While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:
Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.
This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!
You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.
This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!
You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
Login / Register
- Vampire Hunters turns Vampire Survivors into an FPS where you stack 14 weapons together
- Fedora KDE gets approval to be upgraded to sit alongside Fedora Workstation
- Steam gets new tools for game devs to offer players version switching in-game
- Palworld dev details the patents Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are suing for
- SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics & Dreamcast Classics get delisted in December
- > See more over 30 days here
-
GOG launch their Preservation Program to make games liv…
- dibz -
GOG launch their Preservation Program to make games liv…
- tfk -
Valve announced the Steam Deck OLED: Limited Edition Wh…
- Purple Library Guy -
Claw machine deckbuilder Dungeon Clawler arrives Novemb…
- Purple Library Guy -
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Editio…
- BlackBloodRum - > See more comments
- Upped the limit on article titles
- Liam Dawe - Weekend Players' Club 10/11/2024
- KassidyWard - New social media bar in article list
- whizse - Weekend Players' Club 10/18/2024
- DylanFox - Our own anti-cheat list
- Liam Dawe - See more posts
View PC info
I would just like to know more about this I guess.
Porting can be as simple as exporting your game to Linux with the click of a button if you use an engine that makes this possible, or it can be a dauntingly tricky task if the original codebase is tightly tied to the original platform. This is doubly true if the game makes use of Windows-only third party libraries, or triply if it relies on quirks and outright bugs of a platform or a specific compiler.
But generally you'd first map out what parts of the project need to be ported or "made portable", then pick suitable tools and libraries for the task, like OpenAL for audio, SDL for input etc. These are good and mature libraries that work well in both Windows and Linux, so you can use whatever IDE/editor and OS you're most comfortable with for this. Although using a cross platform compiler or two and testing on all target platforms is better for your sanity at this point.
Porting the graphics engine can be really hard or just moderately hard, depending on the level of your expertise and the existing design. If the original engine was indeed built tightly around D3D as you said without any abstraction at all (which is simply bad design) it'll take major refactoring, especially if you need to keep the existing backend in addition to the new OpenGL code. Even in case the original code is excellent, this isn't a simple search-and-replace. But I'm stepping out of my depth here, so that's as far as I go.
Ryan 'icculus' Gordon is often cited as saying that porting a game from Windows to Linux can take anywhere from 24 hours to 3 months, but that's probably more than a bit optimistic for mere mortals.
View PC info
The following article previously posted on Gaming On Linux gives a pretty in-depth overview:
Why We Want Native Ports Only
View PC info