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Quoting: lavedont know about this one.. sure im happy that it will (if it does) support linux but the very same engine, user interface and (horrible!) menus again? if this is just borderlands2 with new content i might just skip it. for some reason when im done with a game i cannot simply enjoy the successor if it doesnt look and feel all new.
stopped playing after 30 minutes of fallout: new vegas because it was all fallout3 again and had a very hard time to motivate myself playing the borderlands2 dlc campaigns after finishing the original game. if the coop gameplay is good again and they do something about that piece of crap that is the inventory (borderlands 1 was way ahead here) then i might still fall for it.. but my first impression is this: meh D:

1) Fallout NV is NOT the same as FO3. Sure the game play is similar, but the story and atmosphere are worlds apart. What did you expect? A Race car sim?

2) The Pre-Sequel is meant to bridge the gap between 1 and 2 explaining some of the conflicts in BL2.

3) I agree that Borderlands 2's menus were a bit off, and the gameplay is highly repetitive. That being said, if you're in the right mood...borderlands 2 is an amazingly fun experience.

I for one am very excited about this :).

Quoting: Beamboom... But maaan, what I would give to see "Linux" after that "Grand Theft Auto 5" entry... :)

I know right...bye bye Windows.

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Quoting: abelthorneI played the first Borderlands and it was pretty fun but a bit too repetitive and boring after a while. I've heard that Borderlands 2 addresses these issues but I've not played it.

Borderlands (either game) is best played with a buddy and a few strong drinks. It's hilarious, a total blast.
But a good friend or three needs to be onboard. As a solo game it's pretty repetitive, that is true. And lonely. At least once you're used to hang out in there with buddies.

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I found the first one good but had many flaws that it felt distant to me. First off, it was waaay to hard to mod your ships. You had to go through lots of menus, load and save ships, rebuilt your fleet if you battle goes badly.

I see the need to make a game like this detailed but it was cumbersome to make changes. The battles themselves were quite good.

For the second I want LOTS of parts for each ship, and possibly the ability to design your own.

P.S: I found the Linux version quite good.

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Well, it's indeed a bit odd after the comments from Pitchford about Borderlands 2. I'd wait for an official confirmation before being too much enthousiastic.

Anyway, I played the first Borderlands and it was pretty fun but a bit too repetitive and boring after a while. I've heard that Borderlands 2 addresses these issues but I've not played it. If the pre-sequel is more like the second episode, it can be a good game.

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Ohhhh Amaaaaazzzinnnng!

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Ok so this is the BOMB. The hands down most fun coop shooter franchise of recent years.


... But maaan, what I would give to see "Linux" after that "Grand Theft Auto 5" entry... :)

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Quoting: GuestI normally don't respond to such things, and this is meant only as an observation from an engineer's perspective, but it's highly likely that under spec hardware and drivers are not the only causes of the cutscene problems.

Thanks for your feedback.

The crash the user mentioned is caused solely by under the minimum specification hardware running older drivers. The only example of that crash on the hardware he quoted is due to drivers. As I mentioned the performance in the cutscenes (not the crash) was improved in the patch and was mentioned as such in the patch notes, however the extreme example the user was seeing is primarily caused by under min spec hardware not having enough cores or threads to decode video quick enough so it is much more apparent on under powered hardware. On our supported hardware you would see a much less extreme example.

As you suspected and we mentioned in the patch notes we moved some things around to improve the decoding as part of an overall attempt to get better frame rates for all machines in cutscenes.

Quoting: GuestI am aware you probably didn't mean it that way, and it's a good move posting info in here (I really, really want such thing to continue), it's just that I personally always have warning bells going off whenever someone says "hardware is under spec".

I only mention under spec / unsupported hardware and software when the most likely (or usually only) contributing factor to the issue is that they are running on systems that have not been tested or been supported. When someone says the game runs really badly on my machine it looks bad for everyone reading, I want to make sure that while we help the user we also make sure other readers realise that the reason for the issue is due to the game being run on hardware and/or software that was not tested against and was not on our supported list. If we didn't do this then the idea of supported systems would be pointless :)

We never would want to deny bugs or misinform people as you can see we have been quite active in the community about any issues people see. We also want to inform users about the supported specification and whether an issue is a bug that all users could see (like a few issues we had with OpenVPN connections) or something specific to an unsupported setup or out of date drivers for example like the issue this user was seeing.

