The title has been changed here on HN and doesn't reflect the article:
Unity 4 is also the first version of the engine to
offer support for "the estimated 10 percent of the
game-hungry PC market" that runs Linux, though the
feature will only be available in "preview" form
for the time being. Those that pre-order Unity 4
starting today will get access to a beta test for
the new engine, ahead of a full release that is
still undated.
-- from the article
Couldn't find an official statement, that the Unity3D development software will run under Linux.
It sounds more like the new update will only allow to build _games_ that run under Linux [1].
You aren't, or at least they haven't published any information about it yet.
On their website they state "Publish to Linux", not "develop on linux", and their "introducing Unity 4" video[1] show Os X compiling for Linux.
I hope to be wrong too, but anyway it's still better than nothing.
You are not wrong. We will not be shipping the Editor for Linux, only export options for players that will run on 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (amd64) Linux. We are only going to offer official support for Ubuntu Linux with vendor-made graphics drivers, but we expect games exported from Unity will run on most modern Linux systems.
Still... VERY interesting possibilities open up if a game server can be run on Linux. Cloud based Windows licenses KILL the pocketbook once your users grow.
So even if it is not the Unity IDE... it's still good news.
Game servers for Unity can already be run on Linux. You'd write a multiplayer game in such a way that it just uses vanilla C#, and data structures that are easy to replicate (like Vector3, Transform, etc).
Running Unity apps themselves on the server even with this announcement would be a big mistake, IMO. It is not a stable piece of software.
On this off-topic excursion, I must say: I have to give Unity another shot. I tried it and ran back to KDE screaming, but it occurs to me that it wasn't really fair and I didn't spend a couple weeks with it, to get over the "new interface aaaah!" reaction.
That's a great news! Seems that Linux is getting a lot of gaming love in the last period.
We should thanks the guys behind Wasteland 2 for helping or providing the port[1].
In the 2D world, Moai now runs in Linux too. I started working for Zipline recently (working on the docs ATM), and (shameless plug) the more I become familiar with the engine, the more I appreciate its simple yet powerful programming model and its architecture.
Each graphical element (a "prop" in Moai parlance), when moved, rotated or scaled, defines its own coordinate system, and other props can be added as children and share some or all of the new coordinates. It makes it very easy to compose elements. People familiar with 3D graphics would know this as affine transforms and UV coordinates.
For example, you can tie the position and scale of a text label to a sprite, but not its rotation, and tie the scale, rotation and position of the sprite to the background. You can then zoom everyting in one command, rotate the wole game world or and keep the label next to the sprite and rotate the whole scene or the sprite relative to the map while leaving the label straight. You don't have to track the relative angles, the engine does it for you.
Similarly, every object whose properties depends on time ("actions") can be attached or detached not only to the root action (which provide a tick each frame) but to other actions as well. When you detach an item, its descendants are also paused. Actions include animations, coroutines, physiscs worlds, you name it...
Both trees are defined declaratively in Lua, and implemented in C++, giving the best of both worlds: expressivity and speed.
Moai's biggest flaw at the moment is the sparse documentation, and we're tackling it. Right now, the main focus of the dev team is the cloud offering (which is our revenue source, after all), so it does not proceed as fast as we would like, but come back in a few weeks and you should see a vastly improved documentation.
I did have a look at Moai (I work with Unity normally) but indeed, the documentation just wasn't there so I gave up and went back to Unity. I'll keep an eye on it.
Hey .. just wondering how the documentation is going? I'm an avid MOAI user and would love to know more about whats planned in the immediate future for the doc catchup ..
I got very excited, because I thought at first from the headline that this meant that Ubuntu's Unity interface now supports Linux. Kind of disappointed to realize that's not the case. I guess we'll have to wait a few more versions..
I was really shocked when I found out, that Unity is not running under Linux. They are flooding the Monologue (Mono) news feed - but their product is not running under linux. Couldn't quite understand this.
I thought that Linux support was already basically provided via Chrome native client exporting?
The part that was interesting to me.
"the estimated 10 percent of the game-hungry PC market" that runs Linux
This kind of runs contrary to the popular philosophy that gamers are very unlikely to be running Linux, mainly because the games support has historically always been very bad.
Of course there may be a mass of people who are running dual boots and are just waiting for a load of games to be released in order to delete their Windows partitions (people like me).
On the other hand, I run a dual boot and mainly use Linux as my desktop but since Windows is only a reboot away whether or not a game is available for Linux is not a massive part of my purchasing decision for the game. So it's possible it won't really affect their sales figures.
This surely also brings DirectX into question in terms of it's future as a platform. If I were to develop a game today I would almost certainly use OpenGL for portability reasons even if DirectX was a better library and it doesn't make a load of sense to make seperate DirectX and OpenGL versions.
Native Client only really gives support for browser-based games. This export option will let you ship standalone games for Linux, that run natively on the platform.
This is really good news. I think the second most important thing holding Linux back in taking over the desktops (after OEMs) is gaming. But if you look at Humble Indie Bundles and kickstarter (so many projects using Unity and/or promising Linux support) - things are changing for the better.
I think there's a bit more than just OEMs and gaming preventing Linux from overtaking the desktop. When netbooks first began they were mostly linux for cost cutting. Games also wouldn't have been an issue because netbooks weren't sold as gaming machines. In any case the market wholly rejected Linux on the netbook in favor of windows.
Only after the iPad recreated the tablet market. For a while netbooks were gaining traction. Just not linux netbooks.
>What's the other thing holding Linux back from the desktop in your opinion that ranks higher than either of reasons I mentioned?
You're shifting the burden of proof here. For what possible reason would anyone believe the market wants Linux on the desktop? I can think of no reason. It doesn't look as nice, it doesn't run the major apps people are used to (e.g. Photoshop, Office, etc.). What "killer feature" does Linux have that would make the masses want to switch to it, and don't say "open source" since I doubt that even a majority of people who know what that means care about that.
Good news I'd say, hope it continues to progress and become the number one engine on Linux. Epic from my understanding gave up on Linux but not Id and now there's Unity.
Unity is not just about games, but more generally about 3D application development. And with Unity Web Player we even got a new closed source browser plugin that starts competing with Flash. I don't care about closed source games (generally I think it increases my freedom to have those compared to not having them at all - kind of like fun manacles which increase choice of action in some moments despite being used to restrict movement). But I do care about the base of software on which other software depends no longer being free and am a little worried about yet another proprietary browser plugin gaining popularity when flash is finally starting to get replaced by html.
