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A Post-mortem On Porting Two Titles To Linux, One Year Of Porting

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Leszek Godlewski has done a presentation on his work to port two bigger game titles to Linux and the slides are now up.

Leszek Godlewski is the man behind porting Deadfall Adventures and Painkiller Hell & Damnation to Linux, he now works for Nordic Games on an unannounced project that should hopefully see Linux support.



A very developer orientated presentation, but it's great to see more and more of these surface that can only serve to help other developers with Linux issues.

A lot of issues in porting will be sorted with UE4.1+ I hope. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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8 comments

Alex May 8, 2014
Why are we even listening to this man? Deadfall Adventures has to be the worst Linux port I have ever bought. I wouldn't take his words seriously, but rather listen to Valve or any other developer who actually make things good and not terrible. Deadfall is just a mess and they don't ship updates to fix the remaining serious bugs. Terrible mouse input, terrible shader porting (lots of the shaders render just black or white squares). It's really the worst porting job ever done.
Mr. Nice May 8, 2014
This was not Leszek Godlewski fault. Nordic Games has moved him to other projects look at steam community.
godlike May 8, 2014
I own both games. While they have some issues (with the worst offender being the loading times and stuttering) they are quite playable (with an nVidia yes). Personally I prefer this kind of "buggy" experience than the endless hoards of 2D indies.

It's a good starting point for Nordic/Farm 51 but I believe that porting games will never be the optimal solution. Planing to support a platform from the beginning will likely produce better results than trying to "adapt" a final code base to something that was not designed for.
Alex May 8, 2014
I have played the game on Intel drivers and NVIDIA. I faced issues like: crash when using the sniper rifle, shiny objects renders as white squares, looking at water turns the whole scene to crap, flying objects in the skybox, the start screen renders as black squares a big part of the time. It's like they never even tested the game at all.

NVIDIA with OpenGL 4.4
killx_den May 8, 2014
I have finished both games (I have a nvidia card).

Painkiller was pretty painless ;)
I just had one crash on a DLC map, but that was it so far.

Deadfall Beta was a bit more of a pain though, it took me 12 hours to finish and I had 17 crashes and a lot of stuttering here and there. But I didn't see any graphic glitches. I have sent all the logs to devs and hope they were helpful. Hopefully they will fix it, because Deadfall is a good game imho.

Quoting: Mr NiceThis was not Leszek Godlewski fault. Nordic Games has moved him to other projects look at steam community.

I have read this too on the Steam forum.
Dubigrasu May 8, 2014
Since I moved to Nvidia both games ran almost flawlessly.
Almost, because that shaders compilation kicking in from time to time and occasional (very rare) graphical glitches.

I would say that he did a pretty good job on both.
For Painkiller I would give a 9/10 and for Deadfall 8/10 points (because of a controller issue).

So yeah, is good to have him on board.
Anonymous May 8, 2014
I have not completed painkiller, nor intending, its just boring. Deadfall was not a bad port. Shaders were broken, but apart from that game was playable AND enjoyable.
Anonymous May 11, 2014
honestly the biggest culprit seems to be UE3 not the efforts of the porters
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