Leadwerks: GDB Is Annoying; Editor Using GTK

Leadwerks, one of the recent commercial game engines that's being ported to Linux following a successful Kickstarter campaign, has shared more of their Linux game engine progress from a developer's perspective.

At the end of October the company shared Leadwerks for Linux is in beta and then earlier this week they shared more information on the Linux porting process. The full update on Leadwerk for Linux can be found via a Kickstarter update but the key information includes:

- The limitations of the GDB debugger being annoying. This isn't too much of a surprise and game developers have found this GNU debugger to be crap. Valve's working on their own debugger while also contributing to LLVM's LLDB. Valve's Linux debugger should be a godsend compared to GDB.

- The Leadwerks game engine editor is using GTK over Qt. The process only took a few days and is moving along but there are some bugs to work out. GTK was used over Qt to fit into their editor tool's design more cleanly. The developers also prefer the "native look and feel" of GTK.

- Developers and early adopters continue to be hit by Linux graphics driver issues and other hardware-related problems.

- The update ended with, "In conclusion, we've been through the difficult parts of porting a complex application to Linux. Although some annoyances and limitations have been discovered, overall I have found Linux to be a completely viable platform for application development."