Curious Linux Question.

[Adenzel]

I understand that Trine isn't coming to Linux ( or Mac) and the reasons why (to small market share), but that leaves me wondering why the past 3 Trines were, especially the fairly recent Trine 3. Has there been a change in the dev team that's lead to a loss of knowledge regarding Mac and Linux development?

[YT GamingTux]

As I understand there was a lot of shared code between the 3 versions of the Frozenbyte Engines that are used in Trine 1 - 3 (and Shadwen) So they can reuse al lot of linux and mac stuff over the years.
Now they have rewritten nearly all party of the engine and they can't use anything from the old code. And OpenGL is realy not a thing in 2019. For macOS they would have to write a new Metal Renderer and for Linux a Vulkan Renderer.

[JLarja]

Renderer is the big issue. Rewriting the rest of the engine isn't really a problem, as most is either platform independent code (e.g. gameplay) or pretty trivial (e.g. file system handling). It's pretty normal that things are getting rewritten, but renderer actually received only pretty minor updates from Trine 2 to Trine 3 and Shadwen (or even 9P).

Still, if you do close comparisons between Trine 3 on Windows and Linux and OS X, you can see that OpenGL renderer is inferior compared to DirectX one. It was only patched up just enough and the lead graphics coder was trying to get to work with the new renderer. The fact that we got both Mac and Linux version was also pretty important. It was the Mac version that was really worth doing, but since Linux version was nearly free to do on top of that, why not?

One big reason to do a Linux port of Trine 2 in the first place was also Humble Bundle. Back then it was a big thing and game had to have Linux and Mac versions to get accepted. Not so anymore, on both accounts.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[Adenzel]

Thank you both for your replies, especially JLarja for clearing up exactly what happened in such detail.

I Just spent the last few days completing Trine 1 & 2 in coop mode with my Girlfriend (Which had been prompted by seeing 4 was getting released) As I had bought both 1 and 2 but never played them. (originally I'd played the free Demo of Trine 1 on my Playstation three when I'd first gotten that many years ago now). Of course that lead me to thinking about getting 3 and 4, and then noticing that 4 wasn't on Linux. If it works ok on Proton then I might consider getting 4, but yeah it's an understandable shame that it's not on Linux.

[JLarja]

In other thread someone said that Proton works OK. Unfortunately we didn't really have time to test it, so officially we can't promise anything.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[roarinelk]

It's super stable on Proton, no crashes, reasonable performance too.

[Tolocoth]

Like others have said, thanks for answering our questions in such a direct way.

I too own Trine 1, 2 and 3 and found out about them due to their Linux support. Like you say, It's true that the Linux market share is tiny compared to Windows, but it's also a market where it's _way_ easier to stand out and get more sales: Let's say that you support Linux, Windows and OS X. If the market share is 95% Windows, 4% OS X, and 1% Linux (made up numbers, but just trying to prove a point) you'd expect that 95% of your sales are Windows players, 4% OS X... and so on. But this is often not the case. Often platforms that have less games available on them give you more % of sales compared to their market share because of exactly what I said before. It's much easier to get a sale on those markets because everyone else tries to address a 95% market that is already saturated with thousands of games.

Also there is the respect and good marketing you earn for supporting less popular platforms: I found out about the franchise in a blog speaking about Linux games, which costed you a total of 0$ in marketing :-)

About Proton: it's great. But I won't buy a game depending on Proton unless it costs me less that 5€, as I find it too risky to pay to play on an unsupported platform.

Ps: Thanks for the cool games :-)!

[Adenzel]

Originally posted by Tolocoth:

Often platforms that have less games available on them give you more % of sales compared to their market share because of exactly what I said before. It's much easier to get a sale on those markets because everyone else tries to address a 95% market that is already saturated with thousands of games.

Not sure this holds particularly true for Linux these days as we do have so many games to choose from. We certainly used to be so starved for games before Valve started supporting Linux that just about any decent Linux game was a must buy... but these days my Wishlist is overflowing and there's no way I can buy them all let alone play them all, and I would say a lot of Linux users find themselves in the same situation.

