No way, that would be a .tar.bz2 in a .tgz in a .lha in a .tar.gz :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Mmh. Seriously, the screenshots don't do this baby justice. The artwork is simply beautiful in its simplicity. Gonna keep an eye on that. :D

(oh... on the "WHY GODS WHY" side of things, a tgz in a .tar.gz? Seriously? - and that's my only gripe. The game itself is pretty cool and runs with no visible problems. Maybe a windowed mode would be nice, but that's just nitpicking :))

View this comment - View article - View full comments

That was... heroic? Epic? Oh well, have a Like either way. ^^

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Ahaaaa, I didn't even know VVVVVV used to be Flash. ^^

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Add me to the "WTF" crowd. Makes as much sense as making a Flash game and not releasing it for GNU/Linux. Oo

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: "Hamish, post: 5839, member: 6"Interplay you say?
http://www.desura.com/company/interplay-entertainment/ [External Link]

Interplay, I say.
http://www.gog.com/interplay/ [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The same is valid for Windows, if you want to go down that particular path. The games are still DRM-free (mostly).
Anyway, no surprise, and their Interplay deal is still sweet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: "Anon, post: 5796"Community behaviour is a major problem, since one never knows what might happen. Although the GOG forums are extremely well behaved so far, and I just can't see that changing.

That much is true. But then again, there's no telling who the 7000 voters are, for starters, and how they'd interact. I know I haven't used the forums so much, I probably would if GNU/Linux support happened and would certainly help where I can, as best I can, but what of others?

I still don't understand why can't they just have a .zip/.tgz alongside the .exes. I hate the fact that they need to be installed to be unpacked right now, which means if I suddenly decide to install a game, I have to have wine.

They don't. Just install innoextract, and run innoextract ./setup_game.exe :)

And about multiple distros - maybe just the biggest ones? Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. That should provide enough coverage in packages that everyone will be happy, and then it's solved. Three distros is still much easier than three Windows versions.

Mmh... Yes, no, maybe. I don't have a problem with it. I'm a tinkerer at heart, so anything would do. I see a hint of a problem though. No offense, but Ubuntu pretty much hosts both chaff and wheat. I don't know about SuSE. Fedora's more for the happy regular user in my experience. How do we distribute? .deb/.rpm? Puh-lease, no. You may support only those officially, but you can't be unaware that others exist. Plus, you're forcing people to install in a predetermined folder, usually with admin rights. Maybe I'm a grumpy old fool, but a "portable" version, inno installer, good ol' sh with tgz, anything would be better. You'll find just as many who'd rather have packages. How do we solve that? Three versions? Thrice the work. :/

Maybe in the meantime, we could get a nice wiki going, and just provide best configs, share launchers and tips on running the games. Would it be possible for one to start such a thing? Perhaps PCGamingWiki would be of some help, or maybe one of the porters that runs multiple wikis for Linux users about games? I'd gladly contribute by writing, testing and getting others on board, if we can get the ball rolling.

That would be a good thing, regardless of whether GOG sees it, acknowledges it and thinks about it. But don't forget that GOG is a business and has partners. It doesn't just depend on them. I sincerely think they need professional support before they can get this rolling. Not just for themselves, but also because a community isn't good enough for the fools out there who allow GOG to distribute their games. Seriously, I feel everyone's shooting the messenger here. ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Ah, sure wish you had put it that way in your comment. It makes much more sense.
Still, there are a few things that are wrong - to me, at least.
* Community support? Fine and dandy. But it's still no support. Not sensu stricto, at least. Saying "got a problem? Check that with the community, we don't got nothing to do with that" isn't exactly professional. You can't blame GOG for not trusting the community either. The communities are full of helpful people, people who know their way around the system... But also full of noobs, and a handful of trolls. Not good enough.
* DOSBox .tar.gz - can't say I disagree with you on this particular point. Though I'm not certain you won't have people crying out loud that they want proper packaging and a ppa and then some. And maybe even some money too. May sound sarcastic, but it happens a bit too often. And some people couldn't ldd a binary to save their own life. Not sure they're not one and the same too. I tend to think .tgz is THE way to go as it's universal, where packages aren't, but how many don't?
* Then there are the OTHER games. Indies? Sure, enough of them have native binaries out there. But people will probably come on the GOG forums for support. If only the devs can solve it, there's no guarantee they'll be checking the forums often enough... Which may - and probably will, as GNU/Linux isn't exactly the engineer's hobby OS anymore - lead to further frustration. Then there's WINE. And the rest.
* GOG, as you say, is a company. They won't take "go to the community forum". Heck, I wouldn't. I want a SPOC. SomeONE I can trust. SomeONE I can build a commercial relationship with. That is ONE person or a relative small group of people. A helpdesk, one may say. Because tons of people can click on the shiny icons, half of those people are able to copy/paste weird lines in the black window and a quarter of those people are able to write said weird things themselves doesn't make them a SPOC. It doesn't make them a POC at all. As helpful as they may be. When GOG files a bug that impacts 85% of distro X users, they want it to be treated as it is: a P1 ticket, solved ASAP with strict SLA, with someone who can keep them updated on how things are going and can be held accountable if it turns into a PR nightmare.
* They *DO* have to support multiple distros. Saying it's unneeded is saying "who gives a f*** what version of windows?'. A Win7 won't have the same issues as a Vista or an XP. Heck, I'm willing to bet a good chunk of my pay your kernel isn't my kernel. I'd probably win.
All that you propose isn't bad either, mind you. But it would only be good enough for unofficial support. And are the publishers GOG works with willing to support THAT? Heh. Ubisoft doesn't even know how to treat customers right, and you expect them to understand such a thing as "unofficial, unsupported versions"? :|

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yeah, Loki is on the far end of the spectrum as far as brokenness goes. Still, even some recent LGP titles give people trouble. See Cold War for example. No sound? Oh why yes, let's rename that /lib folder. Oweeee, that worked. :/

And that falls right into the "support" category. That kind of workaround will work for some, others will need the lib folder, some will have to use padsp/pasuspender while others are still using ALSA, and so on. An Arch x64 running on XFCE without compositing and on ALSA isn't an Ubuntu x86 with Unity and Pulse.

I wish it was as simple as shipping your own libraries and so on. Unfortunately, it isn't. That's my main concern. Even though DOS games should be pretty much unaffected by this. I mean, regressions aren't legion on that end.

But they'll be on their own for most titles, methinks. I don't see Ubisoft giving them support for this old game that has weird behaviour on this and that distro. Even some indie/shareware titles can go wrong pretty quickly (see Sokoban by DanSoft and its libboost problems). It still requires some staff on GOG's end, and isn't as easy as "just asking". :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments