Xenonauts 2 reddit
Building your own toolchain with crosstool-ng or the likes is certainly not what your average dev will be used to dealing with!Įdit: I should also say that expecting a developer to recompile the game when there's ABI breakage is not an acceptable solution. but other things stopped me getting it finished off. I did actually start to assemble a custom "SDK" for VP's Linux stuff, based around GCC 4.8 (which was still fairly current at the time). Yes I know this is where the fanboys start screaming "use makefiles!" but this not what game devs are used to on other platforms, and quite frankly, they are cumbersome. This is no good when you are using an IDE or some other application which wants to call those tools - you either have to run said IDE/app inside the chroot (which can be a dependancy nightmare) or live with a relatively slow invocation of the chroot enviroment for every file compiled. Valve did work on a newer steam-runtime, but it was only usable from inside a chroot. However, it quickly became a problem that they were too old, and the toolchain used to build against them (gcc 4.5) was also getting too old. We used the steam-runtime SDK at VP simply because it gave a nice consistent set of libraries to build against. Steam's runtime was a good attempt to alleviate this, however it creates problems of its own. However, it is not impossible, but it does require knowledge and skills that your average developer will not have unless they are already very familiar with the platform. You are right in that the ABI unstable nature of Linux makes it difficult to support well.
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If they really want to go down this route, they should at least put a sticker on the Steam / GOG page explaining that they don't have the manpower (or whatever) to support the Linux version at this time and offer it at half price in exchange - for existing Linux users, maybe offer Xenonauts 2 for free or at half price as an apology.įor what it's worth, I backed their original Kickstarter precisely because they promised a Linux version (right after they posted "We’ll also be putting female soldiers into the game, and providing a Mac and Linux version of the game too." ) Cutting down on support for one's last game to focus on a new one makes sense, but selling a game and then stating it's not supported (in a different place than the store no less), is absolutely not okay. What should have been done was to make an announcement explaining any cuts in support, what is and isn't considered supported anymore and why. No matter what the case ends up being right now, this is not the way to handle it. I've sent an email to the developer to see if we can get this cleared up, as I never like to outright not support a small developer, but nothing sounds good here right now. So, taking all that into account, why is it suddenly being claimed it's only for legacy customers? It just doesn't add up and I don't like it.Ĭonsidering the developer has moved on to making the sequel, which might support Linux, this will seriously impact my decision to support them. They eventually did a Wine-port and then the native port for the Humble Indie Bundle 15. Notice I said "natively" above, well, it was actually a goal on the original Kickstarter to do a Linux version. Games ported to be included in those bundles don't always get the best support. It's actually another game that was ported natively to Linux to be included in a Humble Bundle (HIB 15 specifically). The GOG & Humble store copies don't mention anything in relation to this at all. That's obviously outdated information then. QuotePlease note that the native Mac / Linux versions of the game are still in beta, however older WINE-wrapped "ports" are available and known to be stable whilst development of the native ports is still ongoing. QuoteLinux and Mac versions of the game are available on both platforms but are not officially supported they were created for legacy customers and no technical support will be provided for those platforms! This is taken right from the official site purchase page: If that's truly the case, having it advertised for sale across those stores is pretty bad practice. With regards to 'legacy customers', essentially, it's only meant for people who purchased it originally. Thanks to reddit for originally pointing it out.ĭespite the Linux version being sold on GOG, Steam & Humble, I find it rather anti-consumer to claim on the official site that the Linux & Mac versions aren't actually supported. The official website now claims it's not actually supported and is only meant for whatever the heck they mean by 'legacy customers'. Some time ago Xenonauts was ported to Linux by Knockout Games. Here's your utterly weird news of the day.