Quoting: CybaCowboyBut are GOG.com really trying?

You could argue that Vavle Software have a lot of buying power - but not talking about a handful of games, one or two publishers... We're talking about a lot of games and many different publishers, not to mention the fact that GOG.com is the smallest of stores out there.

Keep in mind that, often, one of these two things is in play:

1. For the native ports, "Steam holds about 70% of our market and GOG won't accept our Steam builds. Making and bugfixing two Linux builds is too much work. We just won't let GOG sell it on Linux." (I can't remember where I got that number but I seem to remember various figures saying in the vicinity of 70%)

2. For older stuff, "Stop bugging us until the contract is up for renewal."

Also, at least in the case of Defender's Quest [External Link], GOG was the only significant non-Steam download store other than Steam. (Direct sales aren't a "store" and, last I heard, Kongregate didn't do downloads )

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Quoting: rea987That is quite interesting. Cause, I grabbed Bastion with one of the Humble Indie Bundles and now I have access to both Steam and DRM-Free versions of the game. But I guess that may be expected; DRM-Free GNU/Linux built of Metal Slug 3 was offered by one of the Humble Bundles and there is no way to buy either DRM-Free or the GNU/Linux version right now...

That's what I'm saying. Humble Bundle Inc. is allowed to offer the Bastion binaries to people who bought the Humble Bundle but they're not allowed to offer those same binaries to people who bought it after the bundle was over.

(So it's basically similar to those copies of Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics that GOG can allow me to redownload but isn't allowed to sell to new people.)

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Quoting: Hamishand it does not have a selection screen for Cryptic Passage like Shadow Warrior does for its expansions. It does not seem to provide me with any easy way of launching it.

The latter is actually pretty bad. I honestly was expecting better than this, based on my previous experiences with some of their other Build engine game wrappers.

I tend to get mad at GOG games for defaulting to fullscreen mode, seemingly whenever I've just forgotten that they do that, (Openbox can't preserve window placements across resolution changes to save its life) but that's about the only complaint I generally have with them.

Everything that would be exposed via Start Menu icons on Windows is also exposed on Linux... the tarball just doesn't advertise it very well.

1. "./start.sh -h" will show you all of the sub-commands within a given game.
2. "./start.sh -a" will run Cryptic Passage (It's just listed as "addon" but it runs CRYPTIC.EXE)
3. GOG .deb files just unpack and run the undocumented "./start.sh --install-deb" command
4. There's nothing magic about "./start.sh --install-deb" and it should work on any distro.
5. The undocumented "./start.sh --uninstall" does remove everything "--install-deb" adds.
6. The command that gets installed to the PATH is just a "CD and run" wrapper for start.sh
7. start.sh is well structured. It's easy to use "shlex" from the Python stdlib to extract metadata.
8. It's not too difficult to programmatically rewrite and install their .desktop files with non-system-wide paths.

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Quoting: CybaCowboyIn an attempt to "grab headlines", GOG.com made such a big song-and-dance about supporting Linux-based operating systems a while back... And yeah, they hit the 100 games they claimed they would offer.

But the trickle of games since has been just that - a trickle.

I had high hope of GOG.com, considering I've been a happy customer since the start... But I take their claims of enthusiasm for Linux-based operating systems with a grain of salt.

If the publishers are dragging their feet on authorizing an amendment to the contract to add Linux to the list of allowed distribution platforms or the indie developers aren't willing to let them use a port from a Humble Bundle, there's nothing they can do.

(Note things like Bastion where not even Humble Store is allowed to sell the DRM-free Humble Bundle build to new customers despite it already being in their CDN)

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Honestly, I'm kind of happy about this. The only closed-source components I allow in my gaming stack other than the game itself are my BIOS, the nVidia binary drivers, and the Adobe Flash plugin and only because they're grandfathered in.

Hopefully this will push Linux support for it further in the direction of things like my 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator where I've got full functionality via an open-source clone of the closed-source drivers named spacenavd.

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Quoting: Crazy Penguin

Quoting: CheoghI've been waiting for this. :D

Quoting: HamishHonestly though, I am still a little surprised that it showed up for Linux, considering how difficult it was to get Blood onto GOG.com in the first place.

Why? All DOS-Games from GOG working fine on Linux, after some smaller adjustments to the DOSbox config file. Or if you are lazy run it with wine *cough*.

I'm only surprised that they haven't rebundled all DOS Games yet. As they work fine on Linux with DOSbox too.

Because, if it were merely a matter of technical matters, GOG would have most of their catalogue on Linux, either via DOSBox or Wine, by now. (After all, they have no problem making Wine bundles for OSX and they demo'd proof of concept by making Wine-based Linux releases for Flatout and Flatout 2.)

It's standard practice for publishers' lawyers to explicitly list what is allowed in a contract with a company like GOG so they can't be unpleasantly surprised. That means that GOG can't release anything for Linux until they renegotiate the contract to add "and Linux" to the list of allowed platforms.

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The "official statements from GOG" account has responded [External Link] on the topic of passworded installers and it's good news.

They basically said. "Our bad. We'll get rid of the passwords while we find a better solution. We never consciously intended to break support with your tools and never will. However, since those are officially Windows installers, we reserve the right to break PlayOnLinux scripts and the like if we see a backwards-incompatible way to improve the need to make things more comfortable for Windows users."

(Gowor has said that the original purpose of the switch to RAR itself was to allow massive multi-DVD-sized installers to be incrementally modified while a release is being prepared, rather than having to regenerate the entire InnoSetup fileset for every little change. As I understand it, the RAR passwords are a failed attempt to reinvent the authenticity verification that originally came from having hashes of the BIN files stored inside the signed EXE.)

Given that response and how symmetric crypto protected by "security by obscurity" is ineffective as authenticity verification, my impression is that this whole thing was just a case of "someone jumped on an easy 'solution' without putting enough thought into its implications".

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Quoting: neffocouldn't you just use the GOG installer in wine anyway?

These new installers crash under current Wine versions.

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I should also mention that the RAR password protection is ineffective at protecting against malware.

It's symmetric crypto, so anyone who can gain knowledge of the password (eg. because they know how to breakpoint a file without debugging symbols or they learned to disassemble binaries to write cracks and keygens) can generate a RAR with added malware.

I've already suggested to Gowor that a better approach would be to have the (already signed) EXE do a signature or hash verification check on the RAR. (One of the stated goals was enabling rapid iteration, so maybe embedding a public key in the signed EXE and storing a cryptographically-signed manifest of expected contents in the RAR so it could be updated without rebuilding the EXE)

I also suggested that a much less controversial way to prevent user stupidity would be to replace the 7-byte identifying prefix on the RAR header with some other 7-byte string, since they're already using a modified unrar.dll anyway. (eg. replacing the "Rar!" portion at the beginning with "GOG!")

That way, WinRAR wouldn't recognize it but they could be converted into ordinary RARs by us more technical users with a single line of Python code.

(And, of course, someone else pointed out that, if VLC trying to open BIN files is really that much of a problem, they can come up with their own file extension too.)

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Quoting: hardpenguin

Is preventing legitimate customers that use Linux from playing the games worth saving a couple of minutes of support time and the computers of a handful of pirates?

Legitimate? Just pointing out that those 'legitimate' ones want to play games that are not in any way supported for Linux...

What about Unreal Tournament? While not a GOG-supported use, buying the Windows version for the resource files and then downloading the Linux port's binaries is a legal, developer-approved way to play it natively on Linux.

(As long as you're willing to take responsibility for writing wrapper scripts to work around things like the original Unreal engine assuming that the CPU's clock speed will remain fixed.)

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