I did my bit for charity and grabbed both the Humble Indie Bundles 1 & 2 which includes all 3 ports of this (and other) Indie titles. The win32/Mac ports were made redeemable via Steam sometime thereafter.
Having 'same' game titles of various ports, is a very useful thing -- it gives one the opportunity to truly test and compare what 'native' is like compared to using crossover/wine to hoist the win32 port. You can directly compare results, on the same platform, at some realistic vantage point -- it's not all that often you get to do this. I've spent the last couple of days doing just that - running the Mac port on my iMac, the linux port on one or another of my linux boxes, and comparing that performance to what it's like using Crossover Games on the same machines to run both the stand-alone and Steam versions of the win32 port. Imho, caveat the work-around, running the win32 port with Crossover Games is just winning the race right now....here's why...
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Native linux port -- Adobe Flash has always been a bit fractious in linux, I'm not sure why, but it seems awfully prone to display lag a lot of the time. This is so with the native port of this game as well when using fullscreen, but it does calm down a bit if set to use windowed mode.
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win32 ports on linux -- The work-around (as detailed in the Tips&Tricks) merely disables the accelerated 3D graphics setting of the Adobe player code, which is by default enabled at install, but which doesn't work in Crossover/Wine yet. Once you disable that setting, the win32 ports run without a flaw, and punching this out to fullscreen isn't a problem ; the game remains stable, and has more of an artistic quality about it fullscreen with thick black borders (it's the same in Windows btw), sort of gives the game that 'moving picture in a frame look' which I quite like. There was no real appreciable difference in actual raw performance levels, it was just more stable here.
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Native Mac port -- By contrast, Adobe has always been a little bit happier in OSX than in linux for a long time now, and it didn't surprise me at all to find the native Mac ports (Steam and stand-alone) work smoothly and as they should on my 11,2 iMac....that said...
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win32 ports on OSX -- Caveat the same work-around above, the win32 ports on the iMac...really, I couldn't pick the difference performance wise between native and win32 ports on the Mac. Sure, if I looked at process thread count, realtime CPU slice that the win32 and wine processes were calling upon and such'n'similar, we're going to be consuming more system resources there's little doubt, but, considering we are pushing the win32 runtime code through all this overhead...and still arrive at near identical performance at the same time compared to native...that, is a pretty neat result.
So, if the linux native version did fullscreen better or the same as the win32/CXG combo, it'd be neck and neck...but it doesn't ; if you want 'nice' fullscreen performance with this title on linux, CXG & win32 port works best. Tbh, I was actually a little surprised the win32 version hoisted on Steam, performed near identically as the stand-alone (without the Steam overhead)..again, that's a nice result to observe.
The current work-around is a kludge, but hopefully they'll fix that (wine) problem with flash one day. I did a crosstie up for the stand-alone win32 version today...in the interim I may do another crosstie to automate the work-around -- can't quite do Steamapps yet with crossties, but it is coming....so this all turns out to be like the other games where there's multiple platform ports, in that many times I'm finding Crossover Games running the win32 ports, is just as viable as running native, and sometimes just that little bit better too...
Cheers!
