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AFAIR we had (or at least considered) a sorting out phase. One or two days where people can state reasons why some entries are in the wrong list or such.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: EikeAs always, this is Linux release year, not general release year, right?

Edit: Errr no, 2016.

All 2016 apart from "Favourite open source game", "Favourite FOSS project" and "Most anticipated game for 2017".

That didn't really answer the question. So Mad Max counts as 2016, since the Linux version released in 2016. Right?

My bad i misread. Yes, Linux releases in 2016. This is a Linux GOTY.

Quoting: tmtvlAre you gonna go over the list and remove any doubles that snuck in before opening the vote? I've seen Blades of the Shogun appearing twice in the overall best category.

As stated, yes we will be going over the list first. It should not have been possible for the same game to appear twice, will look into that.

Edit: Seems Blades of the Shogun appeared twice as someone spelt it differently.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Nor MantisLove this game. 600+ hours played, performance could be better but runs pretty good on my 960 everything on high, The only time I get serious FPS hit is when I fly into my huge base, masive walled off compound with a metal pyramid built over water, and many captured dinos in it. There are graphical glitches as mentioned already. Usually turn shadows and bloom off in caves using in game terminal command solves it. But nothing game breaking. The devs have won my trust, in my opinion have done a fantastic job. The game keeps getting better and better.

Can you please share the terminal commands you're speaking of? I would really appreciate it....

This is off the top of my head but here are some helpful ones.

console = press tab
r.shadowquality 0
r.bloomquality 0
r.lightshafts 0

every time you relog it resets back to default.

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I think that ARK's performance is unacceptable. People try to defend it by calling it "early access," but the performance is much worse than what an "early access" game should be. All I can figure is that either they don't know how to improve the performance or refuse to profile. I know it's Unreal Engine, but that doesn't stop people from writing bad code. OpenGL isn't the reason that the game performs poorly; so, swapping it with Vulkan isn't going to do much.

I know that people are immediately going to accuse me of being a moron and not understanding how engines work. To quell those accusations, I am working on a game engine myself. It is written with C++ and OpenGL. It works on both Linux and Windows and even performs well on MESA. I am also only a year away from earning a BA in Computer Science.

I can understand why people like the game, but the performance is abysmal.

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Strange or not, the Top 15 only consists of December articles ? Is it a regular pattern (i.e. there are generally more viewers in December each year) or has the site audience been growing lately ? The latter would be a good sign as it might show more people become interested in Linux gaming.

By the way are there signs of growing interest looking at the site audience ? I've never seen an analysis on this I think :)

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I just wish people would read the categories, descriptions before posting. Just to keep the results clean in the end. Especially with the following two categories: Favourite FOSS Project and Favourite Open Source Game.

The description for Favourite FOSS Project reads: Vote for your favourite game engine, open source emulator etc created for games that DON'T support Linux. So, you obviously look at projects that make open source engine clones where you just have to dump the original game files such as OpenRCT2, OpenMW, CorsixTH etc... Or Emulators of entire console systems such as: PCSX2 for PS2 and Dolphin for Nintendo GC and Wii.

Favourite Open Source Game is pretty self-explanatory, open source games that can be download as a fully working title meaning both the game logic and assets are open source and included such as 0 A.D., Super Tux Kart, Open TDD, Flight Gear, etc...

Problem is now there are games in the FOSS projects category and FOSS projects in the games category and in some cases the game or project are in both.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI mean, I dunno how many of these top-selling games were technically "AAA" games in terms of mammoth budgets from big companies, but surely it's more important to have the games people actually bought than the most bloated ones.

Totally! This is AAA fun, not AAA costs. (*)

(*) I should think of actually becoming PR guy. ;)

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: EhvisSo Mad Max counts as 2016, since the Linux version released in 2016. Right?

Yeah it was a good question, it's released for LINUX during 2016.

Mad Max nominations have already been accepted into several categories. Consider your question answered.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: EikeAs always, this is Linux release year, not general release year, right?

Edit: Errr no, 2016.

All 2016 apart from "Favourite open source game", "Favourite FOSS project" and "Most anticipated game for 2017".

That didn't really answer the question. So Mad Max counts as 2016, since the Linux version released in 2016. Right?

Yeah it was a good question, it's released for LINUX during 2016.

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Quoting: no_information_hereI would love to see separate "AAA" and "non-AAA" categories for best game. Games like Deus Ex, Mad Max and Xcom will be hard for smaller devs to muscle out just from sheer voting numbers...

I know it is a little hard deciding where to draw the line between them, though.

I don't think it's a good idea to make such separation. AAA is a bad term to begin with. Do you mean big budget games? Publisher funded games? Or something else? Its ambiguity makes its usage pointless.

For instance I wouldn't vote for most of publisher funded games because they aren't available DRM-free, so I can't even evaluate them and they can't be in my list of GOTY games. And in my understanding, they more frequently end up being mass market driven and as such less original and interesting than games developed by independent studios. And that topic is really orthogonal to budget, since there are big budget independent games as well.

So categories are fine as they are.

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I would love to see separate "AAA" and "non-AAA" categories for best game. Games like Deus Ex, Mad Max and Xcom will be hard for smaller devs to muscle out just from sheer voting numbers...

I know it is a little hard deciding where to draw the line between them, though.

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Why not supporting Vulkan on Windows as well? Where is the point to have 3 different renderers now?

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Oh man, I finished Dune 2 many times when I was a kid. So good.

QuoteDoes anyone know a place still selling it?

Yes, from eBay.

