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Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

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Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#101

Post by fb03 »

mitgraduate wrote: post #81
loa-in-backup wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately DAW and VST plugins are not something you can make in Electron

Can you please explain why?

Audio software has strict buffer/latency demands which usually cannot be guaranteed on interpreted language platforms.

Doing audio synthesis with JS or any other interpreted language really is totally possible and has been done in a more or less serious way in several implementations and webtoys etc. But if you need extremely low latency and guarantees you cannot go that route, sadly.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#102

Post by Jach »

rusk wrote: post #46
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still represent a vastly disproportionate amount of work for how much extra money they get you. They get you 0.1% extra sales, but they cost you 25% (= 20/80*100) extra support work. And this is nevermind the extra time spent during development. Your point would hold if the issues reported by Linux users would also fix issues on Windows. Some issues would occur on both systems, but I bet the vast majority is wei…

> I bet the vast majority This is the crux of your assertion and requires substantiation. On the other hands, all these Linux user might be doing you "a favour" taking the time to log these tickets that less conscientious users on other systems would. Of course that does depend on the classification of the tickets but coming from that community I wouldn't expect them to be trivial issues ...

It's even more of a favor if the bugs aren't just linux-only. But if they're in gfx drivers like the tweet implies and auto-reported, the only thing you'd really care about is "newest drivers?" Same as the parade of crashes in Windows for the same reason, you want to just tell people to update.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#103

Post by wheelerwj »

zeroname wrote: post #64
rkido wrote: post #53

Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don't make these mistakes, so this isn't really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming. It's worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making L…

I think you're in denial. If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux , but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.

100% this.

source: - am a business person - am a developer - am a linux users - am a linux gamer

I love the idea of being able to game and work/dev on the same machine. But its not the current reality and its not the reality of the near future. Ive recently settled for macos because even though it doesn't offer optimal solutions for anything, it offers the really nice solutions for everything.

I tried linux gaming for years, and Steam really really gave it a strong push. But the truth is, gaming on linux is complicated and doesn't offer the same experience as on Windows or even macos. I'd rather my favorite studios and developers dedicate its linux resources to customers that pay instead.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#105

Post by linuxftw »

FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

> And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old versions then the entire project is held back from using latest C++.

> And distos aren't backwards compatible. ie when libcurl4 is released, they remove libcurl3. So you can't have one binary for Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04.

Release the source and the community will help you with many of these issues.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#106

Post by loa-in-backup »

mitgraduate wrote: post #81
loa-in-backup wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately DAW and VST plugins are not something you can make in Electron

Can you please explain why?

There are few reasons: - they most of the time run embedded in a DAW - they are usually computationally intensive themselves - they are meant to be instanced as far as memory/CPU can go

ad to the third point: Music producers already require and use pretty powerful rigs: 32-128GB RAM is not uncommon, CPU as good as it gets. There's great benefit when you can run 100 instrument synthesizer instances parallel vs 14 instances - it's a difference between a differentiated orchestra and a rock band.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#107

Post by mitgraduate »

fb03 wrote: post #101
mitgraduate wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain why?

Audio software has strict buffer/latency demands which usually cannot be guaranteed on interpreted language platforms. Doing audio synthesis with JS or any other interpreted language really is totally possible and has been done in a more or less serious way in several implementations and webtoys etc. But if you need extremely low latency and guarantees you cannot go that route, sadly.

You can always write native extension in c++/rust/c.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#108

Post by madez »

I'll take the step and say that most developers do the mistake to treat linux like any other proprietary system which they can target with stable interfaces and call it a day.

Free software changes more often, but when it does, it is not that big of a problem because you have both control over code and the code that your code interacts with, because all code is accessible.

If game developers opened up, and here I don't demand the optimum, which would be open sourcing their game[0], but just to get people involved that actually are active in both their code and the free software community, they could deal with the eco system much better and make their code actually work even on most of the many configurations that exist.

Of course, the usual argument is that game developers don't have to care about this on other systems, but in fact they did have to gather experience and training on the other platforms, and with free systems, once you are involved in it, you can deal with it much more efficiently than what it seems at the start. There is nothing magic about filing a bug against mesa.

I am one of the persons that contacted Uber about PA not working on my linux system. It was a recent Debian stable without modifications. They didn't offer meaningful support. I just asked them to install a debian stable with free mesa drivers on a computer with a recent AMD gpu, and try to build and run PA, and see why it doesn't work (there were obvious, easy to reproduce issues). That is not a lot of engineering time, and I bet solving those problem would have solved many problems in linux systems.

[0] This starts to become a cultural problem that seems to need laws to deal with. As a society, we shouldn't accept to never have our cultural heritage, which games are part of, in the public domain in a usable form (source code and documentation).

Edit 1: Writing closed programs for a free software community is difficult. I think that it should be difficult. That pain is a constant reminder that you're doing it wrong.

Edit 2: Steam counts unsuccessful launches of a game where the game is laughibly broken as playing time, so after some extenstive testing, you can't even refund a game on Steam because it says you've played more than 2 hours -.-

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#109

Post by hkt »

FigBug wrote: post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

I concluded ages ago that no substantial applications should be integrated into an operating system. Dynamic linking if you're building something portable is just an awful idea because of how much variety you'll inevitably have to support (or choose not to support).

Some people have written about AppImages, this also applies to FlatPak and similar techs too. Isolating anything more complicated than a command line tool is the way forward and the tech exists. Not using isolation this way is a recipe for pain, whether it be on the desktop or the server (or the phone).

It depends how the plugins are loaded - it'd be great if they could use sockets so that AppImages were viable. No idea myself, though.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#110

Post by antris »

zeroname wrote: post #88
antris wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything from Android can be forked into any number of Linux distros you want to make. So none of it is Android-specific, really. For example Android software worked on Jolla's Sailfish OS.

Sailfish has a crappy Android simulation layer. You don't really want that on the Desktop. Android and Desktop Linux are completely different platforms, except maybe for the graphics APIs (Vulkan/OpenGL).

I'm not saying I would want that. My original point was that the person I was replying to said that they won't believe Linux gaming would ever be predominant. I'm saying it already is.
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