With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux
protondb.com
protondb.com
I was using wine quite obsessively well over a decade ago, wine tricks, fiddling with settings for one game, change them for another. Proton removed all of that for me.
I'm not at the forefront of gaming, though i have a nice card, CPU and a heap of RAM (Perks of the job.
Skyrim is my jam lately, I'm spending an insane amount of time in game at ultra settings. Played some Batman - Arkham Asylum, also a windows game, both run well. I'm happy!
I stopped playing the original Skyrim after only one (heavily modded) playthrough because I was just burned out on TES games but Skyrim VR brought back a sense of wonder I can only remember from my Morrowind days. Every dragon battle, every scenic backdrop is an order of magnitude more impressive and I can even tolerate a large part of the dialog without skipping through.
The only downside is how much time you have to waste getting the game configured and modded just right (afaik vast majority of major Skyrim mods work out of the box or were updated for Skyrim VR) and the cost. Bethesda has really been milking Skyrim.
DX11 is where things went wrong again, and mainline Wine has been quite slow to implement DX10+ features. There have been some great projects like DXVK which have made DX11 games playable in Wine, as well as a lot of work going on in different branches and patches of Wine to improve certain functionality. Fortunately Proton brings all of these together, and has all of this configuration dealt with for you.
After a period of stagnation and not being able to play any games released in the last few years, we're back to the point where brand new AAA games can run with Wine/Proton with solid framerates - I was very surprised to see Monster Hunter World running well in Proton within a few days of release.
DRM and anti-cheat remains the biggest blocker though. Some Denuvo games run, but many don't. Anything using BattlEye or Easy Anti-Cheat won't work, or if you're lucky, the anti-cheat might let you in, but then ban you for a false positive. I hope these can be solved at some point, but the nature of Wine works and how anti-cheat identifies tampering means they'll probably never play nice together.
Unless you're also the distributor and can get the publisher/developer to remove those mechanisms, since you have your own. E.g. Steam.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/can-we-get-ban...
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9g111m/blizza...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...
> UPDATE - 14 Sep 08:03: Blizzard is investigating and they will be looking to overturn the bans if this is indeed the case. There appears to be at least five reports of bans so far and does indeed seem that the most likely explanation is a false-positive from Blizzard's anti-cheat technology having issue with DXVK.
https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/
https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/67364/microsoft-is-tryin...
I've never considered this but it makes perfect sense, thanks for that!
Watch this! It's about using ML to catch cheaters.
I searched youtube to show you this video; I used the search term "cs go machine learning". The first video was actually this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w88RIcTuGZQ
Looks like it's using ML to make better aimbots--lol!
Not really a huge issue - professional cheat developers invest huge amounts of effort in subverting and patching the Windows kernel itself just to get a step ahead of anti-cheat. Thinking about how much fun that kind of thing is really makes me rethink my career choices...
I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just so I get native Linux support.
I think it's a good thing to do anyways. It shows that there's a solid market interest in gaming on Linux.
Whichever platform you play a new game on the most during the initial two weeks after getting it will be registered as the platform you bought it for.
E.g. play a Windows-only game for two weeks using Proton and both Steam and the gamedev will see it as a Linux purchase in their stats. Meaning they get actual numbers how big their Linux demographic is.
Does that remove the Windows purchase too? That could be seen as 2 purchases for the same game.
Not tried multiplayer, but it's hard to make that worse.
Also never worked out how to mod things, but if you're just after the vanilla experience, it's very good.
You must run weidu where chitin.key is
The OS is backwards compatible; nVidia's / AMD's video drivers and hardware, well, not so much...
It's often a much better prospect to see if it's available on GOG with any given fixes or notes on how to make it work.
Even then... Windows 98 doesn't work under VirtualBox, unless you run the VM with the Legacy paravirtualisation interface, and with the ICH AC97 audio card, which Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for ... nor does it have drivers for VirtualBox' VGA adapter.
Those problems are easily worked around, of course, but one day, either VirtualBox will drop its Legacy emulation code, or SciTech Display Doctor will stop working with VirtualBox' VGA adapter, or the sound won't work anymore, ...
I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...
Ehm... I think you learned to work around these issues so gradually that you don't realize how complicated the mess that you've solved is
Only the Legacy VirtualBox paravirtualisation interface provides all of the BIOS interrupts and glue code that the Windows 98 installer requires. The Sound Blaster 16 audio card will work out of the box in Windows 98, but VirtualBox itself has trouble copying the virtual audio out onto the host, playing only 3 seconds of the audio at a time and skipping a little; eventually it crashes. So, use the ICH AC97 audio card instead, but then you need to find drivers for it.
As for the VGA adapter, that used to work out of the box (once you installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions), but the additions' support for Windows 98 was dropped a long time ago, so that's no longer an option either.
Put simply, you need the Legacy interface to run the installer, SciTech Display Doctor for the VGA card (which is now free), and Realtek AC97 Win9x audio drivers (which you can find very easily).
Then it all just works... for now.
Tbf, also about $30 ebay purchase away from buying an early 2000 era laptop that will just run win98 and the game natively - so not all hope is lost :-)
Because of that low-level emulation approach, it's not exactly fast. But modern high-end PCs can just about handle something on the order of Pentium 300 + 3dfx Voodoo, which is adequate for pretty much any game from the 90s.
XP is the only way to get all the right grass textures.
One that I want to give thumbs up in particular is Age of Wonders (https://www.gog.com/game/age_of_wonders). It's a 2D turn-based strategy that was released in late 1999. Even back then it was unusual in explicitly supporting Windows NT, and perhaps that's why it continued to work just fine with 2K, XP etc.
But what's even more interesting is that they made the UI to resize according to the resolution, and resize it does - it supports literally any resolution (I tried it on 4K!), and it will properly resize everything. Of course, the widgets and the fonts are still bitmap, so everything's tiny - but even so, still impressive.
