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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!
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.
Pics or GTFO!
cool more game for Linux! it seems that some companies in the game industry take notice of Linux and it's market
Was that an accidental typo or very clever satire?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I thought this was another "gnome 3 is horrible" post. It's so horrible that after a few releases it NOW supports Linux.
It's not the kernel, it's the libraries. That's really all a game engine does - it takes all the libraries and presents a simple interface to them, while integrating the asset tools (ie. model file formats, etc.)
On Windows, almost everything you need is in DirectX. Same for the XBox - it's pretty much the same library. Graphics, audio, networking, input, it's all there except a basic AI library and physics simulation.
On OS X, there's a bunch of less integrated APIs. OpenGL for the graphics, some proprietary library for input, and so on. iOS uses mostly the same libraries.
Android also uses OpenGL, but has it's own, different libraries for pretty much everything else. The same is true for the non-Microsoft consoles - either OpenGL or the OpenGL ES, and custom proprietary crap for everything else.
Linux, again, uses OpenGL. But that's about it as far as "common code". Want to tell if Mouse3 has been pressed? Need new code. Want to play a sound? New code.
Now, it's not quite as bad as it seems - most of the engine is, in fact, the "turn basic libraries into something that does all the work for you", and the renderer *is* the biggest library bit, but it's still quite a bit of work to go from Android to Linux.
I think this trend is being forced by proprietary OS vendors, Valve should be threatened by the Windows 8 Market that is locked (for Metro applications only, for now) and the prospect of a locked down OS X. If that future of entirely lock down stores arrive, Steam will be dead soon. That is the only reason they are looking for an exit on the Linux market.
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.
I knew Linux could not be responsible for such a Desktop travesty! I wonder how much Shuttleworth was receiving to take the rap??
Lets say that there is an article about Ford's term as Vice-President. Just because you thought about the motor company first that doesn't make the article misleading.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Honestly, I don't see how XBox could be losing money with the annual subscription. That said, I won't be renewing my subscription the second time around. I was really hoping windows media center would be a good thing for, you know, media. But as it turns out it blows, so I'm going to build a mini-atx computer to replace it.
Just to be clear there is a LOT that goes on under the hood beyond DX/OpenGL calls and AI.
A substantial part of an engine involves efficiently managing all of that data so only subsets of the data are getting streamed/updated at any given time.
Are you being serious? Studios will continue to not target Linux for the foreseeable future and generally remain DirectX only. Unity of all things isn't going to change this. A DirectX only strategy is not "suicide" when the broad majority of your target user base uses DirectX. But really, you were probably just trolling or seriously delusional anyway.
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.