Streets of Rage 4 is now officially available for Linux, along with Vulkan support in FNA

Lizardcube and Dotemu announced today that Streets of Rage 4 is now officially supported on Linux (and macOS), with a port done by Ethan Lee creator of FNA.

"The all-time classic Streets of Rage, known as Bare Knuckle (ベア・ナックル Bea Nakkuru) in Japan, is a trilogy of beat ‘em up known for this timeless gameplay and electronic dance influenced music. Streets of Rage 4 builds upon the classic trilogy’s gameplay with new mechanics, beautiful hand drawn visuals and a God tier soundtrack."

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Game Features:

• The comeback of the legendary Streets of Rage series.
• Beautiful graphics fully hand-drawn animated by the studio behind Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap.
• Clean up Wood Oak City by yourself or with another friend online!
• For the very first time, team up to 4 people offline to take the city back!
• Classic gameplay enhanced with brand-new mechanics.
• Soundtrack by a wide all-star line up of world-class musicians.
• Braised chicken everywhere.
• A dozen former Streets of Rage characters unlockable and playable in their original pixel versions.
• Play with the music of the previous Streets of Rage games.
• 12 unique stages.
• Fight against your friends in the Battle Mode
• Or team up along to defeat the Boss Rush Mode!

Not only is it now officially supported, it's also the 50th port done by Ethan Lee using FNA and it brings with it both OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Linux version. Speaking about the release on their .plan website, Lee mentioned:

Yes, at long last we're in a position where we can start looking at Vulkan more seriously for FNA, at least from a testing perspective. On Steam you will see two options, one for OpenGL and one for Vulkan Experimental. What does Vulkan provide that OpenGL doesn't? Broadly: Nothing at all, since performance is really good for both renderers. Arguably the Vulkan renderer just raises the VRAM requirement significantly, since texture memory is no longer marshalled between VRAM and host memory, and this game has all the textures. Basically, if you don't have a 4GB+ card, you shouldn't even try to use it. Just about the only thing exclusive to Vulkan is "mailbox" mode, which replaces the "low latency" checkbox found on the Windows version. To enable mailbox mode:

FNA3D_VULKAN_FORCE_MAILBOX_VSYNC=1 %command%

When available, this will use VK_PRESENT_MODE_MAILBOX_KHR which allows the engine to not wait on vsync while also not allowing for tear lines. The game still runs at a 60Hz timestep, but frames will be presented as soon as physically possible, which should noticeably reduce latency for some setups. This is not available for OpenGL and I opted to remove the in-game tickbox because it turns out that mode just manually shoves in a glFinish after SDL_GL_SwapWindow, which I'm not 100% certain works as intended everywhere (it definitely doesn't on macOS).

Aside from that? It's the regular ol game in its perfectly preserved glory. No potentially dangerous write watch hacks needed! This one's been in the waiting room for a while (it was so long we had time to write a whole dang Vulkan renderer), so I hope you'll enjoy it after such a long time!

If you previously used the Proton compatibility layer, you can tell Steam to download the official Linux version by forcing the Steam Linux Runtime from the right click -> Properties menu for the game on Steam (example).

You can buy it on Steam, with the build up on GOG hopefully tomorrow. It's 30% off on Steam until November 16.