I picked up a brand new unopened (still in shrink wrap) retail box very cheap a couple of months back, and I finished the game under Wine with the High Resolution Patch (since I wanted to watch the cut scenes). I've since moved on to playing Emperor: Battle for Dune (again, brand new copies can be found cheap on eBay), which I didn't even know existed until late last year (but beware it has some weird SafeDisc copy protection which wouldn't read in my main optical drive - grab the official patches from ftp://ftp.westwood.com/pub/emperor/update/EMPENGINSTFIX10.ZIP to bypass).

I'll have to take a look at the Dune Legacy project at some point.

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Even though playing ARK runs smoothly on my GTX1060 on high settings (totally unplayable on my GTX660ti), there are still a lot of graphical artifacts that cause me to restart. Watching a streamer last night playing ARK on PS4, she also had the same artifacts when in the rain or next to water. I think the game just needs way more optimization in general. Would be cool to see on Vulkan, though.

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Are you gonna go over the list and remove any doubles that snuck in before opening the vote? I've seen Blades of the Shogun appearing twice in the overall best category.

EDIT:

Quoting: mindplagueLife is Strange.

Bahaha! No.

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Life is Strange.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: EikeAs always, this is Linux release year, not general release year, right?

Edit: Errr no, 2016.

All 2016 apart from "Favourite open source game", "Favourite FOSS project" and "Most anticipated game for 2017".

That didn't really answer the question. So Mad Max counts as 2016, since the Linux version released in 2016. Right?

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Looks like the big thing missing from this game is buoyancy and balance. Which seems kind if vital to me.

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Quoting: CitirollerIs best graphics intended for best visuals/visual style or most realistic/advanced graphics?

Given that there aren't 2 separate categories, one for aesthetic and one for graphical fidelity, I imagine the category is intended to encompass either or both, whatever you found most visually appealing, whether that's high fidelity realistic graphics or something stylized.

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Is best graphics intended for best visuals/visual style or most realistic/advanced graphics?

Edit: does released in 2016 includes games which exited early access in 2016?

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Does anyone use Mesa 13 to play ark successful?
Ark only work with Mesa 12.0.3.

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Quoting: GuestIf you really have an issue with unfinsihed games, you're right, you should avoid this game and any early access steam game. If you feel a game should be optimized while in early access that's a shame on you, not a shame on the developer. It's well known games in early access will be buggy and not be optimized...

My issue is not with the fact that there are bugs in an unfinished game. It's the fact that they have paid DLC while still in Early Access and minimal performance improvements for the past year and a half. This is an anti-consumer move.

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I quit ARK in early 2016 (I even went so far that I removed ARK from my steam library). I had a lot of fun with friends on private servers, but I quit the game cause it was too buggy, even for early access, and the Linux version was horrible when I quit. The Linux version had a lot of common texture books and the game generally looked like it was from 1995, while taking a lot of resources for doing so.

Then I heard about their paid DLC, while still being in early access. If I had stilled played the game by then I would have quit, cause that is unacceptable.

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Quoting: GuestWith some more content and more stuff to do, this game would be great.

How much stuff can there really be to do on a bleedin' raft in the middle of the ocean?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: johndoe86xGuys, I would steer clear of this game at all costs. Performance is wretched across the board regardless of platform. The developers are trying to do too many things and doing none of them, well. They even have paid DLC right now, despite being in early access.

Digital Foundry did several videos on its performance and progress. This video in particular is regarding the PS4.
View video on youtube.com

Vulkan isn't the magic bullet that is going to fix performance problems and bugs for these guys.

This is total BS. Performance is not wonderful but it's acceptable for what it is. This game has an incredible amount of content added to it on a constant basis. Massive game breaking bugs are fixed insanely fast. If you like open world survival games it's top notch and great and so worth the money. I will insta buy anything they add to it. I have well over 1000 hours in the game and am still playing. Don't listen to the haters because of a paid DLC ( which you in no way possible have to have to enjoy the base game ) before the game is out fully. People act like this game is abandoned and it's so not. The devs constantly impress me. If you don't understand performance issues with early access you don't need to play early access. It's that simple. The game is beautiful and the gameplay is so deep you could play 300 hours and still not touch ever aspect of this game. I love this genre and play anything close to it that's available for Linux. This game by far is the best game like it out.

We'll simply have to agree to disagree, while there are some areas that get 25+ fps, the dips and frametimes make this unplayable for me (and a lot of others in the recent Steam reviews). I'm not trying to knock on a game you like, but I feel like the developers really need to focus on performance and bug fixes before adopting two new API's.
Thankfully, Valve allows for refunds and for everyone to make their own decision.

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Oooh thanks for making me aware of this, Liam. I just tried it and had a blast.
If anyone one else is having problems with the screen flickering weirdly; I first fixed it by disabling fullscreen. Then I got fullscreen back, by deactivating "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows".
This was on Ubuntu 16.04. I Guess Dune Legacy requires composition to work.

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43/100 is definitely better than I would have expected. It also cuts directly against the meme of Linux games being all "crappy" indie games--to the contrary, clearly Linux has a bigger percentage of the top games than of games overall. I mean, I dunno how many of these top-selling games were technically "AAA" games in terms of mammoth budgets from big companies, but surely it's more important to have the games people actually bought than the most bloated ones.

I'd have to say this comes close to settling something: Really hard core gamers may still have reasons to want/need Windows so they can have every latest and greatest they choose. But for casual, or even average, gamers nearly half of the top sellers is plenty enough to be able to say, "Yeah you can play games on it".

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Quoting: EikeAs always, this is Linux release year, not general release year, right?

Edit: Errr no, 2016.

All 2016 apart from "Favourite open source game", "Favourite FOSS project" and "Most anticipated game for 2017".

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As always, this is Linux release year, not general release year, right?

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Quoting: ShmerlShould the game appear in the list after adding? I don't see it.

No, they have to be approved.

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