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Make Bug reporting easy. While you can assume most linxers are technically savy and like solving computer related problems, not everyone is at the same level in expertise or ability (or free time). I had one game website that simply said, if you have a bug submit it and the log file here (insert link to their tracker). No indication on what the file's name was, location, etc.

You don't need anything fancy like a log file uploader or anything like that, just some simple, specific directions of what you'd like us to provide. Help us help you!

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Ok so after reading through this wave of chaotic comments I just had to signup for the sole reason of posting this comment.

First off we are second class citizens when it comes to video games. This is a fact so accept it and deal with it.

Second, unless you've been living under a rock this entire time then you know there are going to be issues when a company first releases a game for Linux without prior experience of doing so in the past. Hell even Feral ports are never perfect the moment they go up for sale and they have a lot of experience in this department. So expecting that TW2 was going to be all fine and dandy the moment you got your hands on it was just plain ignorant.

Third, before you EVER make a purchase you have to ask yourself; Do I want to be one of those to purchase at release and help them identify bugs and possibly find workarounds/fixes so that they can share with others what you've done? If not, wait! This website usually covers things like this so coming here you can find out if it's ready for you to plug and play so to speak.

No one forced you buy the game! If the company does not listen to feedback on helping improve the game then simply abstain from purchasing anything from them in the future it's as simple as that.

The biggest point I want to make is if your not willing to go through hardships to make Linux a better platform by participating its growth then you really shouldn't be using Linux at all for the desktop. We don't want you! The only way Linux will ever become a first class citizen is if we the community help make that dream a reality.

Constructive criticism is great and in fact needed. Undeserving personal attacks on another human being make me sad the earth had to subjected to the weight of your ego.

p.s when I say Linux, I am referring to GNU/Linux
m(^-^)m

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Hold tight guys, we probably making too much out of this. It surely does not help linux gaming to "bash" devs and porters.

I understand the disappointment, but we have to carry on and continue to be patient and helpful for the devs like we usually do.

It's the tone that makes the music. "your port is crap and perf sucks" and "A couple of users observed performance issue with your recent port, here are my specs: Ryzen R40k , 2Tb of DDR12..." is a different way of saying the same thing. But at the end of the day it makes a big difference.

On top of that being on a good mood when you face problems, even if does not help solving it, as least avoids adding more problem to it :p

I'm not trying to school anyone. But some have to understand that words on the internet have consequences even if we don't see each other faces. Some of these people will probably not change, but at least if we don't flame them and answer them calmly with respect it won't make the fire too big to be extinguished.

We are on an open source OS which has a totally different philosophy from mac and windows. I think it implies that we continue to behave openly and show that our OS choice is also a matter of ideal that we all have.

Honestly there is not that many studios taking us for wallet scum. And I'm quite gratefull that we have so many great devs and great indie people willing to do their best. The same also goes for our community ambassadors.


To conclude (sorry for the big paragraph), many devs appreciate our community. It takes everyone a little restraint in order to carry on with those amazing last years that we had thanks to all of you.

Simply keep up with the good penguin vibe. Keep your extinguisher near you, and peace!

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Quoting: liamdaweI also made sure to cover it when it was patched, to show how far it had come. This is what I do, this is my job.
Learn the difference between being critical and being hateful.

I didn't say you were hateful, quite the contrary actually if you read the whole post.

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Quoting: camocelticI'm GUESSING that what happened was that they may have realized the project was too big to port in-house like they were probably doing, there was some big problem that can't be fixed, or something similar. I think that (plus some miscommunication) would explain the weird confirmed/unconfirmed problem: Game started in development with port in mind, problems caused it to be put on the shelf, etc.

I'd guess something similar. They probably started the porting (in-house, or with external porters like VP), and that effort hit some major technical setbacks, or the effort was substantial and more than they anticipated, and they didn't want to pay for it. TW3 is no small deal - technically it's quite more complicated than TW2. Just look at how Wine developers are chiseling at it, even though they are making good progress.