All in all, I'd say it's a good example of Win32 API stability. Windows upheld its part of the bargain, and a game like AoW that used all those APIs (DirectDraw etc) strictly as documented still works. The ones that don't work are generally the ones that made assumptions that were valid then, but no longer are.
1. Freesync support over HDMI gave good stutter free gaming experience on a low end Ultrawide PC monitor. (I didn't have to switch between my workstation setup).
2. Hardware is power-efficient & silent; I'm extremely power/noise conscious & specifically select extremely low TDP CPU's for my work. I'm not sure if I would have been able to build a PC of such low power/silent feature-set & get same gaming experience albeit; for the value.
3. Value - A new windows machine for similar gaming experience actually costs more in my country (at-least was at the time of my purchase).
4. OS - I didn't have to deal with the gripes which I have with full-fledged Windows OS; a toned down version only for gaming such as the one on Xbox is turning out to be a good fit.
5. Apps - Youtube on Xbox plays 4K without dropping frames; where as my 7th gen intel core i5 U series CPU couldn't. Youtube on Xbox is actually has less distractions than one on the web (Like comments, Ads).
You probably have software issue with that PC. Video decoding should be done in hardware, and your i5 can decode 4k h264, h265, VC-1, and VP9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Capa...
1.Chrome 70 on Linux doesn't drop frames for 1080p but 4K is unwatchable.
2.Windows 10 on same PC is better for 4K but drops some frames for 1080p as well.
3.Safari doesn't have VP9 codec; so there's no support for anything beyond 1080p.
So Youtube on Xbox is the best experience I've had w.r.t to quality of streaming. But it zooms by default on my ultrawide PC monitor.
I suppose it depends on your country but in the US it is significantly cheaper to build a gaming computer. The hardware in consoles is lower than most people realize.
Tbf, you can recently get the Xbox One X for £360 with few games included(including Forza 7 and RDR2!), and it will let you play those games trouble free in rock solid 30fps in 4K - I can absolutely guarantee that you cannot build a PC to match that within that money. That's not an anti-PC argument, just wanted to point out that for people who don't want to spend a lot of money it really is an excellent option.
I prefer to play games with WASD and a mouse like God intended.
I'm sure the game would work fine with KB+M if the port developers were competent.
I really don't think you can make Dark Souls work well with any KB+M combo, at least without fundamentally changing the gameplay for the worse. Literally every input on an Xbox controller has a purpose (with the exception of left analog press, I think, in later games in the series though they made either that or the classic tap-certain-button-while-running to jump, and I don't recall if they backported that to the 'Remastered' version) and some purposes are contextual.
But maybe you know of another game I could look at that does it right with KB+M, which also meets these constraints: need to move camera freely, need to move 3rd person player freely at variable speeds from a sneak to a walk to a jog, need to toggle-lock enemies, need to 'activate' light action and heavy action for both left and right arms, sometimes at the same time (e.g. spear attack while shielding), need to switch between up to two held items for both left and right hands, need to switch between several spells/hexes/etc. that determines the selected one used when an arm holding the right item is activated, need to switch between several consumable items, need to have a use action to use the currently selected consumable, need a generic action for opening things / dialog selection / etc., need an action to toggle two-handing the right-hand weapon, need an action to trigger back-step, rolling, running fast, and jumping-while-running, need an action to open the game menu for item equipping and other menu things, need an action to open a list of taunts/gestures to use, oh and all of this needs to be done without pausing the game or having some sort of bullet time effect.
Listing it out, I might be able to make something work for myself (as in, I could maybe beat the game despite the controls, I'd give up any sneak attacks) but it'd be using my mouse that has several buttons on it (which incidentally cost about as much as a controller). Common three button mouse? More skeptical. And still I don't think it would be as comfortable for when actions such as holding shield, toggle lock, strike, strike, heavy strike, roll, parry, strike are called for, let alone what I can do if I need to quickly swap equipment for some situation.
I'm more rejecting the developer. That port was outright insulting in how bad it was. That'd be forgivable, except that the developers didn't ever deign to fix it. That's an unacceptable level of disregard for your customers in my opinion.
I also wonder if your viewpoint has any room for forgiveness? When I got a friend to try the Prepare to Die edition on steam, it worked without any issues (he used a controller though), he didn't even need to install DSFix, so clearly through patches they made the port acceptable. The 'Remastered' version also works without installing anything extra (except on Linux, you need to install a dll yourself) plus you get reliable 60 FPS. I don't know what Dark Souls 2 or DS3 looked like for PC gamers on launch day but when I got them I had no problems, but I don't know if they would pass your criteria or signal a sign of improvement.
What amazes me is why the Xbox 360 port was so bad with respect to framerate in one particular area. Even the Xbone X drops down to 15 in a small portion of that area (but at least is rock solid 30 pretty much everywhere else, unlike the 360 or the classic Xbone emulation).
Sure, when they patch the game themselves so it isn't broken. Since that hasn't happened and likely never will happen, I'll take my money elsewhere.
Only in that the keyboard and mouse control was sub-par. I bought it a few years ago and as my first exposure to the series, I will say I was an instant convert. I have an Xbox Controller for Windows controller, which is what I ended up using, and that has a lot to do with it.
I know that for sure, because I got busy and stopped playing for a few months, and when I started back up I forgot to use the Xbox Controller (I don't use it for much, it's just for those games that it makes much more sense, especially emulated console games), and I was really frustrated and it took me good hour or so to realize it's because that's not how I played it before. The contrast is incredible.
> That's an unacceptable level of disregard for your customers in my opinion.
As opposed to those companies that don't bother to provide a port at all? I mean, I assume I would like Red Dead Redemption given what it's supposed to be (Grand Theft Auto as a western), but I've never played it, and haven't owned a console it's available for.
