How OS agnostic is ENet? And other questions

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1

Godot Version

4.6

Question

This is a bit of a loaded question, but I’ve recently finished version 0.1 of Monkanics, which made me think about how I should distribute the game.

What I haven’t considered until now is Mac and Linux ports of the game. I’ve never used Mac or Linux in my entire life, and I’m not sure how to approach porting.

I know Godot provides export templates for Mac and Linux, but I have no idea how to test them myself. How will do I access a Mac and Linux virtual machine on Windows 10?

I also don’t know how OS agnostic ENet (the multiplayer library Godot and Monkanics are built off of) is. Will players of different OS’ be able to connect to the same server?

Any general information would be greatly appreciated, as I’m navigating a LOT of unknowns right now.

I’m also going to ping @gertkeno and @pennyloafers, because they’re pretty knowledgeable about Godot and networking respectively.

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You can use a virtual machine for linux, Virtualbox is a classic but I haven’t used it; qemu works on windows but it’s not fun.

Virtualization is probably not as easy for mac os, I’d bet near impossible and a violation of some TOS somewhere. Typically they want you to have a mac to build on.

ENet will work cross platform, I believe even on Web builds.

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That’s great! I’m glad I won’t have to worry about that.

Man, I did some research on this, and it’s not looking good. Running a virtual machine is going to be rough for me, as I’ve never used one before and have no idea what I’m doing.

My other options are to:

  1. Spend the time to learn complex Linux virtual machines and spend $600 - $1,000 on a Mac PC.
  2. Pray that the Mac and Linux Godot builds work without testing.
  3. Not support Mac and/or Linux all together. Not ideal, but most gamers are on Windows 10 and above anyway.

I’ll figure this out as I go. Thanks for the help.

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I know you marked a solution but I’ve used a lot of virtual machine (specifically virtualbox) and it’s super simple. 99% of operating systems are made to be I tuitive so the OS itself isn’t the issue. Linux distros make it super easy to get virtual machines. I dunno about mac though but it shouldn’t be too difficult. If you take the virtual machine path for testing, I’m in the monkanics discord so feel free to ping me with questions for faster answers compared to the forum (although the forum is pretty fast too lol). Hope this helps a tiny bit.

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Thanks for the offer. However, if and when I do get both virtual machines working, Mac and Linux ports will have their own specific random issues I’ll have to fix/address.

I’m currently solo deving Monkanics, and I’m focusing on getting the game working in its simplest form. So, porting will have to be a bridge I cross later. That’s the only way I’ll know my decision.

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Yeah ports are in my experience a 50/50 either there are barely any issues or everything breaks lol. As said virtual machines are super easy it’s basically just drag and drop a file in then click start. I’ve been doing a lot of ethical hacking and low level systems stuff recently so I can say that the different operating systems (excluding IOS I never use that for anything lol) try to stay similar enough but a lot of deep level stuff is different to if the game is all on a high level plane of programming the port should be fine. Otherwise you might run into issues. Can’t hurt to try it out tho right :p. But yeah always focus on the game before whatever you will do after it’s released.

My offer obviously still stands for whenever you decide to tackle that issue.

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I’ll keep that in my back pocket.

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Maybe; but also you might be overconfident in the making a mac build. They don’t really like cross-compiling in the first place, you’d be buying the Mac to build and test on.

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That makes the investment and ongoing costs even worse.

I’ve also did some more research and Linux can run Windows games with the right emulator, so I technically don’t have to specifically build for Linux. And Mac really wasn’t built for gaming either.

But maybe I’m just rationalizing myself into not putting in the extra work. But that’s a BIG maybe.

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WINE (which stands for Wine Is Not (an) Emulator) and Valve’s Proton (which is WINE + extras) are great options for the linux gamers; With Godot games we can swap out the runtime for unencrypted non-embedded games too. We have our tricks!

:100:

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You know, I actually learned a lot from this topic. Maybe going Windows only is the best call.

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As previously said try it out for sure. Virtual machines are free. Ife had a Godot export of a game with networking and it had like 2 bugs in the other OS.

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