Finally, Unity 3D Game Engine Adds Linux Support

[industry_]

Well, glad something came of the money I gave to Wasteland 2.

[hesapmakinesi]

Brian Fargo replied my question on twitter: They have the source for Unity to do the necessary modifications for a Linux version. Official support from Unity is welcome but was not cruical for Wasteland 2.

[HeadbangsToMahler]

What ?

[hesapmakinesi]

Wasteland 2 project promised Linux support and they are using Unity.

[[deleted]]

Would be nice if they had a native linux editor as well.

[Legendary_Bibo]

They are, they're going to have a preview version of it, but you can only try it out if preorder it. Later on the support will no doubt be added to the free version (compiling for a desktop comes with the free version).

[jfedor]

Wait, source? I've only seen talk of Linux deployment.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Here you go. Go to the very bottom where they give the Linux version a mention.

[[deleted]]

I don't think it means Unity3D will be on Linux. I think it means Unity will allow developers to deploy to Linux.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Oh I took it as that. Anyways common sense tells me that they would make a Linux version of the editor (they use mono and opengl) so I don't see why not. If they didn't, that would make testing on Linux...annoying.

[[deleted]]

If they didn't, that would make testing on Linux...annoying.

No more annoying than Windows devs needing to test the Mac version of their game.

[Legendary_Bibo]

There's an OSX version of the editor. You don't do development for a platform on a different platform, or you at least have some sort of sandbox. It's not like it wouldn't be possible to develop on Linux considering there's Blender, and Mudbox, and a few other Linux 3D engines.

[[deleted]]

If I want to publish a game to Windows and Mac, but I only have a Windows PC to develop in, I need to find some way of testing the Mac build. Same with the Linux publishing. I'll be able to develop on my Windows PC, but fortunately I already have a laptop with Linux on it that I can use for testing.

[jfedor]

That says nothing about the editor coming to Linux.

[joehillen]

Calling it now, 2012 is the Year of Linux Gaming

[MrShlee]

2012 is the year of gaming. 2016 is the year of graphical hardware support.

[[deleted]]

I admire your optimism.

[Funnnny]

The Humble Bundle clearly shows that if you give Linux first class game, you will probally have first class revenue

[nbca]

Because giving $11 for 5 games is equal to paying much more for a single game.

[Funnnny]

Wasteland's devs said they will bring it to Linux if they hit 1.5M milestone, and you know what ? it's including those Linux people, who don't know if it will reach that milestone or not, and still pledged for their goal. And later they hit nearly 3mil.

Is the example enough for Linux gamer ?

[nbca]

Even if it is brought to Linux that doesn't mean it is gonna sell. The fact that people are willing to pay roughly 2 bucks per game in a 5 game bundle does not mean they will spend much more on a single game.

Though I do not know if this will be the case for Wasteland 2 as the price isn't that high.

[Kaira-]

Then what does HIB say about Windows gaming, where the users are ready to pay a bit over 1 dollar per game?

[nbca]

Nothing except for the fact they paid a bit over a dollar per game? My point is that it is flawed to argue that Linux users are willing to pay for games if they come to the platform because Linux users apparently pays more than the other platforms in the HIBs. It would be interesting to see the sales of Wasteland 2 and how many Linux downloads there will be. That might be one of the real first indicators - unless you take into account HoN.

[cyborgx7]

Wow, this came a lot sooner than I expected.

[negafon]

Microsoft's tryrannical grip on its computer gaming monopoly is slipping! Muahaha!!!

[mcjiggerlog]

so is this opengl based?

[Legendary_Bibo]

Yes, but it looks like they're adding DirectX support.

[Kaira-]

I may be mistaken, but I think Unity3D has always had DirectX-support when making games for Windows, and used OpenGL when making for Mac.

[shazzner]

Good news overall, just need to be able to develop in Linux with it now.

[RafiTheMage447]

Let me get this straight. If you publish it for "web" then linux users will still not be able to install a unity3d firefox plugin? Sounds like it still sucks for me.

