Will the Star Citizen Project Fund Linux and Mac Ports For CryENGINE 3?

Mr. Jaggers writes "Chris Roberts, game designer of Wing Commander fame, has had great success with his new crowd-funded Star Citizen project — so much that the $2m base goal has been smashed with weeks to go on the Kickstarter portion of the campaign. Now Chris is floating a list of stretch goals for fans to vote on, with Linux and Mac support both listed as stretch goal candidates. Since Star Citizen is based on the popular CryENGINE 3 game engine, these stretch goals are equivalent to funding Linux and Mac ports of CryENGINE. Chris couldn't make any absolute promises yet, since he doesn't own the engine, but CryENGINE 3 already supports Android, so at least there is existing OpenGL ES support to be leveraged towards adding Linux and Mac OpenGL support. If there is enough outpouring of cross-platform support from fans in this poll, Star Citizen could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities — analogous to the role played by Wasteland 2 in bringing official Linux support to the Unity 4 engine popular among so many Indie developers."

Why is it using CryENGINE???

[Zobeid]

If there was ever any thought of wanting the game to run on Linux or Mac, why did he base it on CryENGINE to begin with? Isn't that sort of stupid? Really, isn't that all kinds of stupid? I should think that developers would have learned better by now.

Re:Why is it using CryENGINE???

[Zocalo]

Because Chris felt that consoles couldn't deliver his vision for the game and originally wanted the game to be PC only. There was a lot of call from fans on the game forums asking about Linux/Mac ports, so now he's looking into the possibility of providing support for those platforms. It's called listening to your target audience, and it's nice to see a company that is actually prepared to do that these days.

What I find far more interesting is the current poll standings for the additional platform support; 23% of the voters want a Linux port vs. only 8% for MacOS. Seriously? Almost a quarter of space/flight sim fans run Linux? I know FlightGear is good, but who knew?

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