Speaking of which, it would be nice for CDPR to partner with Codeweavers and fund more of that development (improving performance for example).

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Quoting: PhiladelphusSerious question, are there actually that many 64-bit executable games out there and is it actually beneficial?

I don't believe the argument is really one of how much benefit 64 bit has over 32 bit. Rather, it's an argument of how beneficial is it to ship both 64 bit and 32 bit builds. If you're writing your own engine from scratch, it's quite a waste of time to make sure it's 32 bit compatible on Linux, just make it 64 bit. If you're building a game using a pre-built engine like Unity, Unreal, etc. then you will gain benefits from making 64 bit builds like wider vectors for SIMD instructions and more available memory for your game and won't really gain anything from 32 bit builds.

I would also argue that if there's a rare case where it's easier for a company to make only 32 bit builds why would they waste any time on 64 bit. I can't imagine too many circumstances where this would be the case, but I'm sure it's come up somewhere.

In a nutshell, the point is time and money. 32 bit builds in almost every case are a waste of both time and money. The game we're building right now we've actually cut out 32 bit builds on even Windows due to memory constraints since our game is very heavy on UGC (User Generated Content). I don't feel too bad about cutting out 5% of the market. It really is time to move on from 32 bit :)

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Quoting: Nyamiou

Quoting: liamdaweI just want people to think a little more, but it's clear from people like "Nyamiou" that we have a lot of work to do. And yes, I know, you will never be able to make a community better than it is, but I will die trying ;)

You have a very selective memory, you were part of the backlash yourself and I wasn't.

Here's the thing, part of my job is to report on things. I reported it accurately on how it performed at the time, but I was working against the clock as back then VP were not in contact with us so the port arrived completely unexpected with no warning. I had to quickly piece together as much information as I could find. And if you bothered to read the article, you would note what I said about mistakes being made at the time.

I also made sure to cover it when it was patched, to show how far it had come. This is what I do, this is my job.
Learn the difference between being critical and being hateful.

Anyway, this is going in circles with strong opinions on each side. I personally won't be commenting on it any further and if it derails too far comments will end up getting locked. Keep emotions in check please everyone :)

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Nyamiou

Quoting: Guest...snip...

I'm not trolling, I'm making an argument about a subject that is important to me. The Linux gaming community continually takes blow and we got an habit of showing the other cheek, which is nice, but sometimes you got to stand and fight for what is right. The Linux community is not a hanful of haters, I will not let anyone say that and I will not let any Linux gamer admit it just so we can get the "pardon" of any gaming company. This has gone too far, we can't let think like that pass, and we cannot accept that company treat us like we are a handful of haters either.

But anyway I'm not suprised by your reaction, everytime a Linux gamer try to speak up for all the injustice that we get, someone come to shut him down, too afraid that the big companies might not like us anymore if we speak up. The result is that today Linux gamers are not respected anymore.

Well, guess what - there was a handful of haters going on! I'm saying it. The community was atrocious to VP. That happened, that was public, and I suggest you deal with it. It wasn't criticism, it was hatred.
You can speak up against companies that do shit to GNU/Linux, but it doesn't mean that GNU/Linux gamers (in this case) are perfect either. Door swings both ways. In this case, why doesn't someone who received so much crap from the community have the right to say that he received all that crap?
I don't think what happened to jaycee in particular is indicative of the community at large, and I don't think it's what things are like in general for most devs. But I also recognise that it's what it's like for him. Continued attacks on him and refusal to accept the situation is only going to reinforce his view....and quite honestly, it's making me think less of large portions of the community too.

You are not getting it, this hate wasn't from this community. I don't remember any pillars of the community either here or on reddit saying that we should send death threat or personal attacks to VP or CDPR or anyone at all, I don't even remember seeing any of this attacks and contrary to some people here might believe I wasn't certainly part of it and if you go back and find the threads you'll see that when the backlash happened I was among the guys defending VP (unlike liam).

