Title says it all. If it’s been scrapped I’m refunding it because I wouldn’t have bought this game if I didn’t think it was going to support linux sooner or later and that’s just blatant false advertising. I understand it’s a new platform [that your game engine fully supports] but 3 months to do… what?
Seriously, Can someone explain to me why it’s so hard to port? UE supports linux so surely if you don’t do anything hacky with the engine it should be fine, Support would be the only problem I see.
Hi there! As an avid Linux user myself, I cannot wait until Tower Unite is on Linux, but porting it is not as simple as clicking a button in Unreal Engine 4 and having it work 100%.
At this time, we have been really busy getting gameplay systems in place, so that’s been the main focus. Porting the game to a new version of the engine, or a different platform (Linux, Mac) takes a vast amount of time, time at the moment we would like to spend getting the gameplay features in.
We’ve stated in the Indiegogo and the Steam Store Page that we want to port the game to Linux and Mac OS X platforms, and we will, but there isn’t any release date at this time.
It’s something I seriously want to look into more in-depth after the major updates planned get rolled out.
Thanks, I can’t do art or anything so I don’t know anything about game development, Though I would like to. My screen is tinted green on windows so I’d also like to see if that fixes with a linux port.
Not currently as the game uses DirectX 11, this could change in the future as Wine gets more and more DX11 support, but at this point, as far as I know the game doesn’t even boot on Wine.
WINE won’t be getting DX11 support anytime soon; They’re still trying (and having many issues) implementing DX10.
UE4 supports setting specific builds (linux / mac) to OpenGL, if I remember correctly.
I definitely recommend getting this out of the way now. The sooner the better; The more you get done before implementing linux support, the harder it will be to add said support in the future.
The other route to getting linux people to at least be able to run the game through WINE would be to add DX9 support… But UE4 doesn’t support anything below DX11, so that’s out of the question.
Content seems to be more important atm. Mac stated that maintaining different versions for Linux and Mac takes up resources because they can’t just build hit a build for Linux button. Eventhough it might not be that hard to enable OpenGL or Vulkan support (unless some custom shaders start complaining). They made their own modifications to UE4’s source code so they have to port them over as well.
An example for this is the Linux DS server. When they launched TU it would crash about every hour while the Windows version was much more stable. Eventually they fixed all these issues but it took them some time.
But don’t worry they’ll get back to that eventually as they promised Linux and Mac support on their Indiego campaign.
As Zennoe stated above, it isn’t as easy as clicking “Export to Linux” in our case.
I believe we have tried a OpenGL build before, but it broke some shaders we use, although that could be a issue with the specific version of OpenGL we tried to export to.
We will be doing a Mac OS X and Linux build of the game. When, I don’t know, but it will happen.
While I’m aware it isn’t always just as simple as clicking Export to Linux, I would like to restate that I think it would be a good idea to get it out of the way now.
The issue with focusing on gameplay first is that you will inevitably add features that simply won’t work on linux without a complete rewrite; Starting from the ground with linux + windows support and then maintaining that support as you add content is much easier than adding a bunch of windows-only content and then having to port it all over.
I know porting would take manpower, but what I’m trying to say is that porting later takes an extremely higher amount of time than porting now.
Obviously this is all just my opinion, and I’m not trying to whine or bitch (I swear). I just would like to suggest these things, as the only thing making me keep winblows 10 on my main machine is Tower Unite.
The big issue with doing it right now is, we then have 3x the amount of work.
Right now we need to build versions of the game for Windows, build a Windows Server and a Linux Server.
We need to test those three before releasing it. If we port to Mac OS X and Linux right now, we now have two more things we need to test, which starts to make the updates come out slower. We’ve had things that only function on the Linux Server vs the Windows server, now adding two more clients where things might work and might now just adds more to the mix.
Believe me, I cannot wait when I can go back to my Linux partition and develop and play Tower Unite and ditch Windows, but at the current stage we aren’t ready for it.
Yep, Fixed the issue now though. Something to do with skylights, Disabled it in the config. Still doesn’t work in condos and plazas, Seems to be locked there.