Scrolling Game Development Kit Forum

Welcome - good to see new people taking an interest.

There is some support for Linux. I once managed to create a project which could compile and run in Linux. The IDE doesn't work well in Linux, but the generated projects can run in Linux with the help of the Linux template (separate download). At least they could at one time. I must confess I have not done much testing or ongoing support for Linux, but am willing to offer some assistance to the extent I am able if you encounter troubles trying to compile a project for Linux. The alternative, of course, is to simply target HTML5, which would work on all platforms.

I don't recall having tested performance in a virtual environment. The biggest factor there is probably the use of OpenGL. If you can play other OpenGL games in a virtual environment, I would expect performance would be similar. Of course you could test it easily by running the sample game in a virtual environment. I expect performance would be good.

The SGDK2 IDE itself and the games it creates are all 100% C# code (unless you export to HTML5 in which case the game becomes JavaScript, which is remarkably similar). However, when you are using the rule editors to define how sprites and "plans" operate, you are working one step up, simply calling C# functions with very little need for C#-specific syntax. That's why the games can be exported to either C# or JavaScript (HTML5) format if you are only using the rule editors. The real C# work comes in when you edit code in the SourceCode node of the IDE. Of course, there is the SGDK2 framework which offers some functions that you can call that would not be there if you were writing C# code without those functions in your project. But yes, the C# code is pure C# with no extensions or modifications.

In fact the C# is so pure that when SGDK2 compiles a project, it also generates a .csproj file that you can load into Microsoft's Visual C# Express IDE and edit, compile, test, and run your project as a pure C# project.

In order to unblock this, see http://gamedev.enigmadream.com/index.php?topic=1400.0. I could post the help files online, but I have not done that lately. The last place I posted them was at http://sgdk2.sourceforge.net/Documentation/Index.html, but those have not been updated since version 2.1.6. If you have trouble accessing the help file still, let me know and I can update the web-hosted help pages so you could look at those instead, and see updated help content. The delivered help file is much nicer, though. For one thing, it will jump directly to the help page for the screen you are looking at in SGDK2.