Regarding expansion packs, so far it's known that for example some clans will be available in expansions, but those will be free. Some story expansions will be paid (similar to The Witcher 3 ones). I don't see any problem with that.

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Quoting: Avehicle7887Nice to see there's chance for a Linux version. I'd definitely buy it. For now I'm happy this isn't going to be a 1 year Epic deal (so far).

Paradox are big enough to avoid falling for this Epic trap tactic. They profit by selling in all stores.

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For anyone planning to buy the first game - get it on GOG. It's the best available release, since it already includes Wesp5's base patch which is practically mandatory today.

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Great news, if true! Paradox really got better lately with untying their games from particular stores and aiming to release them on GOG as well. Bloodlines 2 on Linux and DRM-free would be a treat.

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Quoting: GuestWithout seeing the Stadia SDK, I suspect their input handling is very similar to that provided by SDL2 (if not a modified version of SDL2 itself), or can be easily wrapped into existing input abstraction. So the game engine sees it as just normal input rather than anything more fancy.

That's why I don't think a wrapper is necessary.

If they aim to be compatible with SDL2 - even better. But so far there are not enough details on this.

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Quoting: GuestNo actually sure what's being asked for here. It was mentioned that for the "PC Vulkan port" there was essentially one file different to that maintained for Stadia. No wrapper is needed - it already works, mostly because they want to test it locally. And in this case, Ubisoft wasn't being lazy - they are indeed trying to do things proper (for reasons of Stadia, but it helps desktop regardless), and some of their feedback into tooling has been helping AMD (and Google) focus on those areas.

So what would the wrapper be used for really? I mean, all the middleware problems, input, networking, audio, etc, had to be resolved to make it work with Stadia anyway. So I'm not sure what's really left for a wrapper to do (compared to a Stadia port).

Stadia is different from our regular desktop use case. Think about how it handles input. It's routed to the game from the network, not from your local keyboard and mouse attached to the computer. Same way, output doesn't go to regular Vulkan swapchains aimed at the display, it's packed into some video stream, sent out to the user.

If I understood correctly, Stadia SDK provides those features in the form of some API for the developers. So taking Stadia game as is won't work locally, without going through some unnecessary clunky client server setup (and it's not clear even if the server side of Stadia is open source).

So to convert that into a proper desktop usable code, something needs to be changed. Or some kind of shim implemented like above.

Proper changes might be small, but Ubisoft is too lazy to do even that small amount. Shim might make it practically seamless, though knowing Ubisfot or Bethesda, even that won't help them ;)

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIf Stadia becomes a sizable thing, I wonder if someone will ever create a sort of wrapper that turns Stadia Linux ports into real desktop Linux ports.

I was thinking the same thing. To simplify porting for the likes of lazy Ubisoft (which has piles of money to do it properly, but whatever). Just another incentive to release for Linux.

I.e. something like SDL - Stadia plugin.

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Nice to see many fixes being upstreamed!

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Good points there about how they were bitten by too much reliance on HLSL and MS tools. And of course, despite releasing it for Stadia, there is still no desktop Linux version.

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Good to see them untying the multiplayer from a specific store.

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