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Quoting: edgleyUsing wrappers like Mono and Valves DX to GL calls is a far superior way of dealing with ports than using Wine.

Wine is reverse engineering of closed source libraries. If you rely on that for your game to run, you are going to have a bad time.Not to mention Wine, even in "bottle" format, requires a much larger overhead than almost any other compatibility layer. You are saying, "I need all of the Windows compatibility to run this one library which I'm using".

QuoteI've seen reports from people actually stating Windows games ran in Wine have at times worked better for them on Linux than they did in Windows and hearing that has actually become more common.

Source? With a properly configured Windows XP or Windows 7 install (on the exact same hardware) I have *never* had this. Many games run okay in Wine now, thanks to the countless number of man hours invested in the Wine project from individuals, for free (and some not for free, but companies paying people to develop open source projects is a different matter entirely).

The issue isn't with the intended implementation, but with the attitude surrounding it.

If developers to continue to use closed source products like Direct X, you are essentially allowing companies like Microsoft to continue to control who can and can't access said products. This conflicts (not completely though, of course) with the general principals behind Linux and has potential to cause serious abandonment of alternative open source projects. If a developer can cop out and use DX, why wouldn't they?

This issue seems to be almost entirely driven by two groups of people, gamers and those like Canocial.

I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't switch to Linux just because I have a tight wallet. I come from a gaming heavy background, and this has moved to Linux. But I would rather keep my principles and never play a (computer) game again than give them up to play the latest CoD.

For the sake of programming slack, I don't see any reason to say this is acceptable; though berating a developer because they do not want to support your platform of choice is equally not acceptable.

I do hope that whoever GOG hires can make that clear to GOG as well.

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Really nice to see this turnaround, Liam! :D


One comment regarding Wine - it contains a lot of workarounds which are designed to replicate particular behaviours of particular Windows versions or to enable a particular game to do a particular thing.

The end result is a hugely impressive piece of work that allows us to run most Windows apps, but from the perspective of providing support for one game, there's a fair bit of non-relevant cruft in there. Stuff like eON has the potential to be more targeted, more streamlined and more performant (that it isn't at the moment is disappointing, but not so relevant).

It also seems like a huge balancing act to keep regressions out and Wine as a platform stable, and it's not guaranteed that modifications to Wine made by developers to benefit their own application will necessarily be mergeable. Though there are submission guidelines, coding practice guidelines, unit tests and automated test services to make that easier, not all devs/porters (although this sort of thing is more packaging than porting IMO) will be in a position to focus on them if they also have a game to ship.


It's OK to be disappointed by a bad port, and it's OK to want a refund, but there's no reason or value in being rude about that. Make sure that what's wrong is being communicated back to developers so that they can make fixes and/or avoid making the same mistakes in the future. If they choose not to, then they'll eventually wind up not being able to make money. If we choose to not give proper feedback, then there's no chance that they'll receive it.

The alternative is that comments like, "let this be your one, and only venture into the world of Linux," end up being the only voice out there (in the context of The Witcher 2, that would probably also mean no Linux support from GOG).

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Witcher 2 has a Linux port now? The Mac port was just a Wine wrapper with horrendous performance, so I wouldn't expect much from them. Maybe on Witcher 4 which will be developed with Steam Boxes in mind from the start...

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Quoting: liamdaweThere isn't a single source for that wine performance note, it is something I have observed from a fair few people. To me personally I ran Starcraft 2 under Wine for many months and played it to death without a single issue and performance as far as I could tell was exactly the same as Windows 7.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't games that run fine -- I have been playing EvE Online for over 7 years and most of that has been via Wine. The Linux port was a crappy Wine wrapper and they eventually said it was to much hassle and it ran better in straight Wine anyway. (Edit: Although captains quarters is *still* broken due to the Aurora engine libraries being neigh on impenetrable and the developers not caring).

However, this is not the case in the vast majority of cases and it's unlikely to ever be because of the nature of Wine. Reverse engineering is never going to hit spot on and developers need to realise what they are relying on when they do this.

I'd much rather 10 games were ported to Linux properly (either using cross platform libraries and just recompiling, or using translation layers like Mono) than 1000 ported terribly using substandard methods and poor attitudes.

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There isn't a single source for that wine performance note, it is something I have observed from a fair few people. To me personally I ran Starcraft 2 under Wine for many months and played it to death without a single issue and performance as far as I could tell was exactly the same as Windows 7.

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Using wrappers like Mono and Valves DX to GL calls is a far superior way of dealing with ports than using Wine.

Wine is reverse engineering of closed source libraries. If you rely on that for your game to run, you are going to have a bad time.Not to mention Wine, even in "bottle" format, requires a much larger overhead than almost any other compatibility layer. You are saying, "I need all of the Windows compatibility to run this one library which I'm using".

QuoteI've seen reports from people actually stating Windows games ran in Wine have at times worked better for them on Linux than they did in Windows and hearing that has actually become more common.

Source? With a properly configured Windows XP or Windows 7 install (on the exact same hardware) I have *never* had this. Many games run okay in Wine now, thanks to the countless number of man hours invested in the Wine project from individuals, for free (and some not for free, but companies paying people to develop open source projects is a different matter entirely).

The issue isn't with the intended implementation, but with the attitude surrounding it.

If developers to continue to use closed source products like Direct X, you are essentially allowing companies like Microsoft to continue to control who can and can't access said products. This conflicts (not completely though, of course) with the general principals behind Linux and has potential to cause serious abandonment of alternative open source projects. If a developer can cop out and use DX, why wouldn't they?

This issue seems to be almost entirely driven by two groups of people, gamers and those like Canocial.

