C4 Engine Drops Linux Support, Calls It "Frankenstein OS"

[mike4]

The most dumb decision. They should only support Ubuntu and with the upcoming steam machines they will start to sell.

[GreatEmerald]

Competition is fierce for game engines

It is. And at this point I really don't see why anyone would prefer something like C4 over, say, Unreal Engine 4.

[nightmarex]

I can assure you he is a game developer - a well known, respected game developer with tons of experience in this area. You cannot require or even expect everyone to fall in love with linux

The fact that he doesn't like linux is not something new. The fact that linux has some user experience issues is not new. Linux is still rather complex and scary to install for newcomers (granted: it's less scary than in the good old Slackware days). The differences between the various distribution is a pain (people who want to maintain their packages for various distributions should agree with this ; I'm not saying that distributions should be the same - I'm saying that there's an obvious lack of indirection here).

The platform is far from perfect, and a lot of problems it shows has ben solved on OS X or Windows for ages. I'm pretty sure all of you has encounter at least one annoying problem that doesn't exist on the other major GUI systems out there.

Now, the fact that new versions of the C4 engine are no longer working on linux (along with the fact that this very site relays this specific news) is actually a good thing: it means there is both a demand and room for an open source, modern, professional game engine

I hate this train of thought. Every system has it's draw backs. As far as this "lets cut the guy some slack", no just no. You don't bash someones favorite OS because you're too stupid to use it. This guys is a programmer? I wouldn't touch his junk with a 10 foot pole if those statements about him not being able to install Ubuntu is true. My 10 year old runs MINT!!!

[justmy2cents]

Anyway if you guys are interested in game development at all, please consider C4.

more on this later in my comment

May not seem like it from the announcement but the creator also provides topnotch service to customers as well.

so, dismissing platform is topnotch? @.@"

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. More like "terrible at marketing", which is especially bad when the competition is the opposite. Like I said, I am sure it will be straightened out. Personally I don't care much either way, Linux support is not going to bring many customers to a game or to an engine.

at one side you invite and in same breath you don't care? @.@"

now, let's see
basing your bread and butter project on work done by one developer when that developer can have whims like discontinuing whole platform? one would have to be insane to bet on that horse. not only you risk on getting burned late in the project, you risk your time and investment. whim like that is not "terrible at marketing", that is childish and immature case of handling business without one shred of thought what some move means for your customers. how can anyone be stupid to bet on something so unreliable when you have choices like Source or Unreal?

also, even considering this engine for Linux now would just contribute to what author thinks about Linux when he talks about things not working. he is obviously not willing to make it work. so, why add another things for users to have problems with?

[Adarion]

• What if i want to call my app excutable "sed" (and say i even have original sed compiled from src and installed to /usr/local for the sake of argument)?
• What if i want to have multiple versions of same application/libs installed? (nix is working on that).
• What if i want to quickly gather my installed but otherwise portable application to one folder and ship it? Stuff is all over the place.

Well I don't know but Gentoo clearly allows multiple versions of a lot of things. The problem you describe can be found on MS Windows, too. Portable apps is the same problem everywhere and it is called shared libs. Also in windows, everything is all over the place and always in a different directory. Every manufacturer places stuff somewhere else. In directories with ridiculous names and length and whitespaces in the directory name.
Static builds would help, or if folks would decide to bring their own libs in the same directory and load them from there.
Old DOS was kind of great in that regard. You would install Software X to C:\games\blah-X and it would stay there and only there. You would just deltree the directory and it would be gone. Windows even has a registry that grows to huge byte sizes.
So I don't think that the problem described is in any way Linux specific.


>[*]Very difficult to build portable (across distros) software.

Depends. Depends on the dependencies.


>[*]Distros depend on rather new version of glibc anyway which forces user to rebuild all of dependencies.

Normally you distributor cares about this for you. You only have to recompile if you have manual installations or if you are using Gentoo (or the likes).