Plenty of horrible games are released with horrible control schemes. Dark Souls happens to be a masterful game whose default control scheme on PC is horrible unless you have a controller. That's slightly different, and it might actually be that after having developed it for the console, it would require significant differences in the content to allow for a good keyboard and mouse control scheme. I actually think that's completely possible, and in fact likely given how much attention went into everything in that game.
You've heard it from the others, so I'm just repeating it, but you really owe it to yourself to give it a chance with a good controller (Xbox controller for windows is amazing, I suspect a PS4 USB/bluetooth controller is just as good), especially if you tried it in the first place because you thought it was something you might like. Otherwise you're just that guy complaining that Quake is a crap game because it's too hard to play with your keyboard like you played Doom, when really the problem is that you're not playing it as it was meant to be played. I was that guy, for a little while at least. Don't be that guy. The only person you're punishing when you are is yourself.
Yes. Because they didn't put a product on the market in exchange for money. If you are asking people to exchange money for your product, you should endeavor to produce a good product, and if you fuck it up you should at least try to fix it instead of just leaving your customers to rely on community fixes.
I get the impression that you don't understand just how bad the port was. It's not that KB+M was an inappropriate input method for the game (though that may well be true to an extent), it's that they fucked up how mouse input works.
"With a mouse, the angle of the turn is a function of the distance the mouse is moved. With an analog stick, the angle of the turn is a function of both time and stick displacement (with a relatively small maximum displacement value) . The problem when mapping a mouse to an analog stick should be be immediately apparent, then: when the mouse is moved very quickly, the maximum displacement value is immediately achieved but the duration of the input is much shorter, resulting, counterintuitively, in a shallower turn angle. " [0]
Additionally it had numerous graphical issues, including being locked to a low frame rate and a low internal resolution. To say it was a lazy port would be to give the porters too much credit. As far as I'm aware, the developer never lifted a finger to fix any of these issues and everyone relies on DSFix.
An interesting way to put it. I've already gone on record as playing it on PC. A lot. The port is the only thing I've played, and I found the mechanics worked quite well, as long as I used a controller.
Additionally it had numerous graphical issues, including being locked to a low frame rate and a low internal resolution.
I think you're nitpicking here. 30 FPS is generally considered acceptable, as long as it doesn't go below that. There's a big difference between a game that plays at an average of 30 FPS unlocked, which will undoubtedly drop much lower, and a game that plays at 30 FPS locked, which is capable of much more. The latter will be a much more stable experience. That said, since the dsfix stuff that unlocks the framerate ends up causing gameplay issues if you allow the framerate too high (e.g. you walk through ladders), it's both obvious why that happens, and why they locked it. The collision detection is based on it.
As for the internal resolution, that's exactly how it works on the Xbox 360 as well. That console is only capable of 720p at the most natively, so 1080i and 1080p are upscaled from the base resolution.
I get it, when they ported it, they didn't change a bunch of stuff to make it more PC specific. That's still a port though, and there's been plenty like it in the past. You can either accept that as long as your computer is power enough you get the exact same behavior as the console, or you can complain that it's a horrible port because they didn't change the game. It's obvious you chose the latter, that that's your right. I just think it's a shame because you focused small technical issues that all stem from the original targeted platforms, and decided it must therefore not be worthwhile.
If it were the only issue it might be a nitpick, but it is just one of many issues screaming "we put forth the least effort possible to port this". In other words, the developers do not give a shit about the customer's experience on the PC. I mean seriously, mapping a mouse to an analog stick input like that? I'm a little shocked they didn't just hardcode the buttons to be XYAB while they were at it.
And the worst part, the most damning and unforgivable part, is that they never bothered to fix it themselves. I honestly don't know how people can defend this behavior. Be a fan of the game all you want, I hear it's pretty good, but this is bullshit and you know it.
> That's still a port though, and there's been plenty like it in the past.
Some people make crap software. This does not excuse making crap software.
Frankly, if they're going to do this bad a job porting a game, they should just not have bothered.
You know, I just loaded Dark Souls up and that's completely wrong. I'm not sure if it was a very poor initial version and got updated, but that's not how it functions on my system. The mouse rotates the camera exactly as you would expect. Just as Tomb raider and every other 3rd person PC game does. I'm not using any third party tools.
> And the worst part, the most damning and unforgivable part, is that they never bothered to fix it themselves.
Well, someone sure did. Maybe it came with the DLC pack for the first one. I got it as a bundle in the Prepare to Die edition which includes the DLC. Then again, I'm pretty sure the Prepare to Die edition was the only PC version.
> I hear it's pretty good, but this is bullshit and you know it.
Yeah, I sorta don't, because at this point I'm not sure how much you've even played the game, because you seem to be getting details that are core to your argument completely incorrect.
[0] https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dark_Souls:_Prepare_to_Die_Edi...
> Yeah, I sorta don't
If they have indeed fixed it (despite all evidence to the contrary), then good for them and I can forgive them. But if they haven't, and you don't think that's bullshit, then your judgement is highly suspect.
Batman Arkham Asylum is the game that made me appreciate controllers.
And it is one of the first games, if not the very first, that works seamlessly using keyboard + mouse, or controllers, of several kinds I guess.
If I play with the mouse + keyboard, I get hints for the actions with the key or mouse button required. Without changing any setting, or restarting the game, or anything that interrupts my game, if I just pick up the controller, all the hints are now controller related.
After that, I use the controller for Batman games.
Yeah, that works for some subset of games. If you're doing is playing FPS games and some workable subset of side-scrollers, sure. But games designed for a specific control scheme generally play much better with that controller.
I've played my fair share of emulated NES/SNES games, and while workable on a keyboard, let's not kid ourselves and say it's just as good.
And I remember playing DOOM not with WASD (because I don't think anyone was at that point), but with the numeric control pad so I could easily strafe (when the default most people seemed to use were arrow keys), so it's not like WASD came out fully formed and obvious from the start.[1]
Control schemes change, and people usually end up adopting what works best for a specific genre (or specific game, if it's genre-bending enough).
