@everyone arguing the semantics of "native".
Wine is fine, but it isn't native. Even just the Wine API wrapper, let alone the full Wine system, has a certain amount of added system resource overhead you wouldn't, per se, have were the software written directly targeting the native interfaces. That said, unless you're the kind of idealist who absolutely adheres to Stallman's and the FSF's philosophy (at which point even DOSBox and other emulators are questionable), there is little else that meaningfully suggests against their use when they at least provide a way for us on Linux to demonstrate demand. Once the bigger releases are regularly targeting our platform, there's more room for us to then point out that developing targeting Linux from the ground up is going to reduce porting costs (no need to get a different team up to speed on the code base then make the requisite refactorizations to get the software running on a new system) and that day one native support will ensure more Linux purchases during that critical initial release window at full price and even preorders and the like should enough community good will be garnered.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I don't really do big ticket social media at all, so I'll just leave this here on that off chance Feral do actually read all these.

1a} Pie in the Sky Optimism: Either Fallout 4 or Skyrim SE, if Zenimax/Bethesda could be convinced to get on board. Much as I want these for me (I need to install Wine 3 and see how well my massive mod list can be made to work for Skyrim now), I really just want them to exist on Linux natively more because the underlying engine is likely going to remain the core of both franchises, with some updating, for a long time to come as it has now for near two decades and having a known working codebase to work from is going to make releasing future installments to our platform all that much more likely.

1b} Cynical Realism: Any halfway comparable yet under performing open world RPG on which the Linux community could dog pile and visibly push to more significant numbers just from our interest in having more such titles.

2a} Pie in the Sky Optimism: Any significant and relatively recent Blizzard game. Last I browsed their forums (a few years back) they persisted to insist that there wasn't enough market share for Linux nor enough interest from the Linux gaming community to make porting any of their games worth the costs, including in response to people asking for Hearthstone which is, to my understanding, built on bloody Unity.

2b} Moderately Realistic by Comparison: Magic: The Gathering Arena which is in closed beta now. I've been unable to find out whether they intend to push a Linux native version, but historically Magic Digital Studio has been at least as dismissive as Activision/Blizzard when it comes to Linux releases. I don't really care about Hearthstone and would still like Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, et al or a really suitable replacement but MTG Arena has me drooling as something that seems to be a merger between the Duels of the Planeswalkers games and MTGO and likely to be their future online format going forward.

3} Pie in the Sky Optimism: Any of the Final Fantasy games that have been ported to Windows. Personally I want the chance to repurchase and natively play any of FF1 through FF6 again and relive some of my childhood/teen years putting dozens to hundreds of hours into each of these. Realistically, much as I dislike the game myself, I know that FF7 is the one that has the best chance to draw enough interest to push more installments of the franchise onto Linux with all the updates. There is no realistic alternative here unfortunately.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: HamishI see you missed the sarcasm. :whistle:

More like being intentionally somewhat obtuse. I've met plenty of people, mostly gamers, across both FOSS and proprietary userbases who actually do look at hardware specs like that and I find it worthwhile, upon occasion, to short circuit their typical need to push hard on the upgrade cycle and the related and all too common view that PC gaming is absurdly expensive compared to console gaming (even if I have to occasionally miss the joke to do it). ;D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: HamishSo am I letting the side down then by having a more than five year old rig that uses a ton of second hand parts?

First, I want to second Liam, this is not a pissing contest by any stretch. Second, years old tech is hardly outdated let alone something to think of as "letting down" the Linux community. Even in the Windows space of three years ago, when I stopped duel booting and went 100% Linux, my PC (mostly in service since 2010 and not exactly high tier tech when I bought it*) was still solidly capable for both gaming and core productivity using both FOSS and proprietary tools.

*MSI 785GM-E65, Athlon II 2.6GHz Quad CPU, DDR3 1333 RAM (4GB since 2010, 8 GB added in 2014), Gigabyte R9 270X (upgraded from a Gigabyte HD 4850 in 2014), WD Green 750GB HDD, Sony 24X CD/DVD RW, Logitech T-BC21 (bought in 2003, used since), Logitech K120 (third I've owned since switching to USB keyboards from PS/2, current one is a year old) and a really cheap (sub-$40 when purchased) Linkworld case that came with a cheap 430W PSU (upgraded to a modular 800W PSU in 2014).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: qptain NemoConsidering emulators actually aren't made primarily as means of DRM circumvention wouldn't it be easy to argue against that? Or at the very least wouldn't you have a very fair shot at that? All the counterexamples would be plain truth.

Typically it's not the intended use case but the common in practice use cases these arguments are made from. It's reasonably simple to show that the most commonly discussed use cases for game system emulation in the public sphere online either directly involve or else encourage DRM circumvention.

Quoting: elmapulyou're assuming that people know about those free alternatives, they dont.
it took me years to replace notepad with something better, i didnt even knew what synstax highlight where, or that this is possible.
auto complete is another killer feature, those things are important for productivity, so the text editor you chose do matter!

piracy became part of an culture, people arent used to search for alternatives when they can't pay for something, and as an result they dont tell their frieds, neighbors and family about those alternatives.