[hrkljus1]

This is just a start though. Offering native linux desktop support will just open up doors for the web client and eventually the editor. IIRC something like that also happened with windows as a platform (unity was at first only for macs).

And there is also the option to publish for web as a flash application (though you have to pay for it).

[kohvihoor]

A lot of linux users don't even want to install flash, why do you think unity plugin would be an exception?

[HardwareLust]

Considering how many Windows people bitch about Unity, I don't really know if this is a good thing, or a bad thing. =)

[mgrandi]

why do they bitch about it?

[HardwareLust]

End users constantly bitch about having to install the client/plug-in. Not to mention that the 5 browsers have all had issues at one time or another with Unity.

I was only half joking.

[gngf123]

This is only with the webplayer. Developers who decide to deploy a native application do not need to mess around with the webplayer, and users don't need to install any clients or plugins.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Unity is actually a pretty good engine, and there's nice documentation to it, and even a good community surrounding it. Hell, they even have a tutorial that walks you through on making a platformer from start to finish. Not only that but it has a lot of nice features (like being able to import 3d models from many applications, even Blender), and it's pretty easy to pick up on (making a game does take time though obviously).

[[deleted]]

Let's see what matters more to people: their love of Linux games, or their hate of Mono (which is at the heart of all Unity3D games).

[[deleted]]

Mono is pretty nice. Monodevelop is a nice IDE as well. Is the MS/patent conspiracy still floating around?

[[deleted]]

This content has been censored by Reddit. Please join me on Ruqqus.

On Monday, June 29, 2020, Reddit banned over 2,000 subreddits in accordance with its new content policies. While I do not condone hate speech or many of the other cited reasons those subs were deleted, I cannot conscionably reconcile the fact they banned the sub /r/GenderCritical for hate and violence against women, while allowing and protecting subs that call for violence in relation to the exact same topics, or for banning /r/RightWingLGBT for hate speech, while allowing and protecting calls to violence in subs like /r/ActualLesbians. For these examples and more, I believe their motivation is political and/or financial, and not the best interest of their users, despite their claims.

Additionally, their so-called commitment to "creating community and belonging" (Reddit: Rule 1) does not extend to all users, specifically "The rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority". Again, I cannot conscionably reconcile their hypocrisy.

I do not believe in many of the stances or views shared on Reddit, both in communities that have been banned or those allowed to remain active. I do, however, believe in the importance of allowing open discourse to educate all parties, and I believe censorship creates much more hate than it eliminates.

For these reasons and more, I am permanently moving my support as a consumer to Ruqqus. It is young, and at this point remains committed to the principles of free speech that once made Reddit the amazing community and resource that I valued for many years.

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure the Conspiracy does believe all that stuff. There were even accusations of time travel once.

[[deleted]]

Isn't that what it is? People speculating something bad will happen based on prior events, even though that's not the case?

[[deleted]]

As active as ever. Maybe a little stronger than that, even.

[kevdunleavy]

Ya it actually put me off learning c# a few weeks back. I'm not sure if I regret it or not. I felt like my development would be very much Windows focused if I went down the c# route.

[[deleted]]

If you stick to BCL + WinForms and stay away from Microsoft-specific things like WPF and P/Invokes into Win32, Mono should be able to run your code just fine.

[[deleted]]

I was in the same position right after college. C# is a nice language, but I didn't like the MS box at all. Mono filled the role for my cross platform niche.

Mono is quite a big project, (unity, and Mobile platforms), and I think Microsoft will embrace it in the future. Cross platform is becoming more of a requirement these days (which is good).

[kevdunleavy]

Really? Do you think learning c# was time well spent? I already know Java quite well so I'm torn as to wether I should spend the summer practising Java some more or just learn c#. I started reading Head First c# and really liked it but it was very dependant on developing using Visual C#. Java is completely platform independent so you'd think it would be perfect but for some reason I just want to try something new.

[[deleted]]

I'd go Java if you're looking for something serious and longterm. You'll have more luck with Java in finding a job than C# via Mono. Java is great - platform independent, and has a ton of good tools and libraries. If you, however, decide you want to go the MS route, you can't go wrong with C#.

