Quoting: SabunI have to agree with Mirv on the importance of the Editor itself coming to Linux. I hope Leadwerks succeed.
By the way, whatever happened to Torque3d? Looks like they're interest in bringing their editor to the Linux platform was just fluff... which is depressing. Their Github shows last commit as being a month ago for Linux, unless I'm looking in the wrong place.

No, you're totally correct.  GarageGames has committed to bringing the editor to Linux, but they needed a little help (the company is in rough shape, but is staying in business).  They ran an ill-fated IndieGoGo project [External Link] to do exactly what Leadwerks is doing, but they needed $30K, and ran a fixed-funding campaign (Kickstarter-style).  I pledged to their campaign to help out.

The campaign would have benefited from a number of tweaks... in addition to very light interactivity with the backers (by today's crowd-funding standards), they also didn't even brag about Torque's clients' products' until late in the campaign!  For example, there's the demo video [External Link] from BeamNG [External Link], creators of an awesome soft-body physics engine... aside from obvious YouTube compression artifacts, the graphics may not seem too amazing until you realize that BeamNG are only two programmers & two artists, and they're only doing enough graphics to show off their physics engine!

It's pretty obvious that a larger, better funded, indie team with environment & texture artists could pull off AAA-quality with Torque3D... but GarageGames didn't sell that crucial point, unfortunately.  It's already hard enough to put up, essentially, a free software project crowd-funding campaign, but I feel like they shot themselves in the foot on this one.  Also, their campaign suffered the "IndieGoGo effect" (i.e., ~25% of the potential crowd-funding audience of Kickstarter).

Basically, when it ended, they said this was still important to them, but that they couldn't fund the port full-time.  You know what that means... it's nights & weekends (and poking in a fix, here and there, between other features & deadlines), from the couple of folks willing to do it on their own.  I hope that others (like Leadwerks) succeed and show there is a market for game creation on Linux with tools similar to that which Unity Technology provides.  If that happens, then GarageGames could partner with an investor, or similar, to bring their editor over.

Also, the Linux version of their engine needs some love, but it's supposedly quite capable in the hands of a good video game programmer, albeit somewhat inflexible.  Don't quote me on that, as I haven't used it personally, and am relaying what other developers have stated.

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Hey, Alex V. Sharp... the new logo is absolutely ace!  Thanks!! :D

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I've not fired up a single game out of the 11 bit studios bundle, so I can't comment on Funky Smugglers, sorry.

However, regarding Richard & Alice, I did receive a response from Harvester Games, who replied that they did, in fact, use InnoSetup to package the demo.

???

So, I downloaded the demo and tried out innoextract:

/tmp/foo$ innoextract Richard_and_Alice_demo_setup.exe
Extracting "Richard & Alice" - setup data version 5.5.0
 - "app/richardandalicedemo.exe", "app/richardandalicedemo.exe" (82.3 MiB)
 - "app/acsetup.cfg" (251 B)
 - "app/ags_snowrain.dll" (64 KiB)
 - "app/audio.vox" (30.5 MiB)
 - "app/winsetup.exe" (52 KiB)
Done.

Two things.

First, it appears that this extracted just fine.  Go figure.

Second, it appears that the game uses the old snowrain plugin, rather than the AGS module (i.e., native instead of scripted).  This is, of course, a slight performance advantage, but AGS is not a terribly CPU-hungry engine.  If Harvester Games chooses to switch to the script module, it could open up Richard & Alice to have snow/rain in ported versions of the game for Linux, iOS and Android (as well as Mac OS X, when that port is ready to go).  It is possible that they've packaged it as such, but aren't actually using the snowrain plugin, but I doubt it.  It would be pretty obvious in comparing it to how it looks in Wine (assuming that Wine is working properly with it;  never a guarantee of that).

Anyway, I'll probably end up trying this out myself sometime later in the week.

