Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: 14Glad to see Steam has a demo button. I want to try it out. Only problem is, my friends and I have a fairly stable schedule of playing board games in person, so playing online isn't a large desire for us. I think I would need to add a different circle of players to get some use out of it.

I was always an "in person" man myself, but with Covid we went virtual . . . we'd probably have gone to in person, at a park maybe, for the summer except one of our GMs is married to a doctor and so is being especially careful.

Yeah, we just barely had one session of a new game we started, as we got to a sort of decent place to stop and let someone else GM for mine. Then with everyone being paranoid and one of my friends working at the hospital, we have held off on starting up again.
Shame too, because my Archeologist / Scientist / Engineer character is a hoot to play! Playing GRUPS Space stuff. Always entertaining when a GM asks in the middle of trying to solve an issue "Do you have archeology?" and I say "I do!" and another player says "What?? Of course YOU do!"
Gotta come prepared!

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[quote=Whitewolfe80]

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Without getting into a full debate yeah i know there are tons of linux native indie games but lets be real here most of them are trash.

Without getting into a full debate, I think I've just read some trash.

Ha good one, so have I you may love indie games that look like really bad snes games but i grew up in that era and snes games looked better than that. I know what i like and i know what i find engaging while you may think they are innovative i see re treads of better games with worse graphics.

Speaking of trash, whatever happened to Bum Simulator? Was totally looking forward to that!

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Quoting: GustyGhostThey should release the code so that others who are willing and able to do the maintenance can do so. lol

Proton/Wine/Eon == Gaming on Windows on Linux

Maybe Liam has too much time on his hands and should also create www.windowsgamingonlinux.com? :P

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: slaapliedjeI was thinking about this the other day. While we have both Unity and Unreal engines with the potential of a 'click to export to Linux' have we really seen a large amount of Unreal based games coming natively to Linux?

The major standard engines support Linux, but, yes, a lot of the middleware components devs plug into their games to save time, do not. Since studios tend to develop the entire game on Windows until it's done, even when they promised a Linux version, they often don't even find out until it's too late.

Yeah, but I think slaapliedje was actually proposing a distinction between relatively real Linux support in Unity leading to quite a few Unity-based native Linux games, and relatively unreal Linux support in Unreal not leading to many native Linux games.

In short, yes, it seems porting is largely dead. Thankfully, thanks to Proton, Linux gaming is not. Ironically we can play more games on Linux now than ever.

Porting, in the sense of games being made by Studio A for Windows only and then ported by Studio B to Linux, is largely dead . . . or if not dead (thanks Ethan Lee!), at any rate pretty dashed sick. But except in the AAA segment I'm not convinced that's had a big impact on the number of native Linux games coming out. Porting was always pretty minor compared to publishers making cross-platform games in the first place, and as both game engines and other cross-platform tools have matured that's only gotten truer. Anyone who, when they start making a game, thinks "I want this game to be cross-platform" can now pretty easily do that.

Proton has certainly allowed Linux gaming to include a lot of non-native games though, and that's been particularly helpful in the AAA space where the factors you mentioned, like the failure of the Steam Machine, had an even stronger impact.

I also think that Linux has and will retain a mindshare among developers that, while fringe, is significantly larger than the 1%-ish market share really warrants. That's for two reasons: The strength, even dominance, of Linux in so many other areas of computing, and I think also the continuing ideological cachet of open source. More than 1% of developers want to release for Linux even if it's barely a break-even proposition.

That said, a bigger desktop market share is still the main thing we need.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant. I mean when was the last game using the Unreal engine released natively? I know there have been a few lesser known titles that don't really broadcast that they used UE, but tons of them you can tell use Unity. Actually I think Supraland maybe one of them that used Unreal, and guess what? They are dropping their Linux native version!

You've got some merit there about developers WANTING to use it and release for it. Pretty sure there is just this weird angst against Linux releases by publishers. And I think most of it is because they still think we're all just a bunch of bums that want software for free, and we'll just pirate it, not realizing that a good share of us use Linux professionally, and generally speaking get paid more than our Windows administrating colleagues.

