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Original post by Cipher3D You know what I would really respect? if a respected game company (like ID, although I doubt they will ever do this) came out with a Linux version first, then a windows version three weeks later. It's a shitty marketing plan (and that's just being nice), but I would really like to see the reaction of Windows users when they find out (WTF OMFG It doesn't wurk on me comp!) Then people will start making ENIW (Linux emulator for windows) and.... I'm beginning to rant here...[grin] Ciph

I think Unreal came out on Linux couple of weeks before Windows. It didn't have great 3D capabilities, because those things were optimized for windows.
The thing is, developing for multiple platforms at once does have its advantages. You get to test on multiple platforms, and each platform will show their own bugs.

You can buy linux unreal here: http://www.tuxgames.com/donesearch.cgi?nc=1093699649&type=and&search=unreal
You can get some other games there as well for Linux.
I haven't used the store ever, since I use Windows, but its not unreasonable to do development in Linux, and than optimize graphics for windows.

From game dev's perspective there aren't many linux users and from linux user's perspective there aren't many linux games. That's the catch 22 situation linux is stuck with now. Linux needs to become trouble free and easy to use OS with quality apps that are supported by either commercial companies or by very enthusiastic community devs that offer frequent bug fixes and give endusers what they ask for. I tried Suse 9 personal and it was ok but there were some things that bothered me. It's close to being a good os but in the meantime I'm back to win98 which is superb for me. Somehow MS guessed the right features for their endusers, probably all that testing. Suse I think has a very close shot at making linux more mainstream and I sure hope they add linux winmodem package to their distro because I can't download it from suse when I can't connect to internet in first place. I thought the desktop images and screen savers in suse were superb, a nice touch.

I think most game shops use Windows, in other industries there are niches that use more Unix (Solaris in particular).

I think demostrating that you can produce a cross-platform game is a good thing, since there are a large number of target platforms out there; Windows, Linux, Mac, PlayStation's, various Nintendo's, Palm OS, etc...

You can always install cygwin on Windows ;)

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Original post by QzarBaron Quote: Original post by malune Once you understand those underlying concepts, to me it's just a matter of coding it in a different syntax, but i'm probably wrong. No you aren't wrong it's true. But some of the Windows APIs are just horrible(Win32 has to be one of the worst looking things out there)

Win32 is heaven-sent compared to many *nix libs, bsd sockets are probably the most pathological example. Nevermind looks, focus on the guarantees made by the API; for example in POSIX, if nothing is attempting to join a thread when it terminates, you never can join it. It is an error to attempt to join an already terminated thread, and you are not guaranteed that the join will ever return in this case. Or if a singal it set it is completely lost if no one is waiting for it, even for condition variables. Win32 has nothing this crude in it; only one-shot event pulses can be lost all other signals are latched and threads have to be closed like all other resources (option for self-closing threads if you like detached threads).