What I appreciate -- and I realize this is a bit more meta than about the game itself -- is that when it says "for Linux", it really means "for Linux" and not "for some specific versions of Ubuntu and maybe a 32-bit Red Hat thrown in for good measure".
The game is actually in the package manager for my distro, but just for fun I downloaded the binary off the site. I ran it. It worked.
That's an amazing technical achievement that many cross-platform games today (even the commercial ones) have not managed to attain.
The thing is, there's really is no such thing as a generic "for Linux". It's not just a matter of packaging systems, although that's a factor too. If it's anything nontrivial, it'll be linked against certain versions of certain libraries, and which libraries and which versions it depends on will prevent it from running (out of the box, at least) on distros which don't have those versions of those libraries.
I didn't look at the binary, but another commenter implied that it achieved this portability via static linking. This does get rid of a lot of the dependency issues that might cause problems, but it's not a solution either. You do not want everything to be statically linked, that would be a nightmare.
"You do not want everything to be statically linked, that would be a nightmare."
For a desktop system, you really do. The space and storage drawbacks are history with modern systems; the only remaining issue is that a user has to wait for the developer of their application to release a new version to get security updates, and that's not nearly as much an issue for a desktop system, where a user can just choose not to use software that's not updated promptly.
What makes it a technical achievement is that in order for static linking to be viable, the packager has to be very aware of dependencies and library ecosystems. The developers will also need to consciously constrain their design choices to ensure that the surface area of their package is small enough to deploy reasonably.
Reminds me of Heroes of Newerth back in closed beta and early launch. The game would run on any platform - Linux, Windows or Mac. Everything worked out of the box 100% properly.
It's a shame that the game lost the MoBA wars since their client was and still is the best one out there.
Agreed - HoN has the absolute best game mechanics in the MOBA world (and arguably the best heroes selection, although I miss some original ones like PL or PA). What makes them slowly fall into irrelevancy is the quality of S2 and their developers. While Dota 2 and LoL kept innovating, the differences between HoN and the beta that came about 3 years ago are relatively minor. 95% of their (painful, btw) updates are new hero skins. They added a lot of shit in their quest of making money off it (started as pay-once, then shifted to premium model, now they just sell vanity stuff) while ignoring basic bugs (e.g. the reconnect bug, untouched since the beginning). And, most annoying of all, it runs infuriatingly badly on OSX, for some reason. The game drives any system I run it on close to 100% CPU for some reason. My bitterness aside, the game mechanics are perfect, so chapeau for that.
Source: MOBA player for 7-8 years, including Dota, Dota 2, LoL, Demigod, and obviously HoN
HoN was a good stopgap between Dota and Dota 2 - the engine was smooth and in the early days when they still worked with Icefrog the balance wasn't even too bad.
But I really think D2 outshines it in every way possible, mechanics, engine, art, balance, valve didn't sell my email to spammers, etc.
I like both Dota 2 and HoN, but HoN definitely has the upper hand with regards to fast-pace twitch-based gameplay. The first thing a HoN player notices when trying out Dota 2 for the first time is that input delay.
Supposedly part of the problem is that Dota 2 uses the Source engine with netcode designed for FPS games; hence it does prediction and interpolation which works well for those games but not as well for RTS games. For more info: http://pastebin.com/ekk07PKn
whatever be the technology, it really was surprising that it just worked when I double clicked on the binary just after extracting! That is some user experience not quite associated with games on Linux based distros
The game is actually in the package manager for my distro, but just for fun I downloaded the binary off the site. I ran it. It worked.
That's an amazing technical achievement that many cross-platform games today (even the commercial ones) have not managed to attain.
Massive props.