Engine

[dmazz]

Their promise of a linux port has forced them to adopt unigine. Don't know what Brian was thinking with that one. Hopefully they drop it when they sell a paltry amount of linux copies. But right now it's costing us dearly in the game engines Brian is able to adopt. Due to unigine being one of the 2 engines being considered. It means Brian doesn't intend to port the game through wine, instead he wants a game engine that supports linux.

There is really only 2-3 engines that support linux with support available. Torque unofficially, Ogre3D (which is just a renderer) and unigine.

This isn't a good start. Brian should have realized before promising a linux port that there is practically no game engines that support linux. And none that support visual scripting, which is the critical feature he needs.

Unigine really is the only option they have as it has a better art pipeline, they are getting it at a big discount, maybe even for free, and it's the only one that has visual scripting, granted it's not ready for production use. But I don't like it at all that Wasteland 2 is being forced to be the guinea pig trying out this engine. And there goes the dream of a modkit integrated with the game engines free version available for download. unigine has one of the most restrictive evaluation processes of any game engine.

[Ech]

Their promise of a linux port has forced them to adopt unigine. Don't know what Brian was thinking with that one. There wasn't even a thread calling for linux support. Hopefully they drop it when they sell a paltry amount of linux copies. But right now it's costing us dearly in the game engines Brian is able to adopt.

That makes me sad. The main reason I support Kickstarters and Indie games that support Linux natively is to break the chicken-egg cycle that caused Epic to drop Linux support for Unreal 3 when they have supported it with Unreal 2 in the past.

IMHO that is an extremely short-sighted way to look at things. The only reason I still have a windows install at all is for gaming. Everything else except that I do on Linux already. I do hope they don't back out or go half-heart on their promise on their Linux build. Having substandard ports would hurt Linux more than having none at all. This, in much the same way that the economics of console to PC porting have all but stalled the progress of the quality of PC games.

Personally I would not have supported W2 this early if not for that promise.

[Drool]

Hopefully they drop it when they sell a paltry amount of linux copies.

Well, that's rather way past the point of no return, now isn't it?

Considering Brian's been making games (with cross-platform compatibility) for over 20 years, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[dmazz]

I was reading another forum. A port of the C4 engine to linux is said to be doable and would only cost 50-100K. Unity has also shown they can port their engine to linux. So hopefully that's an option Brian and team are considering. 50-100K+ cost to choose whatever engine you think is best is worth it.

@Ech Are they making wasteland 2 or leading a revolution in linux games development? lol They have set themselves 1 year of dev time which is very little for a game of this scope, they shouldn't have burdened themselves with a linux port. The only reason a linux port was offered was because Brian didn't know what to do with the money he was receiving after he reached his 1 million goal. Brian might have been generous to linux users, but he was being generous with other peoples money, the majority who don't use linux. A wine port or promise that the game would be ported after release would have sufficed.

I'll give Brian and team, senior developers the benefit of the doubt. That unigine is the best game engine available within their price range and is not being chosen primarily because it supports linux. Cause that would suck.

[Ech]

I'm under no delusion that Linux users such as myself are a minority. And I believe one of the biggest reasons for that is because of the lack of proper games on that platform. I may be alone in supporting W2 for the explicit reason of it having Linux support but I did not realize there are people who resented that decision to support that platform.

I respect your opinion and you're ofcourse free to state and campaign for it. But I pray they keep their word or at the very least grant me a refund for my little contribution if they do take your stance.

Supporting more economically viable platforms exclusively would be more profitable for them. But such profit-centric thinking is exactly what caused W2 to almost not get done. I hope they don't go down that path.

[suz]

Supporting more economically viable platforms exclusively would be more profitable for them. But such profit-centric thinking is exactly what caused W2 to almost not get done. I hope they don't go down that path.

From a consumer standpoint, if making a linux binary going to take out 20% of the game's content then it's not really "profitable" even for a linux fan. Most code that doesn't rely on magic, fairies and API bugs runs just fine via wine.