I'd suggest you to search the threads again and read them yourself, and then you tell me if it were about people complaining about having paid for a non-playable game and bad communication or if it was hatred like you said.

Quoting: liamdaweI just want people to think a little more, but it's clear from people like "Nyamiou" that we have a lot of work to do. And yes, I know, you will never be able to make a community better than it is, but I will die trying ;)

You have a very selective memory, you were part of the backlash yourself and I wasn't.

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Great talk from Steam Dev days conference 2014 here..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd8ie5R4CVE

Tools, porting, flow, solutions.

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Now, that Steam has introduced Steam Direct, I don't see any difference betweeen it and itch.io.
I see itch.io growing more and more.

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Developers, Developers, Developers ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE



Dear Developers,

just come to Linux.

;)

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Quoting: brandleesee

Quoting: ShmerlWhile it's annoying, I found one relatively simple workaround. Run such games with:

HOME=$HOME/.local/share

Then all that clutter will move to more appropriate location.

Hello, could I please ask how to implement that code? Is it in bashrc? Thank you.

No! Don't put this into .bashrc that will royally mess up your session. Put it into some script from which you can launch the game. In the script, add:

export HOME=$HOME/.local/share

Or if you want, add this to the .desktop launcher for it. I.e. let's say the game binary is /path/game_bin

So, the launcher would normally have something like:

Exec=/path/game_bin

And you can change it to (use full correct path, otherwise it won't work):

Exec=env HOME=/home/<your_user>/.local/share /path/game_biun

and etc.

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Regarding the abuse that I'm pretty certain happened (regardless of amount): Yeah, those people suck massively. There is no excuse for threats or abuse, especially when the reason is bad performance of a game. I say that as someone who won't buy a VP ported game: Abusing people over a game is ridiculous.

That said, there is no way I'm buying the "Witcher 3 may not have been ported thanks to user backlash" thing. If it were from VP, that makes no sense thanks to the fact that they're still porting games to it. If it were from CDPR, it makes some sense since they've not released a Linux-compatible game since (AFAIK), but the weird "It may come if SteamOS takes off, it's in development, no wait it isn't, what port we never said anything about a port, oh wait that last person didn't know what they were talking about" situation makes me really question it.

My best guess, understanding that I am in no way connected to anyone involved and haven't followed the situation closely so this is 100% speculation, is that it started as a "maybe". They were probably having VP port Witcher 2 to test the waters or to have the port done while they worked on Witcher 3. When the Witcher 2 port was released... nothing changed. They were still supposedly working on the Witcher 3 port into 2015, the year AFTER Witcher 2 was ported and when most of the hate would have happened. I'm GUESSING that what happened was that they may have realized the project was too big to port in-house like they were probably doing, there was some big problem that can't be fixed, or something similar. I think that (plus some miscommunication) would explain the weird confirmed/unconfirmed problem: Game started in development with port in mind, problems caused it to be put on the shelf, etc.

That said, I'm 150% speculating there and really can't say anything for certain.

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Quoting: PhiladelphusSerious question, are there actually that many 64-bit executable games out there and is it actually beneficial?

I ask because the subject comes up regularly on the Paradox forum with people bemoaning the fact that the Clausewitz engine is 32-bit only and predicting massive performance improvements if it were only 64-bit, only for a developer to explain that making the engine 64-bit would change basically nothing about performance (other than allowing the use of more than 4GB of mods together, which is kind of a niche case) and that they have no plans to rewrite the engine.

There may very well be good reasons for making games 64-bit and I've love to hear them, it's just that I tend to see 64-bit thrown around as a bit of a buzz-word.

Paradox should unstick their head from the sand, and fix the engine. I suspect their general neglect to make their tools 64-bit compatible, forced Obsidian to release Tyranny in 32-bit only (because it used Paradox account integration libraries). It created the expected mess of lacking LFS and crashes on large XFS partitions. The bottom line - no excuses. 64-bit is a must today. (Luckily Obsidian finally released 64-bit version of Tyranny this June).