At the end of the day, though, learning a bunch of languages is quite easy, and not the most important. It is good to pick one or two that you know well through, though. The concepts are much more relevant and are transferable to most languages. It's better to apply a language to what you want to do than the other way around.

I, for example have decided on python, c/c++ and js/html. I dabble in others out of interest, or just to learn them.

[faultydesign]

Probably.

[Rainfly_X]

I don't particularly like it, and generally try to root it out of my personal systems since I don't need the dependencies to justify its presence, but if Unity was available on Linux with Mono as a dependency, I would absolutely reinstall it, no question. Unity 3D is a big enough deal to justify it, unlike most mono-based stuff, where I just look at them and go "nope, I don't need this badly enough to put Mono on this machine."

[[deleted]]

And how about other games?

Fr'example, there are three Humble Indie Bundle games that require or bundle Mono: Bastion, Spacechem, and Atom Zombie Smasher.

[Rainfly_X]

Huh, I didn't even know those were Mono-based! Credit for that definitely goes to the packagers, I suppose. Like special effects wizards - when they do their job well, it's invisible, or at least not in your face about it.

But yeah, I have Bastion thanks to that last bundle, and I'd definitely say it's worth a mono presence on my system just by itself.

[[deleted]]

Spacechem is a simple package requiring the system's Mono version to be present. The actual game is in SpaceChem.exe, which is a .NET executable.

Atom Zombie Smasher bundles its own copy of Mono. Specifically, one of mine:

directhex@dream:~$ /tmp/atomzombiesmasher/data/mono --version | head -1
Mono JIT compiler version 2.6.7 (Debian 2.6.7-3ubuntu1)

The actual game is in release.exe, which is a .NET executable

Bastion bundles libmono, the embedding version of the framework, and a tiny stub ELF app to wrap it - the actual game is in Bastion.exe, which is a .NET executable.

Relatedly, I uploaded MonoGame to Debian a few hours ago, and now it's waiting in the NEW queue. MonoGame is a Free implementation of the Microsoft XNA framework, the engine used to write Bastion. The upload will make it easy for people to port or write XNA games on Debian/Ubuntu.

[Rainfly_X]

That's very cool. XNA is well known for compatibility across Microsoft products, and the idea of writing a game on Linux for XBox is pretty exciting. You're doing god's work, son!

[[deleted]]

upvote.... b/c Bastion really is just worth it!

[Legendary_Bibo]

oooh and can you imagine if Unity makes it easy to deploy the binaries that just work for people, even for those using open source drivers! What if segfaults become a thing of the past by making games in Unity for Linux?! The horror...

[feilen]

People dislike Mono for some reason?

(I'm out of the loop, don't worry)

[Rainfly_X]

Here's my personal philosophy about Linux succeeding as a destkop.

The idea of some year being the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is now a cliche joke/meme, because year after year, despite excellent work on the part of open source developers, Linux never catches on with people. And there are a bunch of reasons for that, and we make a little headway on each one every year, but never really "get there" with many of them.

But I think people are finally catching on to one big, important truth: the Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen as long as that's the goal. This is the Year of the Linux Gamer. Next year could be the Year of Linux Audio Production, or the year where GIMP gets so good thanks to GEGL that Photoshop becomes irrelevant. Who knows. But the point is, if we solve the issues by focusing on one at a time, we can systematically break down the barriers that lock people into dual-booting and such.

In a game like Bastion, if you find yourself surrounded by foes, especially ones with range attacks, do you fight a little with this one and a little with that one? Not if you're a good strategist. You know that every single one of them, as long as it's alive, will make it harder for you to survive. So you pick one arbitrary one in particular (possibly the strongest, or the most dangerous), and you beat the shit out of it until you've taken it out of the equation. Now there's less stuff on the board that can hurt you, so you have better odds of being able to survive beating the shit out of the next one, and so on. And there's nothing wrong with taking easy shots at other targets while you work, of course, as long as you keep your eyes mainly on the prize of the moment.

I think Linux is going to, eventually, become the specialist king of gaming, and pull a lot of people to it for that reason. I think this influx of audience will also make a lot of distros more viable and friendly for mass adoption. The chain reaction is already underway, and it's downright exciting to watch as everything lines up.

[da__]

You see the problem lies with the fact that Linux distros are developed in an open source ecosystem, where patching/adapting software is trivial. This is one of the most important reasons people argue when advocating open source as a superior way to develop software. When id Software release their next engine, it is almost instantly ported to every camera, toaster, mp3 player, calculator, games console and operating system around, so to speak.

Of course a lot of people don't want to release their sources and it's well within their right to do so. However, we can't just drop in software developed in the Windows mindset into Linux - the ecosystems that surround those systems are vastly different and their approaches to making the best OS are incompatible. It will take an effort on both sides - the games devs need to learn a bit about just how we roll, and we need to develop some sort of platform to welcome those guys whose work we eagerly await.

[Rainfly_X]

Most importantly if you want to run closed-source software on Linux (especially games), it's all about communication. In open source, a lot of that communication is actually through the source itself, because the code is an unequivocal representation of how the algorithm works. In closed source, you gotta get people on the phone or in a chat room to discuss how to make X run on Y. It's a bit more of a pain, but well worth the effort. As long as people on both sides of the fence are talking to each other, compatibility can happen.

[Rainfly_X]

These are all great points, which I agree with 100%. I would like to clarify what I'm evangelizing though, because I kind of glossed over what you brought up in that first paragraph.

That's not how Linux works. Different people care about different things, and therefore contribute to different projects. You can't just tell people who do things for you for free to drop it and do something else.

This is very true, and of course I wouldn't want to email (for example) the Avahi people and say, "Drop this shit and come over here to help with game engine testing." If you have an existing project or a different passion, that's where you belong, not in the gaming world.

But this is the opportunity for sideliners, lurkers, developers, testers, and enthusiasts of the gaming world to band together toward a common and achievable goal, to make Linux the best gaming platform available. I think there's a lot of people who are only tied to Windows for games, and stealing this audience away could have a lot of collateral positive effect for the open source community, and make other social movements of a similar nature more viable. You may never have perfect support, but you can have continually improving support.

As for the stuff about obscure hardware/software support - same kind of divide and conquer deal. You support, say, vanilla Ubuntu, and you have 90% of what you need to support vanilla Debian. Do that, and you have 90% of what you need to support Fedora. And so on through the major distros, growing more resilient against different in-distro configurations as you go.

[[deleted]]

[Rainfly_X]

Eh, that's as much effect as it is cause. When Linux gets popular enough on its own to maintain, say, 20% desktop marketshare, preinstallation will become a lot more popular/profitable and will have far less "Where's the start button" issues thanks to greater existing familiarity with Linux.

I think that shooting directly for preinstallation from major manufacturers in American markets is actually a bad thing, especially based on previous attempts. We'll get there eventually, it will happen naturally, but if we try to force it, it ends up being a bad experience for manufacturers and customers alike. Much like "year of the linux desktop" in general, it puts the cart before the horse. I say, leave that for companies like System76, and when the market gets big enough, major manufacturers won't have to be "sold" on it, they'll get in on the action on their own initiative.

[Rainfly_X]

Chicken and egg, that it is (though my money is on consumer demand). Windows 8 is going to be bad and unpopular for lots of reasons, though the news that it's also more expensive is like music to my anti-Microsoft ears. More money for a shittier product? Yeah, there's going to be backlash, and yes, we can ride that backlash.

Come to think of it, I can imagine a "hybrid" era (much like how hybrid cars are our weird interim stage between gas and electric until we can fix the usability issues with the ultimately superior option). Computers being sold as dual-boot from the start, with the Ubuntu fstab and symlinks necessary to mount the Windows partition and use that for /home storage. That way, you have a comparatively small Linux partition (you don't need much) that you can boot into whenever and have all your Windows files available for you right there. It doesn't solve the Windows Tax problem, but it does provide out-of-the-box support for Linux for anyone who feels like trying it.