[BentSea]

I don't think the engines that they are limited to picking are hurting the project at all whatsoever. inXile has had a lot of choices and decisions to make, and a lot of features to consider.

Generally, having your game on every single possible available platform, so that people's ability to play your game isn't restricted by the systems they've invested in, is a 100% good thing. And it's generally mostly something that just requires extra time and money again.

And you can thank the linux community at large for being some of the most intelligent capable forces in the market supporting the movement toward a more DRM free friendly environment. This was a goal that inXile clearly wanted to be able to achieve, as there is obviously a demand for it, and it was deliberately and purposefully included as one of their stretch goals.

I am honestly surprised at how much crying I am seeing about "other" platforms getting support, and about things like resources lost to it.



A linux port is as good for the game as being DRM free, it's just generally harder to do. We live in a world where it's difficult to get your game into the hands of people who want to play it. We are surrounded constantly with options, and flooded with other games, and it can be years for a game to make it into the queue of a person who could love the game. It's a good thing to do everything you can to move your game at the very least into their hands, because once they have it, and can play it, then maybe they still wont immediately, but will eventually.

I really have difficulty believing that there's a person here.. supporting this game(and I am just making some strong demographic guesses here) that doesn't have a list as long as their arm of games that they've heard about and know they want to play, but are limited by time and money and may even own a lot of them but maybe still haven't yet installed and played them. This is an increasingly difficult problem to get over as quality indie developers become more and more industrious and prolific. There are just so many good games that deserve people's time and attention, and those are two very limited resources.

[dmazz]

Was reading up and found out Unity can operate it's web player within Google’s Native Client toolkit in Chrome. Which means Unity's webplayer can be run in linux through the chrome browser.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/01/25/uni ... -horizons/

Not sure how powerful webplayer is but this may mean unity does have support for linux. And Unity may be the other engine they are considering.Makes sense as it's one of the few engines with visual scripting.

Brian has said he doesn't want to spend alot of money on technology. How does 5% of the overall budget sound? Cause that gives him 150K to spend. Half of that is 2.5% and 75K to spend. That's a nice amount. Whatever engine he was planning to licence with 1 million he can upgrade now that he has 3 million.

[Ech]

Most code that doesn't rely on magic, fairies and API bugs runs just fine via wine.

And that's the pinch right there. I've tried to live with wine and it's not pretty. But then again, I imagine if Wine actually made it feasible to drop Windows, MS would try to bury it with lawyers with or without legal cause.

Just to clarify my standpoint, I'm looking at the long term impact of projects like W2 to gaming and tech in general. I don't want to have to spend extra money for an OS to play games on a PC, eating up an extra 15GB to do what my 2GB Linux install does (except play games). Yes, I know disks and lots of GBs are dirt cheap (not so much on my SSDs but that's beside the point). Maybe its a cultural thing but I don't like waste and inefficiency - even with resources that are abundant. God knows the clusterfrack our environmental problems was borne by wastefulness of once abundant resources.. but that's getting OT.

Anyway, I trust Brian to keep his word. Maybe Unigine gets used or maybe Unreal3 gets ported. The Machiavelli in me prefers the latter would probably better for Linux gaming in general. Still, the naive little boy in me, roots for the Unigine guys in the background on principal just because they took a chance on us minority guys when the big guys left us for dead.

[Bryce777]

Was reading up and found out Unity can operate it's web player within Google’s Native Client toolkit in Chrome. Which means Unity's webplayer can be run in linux through the chrome browser.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/01/25/uni ... -horizons/

Oh god no, both to Chrome and Unity, but especially to Chrome or any browser solution. Just cancel the project before doing something so ridiculous. Unity would actually be good if you could afford the

I've lused C4 for years and it can be easily ported, and probably will be eventually because iOS is in the works and it already supports mac OS X which is almost exactly like Linux in many ways.

The port would take a few days to get working at all, but driver support and hardware testing is the issue here. Mr. Lengyel is great at support and programming, but you'd probably have to pay something to get him to switch gears to make WL2 a priority.