Unfortunately until we can convince them otherwise, they'll still target Windows. I mean considering that there are/were native builds for Doom 2016 (at least, not sure about Eternal) for Linux that weren't released because Bethesda didn't think they'd make enough money to support it, is kind of telling... and that Epic used to actually say 'why not' and have native games, they don't even care enough about making another Unreal Tournament game to do so...

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: kon14I swear, reading "Linux PC" in these titles is cringier than publishers mixing up Windows and PC when it comes to listing supported platforms.
We're obviously talking about standardized x86 desktop distros of Linux.
It's not as if any proprietary games are being released for other architectures or exotic software setups anyway.
Since when did this actually become a thing.

To each their own, you're the first person to have issues with me saying Linux PC. Part of the issue is how PR and publishers repeatedly refuse to stop saying "PC", despite my asking constantly across every email GOL gets to be clear about platforms. Linux is installed on a PC, we play games on our Linux PC and GamingOnLinux is a website that targets talking about games for Linux....on a PC. So Linux PC is fitting for so many reasons, partly because it shows how silly and outdated it is for "PC" to be used in place of Windows.

I tend to agree with kon14. It's cringe worthy. I'd prefer Linux x86. As most assuredly most of the games won't work on say Linux ARM. And is a Raspberry Pi running a desktop any less than a Personal Computer running Linux? To be fair, publishers / developers should basically be saying Linux / Windows or Linux / Mac / Windows. Alphabetical listing is the correct way to do it, not Windows / Linux, etc.

But yeah just saying "PC, PS5 and XBox.." is wrong when it's also available for Linux. Unless... and this is a HUGE unless, we can finally get PC to equal Linux / Mac / Windows. But I'm sure we'll never get there...

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On the note of porting in general;
I was thinking about this the other day. While we have both Unity and Unreal engines with the potential of a 'click to export to Linux' have we really seen a large amount of Unreal based games coming natively to Linux? There are a few here and there, but I remember how much I wanted Raven Shield to be released natively, as Unreal Tournament and several others in that series were released natively. But it never happened, mostly based on publisher choices vs developers (though in some cases they make mistakes of choosing the wrong middleware, which was the reason why UT3 never came out for us).

But it really makes me feel like Epic only added the Linux export option to Unreal so as not to be beaten by the up and coming Unity engine. If they gave a damn about us, we'd see the Epic Games store and Fortnite ported. Not that I would play such a game, as I tend to not play multiplayer games with people I don't know. But it is definitely one of the more popular ones, and would help get more users to Linux, or at least less reasons for people to boot into Windows.

It's sad about BL2, but I honestly barely played it under Linux, as it didn't seem to have all the features enabled that the Windows version did. Like the PhysX effects.

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I was going to install it and try it out, but apparently only have half the required disk space... need to beat Witcher 2 to free some up...

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Quoting: vipor29probably runs better than microsoft flight sim too

Ha, I bought FS 2020, tried to run it, it asked me to log in... tried to find my old hotmail address, finally got in, it said it needed the xbox live app.. I grumbled, installed it, then it proceeded to crash to the desktop before even trying to download the data. So I promptly removed the game, removed the xbox live crap, and refunded the damn thing.

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I'd like a copy, looks pretty sweet.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: AzPInteresting! I've seen many comments (from the developers I think) that the graphics engine really isn't their main bottleneck, but more or less "everything else". But another native Vulkan-based engine is always welcome!

I'm looking forward to tests of it on Phoronix (or other sites).

I could be wrong here, but moving to Vulkan should make the VR stuff work in Linux? As I believe native Vulkan is a requirement at this point?

So there is that... which also means I should really dig into it with my overly expensive Thrustmaster Warthog set up + Valve Index :)

Nah, that worked with OpenGL as well. What didn't work were the index controllers since the default bindings left you without the ability to interact.

Performance wasn't the main focus of going Vulkan. It was really about getting the rendering engine into a debuggable state where they could actually fix things according to real data instead of having to guess where the OpenGL driver was having issues. This in turn should (eventually) lead to a stutter free flying experience. Having a more modern platform for the future was of course a thing as well. Eventually they will have to overhaul the weather (rendering) engine.

From my understanding of it, that would have required OpenGL to Vulkan wrapper? As I thought SteamVR only supported Vulkan on Linux. Granted, I could be completely wrong.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/250820/discussions/5/133261370000921428/ [External Link]

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