Unity 4 Adds Linux Support 150
dartttt writes "After more than 14,000 votes by Linux users and efforts by Brian Fargo, Unity has added Linux support to their popular 3D game engine. Starting with Unity 4.0, Linux will be supported as a publishing platform allowing Unity games to be played natively on Linux. Only standalone desktop games will be supported initially. From the article: 'Unity Technologies, maker of a widely used video-game engine, today announced that its fourth-generation product will introduce new animation technology and extend its support for Adobe Systems' Flash Player, Linux, and Microsoft's DirectX 11.'"
No source? (Score:5, Funny)
How about a kickstarter to liberate the source of Unity?
Re:No source? (Score:5, Informative)
Um.... do you have any concept of what that would cost? You'd have to be offering a huge pile of money. Right now they can commercially licence their engine for all sorts of projects. Even if those projects don't make money Unity can.
Have a look at their people page, they have probably 110 employees. That's probably 12-13 million a year in revenue alone. Are you going to try and get a kickstarter for 100 million dollars to effectively shut them down, or to guarantee them income to keep working indefinitely?
Don't get me wrong, there need to be more open source game tools (no matter how many you point me to there can always be more). As someone on the teaching side of things in trying to train game developers it's a real problem to know what tools you want to use, because the emphasis shouldn't be on the tools, but fighting with tools puts the emphasis on them. But Unity is pretty good about giving away a free trial, and being a good example of the sort of experience you'll have in industry, with some stuff opened up to you. That's about all we can hope for. Asking for a commercial engine that costs millions of dollars to make and maintain to just give up that kind of money is a pipe dream at best.
Now, trying to get them to pull an id software and release old versions of the engine as open source (say release 2.0 or 3.0 when 4.0 goes live) might be a more realistic goal and would still be awesome.
And by the way, you can negotiate your way into source code for Unity3D. I've never worked with anyone that thought it important enough to try until today, though. I literally advised a company this morning that Unity is probably their best bet for an engine given what they want to do, and they were wondering about source licences, which is the only reason I know that at all. Given that, it wouldn't be a huge shock to see old versions end up open sourced, if nothing else because you can't keep something bottled up indefinitely.
Valve? (Score:1)
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How would that make them money? The steam for linux store is going to be about selling software, not giving it away for free. What do you need steam for at all if you're giving it away for free? They aren't in the business of running a pile of servers for charity.
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Or they could not buy it, and let people do what they're doing already, and still have the potential increase in payware games on Linux...
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Depends on what you're trying to do.
idtech3 gets you basically nothing on mobile, and it's content creation tools are... uh.... well lets be polite. They're mostly for a first person or 3rd person game. Which, to be fair, is a huge swath of the gaming business, but it's certainly not all of it. Trying to do a RTS is idtech3 would be harder than unity.
A game engine is a LOT bigger than just the graphics engine, at least these days. You have AI, pathfinding (which may be a part of AI), building targets to
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I'm not sure how it is hard at all. The game dll module is meant to be replaced... many modify it, but it doesn't need to be you, the single player, on a team, or vs. everyone else in a many player arena. The model/texture loading, collision detection, physics, camera manipulation, etc. should make it more than possible to do such. To me, that is most of the hard work.
Why Unity Is Used (Score:4, Informative)
As response to the above I can confirm that Unity is very much used because of the development environment, ease of use for 3D artists, and an incredibly simple tool chain that lets you target many platforms with one codebase. Art assets can be shared between platforms as well, or specified per platform.
For these reasons, Unity is used a lot at small studios, particularly where gameplay is the main focus and the technology doesn't have to be cutting edge. Systems like Unreal and CryEngine are more powerful from a technology and graphics standpoint, but are not nearly as easy to use for small teams of developers.
In particular, Unity's documentation, specifically its scripting documentation, is outstanding. The documentation for other systems is extremely rough by comparison.
