451–458 of 458 posts
Absolutely. I've been stubborn in the past five years or so about Linux gaming where if a game doesn't work, I just don't play it. And as time went on in the past few years, more and more games just... started working out of the box. Maybe 30% of games worked a few years back and now probably 98% work. It's not always perfect (looking at you, borderlands 3), but it works in a vast majority of games I've played. If ga…
I must not have hit this yet - my girlfriend and I recently started playing through after finding it cheap on Greenmangaming, and it plays fine. Neither of us have super powerful PCs, just 6600XTs, but the level of bugginess (such as the game jumping to default monitor every so often) is about what I would expect for Windows too given how complicated modern games are.
Absolutely. I've been stubborn in the past five years or so about Linux gaming where if a game doesn't work, I just don't play it. And as time went on in the past few years, more and more games just... started working out of the box. Maybe 30% of games worked a few years back and now probably 98% work. It's not always perfect (looking at you, borderlands 3), but it works in a vast majority of games I've played. If ga…
> Looking at you, Borderlands 3 I must not have hit this yet - my girlfriend and I recently started playing through after finding it cheap on Greenmangaming, and it plays fine. Neither of us have super powerful PCs, just 6600XTs, but the level of bugginess (such as the game jumping to default monitor every so often) is about what I would expect for Windows too given how complicated modern games are.
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>What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, but Proton and the Steam Deck are their future insurance policy against Microsoft coming after their profits in the future. The writing was on the wall, they saw how much money Epic was giving to…
Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" Well yeah. That's what a company is. Companies are also people, and people make decisions, and those decisions are sometimes influenced by more than the mere bottom line. You can't read their minds, and it's the opposite of charitable to assume the worst. Fully agree about the rest though. It certainly makes b…
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There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects. The largest platform has the most to gain, when it makes use of social interaction.
Most of the social interaction in the games space happens on discord these days though, and has since about 2016. The only social network effect steam currently has is with game invites, since it's slightly more annoying to join a party of friends via the xbox version of sea of thieves than the steam version, for example.
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You keep repeating this but have you actually tried to distribute binary software for Linux? In what way has "fragmentation" made that harder?
A few links gathered from a quick google search as a primer: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97 https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-... https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_... https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header In other words: there are a lot of steps and a lot of gotchyas to doing this that you're glossi…
But the "easy" solution is really that simple: compile on the oldest distro you want to support and statically link everything you can.
If you have additional requirements like needing a newer compiler or needing dynamic linking then there are more gotchas but even those are not really things that are hard to solve but rather things you need to be aware of.
And even those are all about ABIs not being forward compatible so you can't run things targeting newer system with older systems and instead need to take care to target the older ABIs that are still supported (or to remove unnecessary ABI depencencies). But that has nothing to do with fragmentation. You'd get that even if there was only a single distro.
Unless by fragmentation you mean that that no everyone is on the latest version supporting the ABI of your bleeding edge dev environment which is a ridiculous requirement that you only get if the ABI is frozen. Pretty much no platform has a forward-compatible ABI except if you count dead ones that don't change at all.
I do agree that toolchains should make it easier to target older ABIs. Something to control the target glibc version akin to the WINVER or _WIN32_WINNT macros would be really nice to have. But again, unless have some nonstandard requirements, just compiling on the oldest distro you want to support and statically linking most things works.
> I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary?
Plenty peole do. Unity spits out such binaries (+data) most games outside of steam are distributed like this.
OSS projects often don't bother because they can get into distro repos. Some do though.
> Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?
Besides sandboxing (which users care about, not apps), Flatpak and AppImage primarily make it trivial to distribute software that was designed for the distribution model where it depends on other libraries in the distribution. They also try to solve desktop integration which is not important for Games.
Even if you could not easily distribute binary software without Flatpak et. al, nothing is stopping devs from using those tools for games distribution so I hardly see how their existence is an argument for fragmentation making it harder .
I dig most of this article, and I do applaud the work Valve is doing for the Linux gaming ecosystem, but I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers. That trend in gaming bothers me to no end, and I refuse to knowingly install a game that features one. The presence of 15 year old script kiddies using aimbots does NOT IN ANY WAY justify having kernel level control over my machine, Linux or otherwise. V…
This comment deserves a much more detailed response than I'm able to give at the moment, but I can give some very brief thoughts: Let me say that I have been working in AAA online game development for more than 7 years now; I have worked on games that had 10's of millions of players, and these were full fat $60 AAA games. Cheating was the second[0] biggest issue of our games, it sucked the entire enjoyment out- getti…
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What? You can totally build an aimbot using nothing but image recognition.
But it does eliminate whole classes of cheats like ESPs and wallhacks. It also allows for servers to trust the clients. There's no issue with letting a client determine if they've killed someone instead of needing on the server to rollback and check for kills.