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

[rikkinho]

no ideia

Obviously the guy is plainly trolling. What is C4 engine anyway?

first time i see such name, the guy needs money nd marketing and do this, maybe he thinks apple or M$ will pay him for that, i?m a java dev and i need to use command line often even when i use windows or osx

[dungeon]

When reading about what he is i don't think that men needs help to install an OS

http://www.terathon.com/lengyel/

[Emmanuel Deloget]

I've seen 6 years old install Ubuntu...and he calls himself a game developer????!!!!!
)))))))))))))

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

[shmerl]

Lack of knowledge can't be blamed on "Frankenstein OS". Sometimes people should admit they simply have no time to learn. Which is fine - everyone should be free to manage their time, but one shouldn't use false excuses.

[sleort]

This is wieird...

This guy seems to be one of the most incompetent programmers I have ever read about. His view on Linux is so twisted and reading about his strange statements I couldn't be happier. This game engine doesn't look like anything I would ever use. There is nothing next-gen about this engine, based only on the graphics - and he wants to support PS4. Good luck with that. I'd say with his opinions and so-called programming skills, Linux is far better off without him and his engine.

If he hates "apt-get" simply don't use it. Nobody is forcing him. Saying that every part of Linux is a disaster but the graphics drivers is pure blasphemy. Of course everything can be improved, but going against everything that makes Linux a great piece of software is just political. It feels like his intentions were to show how bad he thinks Linux is compared to other OS's, by only pointing his problems out and claiming that the biggest open-source project in the world has no future viability.
The most strange to me seems that he maybe wants his engine to run on SteamOS, but not on Linux in general, which is so illogical to me. If all his statements about Linux were true, huge companies like IBM, Google, Valve and 98% of supercomputers(according to wikipedia) and most of the servers in the world, probably would have based their systems and software on other operating systems.

Actually I feel kind of stupid after writing all this. Having to argue with someone who has such a narrow view on things and seems so limited in actually technical skills and knowledge*, just makes me angry. I just felt that I had to say it, so everybody who would come across this article, without knowledge either, should know the real Linux (very shortly). It totally fair to like one OS more than another, but to purposely trying to spread your bad words because of your own faults is just mean.

Now I hope he will change his mind, not that I would buy anything from him, but to me, the nature of an open OS like Linux is not to exclude him and his software or anyone by that matter - as long as the intentions are good
(*)I know he probably made the engine, but then he would also know how to use real software and maybe even look more realistically on things.

It's better to remain silent and dumb, than trying convince everyone about it.

[Xaero_Vincent]

This guy essentially "raged quit". He had a bad experience with Ubuntu 14.04 and decided to terminate support for the platform in hissy fit fashion rather than seek help to solve his problems or try another distribution, such as Ubuntu 14.10 or Mint. Not very professional and a stab in the back to his customers who buy licenses for C4's Linux support.

It's not much of a loss though... it seems he is basically the sole developer for the game engine, whereas big name engines like Unreal have dozens if not hundreds of developers. Looking on Wikipedia, it seems almost none of the few unknown (many foreign) games listed to use C4 even support Linux and would have to be played via Wine.

[gens]

Dr. Frankenstein is a smart man, after all

[DanielG]

Eric Lengyel is a very talented engine developer.
He single-handedly wrote the C4 Engine, which is a pretty good engine (except for the new lack of Linux support).

I think the local forum trolls can assume that if he couldn't manage to install Ubuntu on his machine, neither could your 6year old kid or your Grandma (unless she happens to be a Geek).
It's unfortunate that he didn't really share his problems, but there must have been some bigger incompatibility causing freezes during boot - on Twitter someone guessed it could be that he has a nvidia geforce gtx 9xx card which causes the nouveau driver to crash, but maybe it was something else or several things.

Still, it seems unprofessional to drop Linux support just because he had trouble with Ubuntu.

And even worse, forbidding C4 licensees to share their own Linux code seems completely unreasonable.

Developing and maintaining a game engine by yourself certainly is a hard task, so it's understandable that he doesn't want to spend too much time on a platform that he doesn't seem to be familiar with.
The sane thing to do would have been, however, to first ask for help with his problems and (if that doesn't change things in a timely manner) later decide to just put Linux in a "not officially supported, the code is there, patches are welcome" state.

His "Linux is not supported, new Licensees must not support it themselves, existing Licensees may not share code and we may support SteamOS, but only SteamOS and not normal Linux" stance is just horrible.

[johnc]

In fairness, installing Ubuntu 14.04 on machines with Maxwell cards is a complete disaster since Canonical insists on shipping drivers released back in 1982.

There really is no good way to do it. The easiest is to buy a non-Maxwell card and install the latest nvidia drivers and then put the Maxwell card back into the machine.

Let's not sugar coat it... Canonical has totally checked out on its desktop distro and there's nobody else carrying the Linux desktop banner (except Mint, which uses even older drivers than Ubuntu). I can understand the guy's frustration.

[gotwig]

C4 Engine looks very bad. I use UE4 anyhow, and so everyone should, most productive game engine ever, cross platform development&deployment.