I have no affiliation with Unity3D, other than the fact that I've used the software in the past and like it. I know the facts I mention above because I've done consulting and training for many local game studios, many of which have used or are using Unity3D. Also, hundreds of my students currently work in the game industry (many in Vancouver BC) so I often hear about what's going on in local studios.
Re:Why Unity Is Used (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on a small team who uses Unity for... well, they're not games in the strictest sense, more interactive flythroughs, and when I say small team, I mean there's me, a 3D modeller and an Interface Artist, and the Interface Artist rarely actually loads up Unity. He just passes me the graphics and I build the GUI.
It's fantastically simple to use, if you're programming for it the hardest thing you'll probably need is a working knowledge of Vectors and Quaternions (and even then there's code samples out there for 90% of the stuff you'll want to do). Although the standard 2D GUI script is awful, but, again, there's code out there that bypass it entirely and can do UI's that can rival what Scaleform can do (there were actually rumours of Scaleform partnering with them to include it in the engine, don't know what happened with that tbh)
You don't have much access to anything below game logic and file systems. For programming, you can use C# or a variant of Ecmascript to code on top of the Unity engine API and Mono (basically .NET 2.0), but you don't get access to the graphics pipeline. The closest you get is the shader language.
You can use the same scripts to modify the Editor to do stuff too. As such there's loads of 3rd party assets in the store, from Scripts, to models, even entire editing suites (one of my favourites is the Strumpy Shader Editor that, as you can guess, gives you a graphical interface for building shaders). Some are pay-for (for which Unity gets a cut) and some are free (like Strumpy) and if you pay for enough cash and buy enough plugins you can probably forgoe actually coding anything at all. It turns the whole thing into a glorified map maker.
It also uses a fair amount of middleware (like PhsyX and FMOD), which is why you'll never see it open source.
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Good news everyone! (Score:1)
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now devs and companies just have to click a few buttons and we got some games... hopefully
After you pay for the second copy :(
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I've done one extended game jam with unity now. It started as a weekend project which was polished up afterwards. So about 16 hours of coding and design and another 24 odd hours of polishing between two people. I'd show you the game but the flash version is being auctioned off right now. Sorry. :)
Overall I would say that it was remarkably easy. Though I would not attribute that to just being able to push buttons. There was a non significant amount of coding involved. And by that I mean, of the total of 80 h
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Yeah, it continues to bug me that MonoDevelop lags so far behind it's Windows origin, SharpDevelop, when one of the selling points of .NET is cross-platform code - surely you should just be able to build SharpDevelop for Linux...
Fuck yeah! (Score:2, Funny)
OMG! OMG! OMG! More proprietary software is coming to Linux!!! Fuck yeah!!!
Re:Fuck yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the choice between having a proprietary option and having no options, I'll take the option to have proprietary software available every time.
Re:Fuck yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
You just made baby RMS cry.
Re:Fuck yeah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well then he can weep, despite it moving one step closer to his goal. Actually, didn't he acknowledge that proprietary software on a Free platform was better than proprietary software on a proprietary platform?
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A hand job and a kick in the balls is better than two kicks in the balls.
How to develop games with 0 nut shots? (Score:2)
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Quick Internet search nets me a wikiquote page for him: (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman)
Some GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom.
Whether this is before or after something else he may have said is unknown.
Lesser of two evils (Score:2)
Liberated s/w on unliberated OS, or vice versa? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, he very specifically did say that in one of his recent essays. He doesn't like this unliberated software, but he'd rather that it sleeps w/ his liberated OS, rather than an unliberated one.
I actually tend to believe that the opposite choices are the way to go. Had the FOSS movements (not talking about just the FSF, but everybody involved in having source code automatically available w/ binaries) actually started w/ useful apps and making those liberated or open-sourced - things like Office Suites, Image & video editing software, Publishing software, financial software like and so on - that would have been better for FOSS as a whole. People would have gotten used to the likes of Open Office, GIMP, VLC and so on ages ago, just like they're used to Firefox and Chrome, and those would have been ubiquitous on computers. This would also have given these platforms the opportunity to get feature rich and customizable, letting people install either just the features they need, or all the bells & whistles.
