Improve compatibility with Steam Play and Proton (Linux & Mac)

While i would surely be happy about it, i don't think a engine-rewrite just for multi-plattform is sensible at this point. But eliminating the blockers for proper wine/proton-functionality should be a reasonable amount of work.

It would be the least, of course.

Yeah I think they use there own engine so imagine porting it would be a pain. SteamPlay/Proton seems to work really well in some cases though, got a lot more games then I was expecting running well in it.

it would be nice for many other to play SE on linux, but Macs are not for gaming :D

Well, the nice thing about making it work with wine/proton is that it would then also be playable on Mac (if the performance suffices). So the needed effort is miniscule compared to a "proper" port

(Snip) wrong place, I thought I was leaving a comment but I was leaving a reply :D

that does not work for every one unfortunately. I had tried about 4 different how to's and could never get it running properly. i had one time gotten it past the first menu but beyond that no love.

the gaming community on Mac is so small, its not worth the time for the small number of programmers that work on SE to port it, the xbox conversion was "easy" (compared to a mac conversion), because it, and the C# language is all Microsoft.

I do know this

By the way the mac gaming community is not as small as you think it would be

So far I have seen and met at least over 1k players who game on a mac on steam

But with Vulkan the porting should be faster than actually trying to rewrite the whole game just for mac’s to run it

EDIT: just a small question

Can linux read C#?

no, linux does not support C# natively

its the same time consuming problem with making it work 'on mac' or porting to vulkan, not enough to make it worth it, yes vulkan would then include mac and linux, but linux still doesnt support c# there is a very small number of programmers working on SE, less than 10, most of which are still working on the xbox one version. it is more important for them to actually finish the game, than spend a lot of time on something few people will make use of, SE itself is a niche game, its not like its as popular as minecraft, or ever will be. its that 80/20 thing, if you spend more than 80% of your time (to go towards a new update) making something that less than 20% of people will use, then its not worth it.

I agree with your statement

I do believe they should at least finish the game then decide if they would port future platform’s

It's not just a graphics issue. SE is built on .NET. Which is one of the reasons the Xbox version took so long to come out. Xbox had no .NET compatibility until recently.

I know, I figured that out sometime ago. I dropped this convo because I decided to just use bootcamp for space engineers

Main reason for me wishing the game was mac was because windows couldnt get any sound output so I had to rely on speaker. But after a year of trying to fix it, I reinstalled windows because it was running low on space then decided to try installing it without my headphones plugged in, then it worked.

Edit: forgot the problem was based off DX

Woops, I already fixed the problem long ago

I know this thread is ancient but I keep getting emails whenever someone writes things here so I just wanted to clarify a few things:

- Linux has native C#, as does Mac, it's called Mono, it's what Unity uses as well and it's basically identical to .NET and supports basically anything that's written for .NET, and on top of that there's also the Roslyn compiler if you want actual .NET instead of Mono, C# is developed on an open basis and many websites run on C# that are served from Linux machines. https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn More info on that here. Also note that Microsoft owns github, they're not as opensource-unfriendly anymore as you may think ;)

- One of the primary features of Xbox is .NET compatibility, the Xbox One runs a stripped down version of Windows. I think the main reason it took long to get working is because the Xbone/PS4 don't have a lot of horsepower compared to the average PC so they had to optimize the game a lot further.

- The game runs fine in Proton for me these days, you just have to run some small patcher that makes sure some files are in the right place and the intro movie doesn't get played, otherwise it crashes, but the game itself I've played for hours with many mods enabled without a single glitch or issue. Patches can be found here https://github.com/Linux74656/SpaceEngineersLinuxPatches If KeenSWH would implement these fixes in the game itself then all people would have to do is run the game through proton, no porting required :)

it was never open source, but .net core stuff was added, for the xbox one support, linux SE is growing more and more as time goes by, there is a #linux channel on keen's discord to find out more info

keen's discord

https://discord.gg/gsHc2M

It was actually, (for some definitions of open source anyway). went looking for it and it's still there, though hasn't been touched for two years.

https://github.com/KeenSoftwareHouse/SpaceEngineers

good to hear some of it got ported to .net core, that should be a bit more performant than relying on mono.

thats not 'open source', it was published on github, but was never 'open source'. it was published for others to contribute if they feel they wanted to freely contribute, and had some idea that would be a great addition to SE.

open source https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-open-source-software-2071941

It seems the source code is incomplete, and maybe always was. I'm concluding this from several requests to open certain classes for modification.

But to comment on the original topic:

These days SE runs OK-ish on Proton(Linux) for offline play. But trying to join a public server from Proton crashes for me almost 100% of the time.