Linux version

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Meal Worms
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Re: Linux version

Postby Meal Worms » Tue Apr 27, 2010 1:56 pm

Thanks whizse! Yeah, it took about six man-weeks of work to port Osmos to Linux; I hope we'll see enough sales to justify the effort.

We intend to post our sales data a month or two after ship, to let people know more about what development on Linux is like.

I'll be posting back here when I've published my post mortem.

Happy Osmoting!
Dave

blistovmhz
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Re: Linux version

Postby blistovmhz » Thu Apr 29, 2010 7:44 am

Hey guys.
I've seen a few times, that you've been talking about proving a business case for releasing games for the Linux platform. For the record (and I know I am only one human), my purchase of Osmos was based almost entirely on your promise for an eventual Linux port. I've dealt with quite a few professional developers and from my understanding, its not a tonne of work to do the port, as you'd mentioned, because of all the open source/cross platform libraries.

We all know that Linux (on the Desktop) is not "yet" a serious market, but at the same time the market has been growing exponentially over the past 5-7 years. From what I've seen in my 10+ years of Linux development/evangelization, the primary factor holding users back from Linux on the Desktop, is the availability of mainstream games. That being said, the only thing I see holding back gaming on Linux is the lack of mainstream games under Linux. I think "Build it and they will come" says it pretty well.

Congratulations on a fantastic game, and I hope to see more cross platform titles from you.

P.S. Was the Linux port handled by a team of "Mr. Dave" alone? I'm interested to hear more about the port.

blistovmhz
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Re: Linux version

Postby blistovmhz » Thu Apr 29, 2010 7:56 am

whizse wrote:I don't know if you plan on tracking sales per platform, but if you do, it would be interesting if you could provide some statistics in the post-mortem.
Quite a few independent studios (2DBoy, Elecorn, Koonsolo) have mentioned being pleasantly surprised by the amount of sales of the Linux version, so it would be interesting to know if it's the same for you guys.
Anyway, good luck with the launch! :D


The problem with this, I supsect, is that like myself, many Linux users bought this game waaay before the Linux version was released. Many of these customers (myself certainly included) never received and email indicating that the Linux port was available. (Though I was notified of the Mac port). I decided about 3 years ago, to only pay for games with a proper Linux port. Not only because I'm angry and stubborn, but because it has become a political issue. Many game developers are being "coerced" against their better judgment, into developing on top of DirectX even after their in house performance testing showed that OpenGL was faster. (Crysis is an excellent example of this, and the story is fairly well documented)(should also point out that many devs say DX is easier to code for, to be fair).
We vote with our wallet, and my vote is for cross platform development and fair business.

I too would be interested in seeing some market statistics, but ultimately I don't believe they will be accurately represented.
I think the selling point for most developers right now, is that the port is usually easy enough that they don't have to worry too much about the cost benefit (though I firmly believe that there IS a market for Linux games, and any developer who commits to releasing all titles as cross platform, will see a massive amount of support (both political and financial) from the Opensource community).

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Meal Worms
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Re: Linux version

Postby Meal Worms » Thu Apr 29, 2010 9:30 am

Many of these customers (myself certainly included) never received and email indicating that the Linux port was available


Hi blistovmhz,

Our mailer is currently sending out notifications about the Linux version that's now available, but it takes a few days for it to chew through the list of folks who opted for emails. We intentionally choke its throughput to avoid being flagged as a spammer ;-) So your email should arrive soon enough. Please do let us know if it doesn't get through to you.

I have lots to say about the port that will appear in my post-mortem in a couple of weeks, but let me chime in with a few thoughts here.

Regarding the choice of graphics API, if we're strictly discussing performance, it's generally the case that DirectX out-performs OpenGL for the simple reason that HW vendors focus efforts on perf improvements for the widest segment of the PC market (ie DirectX under Windows). So I bring this up simply because it's not a matter of being coerced into using DirectX, but rather choosing what makes sense. (For the record, I tend to prefer OpenGL, actually, although mostly that's because of my background in academic graphics.) There are lots of things in the DirectX API that are pretty nice, and OpenGL is decidedly lacking in documentation and standardization/reliability of implementation/performance across all combinations of drivers/HW/etc. Anyway, we chose to do Osmos in OpenGL from the get-go because we intended all along to port the game to multiple platforms. The only reason I ported the game to DirectX for Osmos was because we did a deal with Microsoft to sell Osmos on GamesForWindowsLive, and to integrate with the LIVE UI you need to run in D3D. (For the record, we were even going to ship OpenGL on the GFWL platforum, because I actually had an OpenGL-to-D3D shim in place whereby Osmos did everything in OpenGL and then the screen was blitted over to D3D texture for compositing with the LIVE UI, but it was not performant enough on our minspec and the idea of shipping a game with an OpenGL and D3D context side-by-side and sharing HW was scary. So I did an eleventh-hour port to D3D before we shipped that version, and we rolled that out as an update to the PC version so that folks could have a choice of which renderer to use.)

It took six-man weeks of effort to port Osmos to Linux (this was on top of having already engineered the game from the ground up with portability in mind, e.g. by choosing OpenGL/OpenAL/OggVorbis/FreeType/etc, as well as having already ported the game to OSX, GamesForWindowsLive and the iPhone/iPad and preparing ahead-of-time for libc/unicode/compiler/etc issues) and I'm hopeful we'll recoup the dev costs.

As for the sales numbers we release, it's true that numbers post Linux-release don't on their own tell the entire story, but we'll have more to say on that next month. ;-)

To wrap it up: thanks for your comments, and I'm looking forward to having more of this kind of discussion after the post mortem in a couple of weeks and when we talk sales in a month or so.

Cheers all!
Dave

niick
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Re: Linux version

Postby niick » Thu Apr 29, 2010 3:47 pm

Thanks very much for following through and delivering a linux port - it is much appreciated. I brought a copy as soon as I read it about on the phoronix forums. Also wanted to mention that I did download the windows installer as well since it was there and I thought what the hell (got the free music too). But my intention was the linux copy, for the record.

Now that one of you has got some linux experience the next port you do will hopefully not take so much of your time. IMHO it is time well spent.

Anyway thanks again, I'll keep checking back at your site for more linux titles in between games of Osmos.

JPL
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Re: Linux version

Postby JPL » Sat May 01, 2010 9:18 am

Fantastic. Downloading the Linux .deb now... I got the game for $2 on Steam a while back, so giving you guys another $10 seems only fair. Looking forward to completing the game and reading the postmortem!

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Meal Worms
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Re: Linux version

Postby Meal Worms » Mon May 17, 2010 11:40 am

Hey folks,

Just wanted to draw your attention that the first of three daily installments of my Linux post-mortem has gone live on our website, link below. Comments/feedback on the blogpost welcome!

http://www.hemispheregames.com/2010/05/ ... m-part-13/

Dave

ben914
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Re: Linux version

Postby ben914 » Sun Jul 04, 2010 9:42 am

Hey, Just wanted to stop by a say thanks for providing a Linux version of Osmos. There aren't enough good games out there for Linux and I'm always glad to find a developer that supports this OS. Great game, keep up the good work.

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Meal Worms
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Re: Linux version

Postby Meal Worms » Tue Jul 06, 2010 8:56 am

Glad to hear it, ben914 -- thanks!

Enjoy,
Dave


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