Once that was out there, it would have been relatively easier to migrate them to FOSS OSs, be it Linux, BSD, osFree, ReactOS, et al. The initial port may have been a bitch - all those API translations and so on - but once that was done & out of the way, making upgrades to say, Linux versions of FOSS titles would have accompanied the upgrades to Windows equivalents (incidentally, while on that subject, such software should not have to be re-written b/w different versions of glibc or GCC or GTK or Qt - once it's written in each library, it should automatically be supported by its successors). Only caveat I see - the business models behind these would have needed to be worked out, but aside from that, it would have ensured a much wider acceptance of FOSS. In other words, if these programs need to be sold, do it, so that the projects don't remain in the red.
In short, what keeps FOSS from being widely embraced is its focus on lower layer s/w like kernels and userland utilities, rather than actual programs that end-users need. Stop making 20 text editors, 10 music players (KDE, I'm looking @ YOU), and so on, and actually produce the type of software that people need - be it things like Quickbooks, Photoshop & so on (close the gaps b/w GNUcash & Quickbooks, GIMP & Photoshop, Calligra vs MS Office and so on). Once those are successful, it will be easier to talk people into installing BSD or Linux or other FOSS OSs, since these titles can be ported there, given the availability of the source.
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Had the FOSS movements (not talking about just the FSF, but everybody involved in having source code automatically available w/ binaries) actually started w/ useful apps and making those liberated or open-sourced - things like Office Suites,
emacs, vi, vim, latex
Image & video editing software
Ok, GIMP lagged Photoshop to market by six years. However, it's worth noting Photoshop was the first in its class.
Video editing? PCs really weren't up to snuff. I remember having to run an MPEG decoder in grayscale mode under Windows 3.1 just because decoding chroma made it run too slow.
Publishing software
LaTeX...which was (and is) a WYSIWYM editor similar in some respects to WordPerfect for DOS (remember that?), but was really a user-friendlier means of working with TeX, the standard bearer for publishin
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emacs, vi weren't the type of apps I was talking about. I was talking about things like Libre-Office. In the KDE suite, I've noticed a lot of applets, but very often, a lot of them have duplicated fuctions, such as - in editors itself - Kate, Kedit, KJots, KWrite. Or, for multimedia, KPlayer, KMPlayer, Kaffeine, Dragon Player. Incidentally, for video editors, I was thinking something that's the equivalent of Microsoft Movie Maker, but the only ones I found were Cinerella and Avidemux, and they were too
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I was talking about things like Libre-Office
So I did a little digging. It looks like the first WYSIWYG functionality in personal computer appeared with the Apple Lisa in 1983, and WYSIWYG quickly made its way into the GUI releases of Word and WordPerfect around 1985. Still, this is 1985 we're talking about. You're lamenting the lack of consumer-oriented open-source desktop applications back at a time when any commercial enterprise trying to build and sell such a product was taking a huge risk. The reason Microsoft's mission statement was "a computer
Re:Fuck yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll happily use unity on my Linux box right alongside my nvidia driver.
Not me; Unity sucks and Shuttleworth can go shove it... oh, you mean this other Unity.
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There's nothing really keeping anyone from developing and offering proprietary software for Linux. However, I do think one of the bigger impediments to it is the lack of standardization of Linux systems: should you offer .deb packages, .rpm packages, Slackware-style .tgz packages, or what? Instead, most proprietary software makers seem to end up making some horrible, nasty custom installer (usually some giant file named something.run) which installs stuff wherever it wants and doesn't integrate with the s
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No, that wouldn't solve anything, because not all distros use RPM or follow the LSB "standard"; really, only Red Hat does. You can't exactly make something that's "Linux compatible" and it doesn't work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu, Debian, or its other derivatives.
Bundling all the libraries needed as you say, or even statically linking them, however, would solve a lot of compatibility problems, even though it'd increase the size. Relying on other libraries to be installed is usually a recipe for disaster; eit
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As long as something consistent is released, it will be repackaged with a simple wrapper (if existing conversion process implimented in "alien" utility won't do it already).
