Show Your Support For Unity3D Editor On Linux | Hacker News Reader

Show Your Support For Unity3D Editor On Linux

feedback.unity3d.com

109 pointsfelipebueno48 comments

"My operating system is linux and as such I have had to make the difficult decision NOT to program in Unity3d and develop primarily in php and html instead."

I don't even know where to begin...

That has to be a troll.

Has it? I'm just about to move in an opposite direction (PHP development being 2-year long accident).

Utterly crazy as it sounds, he wouldn't be the first... http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6665

I don't think it's all that unreasonable, actually. I use Ubuntu and Unity has caught my eye. I would definitely try it if it had a Linux editor, but I'm not going to install Windows just to try it out.

I think it's about the comparison to PHP/HTML which might be usable in other areas but definitely not for 3d games/applications. It might be different with JS and WebGL but PHP is for a completely different use case than Unity.

You omitted the "I develop games primarily for visually/auditorily impaired users" part...

Simple turn based type games can be made with PHP/HTML. Unity, while vastly overpowered, might still be a reasonable choice from the ease of use perspective.

It's interesting that this would come up when just recently I read about issues debugging Castle Story on Linux[1]. The problem took so long to fix because there aren't Unity development tools for Linux. So even though the issue was trivial in the end it took a ridiculous amount of time to track down.

[1] http://www.sauropodstudio.com/dev-diary-number-seventy-seven...

Please don't vote for this unless you would actually use it.

If a lot of well intentioned but not actually Unity developers upvote this it will only serve to take their time away from doing features that will benefit their real userbase.

SteamOS = Linux, so more devtools that run on Linux means more developers developing for SteamOS, which means SteamOS gains more traction quicker. So I'd vote for it even if I'm not going to be an early adopter.

Unity already lets you build for Linux. Develop on Windows / OSX, build for Linux. You just can't run the actual development tools on Linux.

We want the Unity Editor not just the Unity Player.

Debugging platform-specific issues without a debugger is less than ideal.

Unity lets you do remote debugging. Just build with Development + Script Debugging turned on and then you can connect your debugger to your game running on the same network.

Exactly. Linux is my primary OS and I'm not a game developer but I still log on Windows from time to time just to play with Unity and make simple games.

> not actually Unity developers

well, I'm not a Unity developer, but if they added Linux editor support, I might become one. I've longed to try it in the past, but I just can't go back to Windows.

I will not be showing my support because Unity3D is proprietary software. Ask them to free their source code instead.

Precisely. Keep proprietary software out of Linux. The main reason we can get people to switch to Linux is freedom. If it becomes as full of closed programs as Windows, we won't get anyone to switch because there's no reason to (and no benefit). It's FOSS or nothing.

If FOSS OSes have poor to non existent support for proprietary software, there is no way they will be able to compete with proprietary OSes like OSX and Windows that fully support running FOSS applications.

The ability to develop or run proprietary software, if I so choose, is a form of freedom.

You forgot to say GNU/Linux instead of just Linux.

Why wouldn't they just run those same FOSS programs on Windows or OS X instead? It's not like Linux has a monopoly on running open source apps. In general, people use computers in order to use computers, not to make a political statement about how much they disapprove of ways in which everybody else uses computers.

I just don't get you people. It's your choice what software you use; Unity3D is not becoming part of Linux kernel or something.

I love linux. It's my operating system of choice. I think, all other things being equal, it's a superior operating system for just about any use case (other than really edge-case scenarios). I especially enjoy the freedom of the operating system, in every sense of the word as applied to software.

But understand this: the vast majority of the population just doesn't care about "freedom" when it comes to software. They care more about two other things, about in equal measure: 1) does it work well enough to do what I want; 2) can I hold somebody else accountable if/when it doesn't? The latter may be even more important at the "big enterprise" level, where generally "I need to make sure my ass is covered if something this thing touches breaks" outranks "I need to make sure this is a good solution for my company" on the list of priorities. The fact is that FOSS does a decent job of filling (1), but a really poor job of filling (2).

In light of this, the notion that people will switch to linux simply because of the free-ness is a bit, well, naive. Sure, it happens. It isn't happening in large numbers and, in my opinion, isn't likely to.

But at least then you would get some quality software (usability) in Linux.

I'd actually prefer a linux version of the Unity WebPlayer before the editor.

My game server runs on Linux, developing client and server in the same OS will be great!

If games made with it can run on Steam then I'd probably buy this just to play around. Who knows, I might make a 3D game masterpiece.

You can already build your games for Linux with the current version of Unity3d.

The Unity3d development environment runs on OSX and Windows.

The support ticket is for running the development environment on Linux.

