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Unity 4 Adds Linux Support

Posted by samzenpus on from the welcome-to-the-club dept.

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.'"

6 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. No source? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Funny

    How about a kickstarter to liberate the source of Unity?

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    1. Re:No source? by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Informative

      Um.... do you have any concept of what that would cost? You'd have to be offering a huge pile of money. Right now they can commercially licence their engine for all sorts of projects. Even if those projects don't make money Unity can.

      Have a look at their people page, they have probably 110 employees. That's probably 12-13 million a year in revenue alone. Are you going to try and get a kickstarter for 100 million dollars to effectively shut them down, or to guarantee them income to keep working indefinitely?

      Don't get me wrong, there need to be more open source game tools (no matter how many you point me to there can always be more). As someone on the teaching side of things in trying to train game developers it's a real problem to know what tools you want to use, because the emphasis shouldn't be on the tools, but fighting with tools puts the emphasis on them. But Unity is pretty good about giving away a free trial, and being a good example of the sort of experience you'll have in industry, with some stuff opened up to you. That's about all we can hope for. Asking for a commercial engine that costs millions of dollars to make and maintain to just give up that kind of money is a pipe dream at best.

      Now, trying to get them to pull an id software and release old versions of the engine as open source (say release 2.0 or 3.0 when 4.0 goes live) might be a more realistic goal and would still be awesome.

      And by the way, you can negotiate your way into source code for Unity3D. I've never worked with anyone that thought it important enough to try until today, though. I literally advised a company this morning that Unity is probably their best bet for an engine given what they want to do, and they were wondering about source licences, which is the only reason I know that at all. Given that, it wouldn't be a huge shock to see old versions end up open sourced, if nothing else because you can't keep something bottled up indefinitely.

  2. Ubuntu Unity GUI finally works on Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pics or GTFO!

  3. Re:Fuck yeah! by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Given the choice between having a proprietary option and having no options, I'll take the option to have proprietary software available every time.

  4. Re:Fuck yeah! by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Funny

    You just made baby RMS cry.

  5. Gnome + Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought this was another "gnome 3 is horrible" post. It's so horrible that after a few releases it NOW supports Linux.