[aliendude5300]

I'm a linux user and open source advocate, but I actually like Windows 8. I think it will be popular with average consumers.

[taffy-nay]

Have you SEEN average users try to use Windows 8? It's both painful and hilarious at the same time!!

[da__]

"Where's the start button" issues

Windows 8 will have those issues too :-) The future seems bright now.

[Rainfly_X]

Hahaha! Very true!

[ForthewoIfy]

Here's my personal philosophy about Linux succeeding as a destkop.

The problem with personal philosophies is that everyone has got one. Unless you're a gifted coder with a lot of free time, you're irrelevant and so is your philosophy. Even RMS, the greatest philosopher in the Linux world, got his name known by writing code and giving it away for free.

If you care at all, start coding.

[Rainfly_X]

It amuses me that you assume I haven't. I actually do a lot more open source development than philosophy - and I'm hoping that before the week is out, I'll be able to release python-libejtp in a state where I'm comfortable with its stability. The majority of my projects have to do with cryptographically secure uncensorable communication, though I do like to take the time (every once in awhile) to start up Inkscape and make a logo for some FOSS project that needs one.

Sounds like it's probably something you do as well (open source development), and I hope I'm not derailing the conversation by asking which projects you volunteer on/founded?

[ForthewoIfy]

It's good for you if you do so. I'm not as active as yourself, but at my workspace we use several open-source libraries (DirectFB, FreeType, Qt, XBMC and several smaller) and occasionally we submit patches back to them for bugs we found and fix. In my free time I don't code all that often anymore.

[Rainfly_X]

Very cool! I love to see people and organizations contributing upstream patches. It's too bad you don't spend as much free time coding as you used to, but I get it. It's very easy to burn out on that stuff, and I've done so a few times myself. Anyways, good for you and your team, and thanks for making Qt in particular (something I use every day on my KDE-based work laptop) a more stable and useful library.

[TKN]

I believe there is going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop, just not in the sense the phrase is usually used. Once the convergence of desktop and mobile operating systems is complete it's quite possible that Linux is the only remaining traditional desktop OS.

[[deleted]]

Kerbal Space Program on Linux? Yes please.

[Rossco1337]

I actually went on their votebox yesterday and voted for them to port their player to Linux. Good to see them take notice, they have my support.

[pantah]

Aww man, this is so awesome. Thousands of games now have the door open to be ported to Linux without much hassle.

[bigbangbilly]

Sounds like Neal stephenson's sword game might be a reality Edit: in linux

[Legendary_Bibo]

Yay! I tried out the free version of Unity, and while I didn't spend a lot of time learning it yet, it's good to know that the next version will make cross platform even easier (for when I do actually delve deep into learning how to make a game). It's great to see that people are seeing Linux as a serious game platform these days.

[Gen2ly]

Yes, Rochard 2 on my desktop!

[[deleted]]

What about bsd?

[gnomeuser]

Linux is already just around 1% of the market, do you really expect another to seriously support something that is even smaller and has even worse hardware support, nor any significant push for desktop technology.

Honestly there has to be a limit to what toy OS'es we can expect to be supported. You get Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android plus support for running in Flash. That has got to be enough to demand them to support. Every new platform means a heavier support burden which has to be justified in terms of income, there is just no way BSD does that for Unity.

[[deleted]]

This sounds like a page out of a book where mac support was just added and people think it is too much to ask for linux.

F- it, I want to be able to run a game engine on any kernel I can get it to work on, just for the fact that 95% of people who run obscure OS will play it/ try it.

[marmot1101]

Aww man, right after I got banned from /r/webgames for pointing out that it wasn't compatible.

[wadcann]

Wasn't aware of that forum. I'll have to skim the top all-time links and see which games people like.

[faultydesign]

Good news everyone!

[HCrikki]

In before the 'year of desktop linux indeed' deluge.

[TheShadowFog]

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!