Sasa.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: R93_SniperQuoting: x_wingIs the guy a developer? If it is, my theory is that he has only develop on Windows. I mean, it's clear that He only knows how to use Windows dev tools & technology, so when he has to think out of the his sandbox he simply can't (and my statement applies for many devs out there, not only this one).
I think that one of the biggest problem of all gaming/applications projects is that they always start with the multiplatform idea (you know, it sells!), but they just start programming using Windows development tools not even thinking nor testing if what you're doing can crosscompile. So, in essence, I'm convinced that all this guys/enterprise that starts a project and promise multiplatfom support simply think that they can pospone other platform support to a final stage of development, when it MUST be parallel work.
Yes he is a developer, though you're completly correct that most/all of his stuff is on windows based platforms. Its funny you say this as I remarked earlier about how we're doing stuff, but for us I can assure you that we've been having tests to see how easily things begin to cross compile and how they run on other Operating systems. So far the results are promising! [/spoiler]
My apologies for this too late answer (I was on a travel, shitty internet, no time... you know). To be fair, I don't follow your project nor read any other article out of the one Liam quoted in this article. That said, I would appreciate that you share with us any other post that show us your development process so I can understand your answer.
But now, going back to the "crossplatform" commitment, I see as very slim possibility that your project will ever get to our OS having a programmer that makes this statements (In fact, he has already made a technology decision that will affect the portability of your launcher). So, I think that would very important that, if you want to keep your multiplatform commitment, every developer in your team starts getting some experience programming on a Linux environment, because in your current status I believe that the cost of making the changes to get your game to our platform (and even to OSX) won't payback the effort.
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