171–180 of 415 posts
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Could someone explain why this is downvoted?
Self-important idea police?
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> This is why gaming on the Mac is only now starting to be a real thing. Is it? I mean, there's a good amount of support for gaming on the Mac, but I think it's always been so ... I wouldn't call it "a thing" though ... not in comparison to PC or Console ...
This was definitely not the case 10-15 years ago.
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> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countle…
Literally nobody cares about Linux gaming. It's not even press-worthy because of SteamOS. Anyone who games on Linux does it for the adventure of the process, not because it's convenient. If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.
Now, statistically, I realize we don't exist. But at absolute levels, we do.
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 chan…
I think the details matter because they're relevant to how we as a developer / customer community move forward.
If the GP is correct, then the pain felt by these particular devs might not be a sign that targeting Linux is in general a bad idea. For example, we might help future projects be successful simply by spreading awareness of techniques known to make it easier to target Linux / SteamOS.
Regarding the 0.1% of sales issue, perhaps some of that number's smallness comes from a bootstrapping problem. I.e., there's a vicious cycle of: (bad drivers) --> (game is crashy) --> (poor sales) --> (gfx card vendors not motivated to improve drivers) --> (bad drivers) --> ...
I don't think there's much an individual game dev shop can do to break that cycle, but perhaps it's still useful to understand the problem.
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…
1. The game industry is stuck on a "release and forget" model. Except for games designed up-front to have some recurring revenue component, few get more than a couple token patches after release. (There are lots of industry horror stories about studios that find out that they can't even compile a game anymore two years after release.)
2. Most games today rely on proprietary middleware, and the industry is steadily moving farther in that direction. Expecting anyone who wants to rebuild the game to pony up for a site license sounds like a nonstarter. In fact, even sharing information on the middleware is sometimes an NDA violation (everything related to consoles is shrouded in an absurd amount of secrecy) so the codebase might have to be scrubbed of all comments prior to release. I'm sure the games community will be thrilled.
What I think we really need is for someone to revive the Loki model where a studio dedicates itself to publishing Linux ports of existing games. At this point, I'd be willing to pay a company like that a lump up-front fee for a game that includes, say, a year of bug fixes/upgrades, and some recurring fee after that for compatibility updates.
The flip side of this is: I only game on Linux. If your game doesn't run well on Linux, chances are, I'll never play it. There's already a back-log of games on my wish list that I'll get to as soon as i find the time.
Its 100% no tux, no bux at this point. My last Windows title was Darksiders 2. Darksiders 3 came out in 2018, I was totally hype for it, but it was Windows / Xbox / PS4, so no deal there. Not like I have a shortage of dozens of other games to still get around to, my library is overflowing with titles I need to finish like Tomb Raider and Metro.
The worst part was that Nordic was apparently intent to rerelease the remasters of Darksiders on Linux but just dropped it at some point. If they did the math and said it wasn't worth the time fine by them.
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…
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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 fo…
I keep a dualboot system because of the current situation. Linux for "real work" Windows for gaming (no-frills setup) and music production (much easier and less clunky low latency setup, way more availability of free synths etc) I absolutely adore Linux for everything it has done to my career but I cannot drop my Windows system yet.
I have to say that even on Windows, driver stability leaves much to be desired (for Nvidia in my case).
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> 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.
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> 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. Except for video drivers. And, as the tweet notes, the bulk of their issues on Linux were related to graphics.
Why except video drivers? Both AMD's and Intel's drivers are free and open, as is mesa. The other closed drivers are alien to a free software system anyways.