Primal Carnage Says Goodbye To Unigine

[NoEffex]

Total rubbish. OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL/FreeType etc. are all cross-platform and pretty much completely backwards compatible with older versions. In fact one of GLs criticisms has always been it's backwards compatibility; its *lack* of change.

The only reasons games aren't ported to Linux more often are business and legacy decisions (e.g. low provable market share and set DX based toolchain and development process, although it's mainly the former).

What makes this more frustrating is Primal Carnage just switched to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENGINE and don't think anything of it, yet that is likely more work than porting an existing game to a new platform (e.g. from Windows to Linux).

No. You're talking to a dev here. There is constant API change, and more importantly ABI change. If you compile something on Fedora 13, the likelihood of it running on fedorda 12, or debian, or ubuntu, or arch linux, or centos, or rhel, is slim to none. It can be the most basic console app that tells you hello (hello world .

On Windows on the other hand, apps from the last century can still be run. Thus, if they make a game for Windows, chances are, it's going to last longer, whereas if they did it on Linux, it might last until the next week or two when there's a API/ABI change.

[TemplarGR]

No. You're talking to a dev here. There is constant API change, and more importantly ABI change. If you compile something on Fedora 13, the likelihood of it running on fedorda 12, or debian, or ubuntu, or arch linux, or centos, or rhel, is slim to none. It can be the most basic console app that tells you hello (hello world .

On Windows on the other hand, apps from the last century can still be run. Thus, if they make a game for Windows, chances are, it's going to last longer, whereas if they did it on Linux, it might last until the next week or two when there's a API/ABI change.

My friend, you are full of BS. The only way a real developer would say that, would be if he was a Windows-only developer... What you are saying is simply not-true and almost everyone in this forum will be able to see that and not take your opinion seriously...

Or you are simply a troll...

[kayosiii]

I have been developing a game for 3 years. I work mostly under Linux and just started using CB as IDE a couple of days ago. I still write code in Kate and run scons manually. Even so, I prefer to work under Linux instead of Windows. The problem with commercial games is that they develop for Windows and then spent a lot porting to Linux. They get a small profit, so, Linux is bad, no Linux buyers, blah, blah.
I agree that Unigine needs an indie license, perhaps paying after the game is sold. Unreal Engine is by far the most used engine and they do it! And also support for Blender, but thats another story. By the way, who do I have to kill to get a free Unigine license?

What's CB? just curious. I am really enjoying working with Unigine and KDevelop4 at the moment - really nice combo. Unigine really cuts a lot of work out of doing cross platform Linux stuff but this has meant that they wrote the editor in Engine which is a bit of culture shock to a lot of companies and to be honest they could be a lot better. It is interesting you mention blender because that is an app that I think does single graphics context quite well.

I suspect that Unigine is not going to use that pricing structure because they don't have a great deal of cash reserves. I know at my work we the consensus is that Unigine's up front fees work out a lot better than UDK's 25% at the end deal but you have got to have the capital to make that happen I guess. I can only suggest talking to them.

As for the blender bit, two things... You can use the Resource Editor tool to convert obj and Collada models to Unigine format and the binary file formats are well documented and quite simple so it would not be a great deal of work to write an importer/exporter for Blender.

[kayosiii]

No. You're talking to a dev here. There is constant API change, and more importantly ABI change. If you compile something on Fedora 13, the likelihood of it running on fedorda 12, or debian, or ubuntu, or arch linux, or centos, or rhel, is slim to none. It can be the most basic console app that tells you hello (hello world .

On Windows on the other hand, apps from the last century can still be run. Thus, if they make a game for Windows, chances are, it's going to last longer, whereas if they did it on Linux, it might last until the next week or two when there's a API/ABI change.

This is true to a degree but you are hyperbolising. You can compile apps that will work on most versions of Linux if you follow some precautions and quite a number of companies do this successfully. You should compile against a fairly old version of glibc either include specific versions of libraries you compile against or compile on a very vanilla system like Debian.

