Best Way to Port a Windows Game to Linux?

cliffski asks: "I have a Windows game that may benefit from a port to Linux. It's a complex politics sim based on a neural network, (think NationStates with complexity) and is probably right up the street of many Linux gamers. The problem right now is that I don't have the knowledge or the time to handle a Linux port, myself. What's the best way to arrange for a commercial port of games software to the Linux platform? Is it worth talking to lone enthusiastic hackers about collaborating? Would I save myself a lot of hassle by selling the porting rights to an established Linux games company?"

Comments

Boot CD.

[SanityInAnarchy]

However you do it, you'd do well to distribute the game as a boot cd. You can have common content, an autorun-powered Windows installer, and a bootable Linux environment for those who don't want to install it, or have disk space, or like Windows, or want to wait to boot it.

Of course, you'd also want a Linux installer to pull the game off the CD, but that (obviously) needn't be autorun, or even very sophisticated. You'll probably end up being supported by the distros themselves anyway, if it's a good game.

Slightly off-topic, but anyone played the game?

[EvilMagnus]

I downloaded the demo, and it seems to be a total policy wonkage. Very pretty, and some good ideas, but apparently flawed. For example, the *absence* of Policy does not appear to have detrimental effects to any group of voters (I just killed the NHS, because the slider told me that would piss the least number of people off!)

It also doesn't have a very good financial component; no granularity for income tax / personal allowances, etc (policies I'd like to tweak would be 'personal allowances' and tax bands, for example - the BBC has a budget simulator that does this). And the sliders are biased : the choices range from 'very fair' to 'scandalous'. Mmm yeah. Well, if you're a Socialist, a really high tax on rich folks wouldn't be considered scandalous. ;-)

So, to conlude : Absence of policy should impact voter groups, much, much better handling of the economy, and less bias in the slider descriptions. "very low" to "very high" would probably work fine for most things.

Use cross-platform libraries

[mwvdlee]

There are a number of cross-platform libraries which handle pretty much everything that can be platform dependant: Graphics, audio, networking, file-system, GUI; find the best one for you (sufficient platform abstraction, enough support for the platforms you want) and port to them first (keeps you on the platform you're familiar with).

For the rest of the code not supported by standard platform independant libraries, try to create your own library-like structure so the platform-dependant stuff is seperated from the generic code.

Porting the whole thing should now be a lot easier.