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they don't. why develop for Unix, when Windows has a lot more potential players?
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(I'll ignore macOS because it's not a real UNIX clone, even though SUS and POSIX beg to differ)
While sure, FreeBSD on the desktop just... doesn't exist, Linux is very prominent on the desktop.
It's very easy to develop for, since pretty much every tool you could ever want is usually developed for Linux first and then ported to Windows.
I have my game engine running on Linux perfectly fine (it's actually very tied-down to Linux, doing system calls directly in some places with inline assembly for performance reasons for things like file i/o) on all sorts of graphics hardware configurations. (Except NVidia proprietary drivers, but those things don't work very well across kernel releases anyway)
I do have a working Windows port (it's more of removing things, hoping it works, and "running on Windows" on the Linux subsystem for Windows, but good enough) and the performance is absolutely abysmal.
It can't possibly be market share, because if it was, by all means, they'd go and make Linux exclusives like I do so that Windows users will (finally) fade into obscurity and use the operating system which has a superior graphics stack and offers more performance to games.*
*AMD did a test with their open source drivers running games which also have Windows versions, and for the majority of the test, Linux wiped the floor with Windows with > 10FPS improvements. On good ports, the improvement was even greater than 30 FPS. |
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min1upJoin Date: 2010-10-28
Post Count: 2712 |
Linux is my favorite operating system very narrowly by Windows 10 Pro after the Creators update.
(...And I hate there is nothing like Windows Hello on Linux, even if there are a few POCs.)
With my setup, Windows 10 Pro Creators runs games at the same performance with something like Lubuntu after the proper libraries are installed.
Base Windows 10 comes with 4gb of libraries though, and large updates like Creators probably only increased them. Devs can then be lazy (NVidia) and use the libraries already in Windows. People with proprietary hardware just have to suffer (like how I did buying a PCIe Ethernet adapter. feelsbadman)
(Intel and AMD deserve praise for developing and testing driver software before it gets ported and revised on Windows.)
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So one reason is simply laziness.
Probably only 20% of all devs work 80% on Linux.
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Windows overwhelmingly beats Linux and Apple OS combined. From a consumer standpoint, Windows 10 is top for user-friendliness. Manjaro Linux and Elementary are also known for user friendliness, but even in those Linux distros you can't go without using a terminal. It is obvious that everyone other than devs would prefer Windows over Linux.
Windows 10 even specifically appeals to graphical artists with the Anniversary update adding Windows Ink.
(Since the Anniversary update Wacom's net worth been steadily declining.)
Editors don't have to worry about anything on Windows because programs like the Adobe Suite already are on there.
Since the vast majority of consumers use Windows, developers have to work on Windows if they don't want to be bankrupt basically.
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So another reason is that Windows appeals to everyone except devs. Devs have to appeal to consumers, so they have to use Windows too.
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A while back, I tested The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth on an old Lenovo Thinkpad dualbooting Manjaro Linux and Windows 10. Windows 10 runs at full speed while Linux suffers extreme frame dropping.
Manjaro Linux suffers from failed optimizations that Windows proves to make ever since when Windows Aero was introduced (in Vista) and fixed in Windows 7.
With notebooks and probably workstation laptops, Windows would run better than Linux. In situations where integrated graphics have to be used, Windows may provide more RAM than Linux when running games. Windows 10 Creators only proves this further with a "game mode".
And yes it is fun playing games on some of my notebooks.
My most recent one supporting Windows Hello is able to emulate Xenoblade Chronicles at a full 30fps (the frame cap for that game) and even goes to 60fps with a few frame drops on nightly builds and Vulkan.
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Better performance for notebooks.
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Visual Studio is the best developer program ever, and nobody can prove me otherwise.
Visual Studio goes far to even support android emulation. Windows is worth it just for Visual Studio.
Just because of Visual Studio, developing on Windows is as easy, not to mention convenient, as on Linux. |
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min1upJoin Date: 2010-10-28
Post Count: 2712 |
pretend that Linux is Unix or something similar like OpenBSD/FreeBSD.
oh no now its harder to develop
how do you exit vim?
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So market share really is the problem?
hmm
if only Mark Shuttleworth spent time on an advertising campaign instead of the stupid convergence thing (or even better, embrace Android as the 'Ubuntu Mobile' and make it suuuuuper easy to develop for Android on Ubuntu)...
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min1upJoin Date: 2010-10-28
Post Count: 2712 |
yes
by all means, Linux is perfect to develop on
if more companies would opt in to Linux development, Linux wouldn't have to suffer that much
id kill for Microsoft Word on Linux
Libre Office is not good enough for me
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I'm actually thinking about writing yet another GUI toolkit atop of XCB/Wayland which tries to imitate the Win32 GUI mess that Microsoft made... except while trying to clean up some of that 90s mess.
(Plus so I can have something that's not LGPLed to write the GUI stuff for level editing and whatnot for my game engine. Right now, you need to hard-code everything in which is paaaaiiiinnnfuuullllll, especially since you have to open/close/change over and over and over in the game.)
I might actually write a word processor on top of this as a proof-of-concept that 'yes, this can be just as cool as GTK too without a GNU license on it.' |
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gwupJoin Date: 2010-07-25
Post Count: 24613 |
z |
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"FreeBSD"
PlayStation 4's system software is just a FreeBSD distro in disguise w/ AMD drivers and some proprietary fluff.