Some engines have a lot of work to make them 64-bit, and understandably it can take time. But not doing it at all with excuse that performance is OK as is, is just silly. Beamdog for the reference reworked their current generation of Inifinty engine to 64-bit.

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QuoteIf you're wondering whether you need to make a 32bit build of your game, in my honest opinion you don't need to bother.

Serious question, are there actually that many 64-bit executable games out there and is it actually beneficial?

I ask because the subject comes up regularly on the Paradox forum with people bemoaning the fact that the Clausewitz engine is 32-bit only and predicting massive performance improvements if it were only 64-bit, only for a developer to explain that making the engine 64-bit would change basically nothing about performance (other than allowing the use of more than 4GB of mods together, which is kind of a niche case) and that they have no plans to rewrite the engine.

There may very well be good reasons for making games 64-bit and I've love to hear them, it's just that I tend to see 64-bit thrown around as a bit of a buzz-word.

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: ShmerlWhile it's annoying, I found one relatively simple workaround. Run such games with:

HOME=$HOME/.local/share

Then all that clutter will move to more appropriate location.

Good find! Redefining HOME could be used for many things, it's a cheap "user isolation/virtualization" technology, like chroot but for data. You can add any number of "profiles" in terms of settings/accounts/data to any app, even if it doesn't directly support it.

Hello, could I please ask how to implement that code? Is it in bashrc? Thank you.

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Btw, I tried contacting CDPR to clarify their stance on this. I don't really expect them to comment, but who knows.

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Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: Nyamiou

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: NyamiouThe idea that a company would judge an entire community over the reaction of a few individuals no matter how loud they can be is completely unacceptable, if CDRP are really like then they got the hate they deserved.

And "they got the hate they deserved" is the problem. People like YOU are exactly the problem.

People like me? WTF? seriously.

Sure. Since you consider that a company deserves hate (because of a product not meeting some people's expectations).

You should apply for a job in the Trump administration.

Bingo, congratulations on taking what I'm saying out of context and then laugthing at me for how silly this sound. You must be proud.

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This whole discussion leaves a bad taste of victim blaming in me.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Nyamiou

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: NyamiouThe idea that a company would judge an entire community over the reaction of a few individuals no matter how loud they can be is completely unacceptable, if CDRP are really like then they got the hate they deserved.

And "they got the hate they deserved" is the problem. People like YOU are exactly the problem.

People like me? WTF? seriously. Also thx for quoting out of context, that's nice.

Seriously, you are a troll trying to turn people of the Linux community against each others. I don't know why you are doing that and I don't understand why people listen to you, but what I know is that they probably shouldn't.

Give me one good reasons you are telling that stuff, even if it were to be the truth, given the harm it does to the community?

You started to troll here, at least that's what it looks like to me. Please stop that, and please, _please_ stop anything directly against any particular person.

I'm not trolling, I'm making an argument about a subject that is important to me. The Linux gaming community continually takes blow and we got an habit of showing the other cheek, which is nice, but sometimes you got to stand and fight for what is right. The Linux community is not a hanful of haters, I will not let anyone say that and I will not let any Linux gamer admit it just so we can get the "pardon" of any gaming company. This has gone too far, we can't let think like that pass, and we cannot accept that company treat us like we are a handful of haters either.

But anyway I'm not suprised by your reaction, everytime a Linux gamer try to speak up for all the injustice that we get, someone come to shut him down, too afraid that the big companies might not like us anymore if we speak up. The result is that today Linux gamers are not respected anymore.

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My advice would be... Test on a dual screen setup.

If you're using Unity you can check the boxes "Default is Fullscreen" and "Default is Native Resolution" from the "Player Settings" under "Resolution and Presentation". If you don't want to test for resolutions then please at the very least set the "Display Resolution Dialog" to "Enabled".