Don't get me wrong, I abhor the idea of playing a FPS game with a controller as well... but not all games are FPS games.
1: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-wasd-became-the-standard-pc-cont...
I'm still looking for the 'best' controller though, as I don't think it exists yet. I don't know if you can combine a device like a mouse suitable for 'twitch' FPS games with controls suitable for a 6 degrees of freedom game like Descent, Elite or Star Citizen (which currently require two joysticks, pedals, and ideally voice control to play in 'advanced' mode).
People have to do real work to produce newer versions of software, often this work is quite extensive (newer graphics APIs, resolutions, art assets, etc.) If it wasn't a viable enterprise this work wouldn't get done. It's not reasonable to expect perpetual free upgrades.
Myself, I chucked Windows 10 a couple of months ago before the SteamPlay news (which was a really nice cherry on top). But it was easy for me since I'm not quite the gamer anymore that I used to be.
Lately I've been tempted to setup Win10 LTSB on a NUC or something to play a couple oddball games that are too modern to be VM-friendly but old enough to be comfortable on Intel graphics and a relatively-weak CPU. Proton was released just in time to indefinitely postpone those plans.
So with the windows binary for the steam application running under wine, the game worked better than the Linux steam client running wine under the hood. Unclear why, but maybe worth trying both ways if one fails.
I also couldn't figure out how to report this, sadly. If it works better in play4linux steam than directly it seems like it should be straightforward to copy some configuration settings to improve things.
I'm not sure if the games you played rose above that threshold, but if they did then you'd probably see "eventfd: Too many open files" on the console or in the systemd journal.
It looks like Fedora will change the limit in a future update of the systemd package, but you can fix it manually if you chose to.
(It's weird that Fallout 3 is an 'old game'. Am I an 'old man' too?)
Trying to get a Windows game running under Linux is an adventure in itself. This opens up the door for people who don't like those kinds of adventure games.
Many 3D games from the mid-late '90s and early '00s relied on now esoteric hardware accelerators and APIs (like Glide) or GPU features that behave differently on modern hardware than the games expect. These might require a wrapper like nGlide or dgVoodoo 2.
Check the entries for your games on the PC Gaming Wiki (www.pcgamingwiki.com).
On a related note, I finally got a hardware survey on one of my Linux machines! Was even running SteamVR at the time.
>Hey Liam, the normal algorithm is in effect, so if at the end of the two weeks you have more playtime on Linux, it'll be a Linux sale. Proton counts as Linux.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/valve-officially-conf...
Current Game Rating Distribution Tier Rated Highest Report Highest Report (But Pending) Platinum 286 2356 1467 Gold 372 399 232 Silver 319 472 367 Bronze 178 195 158 Borked 245 1162 960
each game has this rating in winedb
╔══════════╦═══════╦════════════════╦══════════════════════════════╗
║ Tier ║ Rated ║ Highest Report ║ Highest Report (But Pending) ║
╠══════════╬═══════╬════════════════╬══════════════════════════════╣
║ Platinum ║ 286 ║ 2356 ║ 1467 ║
║ Gold ║ 372 ║ 399 ║ 232 ║
║ Silver ║ 319 ║ 472 ║ 367 ║
║ Bronze ║ 178 ║ 195 ║ 158 ║
║ Borked ║ 245 ║ 1162 ║ 960 ║
╚══════════╩═══════╩════════════════╩══════════════════════════════╝> The use of the term [extended ASCII] is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the ASCII standard has been updated to include more than 128 characters or that the term unambiguously identifies a single encoding, neither of which is the case.
— Wikipedia[1]
I would agree w/ Wikipedia here: the term is ambiguous at best, and misleading at worst.
Hacker News delivers its pages in UTF-8, so saying they're part of the box drawing characters in Unicode is not incorrect. Nor is the statement that they're not part of ASCII: they're not.
That said, the box drawing characters exist in Unicode, I would guess, largely because the IBM PC included those characters in the numerous character sets it used. Particularly, in North America, it used the character set known today as "Code page 437"[2]; other regions had other character sets w/ similar names, and they usually had at least some (though not always all) of the box drawing characters. IDK if the PC itself included them because some predecessor had them, but it wouldn't particularly surprise me if that was the case; the Atari and the Commodore had similar characters, though not exactly the same set. And again, they might have had them b/c of a predecessor; for all I know it's turtles all the way back to the first person who drew a table on a clay tablet :-)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
The only problem I have is when a game has a broken Linux port there doesn't appear to be a way to tell Steam to use the Windows version instead. An example of this is Eador, which has horrible graphics problems and is effectively unplayable on Linux due to it being a very slipshod port. I'm willing to bet that using SteamPlay on the Windows version would work much better if Valve would give me the option.
Haven't tried this myself but may be of help: https://github.com/Holston5/Native2Proton
I too hope they make an option to run a so-called Linux compatible game using Windows instead. I've got a little category "failed in linux" for those. I bet you could do it manually by downloading the game using Steam running in wine and then using Steam's wine binary to run the exe...
I've had so much trouble with anti-cheat systems that I will now refuse to buy or play any game that uses easyanticheat or battleye. I don't care how much it costs, how many of my friends are playing it, I'm not giving another penny to any company that uses those programs.
I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but i'm so goddamn tired of having to shut down services dedicated to controlling fan speeds in my machine, having to disable network adapters, uninstall vpn software (not just turn it off, uninstall it), and wasting hours trying to figure out why it would crash on startup only to find that it was finding a pcap.dll in a random folder in my downloads from when I was messing with some traffic sniffing stuff on this system like a year before that, and it decided to crash without any warning or error...
Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all.
And I know it's kind of co opting the purpose of Proton, but if they refused to accommodate these anti-cheat systems, then maybe either the game developer or the anti-cheat vendor themselves will see some of the potential paying customers they are excluding and will significantly retool their systems to work.
