Construct 2 for Linux

The Construct is a great tool that compiles to a wide variety of platforms, but only have a windows version. Why there is no version for linux?, There are a lot of developers would use in their games

Probably because building equivalent applications on Linux takes 10x longer than using professional tools like Visual Studio on Windows.

Maintaining and supporting software on Linux is also 10x more expensive because you have to deal with many different versions of OS each that might or might not support various tools, as well as various different desktops and tools they may ...or may not support. Dealing with all kinds of possible version mismatch problems between different Java releases... open source projects etc... and you can say well just use Maven! But then after going through all the trouble you later find out Maven doesn't really work and you still end up with version mismatches in your dependencies.

And then to top it all off the market share of the Linux users is < 5% and so the amount of money that would be made from them would not come even close to the cost of building and maintaining a special version just for them.

Just a guess though... from my personal experience with developing software with Linux vs Windows.

I love this question. My opinion. Meh to all such platforms.

I think Construct 3 should be written in HTML5/JS.

That way for Win/Lin/Mac we can get a NodeWebKit export.

And for those who like punishment can use a Crosswalk version for Android.

Probably because building equivalent applications on Linux takes 10x longer than using professional tools like Visual Studio on Windows.

Maintaining and supporting software on Linux is also 10x more expensive because you have to deal with many different versions of OS each that might or might not support various tools, as well as various different desktops and tools they may ...or may not support. Dealing with all kinds of possible version mismatch problems between different Java releases... open source projects etc... and you can say well just use Maven! But then after going through all the trouble you later find out Maven doesn't really work and you still end up with version mismatches in your dependencies.

And then to top it all off the market share of the Linux users is < 5% and so the amount of money that would be made from them would not come even close to the cost of building and maintaining a special version just for them.

Just a guess though... from my personal experience with developing software with Linux vs Windows.

You will be surprised how many developers work on unix based architectures such a linux or mac.

Isnt QT a good candidate to do linux variations of work done in windows with visual studio ?

QT is also available for windows. (free too)

If I am not mistaken, if development would move to QT, lots of other architectures are in hands range for exports. :)

Sadly, it would take quite some changes for ashley I supose.

The amount of upside you get from being able to distribute on near all platforms will surely outweigh the costs.

edit: its like with construct 2, teh ability to export to so many platforms, one of its geatest assests.

Upfront disclaimer: I use Linux on a daily basis

For a product like Construct2 doing a "linux" version is, in my opinion, not such a great idea.

There is no single linux os, it's a kernel with quite different environments depending on the distro. And a product like Construct2 attracts a lot of shall we say hobby- and home-user customers. They (Scirra) would have to deal with a lot of different distros and can't just publish an unpackaged linux build - people sometimes have a hard time building packages themselves, the shared library model of linux and open source drivers like nouveau with their caveats require some expertise, if you operate closed source software on such systems. That can't be compared to the software the distro maintainers build themselves and is relatively easy to handle for the distro users.

Imagine the support load, if you have to deal with 50000 kids who don't know how to preload libraries for example that must override those of their distro. That's not exactly the thing you want to deal with as a 2-man-company.

In a distant future they might as well switch to a browser based model for their IDE, that would make more sense.

Before there is a support for something unusual as linux, they definitely need to make a Mac Version first!

It would be a monumental and incredibly expensive amount of work for a relatively small userbase.

That's exactly why I think Construct 3 should be a WebApp :D It's just not worth changing C2 to multiplat at this time.

However I do believe there will be come shift of multi device applications will be common. That will be the time C2 will start becoming obsolete and the time will be fore C3 development.

I think C3 should be a WebApp. A Desktop version can act as a versioning control system for remote apps. People will be creating the game from different OS/Devices.

Now I don't believe this will start this or next year. I suspect it will be 5 to 7 years before C3 is even be on the table of consideration. Then there is going to be planning and developement.

But consider this a prediction.. one that will be long forgotten by then.

I love this question. My opinion. Meh to all such platforms.

I think Construct 3 should be written in HTML5/JS.

That way for Win/Lin/Mac we can get a NodeWebKit export.

And for those who like punishment can use a Crosswalk version for Android.

this sounds great, but the construct would lose performance.

I understand that there are few users and a high cost to maintain a linux or mac version, but it would be very interesting to see Construct on other platforms, since there are few Linux tools for creating games (I only know the StencylWorks). What could be done was change the code Construct to be more platform independent, "Windowsless" (like GIMP and GTK). It would be really interesting.

Edit: Could be done at least a version for Ubuntu Linux, which has the largest share of "linux market" so to speak.

Hmmm.... what about drivers? Construct2 requires good up-to-date graphics card drivers.

I have yet to find a Linux distro that has good driver support for sound and graphics cards.

And for such a minimal user base it would not be worth all the work involved to make it happen.

Just my 2 cents worth....

"What could be done was change the code Construct to be more platform independent, "Windowsless" (like GIMP and GTK). It would be really interesting."

I think it is kind of too late to transfer/edit the whole C2 code, also as michael stated, C2 has enough issues with bad graphic card drivers on windows, so on linux it could be even worse.

the time to make that happen will be far too long IMO.

It would be a monumental and incredibly expensive amount of work for a relatively small userbase.

People saying this are missing the point.

The only reason the userbase* is still smaller is that very few people dare to make a difference.

Do you really think consumers would willingly use Windows if their favourite software was available for an OS like Ubuntu or MacOSX (both way more user friendly than Windows)? An OS that seldom crashes and, when it does, prints concise messages rather than the Gobbledy-Gook Windows treats it's users to?

Heck. I think a company supporting a game development framework owes it to themselves and their userbase to publish their whole software to Linux. This way, users can grow and actually acquire some skills they might need later on (if they chose to pursue a professional, IT centric career).

I can't speak for MacOSX, but porting to Linux is blatantly easy and having a varying amount of distros isn't an issue, at all. Most users will choose a Debian based distro, which means you can use dpkg to pack Construct2 as a .deb. Debian also has an rpm packager available, so you can port your .deb to .rpm (used by RHEL, CentOS, etc) in a matter of minutes. Dependencies also won't be much of a problem. Especially if your download page lists certain distros that should be used.

michael

It looks to me as if most of these issues come down to a quite error prone Direct3D implementation (AFAIK, the editor view uses D3D rather then OGL). By porting it over to Unix, you'd have to convert all your rendering code to OpenGL, which should also allow you to iron out all the little flaws within the rendering code.

*That's homeusers, btw. In enterprise applications (especially the server space), Windows is slowly but steadily going the way of the Dodo.

Blinx123

I think its all coded in MS visual studio ....

If so, ... it would require a full re-write from the start.

If c++ is not ashley's forte, ... well .. lets just say it would take quite a bit of time before a next update/release.

Blinx123

I think its all coded in MS visual studio ....

If so, ... it would require a full re-write from the start.

If c++ is not ashley's forte, ... well .. lets just say it would take quite a bit of time before a next update/release.

What do you mean by MS Visual Studio? Visual Studio is just an IDE with some advanced features (version control, integrated build server, gamification, GUI designer, etc).

Of course, if Construct 2 makes heavy use of Windows specific APIs it would've to be rewritten a fair bit. But if an application in our day and age still makes heavy use of Microsoft specific stuff, it should probably be rewritten anyways.

Where I come from, we call this legacy software.

BTW: Even without a native port, Construct 2 already runs better under Ubuntu than Windows 7 for me. So the least Scirra could do is work with someone from Wine or Crossover, fix some of the quirks and deploy a fully wrapped application as a download.

I would assume visual basic.