I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't switch to Linux just because I have a tight wallet. I come from a gaming heavy background, and this has moved to Linux. But I would rather keep my principles and never play a (computer) game again than give them up to play the latest CoD.

For the sake of programming slack, I don't see any reason to say this is acceptable; though berating a developer because they do not want to support your platform of choice is equally not acceptable.

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I like companies that support Wine as a Linux alternative, for example GGG with Path of Exile. Path of Exile works excellently on Wine aside from the problem of hlsl -> glsl shaders causing a lot of stuttering on non-nvidia cards (because AMD/intel cards apparently can't deal with on-the-fly translation well). And yet, the developers have an official wine thread on their forums and answer questions and fix bugs when their updates break Wine. They don't actively spend resources on a Wine port (regrettably), but yet recognize Wine as an almost first-class platform.

Better this way than no game whatsoever... although a native port is always great.

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It's also the matter of convenience of not having two Steam installs for example, one in wine and one not. So many good reason to have developers use it over having no port.

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I think performance and reliability matter more to the end user. Many of us would want 100% native, of course we would.

I recall playing Transgaming version of the Sims when that came out and that played pretty darn well imho, and that was wrapped around winex iirc, when you dont have problems, you dont focus on whats under the bonnet so to speak.

If the Witcher 2 played as well on Linux as the Valve games do then this article probably wouldn't exist.

Bottom line, lets get as many games as possible now, once we hit a certain threshold, all new games should be cross platfrom from the word go. Then we can enjoy a better future.

Next up, how to convince EA to release the source code for Linux version of Alpha Centauri so we can make it better :D

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Actually, It`s bad news. As I understand, releases AAA games on Linux are connected with Steam Machine and Steam OS. With delaying Steam Machine we have delayed games.

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That means that HL3 will also not be released before 2015. :(
(If at all...)

Call me naive but I was still hoping for the big bang at E3
where Valve tells us that HL3 is done and will be released soon.

Even *if* HL3 is ready, I have no doubt that a release along with
Steam Machines is what Valve is aiming at.

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With long delay Steam OS hype can go down too which is not a good thing.

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+1

Just a quick note: it would be "the difference _between night_ and day".

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Quoting: AnonymousAnd there have more time to improve SteamOS, SDL2, GPU drivers, etc.

And finish HL3 & L4D3. ;-)

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I have been waiting for that game a long time now :|

But I waited 10 years for Fallout 3 so I guess it is only a small hindrance.

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Quoting: Anonymousone other thing comes to my mind as reason.

with price drops and new hardware, any machine in console price range will be totally op compared to current gen

This is actually a very good point. It's a competitive advantage.

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Quoting: AnonymousAnd there have more time to improve SteamOS, SDL2, GPU drivers, etc.

....And get more developers on board. There still aren't that many AAA titles available.

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Quoting: Lots of deletesWhy We Shouldn't Accept Bad Linux Ports...

So you will be busy deleting the ported games you are advertising, promoting and removing the download links on this site ?

lol :D

Why the hell would I delete articles highlighting the ports? That's idiotic. We don't hide anything.

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Why We Shouldn't Accept Bad Linux Ports...

So you will be busy deleting the ported games you are advertising, promoting and removing the download links on this site ?

lol :D

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Wouldn't it be like chopping your legs off since majority of games are ported over ?
Ported games have been going on for a long time and not just on the GNU/Linux desktop.
.PC Games ported over to consoles.
.Console games ported over to PC.

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Do people think we should still included stories from the same day this is posted or not?

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And there have more time to improve SteamOS, SDL2, GPU drivers, etc.

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one other thing comes to my mind as reason.

with price drops and new hardware, any machine in console price range will be totally op compared to current gen

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Quoting: Mike

Quoting: AnonymousWill go for it, medieval strategy game for linux still missing in my collection :).

Try Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings, the Paradox games are unbeatable when it comes to strategy.

I love Crusader Kings 2. You need some time to get into it but it's really worth the time. Played it for about 50 hours now. =)

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The USC is gonna be embedded within Unity 8, it's vendor lock-in, yes, but Steam also comes to mind, if it runs on Ubuntu, it should be able to run on anything. It's more like a risk, as there's some people who would be more than happy to buy from the software center, but I agree that this isn't really the best move to be ONLY available on Ubuntu at all.

What they need is to package their program for Debian- and Fedora-based distros. Do they have download links to their programs or do they want Canonical/Microsoft/Apple to host their program?

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Quoting: AnonymousWill go for it, medieval strategy game for linux still missing in my collection :).

Try Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings, the Paradox games are unbeatable when it comes to strategy.

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The AI is hiddeous and makes the game UNPLAYABLE. Enemy gets stuck and can't attack you on some occasions. I prefer Stronghold Crusader, which is a great game.

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Looks like it might be fun, but I'm not going to pay until there is some sort of product. It doesn't have to be finished, but at least something playable. It feels like you really need to pay extra to buy in early, since its $15 for beta builds, this seems backwards.

Give me something I can do something with and I'd probably be interested. Then again even though I've bought plenty of alpha games I've never contributed to a KS, so perhaps I'm just not the target audience.

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" Linux: Worked around drivers grossly underreporting video memory. "

This !


I have been waiting for this fix. Now Just to wait for Verdun , Guns of Icarus and Rust to update.

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Quoting: muntdefemswith the exception of Skulls of the Shogun: at the end of the installation process it complains about not being able to "install the desktop menu item" and then proceeds to revert everything. If you keep the installer open and don't let it finish, you can actually play the game, but it's annoying as hell... :><:

Works fine on Steam for me -- can't you just kill the installer process?

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