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Escape Simulator drops the Linux build to focus on supporting Proton (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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[–] 27 points 1 year ago (14 children)

As a cross platform developer I consider this incompetence.

That's not necessary a bad thing. The world is full of less experienced programmers. But they're making it look like it's a hassle to release for Linux when in reality you can foresee and plan for this from the start, without much overhead down the line.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers? This is a business decision, nothing else. Most likely, some MBA looked over the numbers, saw a few hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux, and decided that Proton was good enough. Most likely, no programmer was even asked whether Linux support should be dropped.

    And yes, even if you know what you are doing, every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested, and that costs time and thus money, which is something every experienced cross platform developer should know.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers?

    Because supporting multiple platforms, especially in gaming, isn't magic or rocket science and almost always comes down to the setup of the toolchain.

    This is a business decision

    Very possible. But I go by their actual statement: "maintaining the native build across many distros was taking time away from developing new content". My point is regarding the "maintaining [...] across many distros" and not the "taking time away". A good toolchain would make these differences extremely minimal.

    hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux

    Extremely unlikely. That would mean more than 10 developers working fulltime purely on Linux support since the release of the game. According to their team page on their website they have 7 developers in total.

    every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested

    This is why experienced developers decouple the game from the platform specific stuff and test them separately.

    The game is made in Unity so most of the platform specific stuff should already be production ready. Unity literally markets their engine as "Industry-leading multiplatform support" with the motto "Create once, ship anywhere".

    So my argument still stands. And as I said, it's not a bad thing. The only thing I dislike is the indirect implication of Linux being a hassle when it would be nicer if they would take more responsibility for it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    The game has been released 4 years ago. An average worker in the US works 1770 hours a year.

    10 developers working full time over 4 years (and this doesn't even include the time they spent building the initial release) would work a total of ~70 000 hours, not "hundreds or thousands" of hours.

    In fact, even thousands of hours would be only a single man year.

    They've released 23 content updates so far, bugfix patches are probably much more. Even just building, superficially testing and deploying a release easily takes 4-5h. And this game is not just a plain and simple flat screen game, but one that supports SteamVR, something that's not remotely trivial on Linux.

    Even a single non-trivial bug can cost 20h of total work time from support handling the report, a dev reproducing it, the bug going trough refinement, bugfixing, code review, testing, deployment and so on.

    I guess you haven't worked in a real company before and don't know how project management and processes work. Stuff takes a lot of time.

    And believing that Unity just magically abstracts all OS-specific bugs away is very naive.

    And it's ridiculous to claim that they are dropping Linux support after 4(!) years because they are too incompetent to figure out how to support Linux. Obviously they could support Linux just fine from a technological standpoint.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    comes down to the setup of the toolchain.

    Unless you're developing graphics-heavy application that uses platrofm-specific API for optimisation. Like a video game for example.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Not a game, but I was involved in making a graphics heavy app. Significant amount of times we had to grapple with question " that's a nice feature you are making, will this work on all the platforms", and significant amount of times the answer was "obviously, unquestionably no".

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    But they’re making it look like it’s a hassle to release for Linux when in reality you can foresee and plan for this from the start, without much overhead down the line.

    They have the overhead to support macOS, though:

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Linux has proton, Mac OS doesn't.

    If they give half a shit about it then supporting the gam through proton is a lot less effort than making an actually good native linux version.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Linux has proton, Mac OS doesn’t.

    macOS has Apple Game Porting Toolkit which is just another Wine distribution for which developers made easy installers for. GPT + Windows version of Steam is how I played Counter Strike 2 against a Mac user just recently.

    https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

    That said, I didn't really expect someone with that Lemmy handle to know such things.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I've been messing with that tool on and off from the day it was available to developers. I'm well aware of it. It's ass.

    It's been a few months since I've used it so maybe it's gotten better? But this is Apple and gaming, so I don't have high hopes.

    It's not at all comparable to proton other than it does the bare minimum to make a game work. All of the tools and tweaks that go into proton are what make it so good. Maybe for CS2 someones put in the work to make it ok. But whether it's through crossover, wiskey, or whatever else it's been awful for me. Maybe version 2 is better. But even then I doubt it will be as seamless or good as proton is.

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