Wolfire Games Forums

Hello,

I'd like to preorder but it seems the linux alpha is not available yet.
The most recent news I could find was devs were waiting for library "awesomium" to be ported, but that was beginning on 2011 and this was supposed to happen "soon".

What are the recent news ? Can we reasonably expect to enjoy the linux version soon ? if awesomium is not available yet, is it easy to do a stripped version that does not need it ?

Thanks

Awesomium is available now. Now they (that is, the Wolfire team) a're waiting for an outsider, Ryan Gordon, to have time to port Overgrowth. He specializes in Linux ports. I have no idea when he has time, or how long the porting will take.

I think he's been busy porting HIB3 to linux, maybe there will be a linux alpha soon?

I guess we'll see. Frankly, the quality of the Linux ports for the HIB was... less than stellar. Maybe he'll be more focused if he only has one thing to work on, rather than a whole bundle.

I am a bit disappointed to learn this, if it is the true story. I though that all these developers were multi-platform aware/friendly/committed (and I was happy about it), and now it appears that it's only one external guy doing all the ports.

I'm curious from a technical point of view too: what are the typical parts of code that are not portable, in games ? (I've only worked on "server" applications so portability was never really an objective for me). Is Overgrowth using a third party engine, or a home made one ?

Here's Ryan Gordon's guest post in the blog.

The post isn't directly about differences between Linux and non-Linux builds, but it does give some hints - graphics libraries, sound libraries etc.

I've read this, but didn't realize it was a guest post.

I have found some interesting info on the wiki, and now can better understand the reasons why the linux port is not top priority (but I still don't know the technical details about non-portability).

It's a shame that there is only this one star guy doing the ports for many games. I'd love to help myself, but I'm far from an expert (probably would not do any better than Overgrowth regular developer). Does someone know if there are some open source games that kind of need a linux port ? This could provide some training material.