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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

#121

Post by everyone »

2007s 'Supreme commander' is still by far the best game in that series, and the best RTS ever imo. It's still going strong, and has an awesome community-built matchmaking service, that effortlessly supports mods and maps, called 'Forged Alliance Forever' or 'FAF' https://www.faforever.com/

Imo the idea of projecting an epic RTS onto a sphere is just, bafflingly bad. In supreme commander, you zoom out the view to get a strategic overview of the entire map.. You cant ever do that with a sphere. I am just bemused by this game.

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

#122

Post by FigBug »

hkt wrote: post #109
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 too…

They are VST plugins and the are dynamic libraries. Call dlopen and call a specified function.

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

#123

Post by fb03 »

thecatspaw wrote: post #119
mitgraduate wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

so then why use electron as well if the majority of your code is going to be native anyway?

exactly.

the UI is the minority of the code. the main engine is gonna need to be implemented in some language which has strict guarantees about performance. also, not having a garbage collector that fires in a seemingly random way helps a lot too :)

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

#124

Post by youdontknowtho »

erikb wrote: post #78
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 don't know why people say that. You don't support Windows XP and Windows 10 either with the same binary. In contrast to Windows you can provide or pay someone to provide libcurl3 if you want to continue to use it. MS will just say you can go F yourself. In contrast to Windows you can study the source code and write a wrapper that provides a central API point that you can use in your single code base. In contrast to…

This is a common misconception. Microsoft is a little insane about backward compatibility. You can target versions of Windows with a single binary from the latest all the way back to unsupported OS's like XP. There are lot's of companies that take advantage of this. It's one of the reasons why MS has so much trouble moving app developers to the new hotness, even if it's safer, faster, or whatever. Because of that the new hotness doesn't get enough traction to support continued development and they sunset it early which draws even more ire from people.

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

#125

Post by dejaime »

brianwawok wrote: post #4
dcbadacd wrote: post #2

This sounds like complaining about users being able to report bugs.

Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?

Complaints or tickets? I would bet that in this game's case what is happening is Linux gamers are techy and will properly file tickets and try and be helpful. While windows players will simply do as I do on windows games and leave a negative review.

Looking at the game's reviews, first two negative ones:

> "wont fit my screen. no setting to scale it correctly... Looks like i have to go buy a new monitor to play this game to its full extent"

> "Constant crashing. When it wasent crashing there were so many bugs involved it wasent funny. The classic one was way better and im happy I still have it so I can play. I will change my review if they fix the game and get it so people can play it, but fornow its just contant crashes. Beware! "

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

#126

Post by chme »

swish_bob wrote: post #90
chme wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then redirecting those issues to the right mailing list could still be very welcome by someone. IMO issues does not need to be fixed by the game developers and drv developers might be happy to have them and some code that reproduces them. Not sure why the game dev complains here.

Because dealing with the users who experience the problems costs more than they make in sales? If every additional Linux sale costs you more than it makes? There's being a good citizen. There's wanting to offer support to a small set of customers. Then there's losing money. At some point, you just can't afford to service the long tail.

If the issue the user has found is in the driver, then redirecting them there or maybe sending an automatic email for each unique issue to the driver mailing list might help fix the issue without much effort on the game dev side.

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

#127

Post by plq »

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 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.

If you don't want to depend on the libcurl provided by the OS, ship your own.

If you don't want to depend on the glibc provided by the OS, ship your own, with your own dynamic linker.

readelf -n will tell you the oldest kernel that will run your stuff. Put that in the requirements document. Write a bash script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly and make sure that's the main entry point to your application during deployment.

You're set.

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

#128

Post by simias »

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…

Technically speaking I'm sure you're right. In practice it doesn't really matter though, if they did it that way it's either because it was easier or because that's the way they were used to doing it. The fact that "technically" it's not Linux's fault doesn't really matter, unless you're more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game.

Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? So that they'd get kudo "clean code" points from people on HN? Most for-profit software cares very little about that, and for good reasons.

Gaming on Linux sucks because Linux is not popular for gaming. Linux is not popular for gaming because gaming on Linux sucks. That's the root of the issue.

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

#129

Post by smileybarry »

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…

He points out that a very large percentage of the crashes were graphics driver related, not dependency issues that would be solved by the Steam runtime.

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

#130

Post by stratosmacker »

Why don't we just support the Steam version of Debian and be done with it? Anyone running custom things should be ready to make their custom fixes...

Oh well, this guys sounds full of hubris. Just because something isn't immediately profitable doesn't mean the community as a whole doesn't benefit from you ironing out bugs.

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