Not saying it doesn't happen - I'm pretty sure there was one that didn't like VirtualBox and I haven't tried again since switching to Hyper V. Maybe I got lucky?
easyanticheat is by far the worst i've ever experienced. That was the one that would crash if it saw pcap.dll, and I use virtualbox as my VM software of choice so that could be part of it as well.
The fan control system is a bit weird since it's a pretty unknown little program, but it took me a while to find because at least easyanticheat wouldn't tell me which program was causing the error, so I had to manually close them until it worked. This is what actually put me over the edge and made it so I'll never buy another game with easyanticheat again unless they significantly rework how much access and power they need.
There are so many games out there now, and so many different developers and styles, that I don't need to put up with these kind of problems to play a good game. Especially when that software is almost always beatable by how often I'd still see cheaters in the games, which meant that the only ones being punished by this are the lazy hackers, or paying customers.
I mean, if you are an outlier, voting with your wallet is never going to work. That is the problem of being an outlier.
And being an outlier doesn't mean you are insignificant. Sure, the latest Call Of Duty won't miss my income, but a smaller dev that was thinking about using easyanticheat because it was cheap and easy to integrate might think twice when reading comments from me, or if their demographic overlaps with people like me that won't put up with it.
I can't in good conscience talk about how much I dislike invasive anti-cheat programs while still buying every game I want that has them.
Maybe, but then surely the cheaters will just set their cheats to be 2.99 sd above the mean. Probably best to use it as a signal rather than a fixed limit.
Assuming normal distribution, 0.1% should be; with top games reaching 1+ million active players, that'd be on the order of 1,000+ players.
And if you start banning people for being too good with no other evidence of cheating, you'll drive of the people who would likely be your most avid non-cheating players.
Back in my day, we just played on community servers with moderators who'd just ban cheaters!
I know that's not really a solution with the scale of today's online games, but cheating isn't a new problem. It's only become a problem of today's world of matchmaking systems, global public servers, and the removal of community hosted servers. Still, I feel like just hiring a few more people to manually check suspected cheaters would reduce the need for such heavy handed anti-cheat.
On the other hand, Valve run 2 of the most popular online games (CS:GO and Dota 2), which both have Linux clients, and don't have the same level of intrusive anti-cheat compared to EAC and BattlEye.
Most of these games have not scaled up. "Scale" is not the issue here.
The issue is that companies want to provide their own server hosting, and charge users for the privilege of hosting games. This leaves no room for community moderation.
Anti-cheat has been one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of gaming on Linux for a long time.
I also found that I have no fun in playing games lately. It feels like a chore, a heroin-like distraction, an addiction basically.
So yesterday I decided to ditch my PC in favor of my Linux-only GPU-lacking work notebook.
And now this.
Me 0:1 Irony
I am quite safe with still having a gmaing console, since they are much more immersive in a sense that distractions will actually hinder the enjoyment. If I can only either do something productive or play a game, I usually try to be productive.
What's your poison?
dxvk[1] is an amazing project (it's translating D3D11 → Vulkan). With Vulkan finally landing VK_EXT_transform_feedback[2] and Wine and dxvk using it (Mesa has it in master for radv, and there are patches for anv; Nvidia blob has it in beta), games like The Witcher 3 can be played on Linux perfectly, without graphics distortions.
1. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
2. http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-feedback-...
Part of what makes SteamPlay work so well is actually outside of Wine though - a lone developer started a project called DXVK a year or so ago, which is a separate translation layer for converting DX11 to Vulkan, and runs alongside Wine. Valve hired this developer and sponsored a few similar projects, and integrated them into SteamPlay.
It also seems like Wine is slow and quite opinionated on merging in changes. For a while now, most people who used Wine for gaming would use forks and patches to improve performance. Some of it got merged into upstream Wine eventually, some things get rejected as it works differently to the usual Wine way of doing things. So Steam has used some of these patches and their own work for Proton, but some of it may not be suitable to be merged into mainline Wine.
Has it come on leaps and bounds since then?
The difference between the past and now is that it lets you use your current native steam client and still run games through wine, in the past you had to run a separate steam client in each wineprefix and you'd end up with steam installed for each game.
The addition of DXVK makes directx10/11 games really speedy, runs great! World of Warcraft runs better in DXVK in its dx11 mode than what it did with OpenGL when they still offered that.
The "game-breaking" thing is usually DRM like denuvo though.
Games run smoothly, no frame rate issues, no Wine to setup manually, no Wine configuration files to play with. It just works.
Then I tried this one more time the summer I started college (3 years ago?) It was working but lagging, and sound wasn't working, and some controls weren't working and it was randomly crashing. But it was still playable.
Then I tried it one more time this summer when I graduated from college. I spent an entire week and couldn't get it done. At some point I was applying patches in C and recompiling Wine which apparently fixed something? I also spent a lot of time trying to find the Wine version and Skyrin executable I used 7 years ago. For the love of God I, a CS graduate, couldn't get something my high school self done.
If you find something working in Wine, save the executable and Wine version. There is no guarantee any other combination will work. But I swear to god, 7 years ago whatever Wine+Skyrim combo I used was working flawlessly, I can't imagine it working any better in Windows back then.
In addition to proton and steam play one has to add Lutris as well. It makes the emulation of games in wine really easy.
Visit `chrome://flags` and set Reader Mode Triggering to Always. The prompt is a minor inconvenience but I use it so much.
Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint are over half, and Arch & gang are about a 1/4
1. Officially, Proton is only supported on Ubuntu. It doesn't stop you from trying though and many Arch-based OS reports are just as successful. 2. Reports people submit includes pasting Steam system info, which for some Arch installations reports as 'Linux 4.x' unless they install additional an additional library.
If you're feeling generous, count the 'Unknown' category as Arch-based.
