I think their technology as Silicon Studio.Net is similar to Net core from Microsoft, although it is possible to compile on Linux or Mac for target but Xenko is quite new from this game world and need to verify it cause it is beta.
I’ve seen threads before where Xenko got a lot of flak for even considering the use of the GPL license (something which even Ton admits is a poor choice for game engines).
Granted, you can always use the official builds, but their open source model is somewhat unusual since people who want to create a secure project are not allowed to use nightly builds or create patches based on what they need (so you have to use whatever the official team develops for the engine).
In fact, I’m not all that sure if Xenko is truly open source in the vein that it’s a community project (you may as well just replace the dual licensing with a paid tier that gives you source code access).
Cue 8 pages of quote-battle licensing debate. Aaaaaaaaaaaand… go.
P.S. Just saw this
Xenko supports the most common export formats, such asFBX,DAE, OBJ, DXF, as well as 3D software formats 3DS, BLEND.
Downloading now. Very curious how well .blend files are supported.
I think that’s probably exactly what they want. They have a ‘true copyleft’ OSS license. You can edit the codebase in house if you want to add features, but to release that without your whole game, then you have to pay $$ for a commercial license?
This, so much this.
Sometimes I read about these new programs and think “jeez, is it the early 90’s again?”. I can vaguely understand when people takes C++ and writes a windows-only program, because the C++ tool chain is the worst, but taking a cross platform development environment and use it to write a single platform program is depressing.
They have ported and run it on a PS4 and Linux, probably need to clean up and stabilise the ports.
There are a number of platforms that will help the dev’s generate money, and unfortunately Linux is probably the last. {PS4, XB1, Windows, iOS, Android, OSX, Linux} In that sense, it’s pretty good that they have a working (but unreleased) Linux port before OSX
That’s the output platform, not the development one. The question is: can I develop a game using that tool, in Linux? Because it is a .NET program, the answer should be yes. With quirks and bugs, but yes. Yet when I look for the installer, the web page tells me “download the windows installer”.
For me, that’s not a good sign: why in the world would you use a cross platform environment to create a windows only program is beyond my grasp.
If you can deploy to multiple platforms, that’s what needs to be supported and that’s what is extremely important. Being able to develop on different platforms also means additional maintainability that is an extremely important factor. Everyone who closely follows the Blender development knows how tedious and time consuming this can be.
For small companies, this can actually be a huge burden and instead of trying to fulfill everyone’s wishes, it can be a better decision to just focus on one platform and doing that really well before spreading out. If this is done, Windows often makes more sense than Linux.
Even with the best cross platform software architecture, everything needs to be tested in depth and there are special cases for every platform that need to be considered. They have actually ported it as far as I have read, but haven’t made it official yet, because it hasn’t been tested enough. Their approach is simply pragmatic.
Unity is implemented in C/C++ and only uses Mono for scripting. The Mono version is known to be very old and missing a lot of optimizations from newer versions.
Since Xenko is based on a very new version of Mono, a comparison is impossible and doesn’t really make sense.
Guys, remember how long it took Unity to port their editor to Linux?
Give them some time, they will probably prioritize getting a functional engine out there before porting it