The issue with packaging is completely bogus.
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So you only want Linux to be usable by experts?
Asking regular users to use alien is ridiculous.
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That's what distribution maintainers do, not users.
Are you really that stupid, or is it your job?
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You seem to be a very stupid person. In case you didn't notice, this discussion is about proprietary software. By definition, proprietary software is NOT included in a Linux distribution, which consists of only Free (freely-distributable) software. The issue brought up 6 levels up by "oakgrove" is that proprietary software has to be usable on a Linux system to make it viable as a desktop system, like it or not. Since distros have zero control over third-party proprietary software, a Linux system would n
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You seem to be a very stupid person. In case you didn't notice, this discussion is about proprietary software. By definition, proprietary software is NOT included in a Linux distribution, which consists of only Free (freely-distributable) software.
There is plenty of proprietary software with packages maintained by distributions -- the package is a wrapper over whatever the software vendor distributed. If possible, package downloads the file automatically, or (thanks, Oracle, for your idiotic policy) it asks the user to get and supply the file. Most proprietary software requires separate license configuration after binaries are installed, or software has to "call home" to download associated data -- those operations have nothing to do with packaging,
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What package ? In what package manager?
Don't pretend to be stupid.
No sane commercial software developer should or will every give up control of distribution of their software to a bunch of F/OSS zealots.
Microsoft Core Fonts and all proprietary graphics drivers, among other things. Every piece of Microsoft software that is installed by winetricks.
Software vendors now produce installers for Windows -- those installers are given to the users, and run on whatever insane installation of Windows those users have. Following your logic, that could not possibly happen because vendors would not want users to run their installers.
In reality, unless vendor specifically disallows any external
How much effort is needed by the developer now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How much effort is needed by the developer now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends. I've never used Unity, but I have used UnrealEngine, Source and idTech, and I've done some light reading on it before.
The most common scenario will probably be "needs some shaders re-written to work with Linux's outdated drivers", assuming, of course, that they'd already written GL shaders (and not just D3D). Best-case, all they need to do is check the "Export for Linux" box right next to the "Export for Android" and "Export for XBLA" boxes.
However, it should be *possible* to make a Unity game that requires a ton of work to port. Either because you actively tried, or because you didn't use the engine to it's full potential and instead re-implemented half the functionality in system-specific ways. Think of Android - you *can* write native apps that don't run on non-ARM (or even only specific ARM) processors, but that's not exactly common.
Of course, engine support historically hasn't translated into game support. UnrealEngine 2 supported Linux (think 3 does as well), as did several idTechs (even before being open-sourced), and yet we only rarely see games using those released for Linux. Although it may be a matter of how *good* the Linux support is - many of those may have required far more work than more modern engines.
Re:How much effort is needed by the developer now? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Unity's surface shaders are more or less 3d-system-agnostic. Some features will of course degrade when the underlying system doesn't support them, and some, although supported, will be too intense for the hardware (e.g. fog on mobiles).
It is of course possible to create a platform-dependent game: in fact, it's as easy as File.ReadAllText("C:/Windows/blah").
However, the majority of real content that has been tried has run out of the box with no major issues.
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They mention that this is coming straight out of their labs so I would guess a lot of effort will be needed.
No ship date at this time so there is still time for them to drop that feature.
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Considering Wasteland 2 was promised to Linux users that backed it... and that they were working with the Unity team to permit Linux support... I'd say it's probably a fair conclusion to say that it will ship. If they decided not to ship it, there would be quite a few upset people on the whole Kickstarter process, inExile, and everyone involved.
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When you are talking about switching between "like" platforms, for example Windows Standalone -vs- OSX Standalone -vs- Soon-to-be-Linux standalone the changes can be very minimal or almost nothing. My experience with the Windows/OSX standalone builds is that you can sometimes deploy with zero changes. The most common issues that seem to crop up are related to custom shaders.