My other big concern with SteamPlay in particular is save game compatibility. It depends on the game, but a lot of the time your save games just won't be compatible across operating systems, which is quite a difficult problem to solve.
That shouldn't be an issue either. Steam ought to be handling game saves anyway.
Been dual booting for many years now only for steam.
I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).
Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it's faster, and you can use whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc.
Why is it better than WINE? Far more compatible. Setting it up can be a hassle, but once you get it working it's (as far as I can tell) identical to a native boot. Better sandboxing (VM's aren't perfect and GPU passthrough likely introduces more holes, but that's better than running proprietary code on your main system).
That said, it's a power user thing and probably always will be. But then, isn't that the PC gaming market anyway?
Any way to avoid dual-booting is also good because if you do your work on Linux, you don't lose state. After a day of work, I sometimes want to play games, and I like it when I don't have to shut down my editor and the image of the program I am working on. In fact, having to reboot is a quite effective deterrent for me.
Passthrough allows me to have one beefy machine that does everything. It's just another VM.
That said, I game very rarely anyway, but sometimes you just want to blow things up, y'know?
Not really for Linux users who don't want to use Windows.
Ditching games that don't work is not a big deal, given that a huge amount works just fine. So avoiding Windows is preferable to running it in VM.
This is relevant because games aren't the only thing holding back people from switching to Linux. As long as there are programs that don't work on Linux and for the foreseeable future won't ever work, plenty of people won't switch.
I've been using GPU passthrough for Windows gaming on and off for a while now.
I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).
I do however have a secondary machine (laptop) to manage the VM from, though.
It's never going to work for everyone, sure, but most will just game on Windows anyway. I like to evangelize because I think it's really quite neat.
Firefox and a terminal window (tmux or similar) is enough for my needs.
90% of the time (right now for example) my screen is 70% terminal and 30% browser.
I have a Linux VM for actual work that also gets GPU passthrough that I "restart" into (e.g. kill qemu1 windows, start qemu2 linux). It's sort of like dual boot except long running processes stay in the background.
You could basically think of it as the VM's being a thin client on to a server, except they're all on the same box.
The host is pretty much a hypervisor only.
I might do a write up of all of this at some point if you're interested. I kind of figure that most Linux users enjoy this sort of masochism. :)
...your Linux VM.
which means that you can't run windows and your Linux desktop at the same time.
It's an improvement, but still a dealbreaker for me personally.
Take the AC series, for example: https://www.protondb.com/search?q=creed
But once you do that the games actually run, I've gotten Odyssey and Unity to run and they run surprisingly well. If Valve can convince Ubisoft to at least make the launchers not be too intrusive and can solve that last 10% of the config issue then it'd be viable.
However attacking FOSS projects using such copyright trolling will backfire and very strongly. In doing that, MS will admit their hypocrisy and all this "MS has changed" will be proven completely wrong.
I'm not saying it's not possible for them to do such attack. But it will basically completely ruin the image they are trying to build now.
(Unless that was proton and I didn't know it?)
That being said, I wish I can run CAD like fusion 360 on Linux. Anyone know of any way to make this happen?
For more programmatic CAD, OpenSCAD is also good.
https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Python_scrip...
I suggest making your own script instead of using PoL (abandoned, check Phoenicis).
Does anyone know which improvements they are referring to?
The ML and crypto hysteria as well as AMD not willing to compete is not healthy for the long term PC gaming industry. It is certainly keeping me out of it.
Instead I play at 1440p and 144FPS with most of the knobs in most games turned up near max (and my graphics card is a couple revs out of date).
The consoles also typically don’t run at full resolution. In the 1080p era, I recall many games topping out at 900p. It was a great source of pc gamer smugness due to the fact most of them could easily run 1080p and 45+ fps. I suspect modern console 4K is the same.
Since the generally accepted fps for consoles is 30, and that’s pretty low, it means developers can either compromise on resolution or other things like how many entities can be on screen at once, or how large open areas can be. I suspect catering to console audiences is why a lot of the last ten years some games feel either empty or constrained in scope.
I've been holding out to do a big upgrade myself, but I got a Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti last year for $147 to comparably replace my dying AMD 7950. Same card today is $190 (on Amazon). It's more than capable for things at 1080p, and does just fine for some games at 4k too (or I survive with 30-50 FPS and/or tweak with the graphics options; "high" is usually acceptable even if it's not "ultimate").
The new xbone x can do 4k pretty reliably, but that's $500, plus $60 per game. Getting your aging PC (mine is nearly a decade old) up to par (and often exceeding) graphics wise is a cheaper investment in a GPU, and games on PC are routinely on mega sales.
Consoles tend to do dynamic resolution - they'll drive the display at 4K (together with UI), but the actual rendering resolution will drop and adapt to the load. It actually looks pretty good - the UI and text keeps being sharp while you generally don't notice the resolution drop that much. Unfortunately most games lose this capability on PC, so you're stuck with blurry looking text if you have a good monitor or TV :(
The other trick they do is checkerboard rendering - the console only renders approximately half the scene each frame. The partially rendered frame is then combined with the previous one with added filtering. The result is not unlike the interlaced CRT TV rendering of 80s era consoles/micros - just with better filtering. Again, this capability tends to disappear on PC versions of those games.
Lack of those two things means that in a lot of cases games on PC look/run worse on equivalent hardware than they do on the console :/
It works well in Forza Horizon 4. And yeah, I wouldn't mind the option for checkerboard rendering on PC. I understand purists want nothing to do with it, but hey, too many options is what PC is all about.
It's so much easier and cheaper and convenient to have one box dedicated to playing games and one box dedicated to doing work. Instead of a $2000 laptop or a $1000 laptop and a $1000 desktop, I can have a $1000 laptop and a $200 Xbox.
