Frayed Knights for Linux - a maybe

[Licaon]

I've tried the pilot episode of Frayed Knights "An Indie Computer RPG of Comedy and High Fantasy. Now in development." a few days ago. When i exited the game a was greeted by a web page asking me feedback about how the game went. I answered those questions and in the comment box i also asked about a possible Linux/Mac port.

Today i just stumbled upon the Frayed Knights - Feedback Frenzy blog post and i decided to ask about the Linux/Mac port and the answer was:

Mac support has been planned from the get-go for the full version, but not the pilot. Linux support is supposedly only a small jump from there, or so I've been told. We shall see. If so, I can't see why we wouldn't support it.

One of the main reasons I chose Torque was its multi-platform support.

BTW gamers, the pilot works in WINE, atleast you can see what is all about

[Svartalf]

Today i just stumbled upon the Frayed Knights - Feedback Frenzy blog post and i decided to ask about the Linux/Mac port and the answer was:

BTW gamers, the pilot works in WINE, atleast you can see what is all about

Torque's got some...issues...word on the street has it, for Linux support. Several indies are commenting that it doesn't QUITE work as nicely as they claim on that front.

If he can get it there or get someone like Ryan or myself to make it play nicely, that'd be a win overall (Nice games are ALWAYS welcome- and fostering the indie community in making things cross-platform and making sure they don't give away the rights to alternate platforms would be one of the better ways of getting things going in a more positive direction...

[SlackerTD]

Torque Game Engine 1.5.2 runs well enough on Linux (the Penny Arcade game is using TGE). Torque Game Builder is a different beast... better off to forget that exists. Only one game that I know of has been put out with TGB for Linux & that isn't using the latest version of TGB (I can't get any of the newer TGB builds to compile anymore). As for Torque Game Engine Advanced... that never did run in Linux, probably never will since it doesn't have OpenGL in it.

Right now, Linux support is "community driven" in TGE. It's been that way for a long time now. While that sounds nice, in reality, GG has been very slow in getting patches put back into the engine. Many of the people who have helped out in the past got tired of dealing with the delays.

Back on topic of the game itself above... if TGE was used, it won't be too hard to get a Linux version out.

[Svartalf]

Torque Game Engine 1.5.2 runs well enough on Linux (the Penny Arcade game is using TGE). Torque Game Builder is a different beast... better off to forget that exists. Only one game that I know of has been put out with TGB for Linux & that isn't using the latest version of TGB (I can't get any of the newer TGB builds to compile anymore). As for Torque Game Engine Advanced... that never did run in Linux, probably never will since it doesn't have OpenGL in it.

Right now, Linux support is "community driven" in TGE. It's been that way for a long time now. While that sounds nice, in reality, GG has been very slow in getting patches put back into the engine. Many of the people who have helped out in the past got tired of dealing with the delays.

Back on topic of the game itself above... if TGE was used, it won't be too hard to get a Linux version out.

Fair enough... There were rumblings from people about TGE not being worth the time for stuff on Pandora with that being the reason given. It's good to know that someone could probably sweet-talk Greenhouse and Hothead into a Pandora version if things start looking good over there on the handheld.

[Kano]

I think multi-plattform support is definitely the future. Maybe Linux is no real mass market but gaming consoles are - now even capable to buy games via download. Best for all would be: game engines based on OpenGL and only small parts of OS specific changes. You can see that this is possible when you look at the Quake/Doom engines or OpenSceneGraph - latest example game: Zero Ballistics. As many games are done with existing 3d engines hopefully those get multi-plattform support soon and would be very easy to support em all.

[SlackerTD]

Unless GG starts changing what they are doing with regards to Linux, I would only think the Linux support of TGE will degrade over time. I'd still like to see it go back to the way it used to be... them doing the work on it or having someone PAID to do it... not a community effort. With all they've posted over time & how hostile they are to that, it isn't likely to happen.

[Svartalf]

Unless GG starts changing what they are doing with regards to Linux, I would only think the Linux support of TGE will degrade over time. I'd still like to see it go back to the way it used to be... them doing the work on it or having someone PAID to do it... not a community effort. With all they've posted over time & how hostile they are to that, it isn't likely to happen.

Heh... That was the takeaway I got over on the Pandora console dev forums. TGE was "okay" but you're probably better off doing IrrLicht (and it's game engine kin...), OGRE, or somesuch like it for a title if you didn't already have the title in hand and was making it happen on Linux for x86 and ARM for the desktop and Pandora spaces.

Perhaps they'll change their tune with all the changes going down right at the moment- if they want anything in the PS3 space, they're going to have to do most of the work anyhow. Ditto MacOS.

[Svartalf]

As many games are done with existing 3d engines hopefully those get multi-plattform support soon and would be very easy to support em all.

Only if you get to support Vista OpenGL... >:-D

I certainly don't wanna do THAT nasty task ever again if I can help it...

[SlackerTD]

Ditto MacOS.

They actually have someone who does work on the Mac side of things. Even with that, they still don't have OpenGL in the newer TGEA. They say they might have something for Torque 2... time will tell. Even then, we still might get squat for Linux. Ever since this posting on Linux support, things have gone downhill.

[deanjo]

From the above link.

Third. Linux does not love back. Too many distros. Much incompatibility. Moving target. Not much community support from Linux users coming back to Torque. Little to no revenue (less than 3% of what we do). Little to no love from the Linux community for our efforts.

In a nutshell, why game publishers ignore linux. OS X at least is a fairly static target. Getting a server ported over to linux is fairly simple. Required packages are relatively stable target. On the client end though, every week it seems there is a "new improved" api / toolkit / etc that claims it's going to be the new standard.

Just looking at the Pulseaudio diagram for example can be a dizzying experience. Flexible, sure, but how the heck is the developer supposed to figure out what libraries are compiled with what support and make their decision on that so it works on nearly every system?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Pulseaudio-diagram.png