And while Windows is better at maintaining ABI compatibility it is far from perfect. At work here there has been more than one application that has required using an older version of windows to run.

[Setlec]

Cb is code block for short!

@NoEffex: dude you are a joke... if you make a driver for linux and you compile it with gcc 4.5.1 and try to use a kernel that was compiled with a different version of gcc you might have some issues.... But saying that a windows 3.1 software could be run on a windows vista/7 because there is almost no changes in the api/abi is bullshit.... then win7 is built with win 3.1 source code inside, right?

if you compile with gcc with kernel 2.6.3X and install a that software with kernel 2.4 then yes you will have some issues.... but if your software is a game that needs to run on a specific hardware you'll use older gcc, kernel, gfx driver to compile your game... you don't make a game with newer kernel version if you intend to support old kernel...

it's a bit messy my arguments sorry!

[rogerdv]

Sorry, Code::Blocks, a cross-platform IDE and in fact, a good one.
Yes, the collada idea is a solution I thought (just mind excercise, the license price is my salary of 10 years), but didnt knew about the second choice.
About that API crap, nobody makes games to be played a couple of years after. Unless you are planning to write a classic like Fallout, but you cant know that in advance. I suppose we are talking about closed source games here. And even so, I have to say that I have an old copy of Heroes of Might and Magic that worked from Redhat 7 to Fedora 1. If I find it, will try with my Gentoo.

[kayosiii]

Sorry, Code::Blocks, a cross-platform IDE and in fact, a good one.
Yes, the collada idea is a solution I thought (just mind excercise, the license price is my salary of 10 years), but didnt knew about the second choice.
About that API crap, nobody makes games to be played a couple of years after. Unless you are planning to write a classic like Fallout, but you cant know that in advance. I suppose we are talking about closed source games here. And even so, I have to say that I have an old copy of Heroes of Might and Magic that worked from Redhat 7 to Fedora 1. If I find it, will try with my Gentoo.

Yes I am vaguely familiar with Code::Blocks... Out of curiosity what part of the world do you come from?

[kayosiii]

Cb is code block for short!

@NoEffex: dude you are a joke... if you make a driver for linux and you compile it with gcc 4.5.1 and try to use a kernel that was compiled with a different version of gcc you might have some issues.... But saying that a windows 3.1 software could be run on a windows vista/7 because there is almost no changes in the api/abi is bullshit.... then win7 is built with win 3.1 source code inside, right?

if you compile with gcc with kernel 2.6.3X and install a that software with kernel 2.4 then yes you will have some issues.... but if your software is a game that needs to run on a specific hardware you'll use older gcc, kernel, gfx driver to compile your game... you don't make a game with newer kernel version if you intend to support old kernel...

it's a bit messy my arguments sorry!

Honestly NoEffex does have a point. What you are missing is that because different distros patch libraries differently applications compiled for one distro will fail when run on a different distro, even some of the larger open source projects have problems with this. To my knowledge Ardour, Inkscape and Blender all bundle libraries to get around this problem. A particularly troublesome area at the moment is sound.

With directx on windows you have a nice one stop shop for everything you want and while you can get most of the things you want by using libraries under Linux there are some areas that are problematic. Rather than making excuses I would like to see them improved.

[Hephasteus]

This is probably a good move. Unigine doesn't look good. It's too sharp and focused in one spot and too blurry in another spot. Would have driven people mad with eye focusing problems.

[bash]

Well then apparently the guys over at EPIC must have done something wrong in the past. The Linux version of UT 2003 (the one from right of the CD) still installs and runs perfectly under the most recent distributions - in this case Ubuntu 10.10. There is only one minor problem that it links against some 3 or 4 specific lib versions. But that can be moved around quickly by symlinking. And could have been avoided completely if they had just linked against libabc1.so instead of libabc1-0-2.so

So it is quite possible to run over 7 year old software in Linux without major problems.