Wow. What'd I miss? :O
This is, to be totally honest, something I've never seen in the Linux community. Perhaps I don't move in the right circles, but normally Linux users are more understanding than most when it comes to, for example, the difficulty of porting a game to another platform.
While I've only been using Linux for about 3 years, every single person I have met have treated me with the utmost politeness, and have always been forgiving and willing to help. All they ask for in return is that I speak, ask questions, and answer questions with some degree of intelligence.
This thread started out as a simple question about the feasibility/likelihood of a Linux port. (I myself dual-boot, so I will be buying the game no matter what. Even if I was Linux-only, I would buy the game to support you guys, because there is always the chance that I'll go back to dual-booting, or even just Windows, and I would like to play it.) I understand the mentality of Linux users when it comes to Wine - if you visit the Ubuntu forums' gaming section, I would say that more than 50% of the posts there are titled something like "lol im a newb how i get wow working on wine". The answers are almost always polite - even if it's just to say "use some initiative, and maybe read the FAQ, here's a link". But my point is, Wine is not good enough for games - when you have to go into a comandline and use an extra flag just to disable some audio debug messages which affect performance, it completely ruins the game experience. Having said that, a game which works *well* under Wine with no tweaking would be fine. For me, at least.
Alec, as has been mentioned here, Linux users are not all about free stuff. It's more about principles. The problem is, things like Windows and Office are very expensive to buy, and a lot of people don't feel that they are worth the money (quite rightly in the case of Windows
). Especially when a bunch of guys is making an open-source equivalent which is just as good. The least you can do is support them by showing the world that you care. Indies are an extension of that ethic; the difference being that they try to make some commercial success. This isn't frowned upon in the slightest - everybody needs food on the table - and so, generally, if you've made something that's worth buying, we would be only too glad to give you something back by buying your game. I have been known to actually click on that Paypal "Donate" button that a lot of freeware devs have somewhere on their site, because I feel it's the least I can do. If something is shareware, even if you can use it for free indefinitely, I'll pay for it if I actually use it.
As for your audio problem, what will happen if you want to, for example, port it to the Wii? Will you have to change libraries then? If so, it may be worth waiting for a while until your options are more clear - release the game on Windows, see what happens, and come back and look at this, say, 3 months on. If a Wii (or any) port is forthcoming, that could be the perfect time to modify your code in such a way that would facilitate a Linux port. Of course, I'm speaking out of my ass here as a non-coder, so it's quite likely to be pure shite.
Another thing to take into account is the rarity of native Linux games. This actually works to your advantage. As good, native Linux games are like gold dust, nearly every Linux gamer will go out and get it because, well, it's a game, and it'll actually work on your system. Battle for Wesnoth is a perfect example - everyone plays it, because it's the only decent game out there.