Since it's a high profile project it would be a great move, and since it's a huge bullet point others ask for a lot (including me) it would probably be something you could get for much less than the real cost. But it might be necessary to limit the hardware and driver versions allowed. That's just due to the graphics card makers often being slow to fix bugs on linux, and if you aren't a top ten game then when you file a bug report it can take eternity.

Uningine seems to make linux a priority so they are the safest bet in linux support that doesn't cost anything. Running unity in chrome makes me rage, but they could port unity, too. But I'm betting their price would be much more than they'd be willing to spend.

I don't know uningine too well, but it's probably not too bad. It's got most the features a 3D engine should have but I don't know about performance

I'm under no delusion that Linux users such as myself are a minority. And I believe one of the biggest reasons for that is because of the lack of proper games on that platform. I may be alone in supporting W2 for the explicit reason of it having Linux support but I did not realize there are people who resented that decision to support that platform.

I respect your opinion and you're ofcourse free to state and campaign for it. But I pray they keep their word or at the very least grant me a refund for my little contribution if they do take your stance.

Supporting more economically viable platforms exclusively would be more profitable for them. But such profit-centric thinking is exactly what caused W2 to almost not get done. I hope they don't go down that path.

Well, they can do it or not. They can't wait around for some engine to appear from nowhere. But I do think it's doable. Uningine is probably suitable and if it's not they could get C4 or Unity ported or just do it themselves and fix the driver bugs after release, though this will cost more money and be buggier.

[Quarex]

Supporting more economically viable platforms exclusively would be more profitable for them. But such profit-centric thinking is exactly what caused W2 to almost not get done. I hope they don't go down that path.

I do not think anyone is saying this. I think they are saying "if the game engine is fundamentally inferior for the task it is asked to do, entirely because of the promise of native Linux support, then that is a bad thing for everyone--even Linux users."

I know literally nothing about engines or cross-platform support or basically anything at all. But I know that this decision is one of the most important ones they will face, and therefore it is easy to understand serious concern about it.

[geezer]

Are people still talking about the Unreal engine? Who's going to pony up the $738,000 + 1/4 of future sales? Even CryEngine 3 is cheaper than that. Crytek would only want a 20% share of the income. I haven't heard anything bad about Unigine. It sounds great. The screenshots for it look amazing. Designed to be multiplatform from the ground up. What more could you want?

[dmazz]

The browser player for unity is a great idea if it's powerful enough. Here's what some guy said.

"NaCl == NATIVELY. “Native Client is an open-source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly execute native compiled code inside the browser.”
Dont like the Chrome browser window? It’s open source, so it shouldnt be hard at all to modify chrome to just launch your game instead of a browser and make it appear standalone."

A far superior option to wine. And judging from the games on the webplayer there doesn't appear to be any graphical limits, just a small performance hit. (5%) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

I'm guessing the choice will come down to which engine is more graphically capable. Still can't believe Brian plans for this game to have 'state of the art graphics'. And the thing about unigine is noone heard anything about it whether good or bad, this hopefully just means they are terrible at promoting/selling their product, and not that the product has been rejected innumerable times.

Unity graphics aren't too shabby first two don't even use the latest hardware. Others don't know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiMu6XTuWk&hd=1
http://vimeo.com/27669302
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhBlMRIEPXE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpm_mkNr ... r_embedded

[TheEmissary]

The browser player for unity is a great idea if it's powerful enough. Here's what some guy said.

"NaCl == NATIVELY. “Native Client is an open-source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly execute native compiled code inside the browser.”
Dont like the Chrome browser window? It’s open source, so it shouldnt be hard at all to modify chrome to just launch your game instead of a browser and make it appear standalone."

A far superior option to wine. And judging from the games on the webplayer there doesn't appear to be any graphical limits, just a small performance hit. (5%) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

I'm guessing the choice will come down to which engine is more graphically capable. Still can't believe Brian plans for this game to have 'state of the art graphics'. And the thing about unigine is noone heard anything about it whether good or bad, this hopefully just means they are terrible at promoting/selling their product, and not that the product has been rejected innumerable times.