Edit:  Yeah, game seems to play fine, for the five minutes I spent on it, at least.  Also, I thanked the devs for sharing that info with me, and for promptly doing so.

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Haha, wow, never knew about this one.  The Real Texas is so bloody weird... like an 8-bit 3D action RPG meets point-n-click adventure game (and that's the least weird part).

If Paradise Perfect Boat Rescue is half as weird as TRT, then it's another must-have, for those of us who are perversely drawn to odd indie titles :D

... like me ...

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Quoting: muntdefems

Quoting: s_dUnless people hit that audio corruption bug w/Pulse... :(

Hmm... How does that bug work? Does it occur randomly? Because yesterday after testing the Richard and Alice demo I also had a go at Primordia and I got a core dump as a result of some sort of audio crash. I restarted the game and it happily didn't crash at the same point again.

The corruption bug sounds like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrdhuNOOuO8 [External Link]

We haven't seen a crash to core dump due to audio trouble, though.  That's new :(

I don't suppose the core dump came from an unstripped build with debug symbols (i.e., you could fire up gdb on the core file and PM me a stack trace?)

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Quoting: SslaxxWadjet Eye's Primordia is *also* an AGS game and thus the bit about the native AGS Linux runtime you mention with Richard and Alice applies there, too.

Unless people hit that audio corruption bug w/Pulse... :(

But that's neither here nor here, and will be resolved eventually, I promise!

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Yep.  GoG.com is not our friend, unfortunately.  Not yet, anyway.  It's simply the best (and often, only) way to buy Good Old Games... but less so, Good Not-So-Old Indies :P

I like their attitude, and would welcome them as another Linux game distributor, should they ever bother to listen to all of the folks voting for Linux support on their wishlist [External Link]!

Anyway, Unepic looks like a pretty cool, and very weird, Castlevania-ish RPG w/roguelike elements.  I've heard it's pretty funny, too, but that the humour is "quirky" (or something?).

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I hope it works out OK for this guy;  I picked up a key for this deal :)

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Quoting: kozecAhem... can I do little "adversing" here?
...
And... well, to put it short, I pledged on indiegogo and dev later sent me thanking mail.
...
So maybe some of you here can check it and vote on greenlight or something. I really don't believe there are only 4 people liking this kind of games.

So, this column is actually for super cheap deals & bundles, but there is a column on this site specifically for promoting crowd-funded game campaigns!  It's called The Funding Crowd.  Fortunately, the same person does both, and may read these comments.  If so, he might add Inverto to the list for the next issue.

Hmm... A Greenlight Spotlight sounds like another useful column.  It could probably be coupled with any new Desura Alpha-Funding games for Linux (since they achieve similar goals in the end).  I wonder if we could convince avarisclari to run a column like that, here, since he practically did it on his blog once already:  http://acbignews.blogspot.com/2013/06/small-news-greelight.html [External Link]

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Quoting: muntdefemsAbout the column's format, it's clear that I cannot cater to everyone's wishes so I'll do what I feel best. Speedster is right: while I'm not at all burnt out, I didn't particularly enjoy writing this column. I don't know if it shows or not, but I'd rather write about less games (let's say 10 games tops, including both Biggies and Hidden Gems) and enjoy doing so.

So, no, it did not show, at least not to me. I hope that explains why I was quite pleased with the level of effort you're exerting. That said, I, too, would rather you enjoy what you are doing. No column is long for the world which comes from an unhappy volunteer.

I like the idea of a richer column, but if that means that the descriptive paragraphs are buried in tables of numbers, then that diminishes it's effectiveness. However, as Speedster rightly pointed out, I'm making assumptions about how this will form up. It may well do no such thing, and I ought simply wait and see (especially since I'm not contributing to it!)

In any case... many thanks to you, muntdefems, and also Speedster now. This is one of the most useful columns here, though I can certainly understand it feeling like a chore at some point. So, you both deserve my gratitude at least. :)

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