Here's something interesting, the Path of Exile team have put out a news post giving some answers to questions from the community and it has some interesting bits in it for us.
What is Path of Exile? It's a pretty popular online Action RPG, set in a dark fantasy world. Going by the numbers on Steam, it regularly sees a player count well above sixteen thousand people playing at once.
In the post they said this about Linux support:
Do you have any plans on implementing Ubuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.
I would like to add Linux support for the game client (the game servers actually already run on Linux, as it's what we use for our online infrastructure). It's a difficult project to prioritise because such a small slice of our playerbase runs Linux on their desktop. I switched from Linux to Windows in 2006 to work on PoE, so I appreciate how important this would be for those players.
As for the question about implementing Vulkan, they simply said a very clear "Yes.". You can see more in the official post.
One thing that does bug me, is the reasoning of their own playerbase only having a "small slice" that run Linux. It's kind of a 'well duh' moment, since the game isn't actually on Linux they can't realistically expect to see many. I'm well aware of course that our market share isn't huge but what do they expect?
At least if/when it does gain Vulkan support, those running it with Steam Play or Wine should see a better performance. If you want to see it on Linux officially though, now might be the time to let them know.
Hat tip to "PoELinuxFan".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
QuoteUbuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.Sorry, what?
Steam -> Steam Play -> Download & play PoE.
How is that hard?
I mean, sure, native would be even better, for performance alone, but PoE is definitely one of the best running games on Proton right now (at leat post Proton 4.2). Most of the problems reported on ProtonDB are actually bugs/performance issues of the game itself (like heavy stuttering when shit hits the fan) which happen on Windows as well.
I'd know, I played on both platforms for dozens of hours ;)
Last edited by Nanobang on 9 May 2019 at 11:54 am UTC
If they had (proper) Vulkan support though, I daresay the rest would fall into place with wine quite easily. Native might still be better for non-graphical components (networking I guess is a pretty big part of this game), but using Vulkan removes a massive blocker for getting a native version working, and wine could act as a semi-official way of running the game in the meantime then.
Mountain Man 9 May, 2019
Quoting: TheSHEEEPAs far as I know, it has always worked well in Wine. It's just that, in my opinion, the game is boring and not worth the trouble.QuoteUbuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.Sorry, what?
Steam -> Steam Play -> Download & play PoE.
How is that hard?
I mean, sure, native would be even better, for performance alone, but PoE is definitely one of the best running games on Proton right now (at leat post Proton 4.2). Most of the problems reported on ProtonDB are actually bugs/performance issues of the game itself (like heavy stuttering when shit hits the fan) which happen on Windows as well.
I'd know, I played on both platforms for dozens of hours ;)
Last edited by lqe5433 on 9 May 2019 at 2:16 pm UTC
Quoting: lqe5433If a game uses Vulkan, then almost no conversion is needed with WINE/proton?
Almost not _graphical_ conversion is needed. There's still plenty of other code that may not map directly (input handling, networking, system calls, 3rd party libs, audio, etc). It's just that the graphical translation is considered the most difficult to achieve, and obviously the most visible.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPQuoteUbuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.Sorry, what?
Steam -> Steam Play -> Download & play PoE.
How is that hard?
I mean, sure, native would be even better, for performance alone, but PoE is definitely one of the best running games on Proton right now (at leat post Proton 4.2). Most of the problems reported on ProtonDB are actually bugs/performance issues of the game itself (like heavy stuttering when shit hits the fan) which happen on Windows as well.
I'd know, I played on both platforms for dozens of hours ;)
I've consistently gotten it to launch. But it would always (90% of the time) crash on load screens between zones, or hard lock my entire computer. I've never found it to be "playable" through proton, even if I've been in game and killed some creatures before. Maybe I need to give it another try.
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