That is, to an extent, certainly part of it, but there are also a metric ton of other factors. Consider, for example, the implications of the mere exposure effect and the anchoring effect on even getting people to try an alternative they do know about, let alone putting in time and effort finding ones they aren't already aware of.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It struck me while I was at work this evening that Galoob v Nintendo [External Link] may also be relevant to this in addition to the others I mentioned upthread.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kozecThing is, gamepads are pain in the ass because of xbox controller. It's The One that works differently from everything else while being backed up by "Windows company", so games have to support it.

So very true. This is also something not helped by the fact that there is some part of their internal spec that let's third party Xbox controllers not absolutely work internally the exact same as MS own yet be recognized and work out of box on Xbox and Windows without needing further config. I learned this when my friend brought over his controller so we could play some Skullgirls and Crawl, his is official and mine is a cheap Game Stop one (Game Stop branded controller was $20 less). On my controller the D-Pad is recognized as 4 buttons, while on his it's two axes like the sticks are.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Before I get down to what I have to say here, I'm not a legal professional, merely a layman who is well read on the subject, take any and every thing I say on these topics with a large grain of salt (and maybe a squirt of citrus :D).

17 USC§1201(2) [External Link]:

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

That was one that came into effect as part of the DMCA. It's relevant here because Atlus/Sega will at least try to argue (in court should it reach that point) that the primary purpose of this particular emulator is as a means of circumvention, that it has no other commercially significant purpose and that the use of whatever mentions of their game existed on the developers' pages effectively act as marketing for the emulator as a means of DRM circumvention. That last is probably the hardest to argue against in any sort of effective manner, and hence is likely why the solution is what it is.

Quoting: Smoke39I think attacking emulators is short-sighted and shows a lack of respect for games as an art form.

Also, the legality of emulators has been tested in court. Bleem died because of legal fees, but they won their case.

Sony v Bleem [External Link] hardly enters into the case here. That case was explicitly about the use of screenshots of Sony games made using their product as used specifically for marketing their product (commercial emulator with screenshots on it's box). The case directly didn't address the legalities entangled in emulation at all and predated the effective date for the part of the USC quoted above.
Sony v Connectix [External Link] (another commercial emulation case from the same period) is a little more instructive as it addresses the legalities involved in reverse engineering the Sony PS BIOS (much like the case in Atari v Nintendo involving the 10NES chip) but again this case also precedes the effective date of the above quoted law.
To my knowledge the legality of emulation itself has never been tested in the US courts since the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA took effect (nor prior, properly speaking). One major reason for this is that most emulation software is not developed by large companies who have the resources to fight such cases and an incentive to do so, but instead by individuals who, even should they have the help of significant groups like the EFF, typically can't afford to see such a case through all the filings that will happen prior to seeing the inside of a court house let alone through the hearings themselves. Another significant reason for such legality never being tested in court is that the involved corporate stakes holders don't bring cases in such a manner as to ever have that legality come up, due in large part to fears of what it would mean if such a case happened to be seen through and the courts were to rule "in favor of" emulators similarly to VCRs in Sony v Universal [External Link]. That is a precedent they absolutely don't ever want to risk for fairly obvious reasons, and hence they always find an adjacent line to sue on (should they even need to bring suit at all).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: lucifertdark

Quoting: Asuinstead of using steamcmd, bug the devs to bring their games to linux lol...
I think every game engine can produce mac and linux binary now.

Bethesda won't budge.

Let's be fair, Bethesda/ZeniMax will be about the last and Activision/Blizzard may be the very last big non-Japanese game publishing company to budge on the Linux issue.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Wildy

Quoting: kf

- Unless running via a .sh (LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH DISPLAY=:0 stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 ./MainBinary), native extensions (.so) cease to load correctly.

Isn't this standard when you ship games that require specific versions of libraries? I've even seen many steam games do this even with the steam runtime avaliable.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH tells the runtime linker to prepend the given locations to the paths where shared objects (.so files) are looked up from by the runtime linker. It is widely used but it shouldn't be when one has control of the binary. There is RPATH for achieving the same and it could get added to the ELF executable during linking. As this header could contain relative locations like $ORIGIN/lib it should be easy to ship a binary with its own set of libraries included.

Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: TheSHEEEPHonestly, it should just be like on Windows - look in the executable folder first, done.

You can literally already do that in Linux. It's just not enabled by default (because that would be a huge security nightmare.

What you can do is set the RPATH [External Link] field in the ELF binary, i.e. the game dev needs to do that on their game binary before release.

You can do that while compiling, or afterwards with patchelf [External Link]. If you do

$ patchelf --set-rpath '$ORIGIN/lib' ./foobar

you modify the binary foobar to automatically search for the lib folder in its own path for libraries.

EDIT: And I was ninja'd again, great :P

I want to thank both Wildy and DrMcCoy for this info. I just recently started working on a small personal coding project (my first in over a decade and first ever on Linux) and was trying to figure out how to do exactly this when I took a break to come read on here as it's been a couple weeks, and lo serendipity.

Quoting: GuestThis is probably for the best. Hyper Light Drifter, Switchcars and Nuclear Throne are examples of GameMaker games that never got their controller support for linux working properly. Feels that most GameMaker-made games are of a type that is best played with a controller. But I wonder how Broforce and Hotline Miami got it working?

I seem to remember reading that both of them had a wrapper written to let them compile their existing code against a different engine for Linux. That's hearsay and it was long enough ago that I can't cite a source, so grain of salt and all that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments