Re:Rocket League left behind on macOS and Linux due to Direc...
by Flicki on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @07:43AM
(#22179850)
D3D11 is much easier to use and more reliable than OpenGL etc, using OpenGL would increase the cost to finish the game and no meaningful gain since Linux is essentially irrelevant.
Also most game devs don't have Linux machines to build or test the game on in the first place.
I thought about it once, tried installing Ubuntu-- it wasn't as simple as I'd like, but eventually worked.. except it didn't seem to be aware of the GPU and was running at 640x480 or some shit.. deleted it.
Re:Rocket League left behind on macOS and Linux due to Direc...
by gamblor956 on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @07:32PM
(#22175840)
They could do that, but then people who can't get the game to work will give negative reviews. It's better to just not give them the opportunity at all.
Re:Rocket League left behind on macOS and Linux due to Direc...
by grawprog on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:41PM
(#22176315)
On the other hand, I just recently asked for support on a linux version of a game for a bug that affected only the linux version of the game, the support staff was extremely quick and responsive, the problem was an easy fix when I found out what it was, I didn't ask for a refund because of this and because of my interactions with their support team I wouldn't hesitate to buy another game from them in the future.
Now, same thing happened with one of the worms games, Team17 was dismissive and rude. I ended up just getting a refund. I've been a fan of the series since the very first one, i've bought a bunch of their games over various systems, I own a copy of worms 3d on both GameCube and ps2, but I don't plan on buying another worms game or anything else they put out any more.
Ideally this is how it would be. Develop the game targeting Windows, and simply don’t do the things that unportably tie it to Windows. If you develop it from the start as cross platform, then it shouldn’t be some gargantuan effort to port it. It shouldn’t take that much longer to use platform-neutral APIs than the Windows-only equivalents.
Then just fling off a “totally unsupported Linux build”, stick it on an FTP server, ignore support tickets mentioning Linux, and let the Linux people figure out how to get it working—they will! Let them figure out their driver problems or which distributions ship the right library dependencies. A totally unsupported build is at least better for Linux users than abandoning the platform entirely.
I think a lot of games fail to work on Linux not because of the support costs or the platform fragmentation, but because the developers just don’t care or they choose engines and technologies that are not cross platform. It just never crosses their mind to do it differently.