We are back with our third episode of our ongoing Podcast series. Following the previous ones with ProfessorKaos64 (SteamOS-Tools, episode 1), James Ramey (WINE/Crossover, episode 2) we now welcome Cybik who has worked on the Linux port of Skullgirls from LabZero as well as Indivisible (still ongoing development). Cybik is based in California and is a Build Engineer. It was the first time for him to be directly involved in porting games and while he did not see the whole porting effort through, he was one of the most active contributors when LabZero was looking for volunteers.

Cybik comes back on how he came to know and use Linux in the first place, his gaming habits, how he got involved into the Skullgirls port, and shares with us his outlook on the Linux gaming landscape. The podcast is just an hour long and you can either download it below, and use our RSS feed (that has the additional benefit of making it easy for you to get new episodes from now on):

– Podcast Episode 3

And of course, there’s a lot more. Get your earphones plugged and listen in!

Dissection:

2:17 – cybik’s background, and when and how he discovered Linux

15:23 – cybik’s contact with Lab Zero and what he was able to do in regards to bringing Skullgirls and Indivisible to Linux

33:14 – cybik’s opinions on the Linux gaming market and various theories on Microsoft, DirectX, and Valve

47:04 – “We just got Life is Strange…which in itself for me is strange!”

And a Too Long; Didn’t Hear section:

Cybik is a build engineer for a “big company” for Android applications

His main Linux distribution is Gentoo and games exclusively on Linux; rarely does he run Windows

While he was able to get a decent amount of porting done for Skullgirls on Linux, the developers at Humble Bundle later kicked in to optimize and finalize the rest of the codebase. Prior to this, he had no porting experience

Bringing Indivisible to Linux was fairly easy since Humble had already optimized the Z-Engine (the engine that runs both Skullgirls and Indivisible) to run in OpenGL. Bringing the prototype to Mac was less work on the code and more work on the packaging

Cybik’s efforts to port these games were voluntary. “Being involved in that game is its own reward. I do it for the love of the platform.“

The Linux gaming market “has definitely been better” since the past two or three years. To further increase this market share, he thinks, is to increase the desktop usage, and by pro eSports teams endorsing Linux and them “owning ass” against Windows-only teams

For games like Street Fighter V and Rocket League, Valve might be “biting a bit more than they can chew” what with all of the projects they’re involved in, or they might be optimizing the state of the tools so that they don’t get in trouble later on, or, simply, they could just be working in Valve time

Cybik feels that the reason why developers have adopted APIs other than DirectX in just the past few years is because it has become more risky for developers to embrace DirectX exclusively (because of Microsoft “hush money“), what with everyone leaking information left and right (Facebook buying Oculus is an example)

That’s all for today. If you haven’t played the prototype of Indivisible you can download the Linux version from their Indiegogo page.

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