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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

#281

Post by politician »

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…

Saw "Coherent UI" in your comment and thought, "I bet it's Planetary Annihilation" and was not disappointed.

The dev team struggled to get Coherent UI working on Windows, to say nothing of Linux. They switched to Coherent UI late in the development cycle and the beta/launch was constantly glitched out. The problem with trying to run an out-of-proc UI renderer within a game loop were so numerous -- the game would frequently lock up in full screen with multiple instances of the Coherent UI render process running if you managed to escape.

... in Windows, not in Linux.

For fans of TA and SupCom, early PA was terrible. Later, the team worked through a lot of the issues, but the damages to their finances (and reviews) were done and PA never got the e-sports league it deserved.

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

#282

Post by politician »

tokai wrote: post #220

As I recall the development of Planetary Annihilation was a clusterfunk of bugs and really bad performance. I kickstarted it, and remember getting it to work on linux. Put even though it ran, it did so 15 frames a second, even on a powerful machine. I actually just gave up on the game as the developers released it, even though it was still unplayable for me - and going by steam reviews - numerous others (mostly windo…

It barely worked on Windows. I don't know what he's trying to pin on Linux.

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

#283

Post by dominotw »

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…

bitwig?

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

#284

Post by [deleted] »

plq wrote: post #127
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…

[deleted]

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

#285

Post by jorvi »

mscasts wrote: post #152
jimmy1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have seen this claim many times, but wonder about it's validity. It's easy to think that a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would make a lot of stir. But I used to play Heroes of Newerth years ago when Linux support were way worse than today. I also read HN then. I never saw any special treatment for that even tho I loved the game and it worked really, really good on linux. Searchin…

Unreal Tournament 2004 was cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux in 2004. But like this post indicates, the tech support headache isn’t worth it, so these days you can only get the Windows version on Steam despite the cross-platform binaries existing somewhere in Epic’s (back then still Epic MegaGames) vault.

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

#286

Post by plq »

_wmd wrote: post #224
plq wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your suggestion to ship glibc caused coffee to end up over my keyboard :) This is the road to hell, but you'd only know that if you had the slightest clue of the ABI interactions involved in swapping out a core library like that - starting with the reality that parts of the (probably binary-only) graphics stack must be linked and loaded in-process, and they naturally depend on at a minimum glibc. Your suggestion is t…

Ignoring your personal attacks, you and I are on the same page.

I do agree that shipping your glibc is "the road to hell" and shipping with the glibc could be qualified as "shipping in the form of its own Linux distro", as amusing as that sounds :) But that's the price of freedom you pay if you want to draw your platform boundary at the kernel -- you need to ship the whole userland! Where's the surprise in that? That means you need to understand the interactions between different version of /usr/lib64/opengl/nvidia/lib/libGLX_nvidia.so.0 (that you need to ship) and nvidia.ko (that is nvidia's binary driver loaded by the kernel, that you do NOT ship)

That's what people mean when they say they "are targeting Linux", even when they don't really understand the kind of work that that statement entails :)

Linux is an OS kernel. I'd wager it's the most popular one by far, in terms of the number of platforms that uses it.

Saying that "Linux is fragmented" is the wrong way to look at the problem. One should rather realize that Linux is just and OS kernel that is used by countless platforms. It's up to the developer to draw platform boundaries and focus engineering effort on the chosen ones.

If you need to support GNU/Linux with glibc-2.25, then you need to set up your testing bench to accommodate that. If you need to have native look and feeling in ubuntu, kubuntu and lubuntu, you already have 3 platforms with at least 2 LTS versions that you need to test with.

Each platform has its own quirks. Linux distros are the ones with the least amount of quirks, but in exchange we get many many platforms, because it's so easy to create them.

I guess that's life :)

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

#287

Post by pas »

hannasanarion wrote: post #211
zanny wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really fragmented? You support Ubuntu (in either its flatpak runtime or the Steam runtime) and you let everyone else figure it out on their own. Distros like Arch have been very good about providing the Steam Native Runtime and Ubuntu flatpak runtime in its own package system for just that reason. The support burden for developers is proportional to the operating systems you officially say you support. If you s…

> You support Ubuntu (in either its flatpak runtime or the Steam runtime) and you let everyone else figure it out on their own. And isn't that already how it is? Pretty sure Steam only supports Ubuntu LTS, steam on every other OS else is an unsupported hack.

They don't support every LTS as far as I know. Also, they don't really make any effort to keep up with getting ready for the next LTS release.

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

#288

Post by klodolph »

pantalaimon wrote: post #265
klodolph wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's Debian, because Debian tends to have compatibility packages for old versions too. For libcurl there's libcurl3. It depends on the package, of course.

Only for so long - try installing qt3 on a recent Debian or Ubuntu.

I might compare qt3 to Silverlight or ActiveX.

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

#289

Post by TheDauthi »

rconti wrote: post #241
taway_1212 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

Why not use OS X on an MBP, or Linux on a generic x86 machine? I'm not clear on why this is the only route to get you off of Windows.

Macs have good hardware. Or you might also want to dual boot.

Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.

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

#290

Post by madez »

bearforcenine wrote: post #280
madez wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _know_. That stone-walling is a reason why they have so many issues. I'd rethink that approach, and consider the cost of the ticket answers and marketing efforts to fight the flames vs that one day of a developer. I don't understand why they wouldn't do it, though. I see no plausible explanation. However, what if it doesn't work on Ubuntu either?

>I don't understand why they wouldn't do it, though. I see no plausible explanation. Money seems like a good reason. If a tiny fraction of your sales and a large fraction of your bugs are from a particular subset of those users, you don't want those users. They are too expensive.

> Money seems like a good reason.

I'd get that argument when the question is whether to make a linux version or not (using the 'movie model'). But my non-understanding was regarding Uber's refusal to spend the work day of one developer to do the right thing (you don't even need a trained developer for most of that work). If it doesn't work on either version of Debian, it is pretty safe to claim that it won't work on Ubuntu, now or soon in the future.

My principal point is that games on linux can be made just fine, but it must be done differently than for propietary systems. If you try it without changing the approach, there will be pain. And people will complain. Rightfully so.

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