The issue in this case was caused by a combination of older unsupported Nvidia hardware and older buggy graphics drivers combining to cause a crash and exacerbate the cut scene performance. I wanted to offer a solution but also make sure readers on the thread knew the reason for the crash so they would not have a bad impression of the port thinking we left in a 100% crash on level 1 on supported systems!

Quoting: GuestBut you mentioned that lower powered machines can get improvements, which indicates internally you managed to fix some issues.

We always look to gain more speed and performance and by doing so for supported hardware it means older unsupported hardware that is under the minimum specification for the game will also get the some benefits as well. However the main issue mentioned the crashing is caused by the combination of unsupported hardware and older buggy graphics drivers.

The upside to all of this is upgrading the drivers fixes the crash and the performance tweaks we did to improve the minor stutter on the lower end supported hardware will make a difference for everyone especially people with lower powered machines so everyone is a winner. It even improves the experience for hardware and software that we don't support officially which is a double win :)

Quoting: GuestCheers for listening to the community and fixing problems, and again cheers for reaching out and posting here!

Happy to help and thank you for offering your thoughts :)

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dont know about this one.. sure im happy that it will (if it does) support linux but the very same engine, user interface and (horrible!) menus again? if this is just borderlands2 with new content i might just skip it. for some reason when im done with a game i cannot simply enjoy the successor if it doesnt look and feel all new.
stopped playing after 30 minutes of fallout: new vegas because it was all fallout3 again and had a very hard time to motivate myself playing the borderlands2 dlc campaigns after finishing the original game. if the coop gameplay is good again and they do something about that piece of crap that is the inventory (borderlands 1 was way ahead here) then i might still fall for it.. but my first impression is this: meh D:

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Quoting: Hellraid DevWhile we can't provide you with any specifics, let's just say it's not entirely out of the question.

Source. This is the most recent news I could find on the matter. It was posted just over 2 months after this article was posted.

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Call me a customer with money to spend, but I also want Borderlands and Borderlands 2!

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Quoting: EKRboiI suggest you give the UE4 linux demos a try if you have not. I still fire them up just to see them and get excited for what is to come. I keep reading people saying that OpenGL is every bit as capable as DX11 to produce sweet looking visuals.. until those demos I was not completely convinced and the engine isn't even done yet for linux. Now I don't think OGL is as optimized as DX in general as it always seems to be more taxing on my system, but things are bound to get better.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Demos

Thanks for reminding. I have not tried UE4 demos yet but I have heard only good so far.

I'm not an expert in any way but as far as I know OpenGL is very much as capable as Direct3D and with extensions even more. DX12 should fix many problems developers are facing today but I hope upcoming(?) OpenGL 5.x is going to have many improvements as well. Lately there has been many blogs and articles about weaknesses of OpenGL so hopefully a new version will address those problems as well.

What comes to games I think one big problem is that most of the games on Linux seems to support only OpenGL 3.x while Windows versions uses DX11.

Personally I wouldn't mind if developers would drop OpenGL 3.x support and use OpenGL 4.x only. Of course it would mean that open source drivers would be useless at this moment and drop support for older GPUs but if that would help to get Linux versions par with Windows I'm OK to pay that price.

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Looks sweet indeed. However, I suck on the mouse controls. So, not my game. May try it one day again with a joystick.

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A I Kickstarted several games, and so far have gotten Akaniero:Demon Hunters (fun for a while), and War For The Overworld (which is stillin beta...), Planet Explorers, Planetary Annihilation (in gamma!), and the original Wasteland. Waiting for Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, and, also from the same people as PoE, Torment:Tides of Numenaria, which is the one I'm really waiting for.

in the meantime, CIV V and X-COM, Desktop Dungeons, Dominions 4, Garry's Mod, Goat Simulator, and, yes, Portal are keping me happy and busy until the others are released.

And to think I called 2013 The Year Of Linux gaming. It looks like 2015 will be when the floodgates open.

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Quoting: geminiMy favourite this year so far is Civilization 5, a true AAA game which takes a lot of time before becoming boring

Id have to vote for XCOM this year and Metro Last Light for last year, for me personally with Civ 5, Im bored right off the bat. I dont think Ive played more than 5 mins before I quit.

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I also received the notification after just reinstalling in wine. It might have something to do with that.

