Licencing and installation
What hurdles do you have to negotiate to get it up and running?
All of the programs that we’re looking at, other than Asset Forge, are open source and free. In all fairness, Asset Forge
is reasonably priced ($19.95 and $39.95 for the Standard and Deluxe versions, respectively). When you make a payment, you’re sent a download link to Asset Forge’s zip file. You run the files from a directory, rather than adding the program to the system.
Because Art of Illusion is a Java application, you’ll need a fully working Java Runtime Environment setup for your distribution before installing it. To get the latest version, we downloaded it from the website and ran the installation script.
For Dust3D, we downloaded the AppImage of the latest version from the website. This ran as expected. The source code is also available on the website for those who want to build it themselves.
We installed the Ubuntu version of Bforartists by downloading the .deb from the website. Note that Bforartists is a fork of Blender.
This means that it’s sometimes slightly behind the latest Blender
release in terms of features and improvements.
The version number of Goxel for Linux was in line with other versions, but we had to download the runnable binary, after some hunting around, from the ‘Older Versions’ page as the link for it wasn’t on the main page. This binary is a single file and it deposits an INI file in the current directory. Alternatively, there’s buildable source code available. There are also, intriguingly, Android and iOS versions to be had.