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Unity3D working on SDL, Wayland and Mir support

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The folks Unity3D are currently doing a "HackWeek" when they work on special projects. It looks like the Linux team are working on using SDL instead of X11 directly which will bring Mir & Wayland support amongst other things.

For those that don't know: X11, Mir and Wayland are what allow you to see windows, drag them around and generally do everything on your Linux computer. X11 is really old and Wayland/Mir will eventually replace it.

I follow Unity developer Na'Tosha Bard on twitter, and it has been fun to see the progress on it, here's what they have done so far!

#unity3d #HackWeek End of Day 1 Status: X11 is out. SDL is partially in. pic.twitter.com/YrWSY6unWk

— Na'Tosha Bard (@natosha_bard) May 9, 2016

#unity3d #HackWeek Day 2: Switch to SDL mostly complete. Partial input handling working. No more assertion failures. pic.twitter.com/4XWYwavziL

— Na'Tosha Bard (@natosha_bard) May 10, 2016

OK, Bonus #unity3d #HackWeek Status: #unity3d running on Wayland! pic.twitter.com/agsZT4kLpE

— Na'Tosha Bard (@natosha_bard) May 10, 2016


I love that Unity developers do things like this. SDL support should make things like multiple monitor handling much better. That is something I am especially keen for, as multiple monitor handling in a lot of Unity games is often really poor. SDL could also help them improve things like gamepad/controller support too.

Worth noting that these changes may not end up in the official Unity builds, but we can hope it all works out.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Unity
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nifker May 16, 2016
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: nifker
Quoting: FUltra
Quoting: nifker1. Any special reason why would you support Unity3D?
2. Everyones acting like X11 is the past and is really buggy and slow - but really most don't have real problems with X11 and if there are problems let us fix them or rewrite parts if neccesarry.

But X11 is the past and is really buggy (try for example to create a 100% no-one-can-bypass screen saver lock for X11). More to the point is that the devs behind X11 is the same devs that are creating Wayland.

The only sad thing with these nice changes to Unity3D is that AFAIK Unity3D is statically linked to each game and does not exist as a shared resource in for example Steam so for this new version to be used games have to be updated one by one(?).
As I said stop creating new projects and help existing - for me it is "I WILL NEVER STOP USING X11" unless I'll see dwm for Wayland which I guess won't happen and Wayland needs to be cross-platform like other Unix-software.
Anyway who says it is the past and is buggy - Really who needs screenssavers thats like Im not at my desk but I need something running at my screen.

Sorry mate, but really that ship has sailed. Yes, X11 has done yeoman service over many years, but as FUltra said, the people making Wayland are the X11 people. It's coming and that's that. And X11 has/creates a whole bunch of security problems, which don't matter to me sitting at my desktop but matter plenty overall. And X11 ultimately just has too many concepts built deep into it which are at odds with how graphics are done now. It just does not, at its core, do things the way modern graphics work, and that creates bottlenecks and limits capability. For a long time the advantages of maturity outweighed that, but the people who developed X11 seem to pretty much all agree that time is past. They could "just update" X11 but for that to work it would have to be a distinction without a difference--the name is about all that would be left.

Wayland has been slow, but it is arriving. And maybe Mir I guess, wtf Canonical and their Not Invented Here syndrome.
So why would I switch - I have no problems and I will probably never have problems. I mean why would I switch to something that says it better but wouldnt benefit for me. So no Wayland wm no Wayland for me.
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