Unity graphics aren't too shabby first two don't even use the latest hardware. Others don't know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiMu6XTuWk&hd=1
http://vimeo.com/27669302
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhBlMRIEPXE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpm_mkNr ... r_embedded

Unigine is well known in the Benchmark scene and has been tested on many different systems. It is more or less the go to for testing tessellation. Google The heaven benchmark or look up the game Oil Rush as those will show you what you need.

[dmazz]

I know unigine has the heaven benchmark. But that doesn't mean anything apart from it being capable of a certain level of graphics detail. Oil rush game doesn't mean much either, as it's a very simple tower defense game made by the engine engineers themselves.

Xaitment has a A.i Unity control plugin for $490. That's cheap. It comes with a graphical editor, so if ten license are bought, the whole team can contribute to developing the A.i. Resulting in some really advanced A.i.

[TheEmissary]

You do realize that the Unity doesn't have a native player for Linux yet. They do have NaCL based Unity player but its not complete yet. That will pretty hurt its chances of being considered. There are plenty of other engines that support Linux such as idtech4 (Doom3 engine), Gamebryo, Torque, OGRE, and couple others.

[suz]

You do realize that the Unity doesn't have a native player for Linux yet. They do have NaCL based Unity player but its not complete yet. That will pretty hurt its chances of being considered. There are plenty of other engines that support Linux such as idtech4 (Doom3 engine), Gamebryo, Torque, OGRE, and couple others.

Eek, I just hope for the sake of us all that gamebryo isn't a serious candidate, that buggy old crap just has to go!

[TheEmissary]

You do realize that the Unity doesn't have a native player for Linux yet. They do have NaCL based Unity player but its not complete yet. That will pretty hurt its chances of being considered. There are plenty of other engines that support Linux such as idtech4 (Doom3 engine), Gamebryo, Torque, OGRE, and couple others.

Eek, I just hope for the sake of us all that gamebryo isn't a serious candidate, that buggy old crap just has to go!

The Gamebryo engine is pretty mature it has been used in practically every type of genre from FPS,RTS,MMOs, and Turn based games. Majority of the bugs were probably of Bethesda's own doing not the engine. There are plenty of games that don't have those issues.

[Bryce777]

It's a pretty crap engine. Dave Eberly, the original programmer is a great programmer but he left the company that started it in like 1999 or something. Since then it's changed hands several times. It's not very actively developed, they just suck down the repeat customers who did the previous games in a series using the engine.

If you don't have a code based attacked to it then there's really no point, and again don't think it does linux and it's an old and klunky engine that's had many chefs in the kitchen so to speak so trying to port it would probably be a bad idea. It's really a console engine, too, and a game made on it is not going to ever run much better than a console game.

[TheEmissary]

It's a pretty crap engine. Dave Eberly, the original programmer is a great programmer but he left the company that started it in like 1999 or something. Since then it's changed hands several times. It's not very actively developed, they just suck down the repeat customers who did the previous games in a series using the engine.

If you don't have a code based attacked to it then there's really no point, and again don't think it does linux and it's an old and klunky engine that's had many chefs in the kitchen so to speak so trying to port it would probably be a bad idea. It's really a console engine, too, and a game made on it is not going to ever run much better than a console game.

For something that is "old and clunky" it sure has lot of support for new technologies that some other big engines don't support. Features like support for a wide variety of platforms and DirectX11 and OpenGL 4.x. What about new game series that have had no prior relationship with the gamebryo engine like Rocksmith,Rift, Warhammer Online, Catherine, Epic Mickey, and so on. The engine has been used in so many places you wouldn't expect and its bit unfair to judge it on what one company (Bethesda) did with it. Older games like turn-based games like Civilization IV never had any issues because of the engine.

You can take a expensive engine and still produce crappy games as seen with some UE3 engine games.