Why aren't PS4 non-exclusive games then ported from PS4 to Mac OS, Linux, and TrueOS/FreeBSD, especially since the lattermost requires basically no effort after abstracting away the graphics API?
If anything, PS4 + Windows support would be a nightmarish hell for any engine developer, especially since Microsoft's C/C++ likes to break the ISO standard all the time*, and has weird syntax for inline assembly.
*Seriously, we have a standard C library for a reason. Please implement the whole thing.
Afaik, you _must_ use MSVC for Windows and can't use clang or gcc. Might be wrong on that, like 90% sure I'm wrong on that. At the very least afaik you need to license some headers and whatnot from Microsoft in some Windows SDK.
And I'm one to just hate CMake already. Not making any Windows portability much easier.
I've never actually done Windows development before (I wouldn't touch Windows with a 39 and a half foot pole.), but I've heard horror stories of porting POSIXy stuff to Windows. |
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Has anyone else worked on a Linux-exclusive indie game too?
I'd reaaaaaallly love to open source mine, but am afraid someone would take it, remove the sanity checks to make sure it's not running on WSL (check contents of /mnt/c/ntuser.dat and /mnt/c/Windows/*, then check PATH for notepad.exe), or even worse, do a full Windows port.
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min1upJoin Date: 2010-10-28
Post Count: 2712 |
"I'd reaaaaaallly love to open source mine, but am afraid someone would take it"
I mean, if you host your project on GitHub, your version will be shown as the original version, and any forks will redirect to the original.
(also id like to try to port it to windows) |
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"(also id like to try to port it to windows)"
That's precisely *why* I don't want to open source it.
If I did, I'm probably intentionally add a ton of overhead to make absolute sure it's not running on Microsoft Windows, maybe do code obfuscation (and do clever things with string pointers to have it point to specific entries in the string table and all to spell 'Windows' and do a check for that and all, all while not having "Windows" show up directly in the rodata-string-table-thing. Do this by taking letters from "You have Won!", "is that true?", etc. etc. and pointing to specific letters in those strings to, at runtime, spell out "Windows", then do strcmp() and all on any way we can identify the OS.)
On top of that, it's very reliant on POSIX (as much as possible), and does the same trick to look for libvulkan.so on the system and dlopens it.
I want to make it as hard as humanly possible to port it to Windows if the source code is ever released. I'd rather do a Haiku or FreeBSD port. **Maybe** a macOS port, but only with a crapton of money off Tim Cook. Ideally, I want to somehow make it illegal to port it to a proprietary kernel (if the userspace, bootloader, etc isn't i dont care), but don't have a lawyer to help me figure out how to make that work. Hell, discrimination against platform might even be illegal, I don't know.
I already have some code in place to check /proc/version and /proc/sys/kernel/osrelease for the strings "-Microsoft" and "#1-Microsoft" in there to make sure it doesn't run on Windows Subsystem for Linux, on top of checking $PATH for notepad.exe and some other Windows programs.
I'd rather crash and burn any fanbase than let Microsoft keep their proprietary unnatural communist monopoly. I'm aware that by myself I won't change anything, but maybe this trend will pick up, increasing market fragmentation and killing off Windows for gaming. |
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min1upJoin Date: 2010-10-28
Post Count: 2712 |
"If I did, I'm probably intentionally add a ton of overhead to make absolute sure it's not running on Microsoft Windows."
this is exactly what happened in The Homeb(censorship)rew Channel (HBC) and Hackmii Installers for the Wii.
team twiizlers didn't want to open source HBC in fear that users would use the channel in the Dolphin emulator.
for an application that existed since 2010, the HBC went open sourced in 2016, and IMMEDIATELY it ran on Dolphin
if you would really make this open-sourced, it would be impossible for someone to *not* port it on windows.
even if you update the original project, a user can only fork the changes they want
also ctrl+f and logs are powerful tools on every operating system |
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yeah, which is a problem.
I don't really know a way to strongarm only having Linux support and forcing games running with my engine to only run on Linux without also violating the free software/ open source ideology I have (or just general morality).
Cognitive dissonance, I guess.
Maybe I can beg Canonical for $1 to make Ubuntu-exclusive games. Yes, one dollar.
I'd literally take any payment to make games for Linux only. |
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fizeyJoin Date: 2010-12-04
Post Count: 40995 |
What are Unix-likes |
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UNIX-likes.
Linux, macOS/FreeBSD, ToaruOS, UNIX itself, AIX, Xenix/SCO Unix, etc.
kinda ironic since the first real userspace program that was on Unix was, in fact, a text-based game... and that the PlayStation is really just a PC running FreeBSD with some GUI hacks on it. |
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Would implementing a brand new operating system which is a Windows-like but not Windows (binary) compatible possibly be feasible for games then?
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min1upJoin Date: 2010-10-28
Post Count: 2712 |
"Would implementing a brand new operating system which is a Windows-like but not Windows (binary) compatible possibly be feasible for games then?"
yes and no
windows has a lot of (proprietary) stuff that nothing could ever be like windows
especially windows 10
mac osx tried
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