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Quoting: neowiz73the survey popped up when I had just installed Steam on Wine to see if I could get certain games to run on wine again. So I refused it, then restarted my Linux install and I haven't received the survey at all again. I'm mainly using Linux Mint, was using Manjaro for the past month though... distro hopping is so much fun.

Ugh, the exact same thing happened to me just now. :/ Hadn't seen the survey for months before that.

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Kinda late to the party but I thought I would answer the questions posed just in case people are subscribed and hadn't gotten answers.

Quoting: MilaniumSadly it is 64-bit only on Linux for no real obvious reason. I just found out myself when trying to locate the binary in ~/.steam/SteamApps/ and start it manually. The customer support was completely overstrained. I sent them all the necessary system information, but just got suggestions like restart your computer and reinstall Steam which of course did not help at all.

Yes, sorry during the first few days we were looking for bugs and we assumed people would have checked their hardware against the Linux min spec. Since then we have hardened the game launching scripts so users should be warned on launch that they are on 32bit and it is not supported. Sorry about that!

Quoting: SkarjakThis doesn't seem like a very good port to me... It's stuttering heavily on cutscenes and crashes to desktop when I try to build a facility. Also there is a few seconds of delay between the sound and the video when playing the cutscene at the beginning of a mission. Gameplay during missions is otherwise fine. This is all on archlinux.

Your hardware is under spec and the drivers you have installed have some very critical bugs, if you upgrade to the 340 or later series of Nvidia drivers the bug is fixed and you will get high performance. We also have released a patch with further improves video decoding on lower powered machines.

Quoting: leillo1975I can't play Enemy Within. If I push the button in the initial selector, it shows me the Xcom EW popup, but nothing happens

Check you own Enemy Within, some early users could sometimes get the EW option even if they down't own the game. We fixed this in the patch but the reason you could not play was likely because you didn't own it :)

Quoting: edgleyEnemy Unkown works fine for me -- Enemy Within however, seems to segfault.

It's late and I've got a lot of other things to do at the moment though, so I haven't looked in to it.

Pretty sure this was caused by a network VPN issue that we fixed in the patch. IT could be avoided by disabling your VPN in the original release.

Quoting: fedsowierd requirements, an AMD HD6450 matches the recommended requirements but an HD5870 is not even up to the minimum requirements... anyone has tried to run the game on a system with low/medium end graphic cards? or on FOSS drivers?

If you can run the latest AMD drivers then you should be OK (if under spec) the FOSS drivers however have a number of issues (and are unsupported) however we have offered assistance to the FOSS team and made a few FOSS specific alterations to XCOM in the patch to help with a few stability issues.

Quoting: wolfyrionI have downloaded and started playing the first mission today , I had some random crashes and freezes ... :(

Make sure you have the latest closed source drivers installed sounds like you have an Nvidia card running older drovers upgrading to the 340 drivers should help. The other possibility would be network setup the latest patch has a load of extra fixes to deal with VPN connections to make the game more stable.

Quoting: edoIts a shame than gaming in Linux still sucks. The r600 driver is still not good enough. Luckily I have windows too.

It should be fine as long as you use the latest closed source drivers.

Any issues make sure you drop our Support an email and we can investigate. Happy gaming everyone!

Edwin

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[quote=edqe]

Quoting: EKRboiI still need Windows for gaming just because there are lots of titles that doesn't run on Linux - on most likely never will. I do use SteamOS for all gaming I can (there is Linux version available) despite the fact the quality of Linux versions are much worse compared to Windows versions.

I suggest you give the UE4 linux demos a try if you have not. I still fire them up just to see them and get excited for what is to come. I keep reading people saying that OpenGL is every bit as capable as DX11 to produce sweet looking visuals.. until those demos I was not completely convinced and the engine isn't even done yet for linux. Now I don't think OGL is as optimized as DX in general as it always seems to be more taxing on my system, but things are bound to get better.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Demos

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P.S. Apologies to anybody who was keen on Steel Storm or Mount & Blade for the delay in getting this post up!

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It is not always an easy task to port a game, especially if it uses proprietary frameworks or engines. It can take time.

Quoting: chrisqTo those who think POL "ports" anything, you should take a look at the code base.
Its a unholy mix of shells-scripts and python that uses some helper scripts to install the program in its own WINEPREFIX, add some dlls etc.
I tried to hack it once, but ended up writing my own cli-program in pure python that basically did the same. It was just to much work to try to understand, and it made no sense why it had all that horrid shell code in there.

