I haven't played a worthwhile racing game on any platform since Forza 2. The follow ups were ruined by 3 minute load screens - made ironic by the fact that the race was frequently two laps of around a minute each.

So, yep, this is great news. They'll be tapping into a starved market too, at least for the racing genre.

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Quoting: lucius.corneliusWhat a list! I've never heard of any of them.
When are they going to start allowing Windows games, that work perfectly on WINE, in the Linux Steam client?
When they wake up sufficiently to do that I'll be interested.

That's an interesting stance. I'd prefer they never did so. It may incur apathy from future devs to support Linux directly, resulting in a sub-par experience.

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Looks like the beta is now fully open:
https://twitter.com/DJ_Link/status/460331847978090496 [External Link]
Might give this one a go...

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Quoting: geminiWhat about The Universim? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crytivogames/the-universim [External Link]

Looks fantastic! I've added it to the [url=www.gamingonlinux.com/crowdfunding/index.php5/List_of_crowdfunding_games]WIKI[/url] and will nominate it as a Biggie. Thanks!

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Quoting: GuestLegends of Persia funding goal seems to low... The "Why help" section does not give enough details. It also says it will help "produce quality game mechanics" when they say at the top the game is scheduled for release in June of 2014... And why no demo if they are this close to a release?

Reading the "Risks" section, it would appear that their main focus is recoding the scripting engine for "FIGS", which will allow simpler translations. However, I agree, the funding goal is oddly low and I did note that in my write up. I can't bring myself to pledge to this one not because of the low goal, but because they only vaguely mention that Linux is on the radar. These days, I'll only pledge to projects that specify that Linux is part of their plans from day one and will launch simultaneously.

To be honest, these days I'm also wanting assurances that any alphas or betas will also launch simultaneously. You can blame the Fun Pimps and their "7 Days to Die" title for my new-found scepticism.

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Quoting: alexThunder

Quoting: liamdaweWhat's not to be "butthurt" about that?

I thought you're feeling butthurt, because we should lower our hopes for a borderlands 2 port. I mean, I can understand your opinion about Colonial Marines very well, but I think that one doesn't belong to this news/article, does it?

That's the second time you've alluded that Colonial Marines is irrelevant to this editorial. Almost as if you had no idea who developed it.

Hint: Gearbox.

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Quoting: Half-Shot

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: scaineBottom line - it's amazing what Icculus does, but porting a game as an after thought is NOT easy and will never have the same quality as a game developed natively. Even Ryan Gordon isn't that good.

It's not a question of how good he is, he is certainly capable. The question is support costs, developers like Tripwire (Killing Floor) would have paid him to port it, not to support it. So once a developer thinks it's good enough Ryan will get his money and then they would part ways.

I don't think he charges amazingly high that gearbox could take a loss on it though, isn't it just the case of sending him the code and getting a game back? I mean there is bug testing, QA and more but thats the basic gist.

No idea what he charges, but he certainly does support the games. However, for long, I have no idea, or even if he's actually paid for providing that support. I assume so, but since Killing Floor has been out for Linux for over a year and it still has the same issues, it's anyone's guess.

In fact, taking a look - https://bugzilla.icculus.org/describecomponents.cgi [External Link], while anyone can file a bug report, it doesn't look like Ryan ever responds. And certainly, looking at Killing Floor, the texture bugs were reported over a year ago, but the bug's never had an update.

So, "best effort" might be putting it optimistically.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: manny

Quoting: GuestWasn't Gabe Newell saying recently that it turned out to be easy to convince publishers to support Linux? Gearbox obviously disagrees.

Engines my friend, engines.

Unreal engine3 doesn't have linux support out of the box. So porting takes more efforts and time.

I expect we'll get more support with UE4 games. I expect chances will be higher once they start using UE4 for games, (maybe a future borderlands3).

If Icculus as a single developer can port UE3 games, a big company like Gearbox should be able too without "wasting" too many resources.

Apart from that, I agree. Having engines supporting Linux as a target out-of-the-box might help significantly. Same goes for the other major game engines that have announced Linux support.

I am in awe of what Icculus does, but I've yet to play a single one UE3 game that didn't have horrible, often game-breaking bugs.

Examples :

Killing Floor - missing textures on all maps, West London is nearly unplayable as a result. I can see the invisible monsters. But I can't see through some scopes...

Sanctum 2 - Textures missing (minor), collision issues (player and monsters falling through the world) and many, many random crashes. This one is still in beta, but it's been like that for weeks without any updates.

Dungeon Defenders - Lots of random crashes, weird mouse sensitivity, poorer performance than what you'd expect.

As for his other non-UE ports, such as Psychonauts or Frozen Synapse, there are other smaller issues. Mouse tracking issues. Gamepad issues. Resolution issues.

Bottom line - it's amazing what Icculus does, but porting a game as an after thought is NOT easy and will never have the same quality as a game developed natively. Even Ryan Gordon isn't that good.

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Quoting: FutureSutureHow many of you actually contacted Gearbox in some manner to let the folks there know you're interested instead of just commenting here? If you haven't contacted Gearbox yet, then do so!

Liam's referred to this post in his reply to Randy Pitchford. Besides, Randy's agreed to raise it internally already, so the Reddit thread itself was enough.

But you're right. It can't hurt to have your voice heard directly.

Interesting though - here's a massive software house, who publish on Steam, who typically launch their Windows games with Mac compatibility and yet Steam Machines were announced last year, while the Linux client for Steam has been around even longer, over a year.

And the President of this massive, Steam-based software house only now is going to raise it internally?

That's... unbelievable.

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For interested parties, you can see a list of all the games Icculus has ported, or is still currently working on here - https://bugzilla.icculus.org/describecomponents.cgi [External Link].

I'm delighted by this news. I sank 70 hours in Borderlands 2 in late 2012 and early 2013, before ditching my Windows partition. That's about the same amount of time I spent on Skyrim during 2011 onwards - one of my biggest time sinks on Steam, apart from my frankly embarrassing 230 hours on Killing Floor.

There's an absolute heap of high quality DLC I could sink my time into if this makes the jump. Great news!

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