Valve is doing god’s work when it comes to Linux gaming. I have played over 40 hours of GTA V without many troubles. The game looks great and performs great. So glad I could get rid of my windows install.
It is amazing to see how far Linux gaming has come since then. 10 years ago almost none of the big games worked, 5 years ago lots of games worked after fiddling with wine config, and now most of the games I have tried work out of the box after enabling Proton.
Imagine what will come in the next 5 to 10 years.
Microsoft knows they can't lock down the OS while gaming on Linux [at least] works.
It's truly an insurance policy, and they have to pay it each month -- if they let Linux gaming lag behind long enough, they lose their ground on MS.
Microsoft recently bought ZeniMax, which makes lots of popular titles that I played on Steam. Unreal is working on their own game store. PS and Xbox has had exclusives for years.
If it keeps going this direction, Valve will have to pull a rabbit out of their hat. Either by making some great games again or surprising us with something completely new.
Competition is great for consumers, but I am somewhat rooting for the guys that improve free, open source software in the process.
This is so sad. Just fragmenting the market more merely increases the influence of MS.
> PS and Xbox has had exclusives for years.
These don't really compete with PCs. People stick to one, another, or both. Seldom do gamers suddenly switch from PC to console and completely drop their PC.
It's still amazing to me now that the only games I don't play on Linux are MMOs and competitive multiplayer because I'm worried about being banned by an overzealous anticheat. And by all accounts , the games in those categories I like do work on proton
1. Loki Entertainment [0] (1988-2001), a third-party porting company that licensed games and released them for Linux
2. Linux Game Publishing [1] (2001-2009), basically continued what Loki was doing
3. id Software used to release their games for Linux and open source the engines [2]
4. Others (mostly Indies) also had Linux ports, but it was still rare: Frictional (Penumbra series, Amnesia), 2D Boy (World of Goo), ... and Wolfire Games who created:
5. Humble Indie Bundle [3] (2010-) incentivized many popular Indie games to be ported to Linux - initially all Bundles where 100% cross-platform between Windows, Linux and OS X.
6. Steam for Linux [4] (beta 2012, 2013-) - with the lure of Steam Machines many more developers jumped onto Linux ports, including some larger Publishers as well as porting companies: Aspyr, Feral Interactive, Virtual Programming (eON)
7. GOG.com Linux support [5] (2014-)
8. DXVK, Proton (2018-) making it easier to play Windows games
There was also Kickstarter where for a while most big ones had Linux support promised in some form. Also Unity adding Linux exports has made it possible for tons of games to be ported (although not without issues). I probably forgot some things, but at least that should be a lot you can read up on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Entertainment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Game_Publishing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software#Linux_gaming
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle
My favorite example is PUBG and their insecure netcode (for the first 2 years it was entirely unencrypted). At one point the cheating was so predominant that they banned anyone running VirtualBox and the game at the same time. I was swept up in that because I had a background dev VM running that I forgot about.
is client entity running at the speed of light?
is client entity teleporting all over the map?
is client entity allowed to fly?
or asking really "hard" questions, like
should server really send detailed position and model data (animation frame, items equipped etc) of players not in a Potentially visible set to client entity?
Or for wine
And Collabora: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/collabora-expect-their...
It came in parallel with the Kickstarter boom, where a lot Kickstarter campaigns would offer Linux support as a way to entice a new audience. The time around 2010-12 was pivotal for Linux gaming and indie gaming alike.
I would also assume that by getting devs to port their games to Linux to run on Stadia, the contribution may be more indirect. You'll get more game studios contributing to the stack, even if Stadia themselves aren't yet.
*I work at Google but not on anything related to Stadia.
If the market is big enough, cross platform development is viable from the start.
The main meat and potatoes of the game is either nearly platform agnostic (Vk, OpenGL, or emulation) or usually similar in principle (audio).
Maybe I've been spoilt by only working on open source projects where people try to write good code because it's public.
Ship non-system libraries with your application instead of assuming they will be in /usr/lib* and that's a solved problem. Valve even does that for you with the Steam runtime.
This isn't any different on Windows - if you don't bundle your dependencies (including MSVCRT / .NET / whatever) then you will run into problems.
The better ports use the native APIs of course, but are few and far between.
This lets the publishers and developers know that there's a market of Linux gamers because they can see that X thousand players play their game on Linux. So when they make their next game, hopefully they'll pick technologies that lets them release with proper Linux support and not "hope it runs under Proton"-support.
Anyway maybe close to a year later, I tried again with Fedora, it ran a bit better, which I imagine to be the work of better updated kernel + system packages, but I had to keep it on the lowest graphics settings to make it barely playable. And this was on a system with a decent mid teir graphics card at the time, more memory than I've ever needed and a Ryzen 9. On top of that there were quite a few updates that completely broke cross platform play and apparently modifying version string resources could hack around that at the risk of desyncs.
To this day most people ive met that play Civ 6 on Linux swear to me that it runs perfect, so I have no idea what was going on. I've also been told running it via Proton might actually run better but I haven't tried.
Though nowadays I have a dual boot and the battery life while running Windows is 4x better than on Debian.
I think Civ probably consumes more CPU/GPU than it really needs to.
Add me to the "it worked OK on Linux" group, though I suspect that a number of drivers could be improved for performance/power reasons. If of use, the laptop I used had an Nvidia 980M which was what I used to play Civ. The fan was blowing hard and the Desktop with a Nvidia 1080 (on Windows) does play faster (I tend to play 'huge' map). It definitely "worked" but maybe less performant.
Out of curiousoity, was this new system also using Nvidia graphics? Or were they otherwise fairly new cards both times?
It threw them off for the first few hours, as written. Doesn't mean that low latency in general irritates them, just that they weren't used to it at first.
I'm a gamer myself. Upgrading my display makes me slightly off-game myself, until I get used to the new one. Same when getting a new car, where the brakes are way more sensitive than on a old car. Doesn't mean I don't like the brakes to be more sensitive, just means I'm not used to it.
And yes, the first few weeks of sensitive brakes are irritating, just touch the pedal and the car grinds quickly to a full halt. But now I do like it better compared to when you fully press down the pedal and the car slowly stops.
Huh. That's a big competitive advantage in competitive games. Why don't pro CS players use Linux? Is the difference smaller in the games that have been optimized for competitive play?
Personally, I always had the feeling that video was slower on Linux (always used nVidia proprietary drivers in Linux), but when I used to play a bit of e-guitar the audio latency was definitely better in Linux (but as well just for audio there are a lot of settings that play some role - e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio ).
Most professional CS is played at 4:3 stretched so the PC is pulling in hundreds of FPS
That's unlikely to be true anymore. Even a modestly modern GPU can produce 100's of FPS in CS:GO at 1920x1080 or higher resolutions. Benchmarks for the 3080 were showing 400-500 FPS in CS:GO at 1440p resolutions.
After maybe double your screen refresh rate, all excess FPS don't matter and are effectively wasted. Pro's mostly use 144Hz monitors because 240Hz is indistinguishable[1] - making anything above 288FPS basically a waste (and it's debatable if anything above 144FPS with FreeSync enabled is a waste too).
"I would actually prefer if you didn't play GTA V. I mean, I guess it doesn't matter since you're going to hell anyway. But still."
- God