Quoting: ArthurOnly Linux to Linux multiplayer? That's a bit sad, as the only way I were going to get this would be if my Windows wielding friends wanted to play it. Now that's not even a distant possibility. :(

We always enable Linux vs Mac vs PC multiplayer when it is technically possible (like with XCOM) however sometimes it is not possible for various reasons. In the case of Empire it proved impossible, we have two explanations for you a simple one and a more technical one.

Simple answer first. Basically the multiplayer code has some platform dependant features meaning it acts very slightly differently on different OS’s causing sync issues that cannot be resolved without redesigning how the multiplayer code works on all platforms.

More technical answer is some games multiplayer libraries were not designed for cross platform when they were initially created, multiplayer networking is a complex process with many things that need to be kept in exact and perfect sync with other players, this is done by using complex mathematical processes. When a game engine is designed to support cross platform multiplayer care is taken to make sure all of the mathematical processes are done in such a way that they don’t use any platform specific features and the maths libraries and results will always match no matter the platform the engine is built on.

In the case of Empire the game engine uses the platforms maths libraries to calculate checksums and syncing between players, this means that due to very subtle differences in various platforms maths libraries (floating point calculations specifically) playing games between different platforms will slowly go out of sync due to the small differences ending up with the players dropping out due to sync issues getting too great.

We are investigating if Mac / Linux might be possible if we rewrite the maths library usage for both platforms, although it's unlikely that Windows will ever be multiplayer compatible with the Mac/Linux version.

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Quoting: MohandevirNot a big fan of this kind of games, but I think I'm going to buy it, just because Feral is awesome with the Linux community.

Keep working your magic, Feral!

Thank you that's very kind!

P.s. If you feel adventurous have a look around in the data you might find some hidden gold to save you.... ;)

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Quoting: GuestI'm just going to shortcut and say: agreed with all, and thankyou again for the good and comprehensive reply, it really is appreciated!

Likewise, posts like yours reinforce to us how the community been overwhelmingly helpful and thoughtful. It's not so much the "Great port" posts (they are great by the way) but the thoughtful posts explaining and suggesting what we can do even better in the future or exactly how some side effect happens.

It's been a great ride so far on XCOM and we're looking forward to the next ones :)

Edwin
feral Interactive

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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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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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Quoting: Bestia

Quoting: edddeduckferalThe person reporting this is running on an unsupported card, based on our testing the norm on supported hardware is very similar, we have a Nvidia 650 here in the office with higher performance (by a few frames) than Windows. Older unsupported cards it seems can sometimes hit driver bottlenecks, due to all the different Window Managers and driver combinations that are possible on Linux it's hard to get a general baseline as some Window managers or overrides in the Nvidia settings utility can affect game performance quite dramatically.

However we are monitoring what people have been reporting to see if anything serious or a pattern appears.

He uses GTX 660 which is much more powerful than your GTX 650 and it is a card that should be supported.

Also there are definitely more people that report a big performance difference when compared to what they get on Windows. Just look at the comments in that post on linux_gaming subreddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/29kyxg/pc_report_xcom_enemy_unknown_on_linux_43_drop_in/ [External Link]

Most people running the game on Linux didn't make comparison with Windows so they couldn't tell if there is any difference in performance. I also didn't make such comparison because I don't have Windows and i don't use it at all since 2008.

We have never said there aren't few people with the odd performance issue that much is certain however most people get decent performance and are very happy with the game, the outliers do seem to usually be running on systems that other people with the same setup get decent performance so it's not clear what the cause of the larger drops for some people is.

I am not denying that Windows can be faster than Linux although with the latest patch (in beta)the performance delta on most cards is usually isn't noticeable at all.

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Quoting: Cheeseness

Quoting: BestiaWell I would say that it is norm. Just today someone posted this on Steam forums [External Link]:

Two people doesn't make it the norm.

So far as I can tell, more people are not having problems than those that are. That doesn't mean that things are perfect (though it is great to see Feral being responsive to people who do have problems) - I only highlight it because focusing on edge cases to judge the port on isn't a good idea.

We have thousands of Linux XCOM players, given the small number of comments on performance I think any major issues are definitely edge cases usually caused by setup. That's not to say they don't exist but people tend to post when things go wrong more than they do when things go right :)

That all said the quest for performance is always never ending as people always want more frames and higher resolutions :)

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*I think they are on a 500 series Nvidia however I might be wrong as I have spoken to so many people recently :)

If you have any details or feedback please drop our support an email.

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Quoting: Bestia

Quoting: CheesenessOthers have highlighted that this could be an edge case rather than the norm, but even if it wasn't, 43fps is still more than playable, and it's better to view that as being "room for improvement" that we can use to positively encourage further development rather than being unacceptable or a poor job.

I don't know what kind of existing Linux experience Feral Interactive had or brought onboard for the project, but as a first port from the studio, it's pretty positive IMO.

Well I would say that it is norm. Just today someone posted this on Steam forums [External Link]:

Just tried the game on windows on the same hardware (i5-3570, gtx660), got ~110 fps at the place where I usually get ~35 on linux.

UPD: nVidia 340.17, linux 3.15.3

That doesn't mean that I consider the port as poor or unacceptable. The port is good, very good but it sure could use some performance boost.

Also the Feral developers are very active and helpful everywhere that I look.

They have a fix in beta patch for crashing after the end of the mission when you are using VPN or ppp0 or other interface which doesn't have MAC address. It only took them two weeks since the first people reported the issue on Steam forums.

The person reporting this is running on an unsupported card, based on our testing the norm on supported hardware is very similar, we have a Nvidia 650 here in the office with higher performance (by a few frames) than Windows. Older unsupported cards it seems can sometimes hit driver bottlenecks, due to all the different Window Managers and driver combinations that are possible on Linux it's hard to get a general baseline as some Window managers or overrides in the Nvidia settings utility can affect game performance quite dramatically.

However we are monitoring what people have been reporting to see if anything serious or a pattern appears.

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Quoting: BestiaThe performance drop for XCOM is big. Several people in linux_gaming subreddit wrote that they get only half of the framerate of Windows version.

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/29kyxg/pc_report_xcom_enemy_unknown_on_linux_43_drop_in/ [External Link]

One guy posted screenshots comparing Windows (124 fps) and Linux (43 fps).

http://imgur.com/a/44sRZ [External Link]

Yes, however the drop could be for many reasons, he could have a strange setup, old drivers, a card with a driver bug on Linux etc etc.

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