Clarify stance on supported platforms to mod/indie developers Thread

There are an awful lot of mods and indie games listed that have half-a-dozen platforms listed and yet do no actually support them all; they will likely have a Windows download available but other platforms are coming at a much later date.

There are also many mods/games that list Linux as a supported platform simply because someone at some point got it running under WINE. In my opinion this is not supporting Linux. The same goes for mods/games claiming support for 64-bit Linux... but only if you install all the 32-bit libraries.

It just muddies the listings and makes it difficult to find those mods/games that do support the platform you are using.

I really hope that this is enforced and implemented, developers shouldn't go around hailing support for Linux whether on 32-bit or 64-bit platforms when their games don't run with native support.

If on the indie game/mod page it shows that a specific platform support is being promised or to be included in the future, that would be better.
An example: Let's say Indie Game X runs on Windows only, you scroll down and see: "Linux - support coming soon" instead of the current "Hell yeah we support Linux! Don't believe me?! Buy the game nay-sayers!".

I agree it should be running before it's support but if they got it running under WINE or with some different libraries, that's like saying you can't say your game supports windows because you have to update to a different version of DX or a specific GPU driver.

In that case all Linux games support Windows because you can just install VirtualBox. Lucky :-)

TheHappyFriar wrote: that's like saying you can't say your game supports windows because you have to update to a different version of DX or a specific GPU driver.

Linux already has a parrallel to this so your claim is like saying Konquest supports Windows, you just have to install KDE.

hemebond wrote:
There are also many mods/games that list Linux as a supported platform simply because someone at some point got it running under WINE. In my opinion this is not supporting Linux. The same goes for mods/games claiming support for 64-bit Linux... but only if you install all the 32-bit libraries..

can you list some of those games? That is unacceptable if it is really true.

HumbleLinux wrote: can you list some of those games? That is unacceptable if it is really true.

The mod that originally put forward that argument has since removed it. Another mod pointed me to Hard-light.net there is a binary for running the game under Linux (which is great) but you can't install it without WINE or Windows (not good).

Two games I know of that have incorrectly listed 64-bit support are the Shadowgrounds games. They won't run on 64-bit Linux without installing 32-bit libraries and deleting many of the 32-bit libraries that the game bundles.

I just realised the problem is more widespread than I thought. I filter by Linux64 and because the Linux platform label defaults to Linux32 only, I didn't see very many. Changing my filter to Linux32 shows many games and mods that list Linux support but don't actually support it at all.

Would it not be better to restrict mods to platforms supported by the original game?