World of Goo Ported To Linux

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Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 13, 2009 @06:17PM from the good-for-goo dept.

christian.einfeldt writes "Lovers of both games and Free Open Source Software will be pleased to see that the popular indie puzzle game World of Goo has been released for Linux. It was designed by a small team of two ex-Electronic Arts developers, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, who used their entire combined savings of $10,000.00 USD to create the gooey game aimed at guiding goo balls to salvation. The developers built their gooey world with open-source technologies such as Simple DirectMedia Layer, Open Dynamics Engine for physics simulation, and TinyXML for configuration and animation files. Subversion and Mantis Bug Tracker were used for work coordination. Blogger Ken Starks points out that the release of this popular game for Linux could be a big step toward ending the chicken-and-egg problem of a dearth of good games that run natively under Linux."

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Re:cool! by FST · 2009-02-13 19:00 · Score: 0, Troll

Yeah. Good job supporting the people who actually do shit right.
If you want more Linux versions, vote with that $20 you earned surfing /. Social parasites like you can fuck off.

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Re:Doesn't work for *all* Linux users by Haeleth · 2009-02-13 23:01 · Score: 0, Troll

That's exactly what Java does
No, Java runs platform-independent code in a virtual machine, with no guarantee that any architecture-specific code will be compiled at any point. It provides portability but there's a significant performance cost. Sometimes JIT compilation can be used to claw back a fair bit of performance, but that's not available for all platforms, and mostly useful for long-running server processes.
Microsoft's .NET platform is closer to what GP describes -- that does involve compiling the bytecode to native code before executing it. But obviously .NET is less portable than Java.

I'm surprised more games aren't written that way anymore, considering how powerful computers are nowadays.
Loads of games are written to run in VMs: the most popular host VM is of course Flash.
Major titles still need to be written in languages that compile down to native code, though, because they really do need all the processor power they can get in order to provide the level of AI, physics, etc. that today's gamers expect.
Re:DRM-Less by LingNoi · 2009-02-14 02:01 · Score: 0, Troll

The game is worth $20 the problem is that you're so used to stealing games for free that you're bias and can no longer put a price tag on things.