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Unity 4 Adds Linux Support
dartttt writes "After more than 14,000 votes by Linux users and efforts by Brian Fargo, Unity has added Linux support to their popular 3D game engine. Starting with Unity 4.0, Linux will be supported as a publishing platform allowing Unity games to be played natively on Linux. Only standalone desktop games will be supported initially. From the article: 'Unity Technologies, maker of a widely used video-game engine, today announced that its fourth-generation product will introduce new animation technology and extend its support for Adobe Systems' Flash Player, Linux, and Microsoft's DirectX 11.'"
How about a kickstarter to liberate the source of Unity?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
now devs and companies just have to click a few buttons and we got some games... hopefully
Laws and common sense still applies.
You mean Unity finally wont suck on Linux?
http://saveie6.com/
OMG! OMG! OMG! More proprietary software is coming to Linux!!! Fuck yeah!!!
Now that the engine is ported, how much additional effort is required by the developer to make their game run on Linux? A lot? A little? I'm readily curious.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
cool more game for Linux! it seems that some companies in the game industry take notice of Linux and it's market
Pics or GTFO!
this could encourage others to support linux with their engines
Since games like shadow gun run on Android and make use if the unity engine, want unity essentially 'ported' to Linux anyway? I mean I'm sure it is native code on Android and not just Java.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
At first, I, like many of you, thought, "What? It's not like Unity wasn't already on Linux and instead ran on Windows or Mac."
Then, I realized they were talking about Unity3D, an application suite and "programming" environment, not the Unity desktop environment. Can we clear that up?
I thought this was another "gnome 3 is horrible" post. It's so horrible that after a few releases it NOW supports Linux.
nt
Is Unity compatible with Ubuntu Unity? Does one allow to kill the other?
It's so nice to see the Linux community persuade the major game companies to port all their big titles over to Linux - and not charge any money for them either.
This will surely tip Linux desktop usage over the critical "1%" milestone. With Apple at 5% and Microsoft with perhaps even more market share, gaming has never been so diverse. I'm betting that Nintendo will cancel their new console so that they can focus on Linux exclusives - Mario Tux Racer FTW!
Can we get some GameMaker up in here?
The community needs to, err, unify Unity and Unity if we're ever going to advance the cause.
Except for UNITY. splitters !
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It makes perfect sense for Valve to buy and opensource Unity to get more games for their upcoming Linux-based game console.
Which means Linux will be dead. (Because Joe Retard's idea of an ideal OS, which is an appliance that thinks for him, while he drools on the floor, is the complete opposite of a full computer with an efficient human-computer interface that is used for automating *your* work away.) Long live Linux!
to use on the Nokia phones
http://memegenerator.net/elop
As response to the above I can confirm that Unity is very much used because of the development environment, ease of use for 3D artists, and an incredibly simple tool chain that lets you target many platforms with one codebase. Art assets can be shared between platforms as well, or specified per platform.
For these reasons, Unity is used a lot at small studios, particularly where gameplay is the main focus and the technology doesn't have to be cutting edge. Systems like Unreal and CryEngine are more powerful from a technology and graphics standpoint, but are not nearly as easy to use for small teams of developers.
In particular, Unity's documentation, specifically its scripting documentation, is outstanding. The documentation for other systems is extremely rough by comparison.
I have no affiliation with Unity3D, other than the fact that I've used the software in the past and like it. I know the facts I mention above because I've done consulting and training for many local game studios, many of which have used or are using Unity3D. Also, hundreds of my students currently work in the game industry (many in Vancouver BC) so I often hear about what's going on in local studios.
One more wall of fortress Microsoft crumbles. Game devs finally notice the way the wind is blowing, a DirextX-only strategy is suicide. OpenGL won and soon only the shrinking PC segment and money losing XBox will be left waving the DirectX flag. It's about time.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I knew Linux could not be responsible for such a Desktop travesty! I wonder how much Shuttleworth was receiving to take the rap??
We run Unity for an embedded gaming solution (electronic gaming, think slots and similar machines). When I approached Unity at G2E they said they had it working on Linux (I suspect IGT or another big player in class 3 asked for it) but it wasn't released to the general masses. Linux is so much easier to manage than the alternatives and is much more cost effective.
This also means you can run Unity games on the RaspberryPi or similar. Can't wait to make myself a Unity arcade cabinet based off the Pi or Rikomagic.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
How wonderful! All 30 of the people who play games on Teh Lunix will be overjoyed! Sadly, only 2 of them actually buy software. But hey, I'm sure those numbers are very compelling for software devs to support Teh Lunix!
