Quoting: HamishGodot was primarily targeted at mobile previously, meaning that the latest and greatest graphics were never its chief concern. That being said, now that it has its source code available we as a community could step in to fix that. Also, it is using OpenGL ES 2, not OpenGL 2, which is actually based on OpenGL 3 and fully API compatibile with OpenGL 4.1.

My main interest here is that Godot may finally help resolve the greatest issue with these game creation environments, which is that you never do actually have complete control or in effect complete ownership of your games. Sine the main editor is free software, this is no longer an issue here.

Ah ok OpenGL ES 2.0 is good. Looks like OpenGL 2.0 but gets rid of all the fixed pipeline stuff.

Anyways I think developers that are really concerned about the ownership of their content fork out more money for source code on the engine they use. It is possible to get source code versions of all the major engines. But there are a lot of people that want to make a game with as little effort as possible and don't care how they do it. This is where cheap engines that you basically just write scripts for come into play. They allow rapid game development but at a cost. You either get control and better performance with longer development times, or faster development, less control, and lower performance.

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Correct me if I'm wrong but I have a theory as to why this was made open source. I swear that the engine is based on OpenGL 2.1. While nearly 100% of systems out there have support for that, it's an older inefficient version. At this point companies are moving on to at least 3.0 and I'm guessing most won't support anything less than 3.2 core profile. If developers want a modern language than using the Godot Engine won't appeal to them. Now I'm sure this will get updated over time. I haven't looked at it but if it's as good as they say it will give Ogre3D a run for its community. Ogre3D is working on 3.0 support but I guess time will tell which engine will advance faster.

I'm one of the developers that wants 3.2 core profile support and higher. I've been watching the Leadwerks engine but we'll see how far I get with my own stuff before the Linux port is done.

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Quoting: aaaaaaaaone would have to guess they went into multi platform THE wrong way, or at least they learned nothing from it.

I feel bad for developers that fall for the propaganda of how they should develop and what tools they have to use. You're right that if you don't build with multiple platforms in mind the porting isn't worth it.

I know a guy who has been trying to complete a game for the past 10 years (multiple games have been attempted). He makes all the wrong decisions about the tools to use. He also won't touch Linux "until" it gets native DirectX support. He seems to think that Microsoft is in the process of open sourcing all that code and that Linux is going to adopt it.

So the real problem stems from the knowledge and research that a developer does before they start development. There are so many tools out there that you don't have to know anything to start making a game. Microsoft shifted the tools in use back when they released DX9 and the Khronos group failed to advance OpenGL fast enough. That stagnation period from 2.1 to the 3.x series is what pushed OpenGL to the back burner of development. Just look at games created prior to DX9, most either used OpenGL exclusively or had the option to switch between OpenGL or D3D. The saving grace is that OpenGL is now advancing faster than DX, it's not tied to an OS, and mobile devices are requiring developers to learn OpenGL (at least if they don't use an abstraction tool Unity3D).

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Love the articles. I wanted to just say a few things. I probably own 80-90 % of Linux games available on Steam and/or Humble. I feel that even if the game isn't screaming at me, they supported Linux so I support them.

But the last point you made was about Project Zomboid. I bought that game a few years ago when I still had a Windows install. It seems to run fine on Windows but I've had nothing but troubles making it work in Linux. The game concept is great but the foundation they built on isn't my favorite. I've pretty much stopped playing any game that required Java because of performance issues. If you use the wrong version of Oracle Java you have problems, if you don't use Oracle Java you have problems. It's just not worth the hassle for a language that was supposed to work flawlessly across multiple platforms.

As for the point about AMD drivers, I completely agree. I'm a big fan of AMD but their Linux drivers aren't the best. I do think they are actually trying to improve the open source driver to the point of being on par with Catalyst. So it's probably an issue of looking in too many directions at once so nothing ends up stellar.

There may be one flaw in the stats as well. Some of these games I bought before they had Linux versions. So while I play on Linux, I bought when it was Windows only. You addressed that for some stuff but it may be something developers should be aware of.

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When I was a Windows user I use to get the survey all the time. When Steam was released for Linux I switched to Steam for Linux. I've only ever seen the survey once since then. It would be nice if these stats said how many people use Steam, how many surveys were sent out, how many people responded, how many were sent out to each OS, and the response rate of each OS.

Being that they build the software I can't image that they actually need a survey to determine what OS is using the client. When you compile for a certain OS just set a flag that can be sent back to say what OS it is. Wine users would be the only thing to skew it and even then they should be considered Windows users since they aren't using native.

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I wish they would sell it at another venue. When it comes to digital sales I really don't like going all over the place. I like that so many people use Humble so I can get all my downloads in one place.

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Holy crap that is awesome. I backed these guys when they crowd funded the game. Love the game but stopped playing when I dropped Windows. I think it's time to just buy it again to support their Linux work.

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Nice contest. Too bad I have the majority of these games heh.

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Holy crap this is awesome. I was watching this game when it was first announced a long time ago. I still had a Windows install at the time but it fell off my radar when I dropped Windows all together. I'm going to have get this.

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Quoting: Quote from Levi

Quoting: Quote from Half-ShotInteresting that they are using Gnome for a desktop manager. I personally prefer it but I do know that the 3.6< had issues with rendering games so I wonder if they made some adjustments to that. If I were valve i would have gone for lxde with a bit of eye candy thrown in so the desktop was functional but not the centrepiece.

Haven't tried SteamOS yet but i will do in the new year when i build a steam box.

funny that you mention that, since they did try lxde, as well as kde. According to the package log.
Gnome tools probably turned out to be best compatible with steam 

This is probably because they initially built everything around the default Ubuntu setup, which uses Unity, which was using some Gnome stuff for awhile. It's not surprising that Gnome would work best without making a lot of changes. Sadly they should focus less on specific WM/DM and just make it freedesktop.org compliant. That way it should work across more WM/DM with little work. The fact they built half their notification system around the Unity implementation was kind of stupid. 

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