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GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

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Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#21

Post by yupyupyups »

thesnide wrote: post #13
aeurielesn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a SteamDeack owner, I'm really looking forward to see AAA games be Linux-first. Windows gaming really needs to stop.

I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only stable ABI is the win32 one. The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't. As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game. Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus…

You can create portable apps on Linux that will work for years to come. Bundle everything except for very core libraries, even libstd++. Things to NOT bundle would be glibc and any opengl implementation. To make apps backwards compatible with older versions of Linux, compile the app on a system with the oldest glibc you wish to support (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible).

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#22

Post by NegatioN »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #19
NegatioN wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a perfect solution, but you could just use Steam to load games from GOG on Linux though. Thereby getting "the best of both worlds". I have yet to stumble upon any major issue doing this.

What does Steam bring to the table here?

You get to launch Windows games through Steam Proton. It's a no-hassle way to get up and running with gaming on Linux, although many are probably using Wine or Lutrix.

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#23

Post by ykonstant »

freedomben wrote: post #2

Just a high level comment on GOG, I am immensely grateful to them for existing and for sticking so strong to their principles against DRM, and for maintaining great customer service. I have bought a lot of games from GOG and have been very happy. As an exclusively Linux user, I also appreciate how well GOG works with Lutris et al and that they aren't making life harder for those devs. I love the offline installers an…

Unfortunately, it is (very) hard to make non-native games from GOG work on Linux, as someone who just doesn't "grok" Wine. This is especially painful for me, because I have supported and want to support GOG, but my obscure point and click adventure games work out of the box with Proton on Steam, which is more than I can say about GOG games.

To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working on my linux system: GRIS, bought from GOG. I tried everything suggested online, nothing worked. Since then (I still have not played GRIS), I tend to get stuff from Steam.

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#24

Post by segasaturn »

thesnide wrote: post #13
aeurielesn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a SteamDeack owner, I'm really looking forward to see AAA games be Linux-first. Windows gaming really needs to stop.

I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only stable ABI is the win32 one. The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't. As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game. Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus…

Is this something that Flatpak could fix?

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#25

Post by ChocolateGod »

yupyupyups wrote: post #21
thesnide wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only stable ABI is the win32 one. The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't. As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game. Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus…

You can create portable apps on Linux that will work for years to come. Bundle everything except for very core libraries, even libstd++. Things to NOT bundle would be glibc and any opengl implementation. To make apps backwards compatible with older versions of Linux, compile the app on a system with the oldest glibc you wish to support (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible).

This never really works in practice, far too many variations and compilation differences between distros. The Linux Standard Base was an attempt to do this and it went.... no where.

> (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible).

I've lost count of times I've had "portable" binaries not work because I'm using a newer version of glibc and the binary was compiled for Ubuntu/Debian.

The only "standardised" way of making native Linux apps portable and "work for life" is to use the thing that worked in the server space, containers, Flatpak being the vendor-neutral and more widely supported for desktop apps.

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#26

Post by keyringlight »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #15
freedomben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by they ignore Linux users? Every game clearly indicates whether it provides a Linux installer so there aren't any surprises there, and even in the cart you'll get a banner message saying something like, "Some of these games don't work on your operating system (Linux)" to avoid surprises. You can even search the store filtering only for games that provide a Linux installer, which is a control I use r…

>They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy This is a bit of an issue. For example, Dead Cells offers daily challenges and has a few items locked behind completing them. They facilitate these by using the platform's tooling, which means the GOG version uses Galaxy and Linux users can't access it. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing on the site telling you this, troubleshooting the problem took a fair amount of di…

Another aspect to this, for recent games I imagine on a certain level it's on the original developer to implement things for their games sold through the GOG channel. There is a spreadsheet [1] of games where the GOG version has lesser functionality or has been left behind compared to others, usually steam.

This is one of my problems with the "PC gaming = steam" attitude that has become prevalent, PC as a platform is broad and varied, and if you're going to sell your product on multiple stores without making clear that they're different then you really should support them, otherwise be honest enough to only sell where you are prepared to. I'd say managing expectations and who's responsible only gets muddier when you're involving compatibility across different windows versions, hardware generations, or different OSes entirely.

[1] - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkgtTDRB2I...

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#27

Post by ChocolateGod »

segasaturn wrote: post #24
thesnide wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only stable ABI is the win32 one. The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't. As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game. Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus…

Is this something that Flatpak could fix?

Steam can already use bwrap (Flatpaks sandbox system) with its own runtime to accomplish this, but why bother when you can just target Win32 and have it work out the box.

Outside of graphic and input, game engines make use of very few native APIs compared to applications as they're made to be portable with consoles.

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#28

Post by izacus »

ykonstant wrote: post #23
freedomben wrote: post #2

Just a high level comment on GOG, I am immensely grateful to them for existing and for sticking so strong to their principles against DRM, and for maintaining great customer service. I have bought a lot of games from GOG and have been very happy. As an exclusively Linux user, I also appreciate how well GOG works with Lutris et al and that they aren't making life harder for those devs. I love the offline installers an…

Unfortunately, it is (very) hard to make non-native games from GOG work on Linux, as someone who just doesn't "grok" Wine. This is especially painful for me, because I have supported and want to support GOG, but my obscure point and click adventure games work out of the box with Proton on Steam, which is more than I can say about GOG games. To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working o…

GoG games work just fine when installed with Heroic in Linux.

Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds support for your rare operating system is some massive entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make them work now.

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#29

Post by ensignavenger »

izacus wrote: post #28
ykonstant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it is (very) hard to make non-native games from GOG work on Linux, as someone who just doesn't "grok" Wine. This is especially painful for me, because I have supported and want to support GOG, but my obscure point and click adventure games work out of the box with Proton on Steam, which is more than I can say about GOG games. To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working o…

GoG games work just fine when installed with Heroic in Linux. Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds support for your rare operating system is some massive entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make them work now.

Nobody is demanding anything. They simply stated what they value as a consumer, and if GOG wants more of their business, what they need to do to earn it. This is valuable feedback to any company.

Re: GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

#30

Post by mig39 »

Now if only GOG could fix their Mac client so that you can actually quit it.

Maybe someone at GOG will actually read this and let a project manager to let a programmer know to fix this. Because they keep doing everything else other than fixing a really really annoying bug. We shouldn't have to force-quit apps!

https://www.gog.com/forum/general_beta_gog_galaxy_2.0/macos_...

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