I maintain a bunch of games and demos that we use as examples for our networking middleware, and they basically never need platform cus
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Now that the engine is ported, how much additional effort is required by the developer to make their game run on Linux? A lot? A little? I'm readily curious.
That depends on whether it really is native or just another Wine port. The latter isn't much effort, but also isn't Linux.
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Unity on Linux will be a native Linux binary. For games designed to run on desktop systems, the porting "effort" should be no more then clicking a button -- unless you use custom C++ libraries. All the game logic in Unity is implemented in mono bytecode, and the graphics already use OpenGL on OSX (you generally don't need to write platform specific shaders in Unity, as shaders are cross compiled to the target platform).
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Porting is a lot more than graphics. If you can change to Linux audio/keyboard/mouse support or screen/viewport configurations by the click of a button, I want that button.
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Porting is a lot more than graphics. If you can change to Linux audio/keyboard/mouse support or screen/viewport configurations by the click of a button, I want that button.
Get Unity 4 when it comes out, and you will have that button. Unity abstracts all of what you listed, so you won't have to deal with any of it when developing games in Unity.
next: steam for linux (Score:1)
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cool more game for Linux! it seems that some companies in the game industry take notice of Linux and it's market
Was that an accidental typo or very clever satire?
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Re:next: steam for linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this trend is being forced by proprietary OS vendors, Valve should be threatened by the Windows 8 Market that is locked (for Metro applications only, for now) and the prospect of a locked down OS X. If that future of entirely lock down stores arrive, Steam will be dead soon. That is the only reason they are looking for an exit on the Linux market.
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On desktop Linux, no. But they can make a Steam console, and Linux would be a natural choice for that.
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It would be especially funny if Linux got a boost from software producers being worried about platform lock-in rather than users, but I think these businesses can see the future a bit more clearly than the average user who seems to think walled gardens are wonderful things. Of course, the users don't see where that extra 30% of their money is going.
Ubuntu Unity GUI finally works on Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
Pics or GTFO!
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Pics or GTFO!
It said nothing of the GUI working on Linux, only that the games would.
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To clarify: The Unity Editor (the application you develop games with) will not be supported on Linux with this release.
The engine's GUI system (the feature you use to make in-game GUIs) will, of course, be supported on Linux.
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WOOSH
great! (Score:1)
Question (Score:2)
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It's not the kernel that matters. It's the userspace part. So, no, it wasn't ported to X11 desktop Linux anyway.
X11/Linux (Score:2)
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Go get any book on Operating System design. It will be entirely about the operating system kernel. Why? Because that is the operating system. Userspace and libraries are not the operating system, that is an operating system distribution. From Wikipedia: "An operating system (OS) is a set of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs. The operating system is a vital component of the system software in a computer system. Application programs require an
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The problem are the APIs used on Android generally don't line up to anything you normally find on non-Android Linux platforms. The entire JNI setup, for instance, isn't necessary on non-Andorid platforms. Instead you need to work through Xorg (X11) and deal with the standard *nix user space and not whatever Android supplies instead.
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Ignoring the complete different graphics and audio layers and APIs that Android has versus a desktop Linux? The game code won't care but the OS-specific code that Unity uses to target the platform is not just transferable between Android and a desktop Linux.
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Graphics is the most involved and expensive part of a game engine by far. OpenGL-everywhere is huge.
Also note: it's actually OpenGL ES 2 on Android which in general a subset of OpenGL 3 rather than classic OpenGL. In short, stick to DrawArrays and friends and you're good, which you should do anyway for performance reasons.
Control doesn't always translate perfectly (Score:2)
The things which are classicaly non-portable are things which require input and output.
Every video game requires input and output. If your gameplay is finely tuned for a keyboard or joystick, then adapting it to a completely flat touch screen isn't necessarily a trivial matter. An on-screen gamepad isn't enough because the player can't feel where the buttons are without looking, a problem known since the Intellivision [wikipedia.org]. For example, how would you adapt Super Mario Bros. to touch control? I tried playing the official Tetris® game for iPhone once, and I couldn't get even half the TPM (play
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No one and I mean no one is porting games which require "finely tuned keyboard or joystick" to the Android or iOS platforms.
