- Are steam games required to run on Windows?
- Difference between open source games and games for linux
- Wordforge uses a number of different dependencies/libraries.
- Game companies have perfect control over dependencies; Worldforge needs to package everything and setup dependency trees.
- Steam makes things really easy to package and distribute; No need to bring up package manager to install dependencies.
- On Android
- Main C lib on Android is called Bionic. Sometimes, things need to be fixed (e.g. a POSIX problem with the library), but this causes a problem with a specific game.
- Worst case for Android is that developers need to be notified.
- If relying on a quirk or bug in a given library, then that game will break. The solution for Windows is to bundle the C library with the game.
- The NDK on Android is a very thin client. Essentially, the C lib is provided with games, but this means that every game is large if using the NDK (but is bug compliant).
- For non-mobile games, it's not really a big deal to ship a C library.
- Every step you add between when the user decides to purchase/download your game and when they can play, you lose a large number of users. For example, in jMonkeyEngine (a Java Graphics Engine), the JDK is often shipped with every game.
- If SteamOS goes big, more tools will be available for Linux game developers.
- What's odd is that if there is one type of application that doesn't really use the OS-level stuff, it's games - games really want to talk to the hardware directly. Thus, it's odd that Windows is where most of the games are available.
- One big concern is that Linux has a bunch of issues with drivers. Google works around this by makingit the case that something cannot be certified as "Android" if there are major driver problems.