So how do you recommend funding the development and publishing of a professional-quality video game with zero kicks in the gonads?
Hopefully this means we'll be seeing a nice flood of Unity games that have been waiting for the Linux support like Kerbal Space Program.
I believe Microlith was referring to RMS's statement linked from this story, which might be taken to mean that non-free games on a free platform are the lesser of two evils: "At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do." He goes on to say something to the effect "instead of actually playing games, support these vaporware projects".
X.Org X11 Server is not part of the GNU project, and in fact, a GNU system need not be running any sort of window system at all. Some comments to other Slashdot stories have convinced me that if the sense is "GUI Linux but not Android", the term "X11/Linux" is probably more accurate.
The things which are classicaly non-portable are things which require input and output.
Every video game requires input and output. If your gameplay is finely tuned for a keyboard or joystick, then adapting it to a completely flat touch screen isn't necessarily a trivial matter. An on-screen gamepad isn't enough because the player can't feel where the buttons are without looking, a problem known since the Intellivision. For example, how would you adapt Super Mario Bros. to touch control? I tried playing the official Tetris® game for iPhone once, and I couldn't get even half the TPM (play speed) on it that I could get on Tetris DS.
Judging from the number of the "This had better run on Linux!" comments on Neal Stephenson's sword game Kickstarter campaign (they are likely to use Unity for CLANG), this should make some people happy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I contributed to the Wasteland 2 kickstarter, and it was said all along that if/when it reached X dollars there would also be a Mac and Linux version. It easily passed that amount. In one of the follow-up newsletters, they stated that they had reviewed a number of game engines and chosen Unity, one of the reasons being that they had been working on porting it to Linux anyway and that there had been a substantial amount of work done already to that end, before being chosen for Wasteland 2. That and the development tools made it very easy to work with and they could put more resources into content, rather than creating/porting an engine and so on. (I don't have the email in front of me - so I'm going from memory)
Yeah, he very specifically did say that in one of his recent essays. He doesn't like this unliberated software, but he'd rather that it sleeps w/ his liberated OS, rather than an unliberated one.
I actually tend to believe that the opposite choices are the way to go. Had the FOSS movements (not talking about just the FSF, but everybody involved in having source code automatically available w/ binaries) actually started w/ useful apps and making those liberated or open-sourced - things like Office Suites, Image & video editing software, Publishing software, financial software like and so on - that would have been better for FOSS as a whole. People would have gotten used to the likes of Open Office, GIMP, VLC and so on ages ago, just like they're used to Firefox and Chrome, and those would have been ubiquitous on computers. This would also have given these platforms the opportunity to get feature rich and customizable, letting people install either just the features they need, or all the bells & whistles.
Once that was out there, it would have been relatively easier to migrate them to FOSS OSs, be it Linux, BSD, osFree, ReactOS, et al. The initial port may have been a bitch - all those API translations and so on - but once that was done & out of the way, making upgrades to say, Linux versions of FOSS titles would have accompanied the upgrades to Windows equivalents (incidentally, while on that subject, such software should not have to be re-written b/w different versions of glibc or GCC or GTK or Qt - once it's written in each library, it should automatically be supported by its successors). Only caveat I see - the business models behind these would have needed to be worked out, but aside from that, it would have ensured a much wider acceptance of FOSS. In other words, if these programs need to be sold, do it, so that the projects don't remain in the red.
In short, what keeps FOSS from being widely embraced is its focus on lower layer s/w like kernels and userland utilities, rather than actual programs that end-users need. Stop making 20 text editors, 10 music players (KDE, I'm looking @ YOU), and so on, and actually produce the type of software that people need - be it things like Quickbooks, Photoshop & so on (close the gaps b/w GNUcash & Quickbooks, GIMP & Photoshop, Calligra vs MS Office and so on). Once those are successful, it will be easier to talk people into installing BSD or Linux or other FOSS OSs, since these titles can be ported there, given the availability of the source.
That explains why I didn't get it to work for me!
Apparently, the most popular modes are Capture-The-Menu and Hidden-App-Minefield. And if your PC supports 3D, you can experience the 21st century blur effect that will cause your computer to hang, that should be familiar to MS Windows users.
Please bring Unity3D web player support so we can use NASA's "Eyes on the solar system" app !
PLEASE my god please