EA is, and the game is called Tetris.
But in general, to which platform should such a game be ported before the (smaller) developer becomes eligible for a console license?
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the kernel, it's the libraries. That's really all a game engine does - it takes all the libraries and presents a simple interface to them, while integrating the asset tools (ie. model file formats, etc.)
On Windows, almost everything you need is in DirectX. Same for the XBox - it's pretty much the same library. Graphics, audio, networking, input, it's all there except a basic AI library and physics simulation.
On OS X, there's a bunch of less integrated APIs. OpenGL for the graphics, some proprietary library for input, and so on. iOS uses mostly the same libraries.
Android also uses OpenGL, but has it's own, different libraries for pretty much everything else. The same is true for the non-Microsoft consoles - either OpenGL or the OpenGL ES, and custom proprietary crap for everything else.
Linux, again, uses OpenGL. But that's about it as far as "common code". Want to tell if Mouse3 has been pressed? Need new code. Want to play a sound? New code.
Now, it's not quite as bad as it seems - most of the engine is, in fact, the "turn basic libraries into something that does all the work for you", and the renderer *is* the biggest library bit, but it's still quite a bit of work to go from Android to Linux.
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Just to be clear there is a LOT that goes on under the hood beyond DX/OpenGL calls and AI.
A substantial part of an engine involves efficiently managing all of that data so only subsets of the data are getting streamed/updated at any given time.
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Yeah, I guess I did sort of misrepresent that. I was a bit rushed at the end there, boss was looking over my shoulder.
For an analogy /. would understand, think of a game engine as Webkit, except in full 3D, rendering millions of elements every frame (and if you EVER dip below 30FPS there will be hell to pay). Oh, and half the elements have to think for themselves, and you have to run on everything more powerful than a wristwatch, and you have to have an integrated IDE that handles large-scale level geometry
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So what exactly is the problem...
Microsoft removing all that easy cross-platform stuff in the next version of Windows :)
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Input. Input is the big one, because, as far as I can tell, EVERY operating system does it differently. Sure, for stuff like a web browser or text editor, you might be able to rely on relatively common stuff, but for low-latency and especially for gamepad/joystick input, there's really no good way.
Linux has SDL. Which is a bit crap, actually, so you don't use it for big-name games unless you have no better option.
Windows has DirectInput, which I believe is also used on the X360.
OS X is apparently a mess of
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Thanks to the availability of Android's NDK, you can develop applications which basically run directly on top of Linux. As such, most any native Linux C/C++ application and/or game which leverages OpenGL can be made to run on Android.
He specifically pointed out that OpenGL is exposed directly. But there are other things in a game - sound, input etc - and all those have their own platform-specific APIs in Android, even with the NDK.
Gnome + Ubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
I thought this was another "gnome 3 is horrible" post. It's so horrible that after a few releases it NOW supports Linux.
I knew it!! (Score:3, Funny)
Yay, we can move to Linux! (Score:2)
This also means you can run Unity games on the RaspberryPi or similar. Can't wait to make myself a Unity arcade cabinet based off the Pi or Riko
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This also means you can run Unity games on the RaspberryPi or similar.
When was the last time a closed source proprietary applicaiton was released for ARM Linux? You will get the architectures they deem profitable to support, no more, no less.
Excellent News For Sword Nerds (Score:2)
Largely because of Wasteland 2.. (Score:2)
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It is not misleading, it is only misleading if you are a moron.
It should have taken you a whole 3/4 of a second to realize that it was not the Unity you expected and is instead a different Unity.
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Lets say that there is an article about Ford's term as Vice-President. Just because you thought about the motor company first that doesn't make the article misleading.
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But Unity (the game engine) is actually just called "Unity", and not "Unity3d". The latter is commonly used to refer to it, because the website is unity3d.com, but the product is simply called "Unity", so the headline is correct in that sense. I guess it could have been more explicit by mentioning the words game engine in the title, though.
haet those guys (Score:2)
Except for UNITY. splitters !