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: webcreaturehttps://twitter.com/kalypsomedia/status/831895655534694400

Kalypso told me the Linux version would delay about 4 weeks.
So end of April it is, if nothing happens..

Can you please ask them if they'll release the Linux version on GOG? Multiplayer feature is a suspect, since they might use Galaxy / Steamworks, and the former isn't available for Linux.

Uhh.. sorry, I did not see that reply. Unfortunately Vikings will be delayed again.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/404590/discussions/0/343787920136290410/?ctp=2#c1368380934285001612
About Gog I asked them a long time ago, and they were not sure at that time. But I'll ask again!

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Quoting: Xzyl

Quoting: liamdawe<snip>
I just want people to think a little more, but it's clear from people like "Nyamiou" that we have a lot of work to do. And yes, I know, you will never be able to make a community better than it is, but I will die trying ;)

Anyway...back to actual work for me

His posts were probably in bad taste, but the way you react to these things... Liam, I know this is your site, however the way you react to posts you don't like paints a pretty poor picture of your character. We can all encourage others to behave better but, as you yourself demonstrated by calling this guy out (in a VERY unprofessional way), you should probably work on yourself before trying to help others. *snipped the rest*

Respectfully, I disagree.

So you agree his posts were in bad taste, but it's "VERY" unprofessional of me to call out toxic and abusive behaviour in my own website comments? I really don't get the logic there. It is not user shaming (as you called it) to use the quote function to make it clear certain types of comments won't be tolerated.

99% of people here appreciate how I run and moderate the site, in fact many people constantly tell me it's why they keep coming back here because the community I've helped mould is generally pretty decent.

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThese days it might also be worth looking into those Snap or Flatpak thingies. Extra fiddling maybe, but near as I understand it could buy you quite a bit of distribution-agnostic-ness.

Snap isn't that good yet. Maybe on Ubuntu it just works but on Debian I only got the CLI apps working. As I understood it, the snap developers have to hardcode NVIDIA driver paths in the framework and I use the binary non-repo driver. So OpenGL doesn't work and at least Krita couldn't run.

Ah. Well, maybe in a couple of years. Too many useful things always seem to be maybe in a couple of years.

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Quoting: 14

Quoting: berillionsI don't care about this ...
I hate Wine and with m'y desktop i create a PCI Passthrough so ...

...you're gaming on Windows?

Linux's games on Linux, Windows's games on Windows

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I am German and there are a lot of games that have a problem with comma being the decimal point in my locale. Often enough, even recent Unity games, save floating point data locale independent and parse them locale dependent, leading to crashes, bugs, and corrupted saves.

It's easy enough. Just use Double.Parse with the current locale as separate parameter. It's not magic. I think I've added LC=C_ALL as a environment variable to about half of all Steam games I play.

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Quoting: berillionsI don't care about this ...
I hate Wine and with m'y desktop i create a PCI Passthrough so ...

...you're gaming on Windows?

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Quoting: liamdawe<snip>
I just want people to think a little more, but it's clear from people like "Nyamiou" that we have a lot of work to do. And yes, I know, you will never be able to make a community better than it is, but I will die trying ;)

Anyway...back to actual work for me

His posts were probably in bad taste, but the way you react to these things... Liam, I know this is your site, however the way you react to posts you don't like paints a pretty poor picture of your character. We can all encourage others to behave better but, as you yourself demonstrated by calling this guy out (in a VERY unprofessional way), you should probably work on yourself before trying to help others. However, that said, this last bit (excluding the user shaming), about thinking a bit more and that we have work to do, is probably the most poignant part of the argument you've been trying to make. This site, is a portal that us users come to for information so we can have something to either look forward to or other users so we know if games work. It's an invaluable tool to the community and I hope you realize the importance this site has for a good deal of us. You do some good work providing a link between community and developer so these incidents don't happen and hopefully going forward childish behavior (on all sides), is a thing of the past.

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