Looks like Nothing to Hide made it!

I've gone for both Star Crawlers (love the name!) and Earthlock, which looks like it has a fighting chance to be one of those rare high-goal projects that manages to get funded

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So, Star Citizen for Linux...?

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Ok this is the sort of present that those who grumbled about gifting of non-free games to debian/ubuntu devs should be impressed with! Way to go Valve!

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Quoting: q4aLiam already wrote article about Proven Lands, which is on Kickstarter [External Link] now, but there is no mention about this game. It's a bit strange.. or you don't want to duplicate it?

No, it's more a matter of timing...

By the time Liam wrote that article, this article was close to the target publishing deadline. Definitely by the time I noticed Proven Lands, this article's text was complete (aside from errors caught during proof reading). So I think that's why Liam didn't add it to the list of nominated games, unlike Heart & Slash which he nominated 3 days ago, before the writeups had been done.

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Quoting: HadBabitsCompared to my 6620 AMD card (no idea where that is in the spectrum) with 6 gigs of RAM and some kind of quad core processor that ran at 1.6 GHZ.

Radeon 6620 chipset is pretty bottom end, normally meant for laptops...
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+6620G [External Link]
looks like far worse performance even than the wimpy Radeon 6850 that IT dept ended up getting instead of the mid-range 6970 I had requested. A more fair comparison for the 6620 would be against Intel integrated video. No wonder you weren't exactly happy with it as a card for gaming!

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Yes yes yes! Bring on Portal 2!!

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Quoting: commodore256Also, GlibC changes have broken the old Loki binaries.

But you can still run the old binaries with old libraries on a modern system...
http://www.swanson.ukfsn.org/loki/ [External Link]

If a game publisher wanted to make things easy for us Linux users, they would simply maintain such a collection of the needed libraries. Those who want to run the game with distro-provided libraries (with possible security bugfixes and all) could still try to do so, but that's outside of the scope of the game publisher.

This is the same concept as packaging up all dlls needed by a game, which has been an accepted practice among many windows developers...

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Quoting: commodore256Come on, they have a legitimate reason for not supporting Linux. It's because no two distros are the same. Linux has no Standard API, No Standard API and shared libraries have caused dependency hell. You may say that modern Linux is more compatible with Wine is with ancient Windows Programs more than modern Windows. But Windows Programs from 1995 are more compatible with modern Windows than a Linux Binary from 1995 is with Modern Linux.

Perhaps you have never played with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and even chroots? Linux is actually quite backward compatible, thanks to Linus' policy about keeping userspace backward compatibility at the kernel level. For instance, on one contract I had to run some RHEL 2.1 apps 10 years later. LD_LIBRARY_PATH worked. Some GOL members are still running Linux binaries of NWN, which were released in 2003 (so over 10 years ago)
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/187/index/4643217 [External Link]

The main question with respect to providing binary-only games on Linux that will work for the next 10 years would be the quality of wayland backward compatibility support for old versions of opengl. There will probably be some less-accelerated fallback way to run it on the powerful future hardware, if needed. However, it's not like running 10 year old games is a sure thing on Windows either -- just today I was seeing complaints from a windows gamer fighting to get 4-yrs-old game working with modern Windows drivers.

Anyway, a distributor who set a goal of wanting their binary stuff to work on Linux for a long time would mainly just need to collect together the corresponding libraries and make the launcher use those libraries. It's not that bad for the developers, and totally convenient for the users.

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There you have it. SteamOS will somehow negate having to support five Linux distributions and defeat the beast that is distro fragmentation once and for all.

It is rather amusing, but if having Valve put together the needed libraries in SteamOS, rather than having to collect together the dependencies themselves, is what it takes to for some developers to be sensible about Linux... then we've got another thing to thank Valve for. I'm sure these guys aren't the only ones who need Valve's support as confidence-builder.

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Weird, I didn't have any crashes on Book of Unwritten Tales, and also didn't have to replace any libraries. That game worked great for me, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the sequel.

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