It's a shame the "PC Master Race" thing has become such a meme lately to fragment and radicalize the gaming community. All I care about is playing video games to relax and enjoy myself. It doesn't matter one bit how I accomplish that goal.
To me the PC Master Race meme started with FPS games (CS 1.6/SourceGO vs COD on console), the cultures around the various platforms, and how video games in general just seem to be more enjoyable with a mouse and a keyboard than a joystick (not to mention you can be much more accurate with the crosshairs),. The only exception to me are fighters and drivers.
The meme then slowly morphed into this pseudo-elitism about graphics and performance, but most "pc master racers" have at least one console, if not two.
That type of blatant rent-seeking by gatekeepers can never happen in an open-source OS gaming ecosystem with unrestricted HID hardware. It's a structural impossibility. That's what I think about when I see the phrase. It's PC-master race, not PC master-race. Owning your own device means being its master, and master over any software that must petition you to run on it.
You also have better anti-cheat systems (get caught cheating on PC, you have to buy another copy... get caught cheating on Xbox you have to buy another Xbox). I tried playing CoD4 on PC when it came out and very quickly switched to Xbox because I didn't want to have to install an aimbot.
But that's ignoring all the games that exist on PC that you do have to pay money to play online...
None of this addresses the fact that console manufacturers are erecting tiny tollbooths on the wire between the computing device that the customers own and the network router that the customers own, extracting rents from transactions that they no longer have any business being a part of.
The best anti-cheat system I have ever seen is the ability for users to refuse to play with other users whom they suspect may be cheaters. Whether they actually are or not is immaterial. You should be able to not play with someone who makes a game less fun for you (blacklisting). And you should also be able to play with only friends whom you know and have invited (whitelisting). Needing anti-cheat measures beyond that is usually a symptom of not allowing customers to run their own private servers, likely because they won't pay for access to the main company servers if they don't have to. Get caught cheating or griefing on my server, and you can only play in the trashbag-exile instance, which is somehow still fun for some twisted weirdos. Get caught cheating on a centralized corporate server, and someone has to Report you, then there is a Process, and then that guy is banned and maybe just replaced by yet another guy just like him, doing all the same stuff that got the last guy banned. If your culture turns toxic, the good players abandon the game altogether, instead of just switching servers.
I don't know of any games that have both a PC and a console version that charges for the PC version, but not the console. That money to the games distributor pays for the server maintenance and the development team salaries, and there is a clear line of demarcation between what I own and what I am paying for. But there have always been free servers, pay servers, prince/pauper servers, and donation begging servers out there in the computing world, since shortly after 1 Jan 1983. It has been entirely possible to waste all your spare time online, from your home computer, without spending a single dime above the cost of the network link, for decades now.
You can grab a GTX970/GTX1060 and be able to run any game on 1080p-1440p.
Q: Any plans for macOS support?
While Wine and Proton work on macOS, there are no plans to support the new Steam Play functionality on macOS at the moment.
--------------------
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/28/why-macos-mojave-...
I already use wine-d3d9 which is very good for WoW but as its name says it doesn't run DX11/12 games.
See here for example: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrapper...
However, you can simply use upstream Wine with add-ons like dxvk[1] (which is used in Proton).
Using esync[2] (also utilized by Proton) requires special branch of Wine, since it's not going to be upstreamed and it's not as simple as installing dll overrides.
1. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
2. https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync-rebased/README.es...
Lutris is excellent for getting many games up and running, and WoW runs much better with dx11+dxvk than wine-d3d9.
'Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this.'
Even reading down the article to look for more details provides information about building the product, but as far as I can see no other significant details about it's underlying technology.
There may be other articles or posts that go over this more, but your link provided no useful or helpful information that I could see in two brief read-overs.
For your question, look under "Q: What is Proton exactly? How does it differ from normal Wine? Who worked on it?"
I appreciate the attempt to clarify, but it's nice to make sure the clarification actually makes things make more sense.
Also, if you're factually wrong about something, nobody owes you research even though it would be nice. You're still wrong even if you can't be bothered to click a few links, so it's a weird complaint. They didn't just have a "point"; they were right.
Finally, lighten up. It's just gaming-related chit chat. Nobody here is paid to use their free time to write comments on HN or to give you better links.
I long ago lost interest in PC gaming, both from the lack of cross-platform compatibility, and due to the fact that a great graphics card alone easily costs as much as a console these days.
I've never played a WINE-wrapped video game or application that did not feel like a half-baked version of it's native application. It's usually things like fonts and strange aliasing that are a complete and dead giveaway. Small aesthetic issues like that completely ruin an otherwise immersive experience for me.
I'm glad WINE exists, but I honestly sort of wish they'd just stick to supporting applications more, and pretty much just forget the gaming side. It's never going to get to an equivalent level, because Windows' gaming technology keeps moving forward.
Two people start running a race. One of them starts when the gun fires. The other one sits and waits, decides it wants to follow the first runner every step of the way, and starts several minutes (or years, in this metaphor) behind the first.
Even if this second runner (WINE) could run as fast as the first (Windows), it would never catch up. And that's assuming it could run as fast as a multi-billion-dollar company.
WINE can, simply, never reach a point of compatibility that even most major console emulators have. Because, unlike consoles, Windows keeps on moving.
Let's face it. None of us are running *nix or MacOS for the sake of gaming. If you want to run a desktop OS for gaming, there is one. Yes, it's not free, but neither are games. Windows is, at this point, just part of the initial cost of PC gaming, just like a couple extra controllers might be for a console.
This is true, but also irrelevant.
A lot of people are using Linux as their daily driver, and dual boot is not convenient. So wine is very welcome, and I think proton is amazing, you should try it again (i didn't encounter any strange fonts or aliasing like you're describing on games ran with proton via steam). I've been gaming on Linux for the past year and i'm impressed by steam's work here.
Without 100% compatibility, I'm not really interested in something that may run half, or even 75% of my games. I play games to relax. I make games for a living.
