With our Linux build gaining momentum, Keith recently had a long chat with Liam from Gamingonlinux.com who asked a number of questions about our progress that were sent in by Linux users. Here is a snippet from each of the three parts.
Q) What makes Desura different than say Steam, Stardocks impulse and the others now cropping up?
A) I think I could ramble on for hours on that topic, but the key ingredient is probably our ties to the indie community. As you may know, Desura is part of DesuraNET, which also runs ModDB and the spin-off IndieDB. This is something that no other game distribution platform has, and really does give us a niche market and more direct ties between us, the gamers, and the developers. With this, developers get better feedback on their games, have more resources at their fingertips, can push information out to the public easily, and get to know the people that make up their target audience
Part 2 What Linux Games will be released?
Q) "Is this for native Linux games only, or will it have a list of games with "best wine config" built-in?"
10 A) It seems like it wasn't just me that had this thought. I suggested a very similar thing to the guys the other day, but it isn't something that we are going to do immediately. Our first goal is to support native Linux games, after all we want to encourage linux game development. However if particular games work well under wine, and we get requests from the community or developer, we will consider it
Q) Will the Linux version always be up to date with the Windows version?
A) This one is sometimes a problem, but we haven't created a new Linux branch or fork, we're modifying the existing code-base to support Linux. This in theory means that both Windows and Linux releases should be the same revision (although build and version number will differ slightly). There are two notes with this though: A) Desura may have some minor bugs appear over the next few weeks as I modify the code to support Linux, while we are also doing the occasional release build. Hopefully our testing process will pick that up though. and B) Some Desura features just won't be available on Linux any time soon, such as aforementioned mod support.
Got questions for us? Ask them here or on Twitter.
As mod support it shouldn't be difficult to implement, still i don't know how desura handle mod installing. Assuming it streamline directly mod files to disk and then launch a conf_script, and that mods don't modify the original game binary (there are exception for example Source Engine) than the problem is reduced to create flags to define the platform of each conf_script (and on modder-side write different platform specifics script or at least help desura team porting the existing ones).
Obviously mod support isn't top priority, personally I'll be more than happy when desura will finally arrive to GNU/Linux, and while no one would care about the lack of mod support in the first versions many would be happier if and when it have been implemented.
it is exactly as protektor said below. first we work with native games, then we consider wine games, then we consider things like mods and other content.
rest assured we shall be supporting many of the free and awesome linux games, Warsow for example: Indiedb.com
My post wasn't at all like "don't care how i want it now!" it only specify that implementing mod in the GNU/Linux version of Desura shouldn't be difficult.
I know that is a resource balancing problem that prevents the development of this right now and as i said the presence of a unified marketplace to buy the tons of games ported on GNU/Linux is already a wonderful result.
Well guys its an issue of resources. So they have to pick and choose the order of features to be programed and released. I would assume though that community requests and interest would factor in to the decisions. We can't have everything at once unfortunately. ;)
I didn't mean to imply anyone thought they should get something right now. Well...other than I wish I could have it all right now, hehe, but I know if we waited for everything it might be another year or whatever. So I will take whatever is available first. I guess I can then pester you guys about my favorite wants after that. ;)
Speaking of asking. I have been asking for this for years and never got it. I could really use today's winning lottery ticket. If that can't be arranged then, a sure fire gambling formula/scheme/procedure that wins every time, I would settle for. ;)
It would be nice to have Desura running on Linux. Would be great for for id-tech3 based games like World of Padman, which runs native on Linux.
As a dev of a game that has a native linux version, I can't tell you how exciting this is to be able to unify the Windows and Linux versions under one roof. Plus, I really think that Desura can bring some real popularity to the Ubuntu OS which is underutilized. Anyone who gets a mac instead of installing ubuntu should probably have their head examined. I myself love ubuntu, however most of the dev tools that I use are only available on windows, not to mention all my games that are windows only QQ
Regardless, this is going to be freaking sweet, can't wait :-)