[Dangerous Beans]

Originally posted by Tolocoth:

About Proton: it's great. But I won't buy a game depending on Proton unless it costs me less that 5€, as I find it too risky to pay to play on an unsupported platform.

The risk is pretty slim: Checking ProtonDB before buying a game will give you a very good estimate how well it will work, and you can get a refund in case of unexpected problems. I've already bought several dozen games to play with Proton, and so far there were no major disappointments.

As for Trine 4: I've just started playing it. It worked fantastic for more then an hour, then it crashed in the middle of the first boss fight. It worked on the second attempt, but it's still a bit disconcerting.

[Dangerous Beans]

Originally posted by Dangerous Beans:

It worked fantastic for more then an hour, then it crashed in the middle of the first boss fight.

Update: Had one more crash in the 16 hours it took to complete the game and find all collectibles. Not perfect, but close enough.

[Adenzel]

Originally posted by Dangerous Beans:

Originally posted by Dangerous Beans:

It worked fantastic for more then an hour, then it crashed in the middle of the first boss fight.

Update: Had one more crash in the 16 hours it took to complete the game and find all collectibles. Not perfect, but close enough.

Thanks for the update, I'll grab it on sale when I'm not so broke XD

[Dangerous Beans]

Originally posted by Adenzel:

Thanks for the update, I'll grab it on sale when I'm not so broke XD

If you already own the first three games you can get a nice 40% discount by buying the Ultimate Collection bundle. The game is brilliant, but I wouldn't pay 30 bucks for it (or for pretty much any other game).

[murks]

Originally posted by YouTube.GTuxTV:

As I understand there was a lot of shared code between the 3 versions of the Frozenbyte Engines that are used in Trine 1 - 3 (and Shadwen) So they can reuse al lot of linux and mac stuff over the years.
Now they have rewritten nearly all party of the engine and they can't use anything from the old code. And OpenGL is realy not a thing in 2019. For macOS they would have to write a new Metal Renderer and for Linux a Vulkan Renderer.

Nah, it's totally OK to write something against OpenGL, it's not going to get killed on Linux anytime soon. We are not Apple, trying to push our proprietary API.

Users would like developers to use Vulkan mainly because it is the new thing, essentially equivalent to DX12 and Metal, but cross platform. The hope is that this would make a Linux build more likely.

Trine 4 is a good example, had it been written against Vulkan there would stand little in the way of a Linux port. That Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan is an unfortunate consequence of their vendor lock in approach, but there is MoltenVK to work around that.

[🌸Azuma🌸]

Originally posted by JLarja:

Renderer is the big issue. Rewriting the rest of the engine isn't really a problem, as most is either platform independent code (e.g. gameplay) or pretty trivial (e.g. file system handling). It's pretty normal that things are getting rewritten, but renderer actually received only pretty minor updates from Trine 2 to Trine 3 and Shadwen (or even 9P).

Still, if you do close comparisons between Trine 3 on Windows and Linux and OS X, you can see that OpenGL renderer is inferior compared to DirectX one. It was only patched up just enough and the lead graphics coder was trying to get to work with the new renderer. The fact that we got both Mac and Linux version was also pretty important. It was the Mac version that was really worth doing, but since Linux version was nearly free to do on top of that, why not?

One big reason to do a Linux port of Trine 2 in the first place was also Humble Bundle. Back then it was a big thing and game had to have Linux and Mac versions to get accepted. Not so anymore, on both accounts.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

OpenGL?! This isn't 2005, this game was made in 2019. Have you people ever heard of Vulkan?! wtf

[JLarja]

Hmm? Trine 3 wasn't made in 2019.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[rugunac]

Originally posted by JLarja:

Hmm? Trine 3 wasn't made in 2019.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

I believe they mean Trine 4 by "this game". I too wish there was a Vulkan support or Proton support for this game.