Open Letter to Clickteam - Linux (it's about time)

Welcome to our brand new Clickteam Community Hub! We hope you will enjoy using the new features, which we will be further expanding in the coming months.

A few features including Passport are unavailable initially whilst we monitor stability of the new platform, we hope to bring these online very soon. Small issues will crop up following the import from our old system, including some message formatting, translation accuracy and other things.

Thank you for your patience whilst we've worked on this and we look forward to more exciting community developments soon!

Clickteam.
  • With all the hype over Steam's new Linux version (coming soon), and the premiere of Windows 8, it would seem to me a perfect time to release Multimedia Fusion for Linux. Clickteam has added support for IOS, Adobe Flash, Xbox, and surely more is on the way. It would only seem right to port Multimedia Fusion to Linux to not only sell more units, but to make your current customers who are Linux users happy.

    In this day and age, Microsoft Windows is infested with various malware. If you don't update your system and you simply search the web, you may end up with a fake anti virus that holds your system hostage, until you either pay up, or get rid of the fake anti virus through other means (and I doubt paying up would even work).

    More and more intelligent people flock to Linux and other free systems on a daily basis. FreeBSD is another good example. FreeBSD has great Linux support, so if Clickteam released Multimedia Fusion for Linux, FreeBSD users would have a practically native way to run it as well.

    Growing up, Yves, Francois, and even Jeff who runs the forums to a certain extent, were my heroes. It seems to me these extremely intelligent talented people, wouldn't limit themselves to Microsoft Windows.

    Even though this seems like an impossible dream to me, I just wanted to generate some discussion on the topic. Does anyone else want to see Clickteam products on Linux as much as I do?

  • Have you looked at the Please login to see this link.? It compiles to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

    Darkwire Software Lead Programmer (C++ & C#)
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  • Have you looked at the Please login to see this link.? It compiles to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

    That's very cool, but I don't think that's quite the project I was looking for. At the moment I'm running MMF2 through wine. I can't even get the SWF exporter to work under Linux, probably because it relies on the Windows JDK. I don't much want to come off as a pretentious ass, even if that's what I sound like, but I think it would be more than worth it to have MMF2 itself ported to Linux.

  • I hear you (being a Linux user myself), but porting the whole thing over to a cross-platform GUI toolkit isn't something we can do before MMF3 (MMF2 is heavily tied into the Windows APIs and MFC).

    For now, you might have more success with a VM where WINE doesn't work. You could also try running the edge version of WINE, which improves things a bit.

  • Is there any news on MMF3 progress? I haven't seen it talked about much, or is it still that thing in the future that might happen one day. Although I guess it makes sense to not talk about it when you're doing everything possible to prolong the life of MMF2.

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  • The main concern with doing a Linux product is that Linux user have the habit of having everything for free. Doing this would take us a lot of time for very little return.
    Anyway, with MMF3, we will have cross-platform products, and I'm sure Jamie, who is a fan of Linux will make a version on his spare time :)

    Francois
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  • It's true that Linux users are more likely to use open source software whenever possible, but with recent developments like the Ubuntu App Store, the announcement of Steam for Linux, things like the Humble Bundle - I think it's starting to prove that it doesn't stop them paying for things they want.

    As you say, we're building MMF3 on cross-platform technology, so even if it is in my spare time - normally I'd be careful about saying something like this, but it's something I'm definitely going to do.

    Edited 4 times, last by Forum User (October 17, 2012 at 2:54 PM).

  • FreeBSD has great Linux support ? I don't thin FreeBSD is linux at all but that's not the point.
    I don't think that porting MMF to linux is a great idea for the reasons Francois pointed but it could be WINE supported for example like Teamviewer does.
    I am Ubuntu user myself but not when it comes to graphic design or MMF, however I would be happy if MMF was WINE supported by CT.

  • I think Linux users are people who prefer doing things themselves manually anyway - MMF3 wouldn't sound appealing to them.


    I wouldn't be so sure - most people who use Linux-based operating systems do so because they're free and open source, rather than just because they fancy a challenge. Distributions like Ubuntu require very little manual intervention.

    Edited 11 times, last by Forum User (October 25, 2012 at 10:02 AM).

  • Does anyone else want to see Clickteam products on Linux as much as I do?


    I agree with you xeemo! I was one of the folks who flocked to Ubuntu a year ago to see what a Linux OS would be like. To my surprise, it ran flawlessly out of the box! (And it's my full time OS now) If MMF2 (and my projects) worked natively on Linux, that would be amazing!

    I can see a link too:

    The main concern with doing a Linux product is that Linux user have the habit of having everything for free.

    In this day and age, Microsoft Windows is infested with various malware.


    I see a world for both closed source (MMF2 and apps built with it) and open source (Linux & it's apps & being free), since it helps reduce down the amount of malware since more developers keep an eye on the code and push out updates faster then Windows. I've come across a few occasions where free software outweighs what you would get with certain paid software.

    You know, if we could (as Linux users) make our own PPA's (software sources) to store our complied Linux apps, wouldn't that make our lives much easier to push updates easily through the Software Updater?

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  • sorry to bring this thread from the dead. Just to weight in my thoughts on linux.

    Linux users use linux not because it is free as in gratis. We use it because it is open as an OS and it is tied to a big community of contributors. That means that if there is a problem with the OS, you are able to google and fix it yourself. In windows if you get a problem, the most common fix is to reinstall the entire OS. Once you arrive at that conclusion you sort of start to realize why it sucks to have a closed source operating system - with terminal bug reports being encrypted in strange code messages and binary strings that google gives no answers to.

    We can also customize every aspect of the OS without having to install addons that would slow it down. We can streamline it to fit our needs.

    Moreover linux users get access to nice bleeding edge technologies that most other os users dont get to as easily. Linux is a great environment for compiling software straight from github and other repositories - with the development kits and libraries already set for you and automated systems ready to do all the work with a single command. It's the easiest environment to compile on, and the most transparent one in terms of whats going on under the hood.

    That said currently there is a market opportunity for clickteam to make a profit. I think we have managed to prove that we like to spend more money on software and games than other os users (see indie humble bundle statistics) . Why? Because we appreciate the native port and openly support it by voting with our wallets. And because if you port it, you wont have much of a competition to be honest. The open source projects are simply not mature enough and not as accessible as mmf.

    There is currently nothing quite as mature and stable as multimedia fusion on linux. None. I can think of only stencyl, but those guys have a very different approach to things which i do not necessarily like.
    The reason I purchased a license for fusion was the sole fact that it runs almost flawlessly under wine on linux. But it is not perfect and I do not like running things on wine. A native port on linux would be very much welcome and I believe that it would attract actual developers who like to make games.

    UDK is moving to linux, so as many other engines getting a native port as well. This is possibly thanks to Valve and their aggressive push to make linux the gaming OS of the living room.

    Ubuntu has managed to become a mainstream OS, and especially now becoming more popular in china and getting preinstalled on many computers. There is also an active community for gaming under linux
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    So please, dont believe the hype that we like things for free. We like to spend money and buy nice things too. Port the editor for linux, put it on steam and see what happens when Steam boxes start getting sold everywhere.

    Linux is a free os. Do you know what that means for you? It means that more people can get to the point of buying your software. We have free tools that compliment your software. Inkscape, krita, gimp, blender - free with first class support on linux.

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