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and what about the unity matrix?
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Honestly, I don't see how XBox could be losing money with the annual subscription. That said, I won't be renewing my subscription the second time around. I was really hoping windows media center would be a good thing for, you know, media. But as it turns out it blows, so I'm going to build a mini-atx computer to replace it.
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Honestly, I don't see how XBox could be losing money with the annual subscription.
XBox had a few quarters running in the black, not doing nearly so well right now, and not remotely close to payback on the original investment. Meanwhile the product is well past what should have been its end of life and the whole kooky charade has to play out all over again. If not for Balmer's personal pride this vanity project would have stopped providing subsidized gaming consoles long ago.
Do you see it now? Not "losing money" but "already lost tons of money with no hope of getting it back now or ever".
Re:DirectX takes one in the nads (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you being serious? Studios will continue to not target Linux for the foreseeable future and generally remain DirectX only. Unity of all things isn't going to change this. A DirectX only strategy is not "suicide" when the broad majority of your target user base uses DirectX. But really, you were probably just trolling or seriously delusional anyway.
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Outside of mobile platforms where DirectX is actually a competitor, OpenGL will not overtake DirectX in use for the foreseeable future. Microsoft has never taken a strong interest in bringing DirectX to mobile platforms to begin with. DirectX flourishes just fine on the platforms Microsoft actually cares about it being on. You can tout your nonsense about the end being nigh for DirectX until your face turns blue, but it won't make it true. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
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The presence of DirectX in the mobile space rounds to zero, and that is where the action is. Meanwhile, OpenGL has a foothold in or dominates every market except XBox, where Ballmer would rather eat a floppy disk than let anybody ship a game based on the graphics library he tried so hard to kill. Maybe Ballmer should have tried harder because failing in that evil project was a critical failure and no doubt will be the cause of much chair throwing in Redmond as the logical consequences play out.
It verges on
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You clearly don't understand the purpose of DirectX if you believe Microsoft is actually sweating OpenGL's current position in the mobile market. If Microsoft wanted DirectX to be more widespread in the mobile market, they would actually be trying to further that goal. They're not going to for the same reason they'll never bring DirectX to Mac or Linux: It's a platform specific library designed to bring in developers to the Windows platform. DirectX maintains its strong dominance over OpenGL in the Windows
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Microsoft cares about OpenGL to the extent that it allows users of non-Microsoft platforms to enjoy a high performance 3D gaming experience, and Microsoft hates that. Games are one of the few remaining areas where Microsoft is able to create a platform advantage, and that particular advantage is quickly eroding. So yes, Microsoft care about OpenGL, it is a strategic technology. Microsoft always knew that a healthy OpenGL would facilitate escape from its platform locking, and therefore tried very hard to kil
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One more wall of fortress Microsoft crumbles. Game devs finally notice the way the wind is blowing, a DirextX-only strategy is suicide. OpenGL won and soon only the shrinking PC segment and money losing XBox will be left waving the DirectX flag. It's about time.
And how does Microsoft respond? Sure, send in the Slashdot spinmods. Sheesh. Better you boys should do some honest work.
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One more wall of fortress Microsoft crumbles. Game devs finally notice the way the wind is blowing, a DirextX-only strategy is suicide. OpenGL won and soon only the shrinking PC segment and money losing XBox will be left waving the DirectX flag. It's about time.
I can hardly wait for Slashdot to break the Microsoft Surface story so I can make fun of it.
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Let's examine the numbers. Real world numbers, not your sarcastic take on them.
Look at the latest Humble Bundle. They have a pie chart breakdown of Windows / Mac / Linux user purchases. Peeking into the html source, you'll discover that the percentage of Linux purchases was 10.14% .
Total purchases was 598,995. Therefore the number of Linux users _purchasing_ the Humble Bundle is 60,738.
Furthermore, look at the average price paid by Linux users. Note that it is significantly higher than the Windows aver