Surround sound works. 5.1 only. The channels are correctly mapped. Good job Aspyr!

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Wow, the Linux port chews up about 15x as much disk space as the Windows version.

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Quoting: Creak

Quoting: MajGuanoGreat game, mediocre port.

If you consider that the game runs on (your) Manjaro and (my) Fedora, on top of the only official distrib: Ubuntu, and also if you consider the poor status of the sound stack in Linux in general; don't you think "mediocre port" is a bit exaggerated?

In general, most Steam Linux games work on all distros. Zero of the 150 games in my library which work on Ubuntu fail to work on Manjaro. A few require special launch options.

Surround sound is missing from Alien Isolation on SteamOS and Ubuntu, which Feral officially supports. It's lacking feature parity with with all the other versions. It works on Windows. It works on XBox. It works on Playstation (Well, I don't know about the Feral's Mac version, I don't have MacOS handy).

Sound is an enormously important part of Alien Isolation. Compared to these other versions, Feral's port simply provides an inferior experience if you've got a good sound system. If you just play on headphones at your desk, it's fine. But if you've got a Steam box hooked up to a kickass home theater setup, you'll be very disappointed. To me, using only 25% of my available sound channels is equivalent to drawing the graphics on only a quarter of my screen.

Surround sound also works in some (but not all) of Feral's other Linux ports. It was broken at launch in Shadow of Mordor, but they later released a patch which enables it. A:I has received no such love.

By this standard, yeah, it's a mediocre port. It's not bad. It runs. But it's not great, either. "Mediocre" doesn't mean "bad". It means "of ordinary or moderate quality". In this case, it might be slightly generous to call it "mediocre", since it's significantly worse than all other versions of A:I, as well as many other Feral products.

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It's too bad Feral never fixed surround sound. If you have a good sound system, prepare to be disappointed.

At least they're selling Steam keys. So you're also getting the Windows version for 70% off, and it has excellent audio.

Great game, mediocre port.

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The game crashes on launch for me.

[email protected] (Below official spec, but the game runs acceptably for me on Windows)
GTX 760 (4GB) on NVIDIA 370.28
8GB DDR3
Manjaro KDE 64-bit

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Does surround sound work, 5.1 or 7.1?

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Quoting: Mountain ManXCOM 2 was a Day 1 release. Why wouldn't Firaxis do the same with Civ VI? I suppose it doesn't really matter to me because I see no reason at all to prefer Civ VI over Civ V with its expansions, and I really don't like VI's cartoon aesthetic. Besides, the Civilization series just feels a bit shallow after getting hooked on Paradox's ridiculously deep and complex grand strategy games.

Feral did the XCOM ports. Aspyr did the Civ ports. Different companies, different workflows, different codebases, different schedules.

The ports of XCOM: EU and Civ V were released years after the original Windows release.

XCOM2 had a day-one release, but it also had some graphical problems. I'm not sure to what extent they've been patched-up yet. Quality of the game itself aside, I'd say their port of XCOM2 wasn't quite as good as XCOM: EU, which was pretty-much flawless.

IIRC, Aspyr had hoped to do same-day release for Civ BE, but weren't quite able to pull it off, and it ended up being a couple months late. Aspyr did a better job of porting Civ BE than they did with Civ V. The complete lack of anti-aliasing in the Linux version of Civ V was a pretty glaring flaw, but this was fixed in BE along with other graphical improvements. In general, BE was much closer to feature-parity with Windows than Civ V was.

If it's not a day-one release, I wouldn't expect it to be more than a couple months behind. If it's a little late, don't sweat it. They're just trying to polish it up for us. Having a same-day port done by an external porter sounds like a really hard task. You're always a little bit behind the original developers, but still have to hit their schedule. The most feasable way to do this would be to delay the Windows release in order to give the porting house time to catch up. Given what a small market segment we are, it wouldn't make economic sense for Firaxis to miss the holiday-season sales bonanza just because a 3rd-party port to was running a little bit late.

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Done!

Could you also add audio information? (2-channel, 6-channel, 8-channel, more?). I need something to brag about, because my system is otherwise mediocre. Since I actually use all 8 of my mobo's built-in audio channels, I assume I'm way ahead of most of you stereo/headphone plebs in that department.

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Quoting: KithopReally quick and dirty and horrible, but here's a quick HOWTO of how I got it finally working on my system (Xubuntu 16.04):

OBS with NVENC for Ubuntu 16.04 [External Link]

Congratulations on your success, and thank you for sharing the build instructions!

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Oh goody, another DRM-encumbered video service! Just what I was hoping for! /sarcasm

I fail to see how this is "Pretty awsome news".

Furthermore, Steam's built-in music player is very, very bad just for dealing with a large library of local content, especially in BPM. Is there any reason to expect they would handle video better?

Also, this article seems a little off-topic for this site. It's GamingOnLinux, not SteamOnLinux. What does this news have to do with this site's core topic? You don't need to report every little thing Valve does. Wouldn't sticking to the stuff that actually relates directly to gaming and linux be a better use of your time and your readers' time? There are plenty of other sites we can go to for generic information. This site is unique in its focus. I hope you have the foresight to understand why it's important to keep it that way.

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