Wube Software gave Factorio something players have been asking for 11 years - a full ARM64 Linux port to play anywhere, which is ready for the Steam Frame.
This was fairly easy because they already had ARM64 support (Switch) and x86 Linux support. That meant they had already worked out any architectural differences and they had a set of Linux-friendly libraries. The only real hurdles were:
Getting a non-Frame ARM64 Linux system for testing
Steam ARM64 teething issues since Valve has been working on the expectation that nearly everything will be either x86 or ARM Android builds run through a wrapper
A single library that uses a funky build system
If they’d outsourced the Switch port to a porting house or didn’t already have Linux support, this would have been a ton of work.
This was fairly easy because they already had ARM64 support (Switch) and x86 Linux support. That meant they had already worked out any architectural differences and they had a set of Linux-friendly libraries. The only real hurdles were:
If they’d outsourced the Switch port to a porting house or didn’t already have Linux support, this would have been a ton of work.