Technical overview

[vv221]

Hello!

I joined the beta today, and played no more than thirty minutes yet, so I won't be able to give any input on the game contents yet.

On a technical point of view:
_everything works well without any tweaking on a Debian Sid amd64 (GNU/Linux 64-bit)
_it runs without any slowdown with the radeon free driver, no need for the proprietary driver is rare enough in modern games to be noted
_the game can't run if the user doesn't have writing rights on the game main folder
_the graphics are nice, and don't seem to be resource intensive (no real benchmarking, pure feeling only)

The only issue I've found is the impossibility to package it in .deb format (Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.) due to the need of writing data in the game main folder, which could be avoided by moving the "Logs" folder to "$HOME/.config/Proxy Studios/Pandora Beta/".
I don't know if you intend to provide distribution-specific packages, but it is a nice feature always appreciated by GNU/Linux users (better integration in the system, easier upgrades, easier installation/removal).
Would you consider distribution-specific packaging for GNU/Linux, I'm willing to offer my help to build .deb packages, which can be used in any Debian-based distribution. A quite exhaustive list can be found on Wikipedia, on a page named "List_of_Linux_distributions#Debian-based" (I'm not allowed to post full links to outside websites yet, I'm going to update to the full link later).

I'll come back later for my feedback on the game itself.

[SephiRok]

Thanks for the input.

Even if we would move the Logs folder, we still use an updater which requires write permissions, so that wouldn't really help.

Cheers,
Rok

[dalves]

If you want to do this, perhaps you could copy Steam approach.
As far as I know, they have a minimal program installed, which downloads the Steam proper executable to a hidden directory in the home directory.

[vv221]

I didn't think about the internal updater.
By using it we already have most of the ease-of-use of a distribution-specific packaging.

Distribution-specific packaging would mean distribution-specific updating, and I would understand that you will not be able to maintain different ways to upgrade the game depending on the distribution used (maintaining repositories, etc.).