Megagon Industries have now confirmed the status of Lonely Mountains: Downhill for Linux and currently it's not good news.
This is a game that was funded on Kickstarter, that had Linux as a platform for release. If this sounds familiar, it's because we wrote about this game recently where the developer seemed a bit confused on the Linux version and they weren't clear on what they were doing.
Yesterday, they put out a longer and more detailed update on Kickstarter about Linux support. The bad news, is that currently Unity doesn't support IL2CPP (a Unity-developed scripting backend) on Linux which they're now using and without it, the Linux version runs "pretty poorly" to the point that Megagon Industries don't feel comfortable enough releasing it.
Hold on though, there's some good news on the horizon. They did say they have Lonely Mountains and all features working on Linux, IL2CPP is just the last hurdle. On top of that, Unity has finally added support for IL2CPP on Linux as of 2019.3.0b4 (a Beta version), but they won't upgrade to it until it's out and fully supported so we are in for a wait.
This IL2CPP issue is actually the same problem that caused Throne of Lies to remove Linux support, although Throne of Lies may return to Linux again in future. Same for Facepunch who also mentioned that the lack of IL2CPP in Unity for Linux would cause issues for Rust.
Thunderful Publishing has already provided GamingOnLinux with a key, so once Linux support is in good shape with an eventual Unity upgrade we will take a good look at it.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
GustyGhost Oct 16, 2019
I'm really liking the art direction on this.
Yeah me too, looks absolutely fabulous.
Doesn't IL2CPP merely convert C# scripts to C++?
C# is quite fast to begin with. You really have to make things very convoluted and messy to get bad performance with Mono/C# that you'd then need to convert to C++ for a very noticeable boost.
Of course, it might be that Unity adds some problems of its own here.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 16 October 2019 at 2:31 pm UTC
PublicNuisance Oct 16, 2019
ElectricPrism Oct 16, 2019
Fixing issues as you go is okay, not realeasing for their linux backers is NOT. Linux gamers are not as finicky as win and mac they greatly underestimate us. They owe their backers and need to do their best and then release whatever they have.
I wonder why they think they need il2cpp. Thousands of games have been made with Unity3D without il2cpp.I think some brought up security issues as an argument.
Which... on one hand isn't totally wrong, as games using "just" c# are super simple to modify, given how easily C# can be reverse engineered, modified and put back in (that's how many mods are made).
On the other hand, the same can be done with C++, it's just harder as it doesn't keep the code structure as intact when built as C# does.
I get that somewhat for games that are primarily multiplayer, but for single player games I really don't.
But in the end, only a server-client model, in which the server does all the decision-making and the game client is merely there for the simulation and input, can make sure there are less hacks.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 17 October 2019 at 8:52 am UTC
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