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Which libraries/platforms are available on Linux to start game development?

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You're going to need to be more specific. What kind of games do you want to make? What languages do you want to use? What do you mean by "platforms"? – michael.bartnett Feb 9 '12 at 8:39
As stated in the faq which technology to use questions are now deemed off-topic. A good resource for this kind of thing is devmaster – Noctrine♦ Feb 9 '12 at 15:50

closed as not constructive by Noctrine♦ Feb 9 '12 at 15:50

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OpenGL and SDL are both open source and cross platform.

For C#, there is also a Mono library, which attempts to be a game library like XNA but cross-platform. I have not used Mono, but heard bad things about it.

PyGame is another popular cross platform library.

I don't know much about Java libraries, but Java itself tends to be easy for simple beginner projects, and it is obviously suited for multiplatform stuff.

The Unreal Engine apparently works on Linux using OpenGL, you might be happy to hear.

In general, anything open source will probably support GNU/Linux. More than that, they usually "start" on Linux. Proprietary stuff rarely strays outside Windows, on the other hand.

Keep in mind that if you develop for Windows, using for instance DirectX 9, your games might be playable through Wine on Linux if you're lucky.

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Way way way too optimistic about Wine. – Lohoris Feb 9 '12 at 9:55
Well, I don't have much experience myself, but the Wine community always claims decent support for older versions. – Superbest Feb 9 '12 at 15:06
Of course they claim it... – Lohoris Feb 9 '12 at 16:33
sorry, but Wine is not a solution. It's an end-user feature so that users aren't totally fucked when they own stuff that doesn't work on windows. So don't plan on it at all from the get-go. Just do multiplatform right out the gates. It isn't like it's difficult or anything. Hell, it's easier than doing windows-exclusive development. (I find opengl way, way easier than directx's overcomplication of the same features, not to mention performance overhead), for instance. – user148459 May 11 at 20:29

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