I’ve got some bad news for Linux users that I was hoping I wouldn’t have to announce – I’ve tried everything I can think of, but I can’t get a version of VVVVVV working on Linux. I’m out of ideas and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Believe me, I’m as annoyed about this as I’m sure you are.
Flash is supposed to be cross platform, so I was under the impression that making a standalone Linux version just involved making a flash projector on Linux (like it did on a Mac). That’s not the case – I was horrified to discover on the day of the release that the Linux version was completely broken; it wasn’t displaying the graphics properly, and it didn’t take any keyboard input at all.
Since the launch I’ve optimistically tried everything I could to get it working, but VVVVVV is a flash game, and I’m completely at the mercy of how well flash works in Linux. I had some success using different versions of the standalone player, and I tried making changes to the game to hopefully work around the various problems I was having. The closest I got was by making an AIR version of the game and running it with the new (still in beta) version of AIR 2.0 – and that still had serious problems. The game had an audio lag of a couple of seconds, ran very slowly in fullscreen and worst of all, randomly called KeyUp events when you were holding down a key, which completely breaks the game’s controls.
I’m… disappointed that Flash support on Linux isn’t better than it is, but there’s nothing I can do.
There is at least some consolation, though – VVVVVV seems to work very well on Linux through Wine, at least in a window. With the patch I’ve been working on, I’m going to make the game a bit more Wine friendly by having it start in windowed mode. edit: WAIT FOR THE PATCH!
As well as that, I’ve also been looking into making an online version of the game available too which should work better (since the flash browser plug in on linux seems to be a lot better than the standalone version, for whatever reason). More on that in the next few days.
In any case, I’ll keep trying – hopefully a newer version of the Linux flash standalone player comes along at some point to fix these issues. I wish there was more I could do