They do have a nice repository of precompiled wine-versions though.

Unholly and horrible shell code, but also hours and hours of tests. Making an app run with wine with zero configuration on a large number of very different computers is not easy task, believe me. And when I see some wine based "ports", I can tell you that some mistake could be avoided. Why chosing a mix of Bash and Python? Simply because it's easier for beginers to write scripts in bash than in Python. (See supported apps section for further information). Also, the first version was fully written in Bash. Python came one year after to add a GUI. We kept the bash base, that's why the program does not follow a MVC model, that's why you might find strange things in the code. We are aware of that. We've started working on that for the fifth version, but it takes time, as everything...

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Quoting: ReveArekReleasing source code is not enought when there are no devs to work on it. There are many games with source available but no one to work on porting them :( Like this one.

Well, the usual argument applies that if you want to change that the source code is out there, etc...

Still, if there are no developers that are willing to work on it then all that really shows is that the game does not have enough to hold someone's interest long enough to keep it from being abandoned.

And it is a bit of a stretch to point to one example and then say there are "many games" like that.

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To those who think POL "ports" anything, you should take a look at the code base.
Its a unholy mix of shells-scripts and python that uses some helper scripts to install the program in its own WINEPREFIX, add some dlls etc.
I tried to hack it once, but ended up writing my own cli-program in pure python that basically did the same. It was just to much work to try to understand, and it made no sense why it had all that horrid shell code in there.

They do have a nice repository of precompiled wine-versions though.

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This is interesting, and, yes, wine performance is variable. I've been pretty impressed with PlayOnLinux, and if they can do what they claim that they can do, the bottom line is that more (older) games can be playable on Linux, which is already enough of a gaming platform that I deleted my Windows partition and don't miss it.

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i really like the mixture of classic spaceshooter pixelgraphics and fancy explosions/particles. if the font rendering is a lot clearer now i wonder how its been before, because its still blurred and hard to read. i think some of that has to stay to fit the graphicsstyle, but some improvements to font and general HUD wouldnt hurt, namely:
a) dont use darkblue as font if the space is black already, theres little contrast. thats fine for most of the hud but important stuff should stand out with a brighter tone. especially targetship-name, targetdistance, targetbrackets, crosshair.
b) get rid of redundant information. why would anyone need a 5 digit decimal place in the target distance. why does my hud has colorful indications for my entire shipparts but not even an indicator in which direction my not-on-screen target is

gotta say tho i totally love the menu/shipyard style & music. the field of view is way to low for me as i feel like looking through a scope while flying but other than that this game has tons of potential in my eyes, kudos!

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I loved You Have to Win the Game, so this is definitely a day one purchase for me.

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I don't know. Maybe to speed up the process or out of convenience? They started talking about it over a year ago and so far only Gemini Rue and The Shivah are available I think. Wadjet Eye are just Dave Gilbert and his wife so it might be that they've just been to busy working on the latest Blackwell game to consider it.

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Neat, looking forward to that.

But why would you need to contract someone to "port" it? It runs on AGS, ffs! AGS has already been ported by the community.

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I learned yesterday that the original Blackwell trilogy from Wadjet Eye has been ported to Linux by a contracted third-party and is currently being tested, so that's also something I'm looking forward to.

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Quoting: HamishThe true solution for old games are source code releases, wherever possible.

Releasing source code is not enought when there are no devs to work on it. There are many games with source available but no one to work on porting them :( Like this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6iv2530phw

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Quoting: EKRboiObvisouly I don't have any data to back any of this up but it's what makes sense to me from my experience, that said..

Well said.

I still need Windows for gaming just because there are lots of titles that doesn't run on Linux - on most likely never will. I do use SteamOS for all gaming I can (there is Linux version available) despite the fact the quality of Linux versions are much worse compared to Windows versions.

There is still very long way to go for Linux gaming. Personally I believe SteamOS is not going to be successful among big masses for many years. More likely we will have articles like "How to make your Steam Machine a good gaming device - install Windows".
Consoles are living their own lives and I don't believe console games would be interested about PC/Steam Machines at all.

I believe Valve is able to make SteamOS successful in the long run. It just takes some time.

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