I don't run Windows and never an Apple product for my own use, which is why I replied to this thread in the first place, if this dev environment would run on Linux and the games produced by it do and they can work on Steam like the sample I tried with the Steam SDK; great, I'd consider buying it, the development environment, for Linux.

Any game made with anything can run on steam. I use libgdx because I prefer to do more coding, and because it's FOSS

Let's try to get the editor working properly on OS X first.

Whenever I try to set a breakpoint and debug the app hangs and I have to force quit.

I recently found out that the secret trick to get debugging to actually work is to click the button to connect the debugger to unity "really quickly" (seriously).

Debugging on OSX works fine. OSX Mavericks broke it but now it is fixed with Unity 4.3.

There is a weird thing with Monodevelop on OSX where the "connect to debugger" pane is super laggy, and yeah, you have to select your debugger connection as fast as possible. If you let it sit there it doesn't work for some reason. That's been a bug for years.

My other annoying OSX bug is that for some reason on my macbook pro retina (it worked on my old macbook pro) the shift-cmd-b hotkey doesn't work. Other than that I haven't noticed any problems with Unity3d on OSX vs Windows, and I use Unity3d on both for 8+ hours a day.

The big deal for me is that a unity3d headless server only runs on windows. I have an architecture the produces customized video content, I'd love to write a unity module but cannot until Linux is supported.

I wish to developp games next year, I will go to a school, I know that we'll have to make project where we'll be able to choose our Engine.. I will use Unity3D Editor if it comes to linux !

I'd be a lot more interested in supporting anything Unity3D related if it's licensing wasn't so outrageously expensive (for any platform).

Unity3d is a tiny fraction of the cost of any competing engine. Unreal Engine / Farcry start out costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and some studios might even be paying 1m+ for their licenses.

At $1500 a developer (or $4500 if you need iOS + Android licenses), Unity3d is a steal. Plus you can happily develop with the free version until your company is making 6 figures in revs. The free version is lacking some features but until you get really serious about Unity you don't really need it.

Unreal Engine used to be licensed that way, but they've moved to a royalty model that actually makes it pretty cheap for small studios, and free for hobbyists. The current licensing options are,

Non-commercial use: free

Commercial use for in-house applications (e.g. training simulations): $2,500 per-seat

Commercial use for end-user-oriented applications (e.g. game development): $99 plus 25% of royalties above $50,000

Full terms: http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/licensing/commercial_license...

Ouch. App stores often take 30%, which means that only 52.5% (0.7*0.75) of what the user pays goes to the developer. That is quite a significant number.

That's UDK though, not the full Unreal Engine. But to be fair UDK is more similar to Unity.

For anything but not-successful games the 25% royalties is going to be a lot more than just $1500-$4500 up front per dev. I'll take the Unity licensing scheme any day of the week.

Huh? It's free for commercial use. You really can't beat that. I doubt you will need the advanced (paid) features of Unity unless you are established and have a team of developers. In which case, you can surely afford $1500.

To be fair I hadn't looked at the license comparison in awhile (http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses). It looks reasonable - I think I recall at one point you couldn't even submit to the App Store without a pro license, which I may be imagining.

Oh well. I stand corrected :-)

Maybe I was thinking of Xamarin's license costs instead ;-)

Not a fan of Unity, but more Mono everywhere is better for everyone (some healthy competition for JVM).

What about just using Vim, Emacs, nedit, gedit, or whatever your favorite editor is on UNIX/Linux? Why do we need a special editor just for Unity when there are already plenty of good alternatives?

I'm an [emacs -nw + bash] dude but, sometimes, I like using fancy shiny gui tools. :)

Unity3D Editor means the entire Unity3D game production system, not just a glorified ed. Currently Unity3D games can be developed for Linux, but they cannot be developed on Linux.

Unity3D is not just a text/program editor but rather an IDE for making games (as far as I understand, I've never used it).

the text-editing part of Unity3D is pretty terrible, and I do most of it in vim. But it is good for viewing models and moving components around without building your own model viewer or mouse-driven Entity-System editor

So many comments from people that have obviously never even downloaded it and tried it out for 5 minutes.

Unity3d comes with Mono Develop (http://monodevelop.com/). That's their default editor. However, you can easily switch to Visual Studio or whatever you want. You can use gvim if you want. If you pair up Unity with cygwin and git you come pretty close to what Linux gives you. I'd still prefer it if they ported the editor to Linux, since it would mean I don't have to boot Windows.

Unity3d is not a text editor. It's similar to Blender... it's a UI for manipulating 3d objects and setting various components of those 3d objects. When you need to edit the scripting of an object, it launches the external text editor.

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