> Enter chroots of old distros

Is there any form of chroot under windows?


> In other areas things are getting better but this properietary software unfriendlyness is what is stopping linux.

Partially, yes. The thing is that Linux is in a steady flow of development. A lot of APIs are totally stable (e.g. Kernel to userland). I mean, how often do you really upGRADE Windows? E.g going from 9x to XP was a pain for a plethora of programs, drivers and so on. You definitely have a problem there. I update my kernel about 1-2 times per month on several machines.
Furthermore, related to kernel stuff, I can 100% understand that kernel people don't want blobs to taint the kernel, to mess up, but they have no chance to give support and debug anything since the blob is closed. It just doesn't make sense there.
Userland might be different. But here you have LTS and enterprise versions which tackle that culprit. Of course it would be fine if some things were more stable in this regard on long terms. I definitely give you that. But then, a lot of games that worked in W9x aren't running now in W7 or 8. Seems that we will have a DOS... err... WindowsBOX full emulator in a few years? Or maybe we can hope to run that elderly software through wine then.

It is also not the point of Linux to be some Windows clone. Also not in terms of operating system architecture. Yes, it helps people to migrate if KDE can behave and look like Windows, or if you can run stuff through wine. I personally only miss some very specific software to be on Linux and games. Things like photoshop do have alternatives and I heard that the business model of Adobe with PS is becoming enigmatic. Like driving in a SaaS direction. With cloud and all that crap. So do we really want these kind of things on Linux?

[Kano]

@mike4

SteamOS is NOT Ubuntu based, the base is a recompiled Debian 7.0 (wheezy) with updated/backported packages for fglrx/nvidia and some others, main change was using a newer libc6. They added a few mesa patches as well (for Intel) but their mesa 10.1.6 is still older than jessie's 10.3.2. Maybe they rebase it on jessie, no idea, what Valve wants to do, i would recommend this. I could help em with automatic Optimus support if they want, but i don't think somebody will ask.

[Adarion]

No shit. This is Phoronix. Mostly clueless idiots. So many butthurt Linux idiots.

I wonder who is clueless. I mean, honestly, he is of course allowed to be angry if something in a Linux distribution doesn't work as he expected. But then, did he get to the ground of things? Maybe it is supposed to behave not like Windows does a similar task? If he was just some John Doe user, well. But from a DEVELOPER I would have expected a bit more detail. A bug report. Something like that. Especially since Linux can be quite talkative and you might get some infos from the console output.
It's not that if you deliver a good bug report it will be ignored.

[pgoetz]

1. Audio in Linux is still largely broken.
2. MS Word 2013 will open Word 2000 documents without any problems.
3. Maintaining backwards compatibility is the key to success, as seen by Windows, Android and MacOS X.

But perhaps Linux users and developers just don't give a f*ck. I don't know. At least you seem not to give a f*ck.

1. Define broken. It works fine for me.
2. I just guessed at the versions, but on more than one occasion I've had a newer version of Word refuse to open a document created by an older version (possibly the older version was generated on a Mac). Try running a game like Myst or Zoombinis on Windows XP, let alone newer versions. Completely broken.
3. Maintaining backwards compatibility is the key to bloated, slow, and unmanageable software.

[Shoost]

It is. And at this point I really don't see why anyone would prefer something like C4 over, say, Unreal Engine 4.

25% off the top is not really workable. If you sell a game in a store you don't even get 25% of the net yourself. So unless you have a half million to a million to get a 'real' license you are out of luck. It's also not that easy to do everything with Unreal you might want to do, and you are at the mercy of some megacorporation's whim. If they don't want to support you or don't want your business any more or fold up/merge to EA or Activision, you are out of luck.

I think if C4 went to linux some years ago say pre-2010 it could have gotten many customers. Going there when everyone else is headed the same way does not really get you anything, the market is already tapped.

[YoungManKlaus]

And now to something completely different ...

those screens look like games did like ... around the original HL2, so 10 years ago?