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PSA about CORE (TL;DR: it's not cross-platform)

A topic by CliffracerX created Aug 21, 2020 Views: 200 Replies: 4
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Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

If you're a creator looking to ensure as many of your fellow devs as possible will be able to play & rate your stuff, please note that CORE does not work under WINE & the likes, rendering Linux and Mac players unable to access your games!  Pure Unreal 4 games can usually run via tools like SteamPlay/Proton/a raw Wine setup, so if you've got the U4 chops you're fine, and Unity games almost always work with those tools in addition to the native support for building cross-platform games, but CORE is a no-go at the moment.

This means devs on Linux or Macs - myself included as I only run XUbuntu at this point - likely won't be able to play or rate your stuff if you make it with CORE, certainly not in time for meaningful jam participation.

EDIT 1: Forgot the "as possible", whoops

Submitted

Unity can't really build for Linux or Mac either unless you have a Unix machine available.

Submitted

I don't know about Unreal, but

> Unity can't really build for Linux or Mac

This is not true. You can build for Mac on Windows and for Windows on Mac in Unity.

Submitted (1 edit)

The package for Mac made on Windows will be unusable unless repacked on a Mac first. You just cannot build something that will run on a unix system on windows without major finagling.

Submitted(+1)

Unless they've totally busted the build system in modern releases (i.e, 2020 and beyond), that was basically never the case when I did development under Windows.  IIRC 5.0.0ish did have some issues with Mac builds never making it past the splash screen, but it was fixed shortly after, and the Linux ones legitimately never broke, even back into the dark ages of Unity 4 and the likes.

Also, it's important to remember that while Mac OSX and Linux are both unix-derived, Linux != Mac OSX.  Macs are nightmarishly overcomplicated, ridiculously locked-down, and their "applications" being folders w/ metadata in addition to executables and data files is where I recall many of the 5.0-era build bugs happening.  Linux is a lot more akin to Windows in that applications are just executable files, with no need for a fancy folder structure or a hundred different pieces of hidden metadata that'll break everything if they're messed up.

TL;DR: Linux builds from Windows should be fine, it's not a tenth as picky as Macs are, and AFAIK Mac builds from Windows machines will be fine as well, in all cases doubly so if you use something like Butler for uploading builds instead of relying on Windows' at-time janky system for working with zip flies.

(As for Unreal: to my knowledge, you can only build for the platform your editor is running in, so while you can make a game cross-platform with it, you've gotta dual-boot and keep an identical editor setup on both, or worse, triple-boot if you want to cover Macs as well.)