Lonely Mountains: Downhill new support update for Linux, as well as Mac and Windows PC. With some interesting news from developer Megagon Industries. Due to make a debut on October 23rd via Steam.
Megagon Industries reached out today to outline the Kickstarter update. Below the developers explain what is happening with Linux. Since they are sending out keys soon for Lonely Mountains: Downhill Steam release.
Linux Support Update:
We know that everyone who backed for the Linux version had a lot of questions. And we want to apologize for not being very clear about it in our backer updates. As well as not addressing it earlier.
The bad news Lonely Mountains: Downhill (sorry for getting a little technical here). At the moment Unity is not officially supporting IL2CPP. In short: a compiler which turns .net code into much faster C++ code on Linux platforms. Switching to IL2CPP gave the game a huge performance boost. And is used on all other platforms. Without it the game runs pretty poorly. At least in our Linux test environment. So poorly that we don’t feel comfortable to make it publicly available.
Good News about Lonely Mountains: Downhill:
The good news however is that we have a running native Linux build. Where all the game features work.
We did a lot of performance optimizations in recent weeks. Hoping to get Lonely Mountains: Downhill to a point where it can run smoothly without IL2CPP. That’s why we were hesitant to break the news earlier. But unfortunately, that’s not the case. We underestimated how important this feature is performance wise. There might be Linux users with a good enough hardware. Who can still play the game without problems. But it won’t be really playable on a regular PC.
So we’re now at a point where we don’t see any other solution. Then to wait for Unity to add official IL2CPP support for Linux. They do have a support for it in their newest Unity-beta version. So hopefully it won’t be too long. But we can’t upgrade to this one as long as it’s not officially supported by all platforms. It might be a few weeks. But truthfully it can also easily be months until we’re able to update to it.
Also updating to a newer Unity version can take between a week up to a month+. As it means that all the plugins, etc. Also, having to be updated for Lonely Mountains: Downhill. And big updates like these tend to break a lot of things.
A final word
So, we are very sorry. And sincerely apologize to everyone who backed the game for a native Linux version. But we don’t see any way we can fulfill that promise at the moment. We just completely underestimated the IL2CPP problem.
That’s the reason why we will only have a Win and Mac build on release. You should still be able to play Lonely Mountains: Downhill on Linux by playing the windows version on SteamPlay. And it will probably run way better than our native Linux build.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill is due to release on Octobers 23rd. Available via Steam for Mac and Windows PC. While Linux will not receive a day one launch. It’s still in the works.