The Darkside Detective is highly recommended. It does so much with so little. No voice acting, low res artwork, minimal animations and still manages to deliver!

The "Tome Alone" case was especially fun. You have to admire the mind that concocts a storyline with both Enid Blyton and Aleister Crowley. I'm not sure who was the most twisted of the two... eh, who am I kidding, it was certainly Blyton!

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Quoting: KimyrielleOffices are still a thing? :P

You know, some sort of work from home sim game might not be a bad idea:

Reach your performance target for the day whilst keeping up with the housework, pets and sick kids. Try to manage not only your own sanity and health but also make sure to keep your marriage alive!

* Mini game where you try to keep a straight face during zoom meetings when the flatulence issues of your spouse goes totally out of control.
* Do you sacrifice work hours to go grocery shopping or increase productivity by using your TPS reports as TP and risk getting piles?
* Pre-order bonus includes rare golden ergonomic office chair with +10 lumbar support!

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis reminds me of a friend who worked for a security company. They sold alarm-type devices with software attached. They sold these in a range, three tiers I think from basic to deluxe, you know how it goes. The basic version was in fact the deluxe version with a few functions disabled. When he told me that I realized this was obviously not just his company, it is how things work.

Just how things works.

A certain car was sold in "1.8" (150bhp) and "2.0" (175bph) models. Both are in fact 2.0 litre engines with the same components. The only difference was the price and the software.

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How topical! I spent most of the morning staring out the window at a crew digging up the street.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI really liked that theme too...

Good old Bluecurve!

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This looks very impressive and ambitious for an indie game. 15 hours gameplay, animations and voice acting...

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Quoting: IggiA few findings already with long gaps, but nothing has beaten Noctropolis so far:

Turok: 21 years
The Labyrinth of Time: 21 years
Inherit the Earth: 20 years
Silver: 18 years
Broken Sword / Circle of Blood: 17 years
Broken Sword 2: 16 years
Vangers: 16 years
Shadow Warrior: 16 years (for an official Linux port - the game was playable before due to the Build Engine source code release)

Interesting, quite a few golden oldies in that list!

Also, didn't know MobyGames had such a useful API.

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I'll just casually drop this image here, like so. To balance things out and bring some peace and amity to this thread.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySweet! Linux is getting games a mere ten years after release! That means the gap is shrinking, right? :wink:

I am curious what the longest gap is between initial release and a Linux port. Noctropolis comes to mind. Released in 1994 for DOS and ported by Night Dive in 2017. That makes the gap 23 years, does any game beat that?

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Just some further points for the bUt It iS imPosSibLe crowd...

• Windows is well documented and for the fiddly bits you certainly can refer to Wine. As longs as you don't Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V I'm sure the Wine devs would be fine with someone else reading the code. If not, you just use as chinese wall technique and have a third party write documentation from the Wine sources.


• Wine was MIT licensed up to 2002 so that's a good starting point for the basic bits if you want to build something proprietary.


• Making a targeted effort, like a specific game, or game engine is much easier than providing support for the whole Windows ecosystem.


• There's something of a mono-culture when it comes to game engines. Bringing up the first UE game is presumably hard, the second one probably a lot easier. Most older games used custom engines.


• They are using DXVK which is a pretty major building block for any game. Likewise, bringing up a Vulkan or OpenGL game would not be too hard.

Also, efforts like these tend to get easier with time. People learn, share experience, develop better tools. To quote Terry Pratchett:

"No matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it'll become a whole lot easier and will therefore be done a lot. A huge mountain might be scaled by strong men only after many centuries of failed attempts, but a few decades later grandmothers will be strolling up it for tea 'and then wandering back afterwards to see where they left their glasses."

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