5 Months And Still No UT3 For Linux

[deanjo]

Since I think someone mentioning the Mac version of UT3 in here, I just searched for when this was meant to be out and it seems it is hit by the delay, too. That is macsoft (the publisher behind the mac version for Unreal Tournament 3) still announces it as "the Tournament returns to macintosh this spring" (cf the UT3 minipage at their site). So in short: I think something is probably really f***ed up somewhere. I could imagine that somehow layers are involved (third party "intellectual property" anyone?) since if it were just something for the game dev like some (bigger) routine not working, it would probably have been long solved by now where you have no idea how long it might take once lawyers are involved...

It could be that Ryan is doing the port as well, presumably doing the ports in unison.

[Svartalf]

Don't get too excited. I parted with the great majority as sort-of gag gifts over the intervening years. I think I have a small single digit number remaining. I'll look, and if it's more than 3 or so, I'll hand em out.

That works. It'd be neat, in a way...

[Svartalf]

It could be that Ryan is doing the port as well, presumably doing the ports in unison.

He often does that sort of thing. There's often little to no delta, as far as a game goes, between MacOS and Linux, unless the game's 2D and relies on UI elements heavily. At that point, you might want to consider Qt or FLTK, depending on the requirements.

In fact, it could just as easily be a MacOS side snafu that's holding this whole thing up as something on the Linux side, thinking about it now.

[deanjo]

He often does that sort of thing. There's often little to no delta, as far as a game goes, between MacOS and Linux, unless the game's 2D and relies on UI elements heavily. At that point, you might want to consider Qt or FLTK, depending on the requirements.

In fact, it could just as easily be a MacOS side snafu that's holding this whole thing up as something on the Linux side, thinking about it now.

FLTK....... ewwwwww.

[Svartalf]

FLTK....... ewwwwww.

I didn't say it'd be a pretty thing...just that it'd work.

GTK+ might be a candidate there, but I've not done anything cross-platform with it so I don't know what unpleasantness it might bring to the table.

[RobbieAB]

Different default button orders comes to mind...

Though it's programmable (I assume, not done much with GTK), it seems like a pain to be fighting the toolkit over that.

[Dragonlord]

Oh... Gui Toolkits... let's start the bashing shall we? ^.=.^

GTK: I hated it, really. Most shitty toolkit I've seen... nearly as shit as MFC
Qt: Could be nice but it's a little beast. I don't work with it anymore

So I would recommand "Fox Toolkit". I'm doing all my editors and other apps requiring cross-platform gui with this guy. It's rather simple to use, class oriented and allows to build GUIs rather fast. You have to learn though your way around the layout class first as it is a bit different than your other toolkits.

EDIT: Also a plus point which made it for me is independence. The FOX lib can be easily linked into your windows app nullifying any external libraries. On Linux of course going shared lib beats the race.

[RobbieAB]

tool kit bashing? Ok...

MyTK is better than your one, you idiotic incompetent hamster...

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

[Dragonlord]

Rofl... Nice one with the hamster

EDIT: Should precise a bit. Worked with all of the mentioned ones and I judged them upon:
1) Usability ( can you do all the important GUI things? Is major recoding required or Out-of-the-box? )
2) Stability ( is the toolkit prone to crashes? How easy is it to get things wrong? *see code-bloat* )
3) Extendibility ( how easy is it to add new functionality if required? )
4) Code-Bloat ( do you need 1 or 10 lines of code to get something simple done? )
5) Cross-Platform ( how easy is it to compile it on something else than Linux? Dep-Hell? )
6) Documentation ( how good are the docs? are there any docs at all? are the uptodate? are the comprehensible? are they complete? )

Those are mostly my judging scales.

[ivanovic]

It could be that Ryan is doing the port as well, presumably doing the ports in unison.

Yes, from what I heard he is doing both, the Mac and Linux port. I hope it will be completed, too.

And from what I have seen is that the difference between Mac and Linux version of a game can be as small as just recompiling and maybe including one or two ifdefs around some "special code for windowed mode" plus the slightly different keyboard layout (command key and such). For most games it is unnormal to use "normal" gui toolkits anyway, so it should just a matter of recompiling. That is: this way several mac games can easily be ported to Linux without much extra work. As you can see with Runesoft where 200 preorders are enough sales for them to port to Linux from Mac.