So all I want, personally, is to pop any disc in my console or hit a shortcut on my desktop and just have it work, every time, out of the box.
I know this isn't everyone, but it does hopefully explain a little better why WINE will always be 'irrelevant' to myself.
Personally, I think it's the graphics card cost that really prevents me from considering it at all, especially as if I was bothered with PC gaming again, I'd be getting a Vive, also for development's sake.
Me too, I game on windows, and that isn't exactly what I'd call my experience ;)
Dual booting isn't just inconvenient. It is buggy and randomly unreliable. It is an ILoveLucy farce where a line has been drawn down the middle of the apartment and each side is supposed to share the TV. I really get angry when I see sob stories about linux from people whose only experience is a failed attempt to dual boot a dell laptop.
If you want to use both go with a VM, preferably a windows VM running within a linux box.
That said, at work we have to use Ubuntu, and my god the kernel update for that is a nightmare. I can totally see how it would wreck a dual setup when it's successful at wrecking single OS setups.
Another upside to running VMs, is when really old games just do not work reliably anymore... run them in a VM for the OS they were released on. (You might have to get some old drivers from unsavory sources though and pray.)
And Proton's not the end-game: it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem. Most people (like yourself) don't see Linux as a viable gaming platform largely because of the lack of games available, and therefore developers don't invest in Linux support, and thus there continue to be few games available for the platform. The promise of Proton is to make Linux good-enough for some gamers, thus increasing the Linux player-base, making Linux a viable target for 1st party titles.
> It's never going to get to an equivalent level, because Windows' gaming technology keeps moving forward.
That's not really accurate, and hasn't been for some time. For years OpenGL has been on-par with DX in terms of what it can do for some time and the story has only gotten better with Vulkan. Just look at Doom 2016: it was a high-profile AAA game built entirely on an open-source graphics stack (OpenGL and Vulkan) and it was one of the best-looking, best-optimized titles of the year. The main "edge" Microsoft has in terms of being able to bring the best games to its platform has nothing to do with a technical advantage: it has everything to do with industry momentum and incentivizing studios and industry professionals to use their proprietary technologies.
Do you think the studios will know? Seems like these would come in as windows sales.
No, they count as Linux sales, that was said explicitly by Valve. Even GOG counts Linux downloads of Windows games (they rely on user agent). Not sure how they share that info with developers though.
I had not understood that there was access to Vulkan, that does obviously significantly affect performance.
There was another poster here who attempted to elaborate and ended up posting something that absolutely did not.
Vulkan is good, but it doesn't affect compatibility, just performance. I just don't care about the performance if compatibility is not even at least close to 90%. I need to run all of my applications and games, not a select few of them that run great.
On Linux, I can now successfully (i.e. with decent performance and no critical bugs) run about two thirds of the "active" (played at least once in the past two years) games in my library. I originally had the same opinion as you—that this doesn't matter if I still have to dual-boot Windows—but what I've found in practice is that I haven't booted into Windows in months, and have simply stopped playing games that don't run on Linux. YMMV, but I would bet that a lot of Linux users would be perfectly happy with even half their games running well on Linux, so I don't think compatibility is all-or-nothing like you're implying.
That's exactly what it does. DXVK is a compatibility layer that lets DirectX games run on top of vulkan with near-native performance with no work required of developers. It's about making Windows games run like native Linux games.
True, not primarily for gaming. But there's more than Windows, and Linux is becoming increasingly viable for exactly the target of people who are tech savvy and play games but are not primarily gamers, a group which includes me. I seldom play AAA games -- but when I do, many of those work on Linux without emulators, such as Shadow of Mordor or Mad Max -- and many others work on Wine (e.g. Space Marine), but the bulk of what I play are indie games, which either run natively on Linux or are very easy to get working on an emulator. I understand if they are not your thing, but to me indie games is where it's at -- the latest and greatest 3D games bore me to tears, while something refreshing like Return of the Obra Dinn makes me renew my love of games.
So yes, Linux is a valid gaming OS for a non-gamer like me, who actually plays many non-AAA games :)
And I'll never buy Windows just for gaming, if I can help it.
If I could get the handful of Windows-only games in my Steam library working on Linux, I'd dump Windows 10 in a second.
But they tend to be the old/AA/AAA and/or graphically heavy ones that are unlikely to port/Proton across well.
There may be two tiers of gamers, those who haven't seen much and are impressed with old mechanics, but with the latest graphical developments. And those who have seem more and are more difficult to impress.
I would add that buying my Nintendo Switch, my first new console since my Sega Genesis (I did buy some consoles after that point but they were last-gen by that point and second-hand), has proven to me they are the premier AAA game developer in the world. The polish and mechanics of most 1st party Nintendo titles are unmatched in my experience. If you're a real gamer, which you sound like to me, I would definitely recommend at least considering adding a Switch to pair with desktop/laptop PC gaming.
I will be looking into Return of the Obra Dinn based off your comment, and I can tell you already those graphics don't dissuade me at all. We're always in a creative crisis and technical overload. Whether it's 4K screens, $1,200 GPUs or bad shows and games. I'm ready for artistry to take hold and we already have more than enough technology to convey most creative visions. Gameplay, character development and story first.
I haven’t played it yet, but the developer’s previous game, Paper, Please[1], is phenomenal.
I'll be honest, my main OS for gaming is macOS. Is it the best choice? No, but it works well for me. If there's ever a windows exclusive game then I just resort to GeForce Now[1]. It's definitely not the best option, but I find it to be the most convenient for me.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/
My only OS for gaming is macOS. I don’t even play on iOS. If a game doesn’t exist for macOS, it doesn’t matter how much I’d want to play it — I don’t buy it. If a humble bundle[1] has games that are not on macOS, I make sure to give those developers zero euros of my contribution.
But I don’t run macOS for gaming — and it seems that neither do you — and that was GP’s point.