Production manager Edwin Smith from Feral Interactive, a well‐known Mac porting house, joins the SteamLUG Cast to converse about their first Linux port XCOM. We then move onto the topics of the last fortnight.
John has been playing Dota 2, Skulls of the Shogun, XCOM, LYNE and Things™
DerRidda has been playing Dota 2, NEO Scavenger, Half‐Life: Blue Shift
Cheese has been playing Guns of Icarus Online, Crypt of the NecroDancer, TF2, Civ V, Hand of Fate, XCOM. Testing The Fall, The Maker’s Eden, The Journey Down Chapter 2 and an unannounced title
Edwin was not too busy to play XCOM, Football Manager, in development titles like Shogun 2, Half‐Life, LEGO games
Aren’t LEGO games lovely?
Interview with Edwin
Who are Feral and what do you do?
Does porting to Linux benefit the Mac side of things?
Did porting to Linux meet your expectations and how did the heterogeneous nature of Linux affect you?
Did the Steam‐Runtime help?
How was the feedback from the Linux community?
Is the Linux community’s level of vocality different from the Mac community?
Does Linux make you a nerd or do nerds gravitate towards Linux?
What does your testing environment look like?
Do you change your testing hardware in order to reproduce issues?
Has this kind of thorough testing become rare in the industry?
How do you approach your licensees about porting to Linux/ do they approach you?
Is demand by Linux users going to influence which games are going to be ported in the future?
(How) do external porting houses interact with upstream developers?
How do you handle support requests that are platform specific and those that are platform independent?
What were the stand‐out issues you encountered with your first Linux port?
What about X11 and case sensitive file systems?
Any information about future updates/patches?
Are we likely to see new Linux ports from within you existing Mac catalog or completely new ones?
If you could license and port any title you want, which one would it be?
Swordfischer wants a first person shooter and DerRidda agrees.
Linux gamers are gamers.
Edwin answers a question about Deus Ex from the mumble chat.
John: We were chatting about Deus Ex (1), Loki’s defunct port, and it being an early Unreal build.
What was the experience of moving your development environment to Linux like?
Do you expect OS X and Linux to drift apart more in the future (Clang vs GCC)?
Linux Game Awards’ Project Of The Month goes to Unvanquished [source]
Guns of Icarus Online is going to become an MLG game [source]
The Maker’s Eden planned for release on 31st July
Native Prince of Persia 1 based on Apple ][ source release (thanks to Norbert for the heads up on this - he also runs popot.org !) [source]
The Journey Down chapter 2 is available for pre-order (coming 25th August). [source]
50% of pre-order revenue will got to help the construction of a Mavuno Project girl’s school in Tanzania in partnership with Engineers Without Borders [source]
Humble Weekly Bundle: Plug In Digital has 2 Linux games, Finding Teddy and Kill The Bad Guy (+more coming) [source]
Sign-off
SteamLUG Cast is a casual, fortnightly audiocast which aims to provide interesting news and discussion for the SteamLUG and broader Linux gaming communities.
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