> Sadly we never released the game on Linux to the public.
That's an improvement over not having a Linux port at all, as it reduces the investment needed to publish the game to Linux eventually. Once the Linux gaming market is big enough, studios might consider to release the game.
That said, I wonder if being low-key not released multiplatform might actually mean there's likely less compatibility issues when playing with wine/proton.
This is a real-world Linux game production story: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760. Note that the developers tried hard to release the native Linux port.
Crucial excerpt (from https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080214424474906624):
> We eventually laid out a guide with known good versions of Linux and graphics drivers, but it didn't matter. Part of the allure of Linux is the customizability, so few actually stuck to it, and generally wanted to run the game on older hardware we didn't support.
In order for Linux games production to be economically viable, there should be a Linux gaming standard, but because of the Linux culture, there will never be (there's nothing wrong; it's just its nature). Even if somebody came up with a gaming standard... xkcd explains what would happen: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/927:_Standards.
I'm not considering adhoc Linux gaming distributions like SteamOS, as they would have to be treated as an independently installed, separate, operating system.
Even my recent purchases on GOG where there's plenty of native Linux to be found, I usually download the Windows version because WINE is a more stable platform in the long run, in my experience.
On another computer I had, with the supremely buggy nVidia Optimus, SimCity 4 and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura both worked correctly only with Wine DLLs on their folder, preventing them from using Windows normal APIs.
The Beamdog Client no longer seems to work (pango lib issue), but GOG installs just fine. I like Beamdog and appreciate their ongoing support for Linux and have in turn purchased NWN gift keys for many people, but man - fix the Linux client please.
(Beamdog, feel free to contact me and I'll fix the broken client for free - seriously).
because if you don't keep your game up to date, it would not run. in windows you basically can run games for way longer because libraries are way more binary compatible. for running webservers/cloud whatever a breakage doesn't hurt and removes old crud, but sometimes the old crud is used in xyz in a way that nobody tought and without it the game would crash, that's why you would need to target a specific runtime.
the same thing more or less did windows up to 7 relativ well, via the version selection. unfortunatly windows 10 broke some games even with the version selection.
Games stand alone and don't need this integration.
CG programs and renderers need to have subdivision surface data be the same and image filtering be the same. They may be able to architect their way around standard library versions, but games don't need this same treatment because they stand alone.
Yes. Steam already supports multiple Proton runtimes, why not multiple Steam runtimes as well? With the latter, native Linux games could say in their metadata which one they need and the user wouldn't even notice.
Not entirely, it still relies on some system libraries, and you will see there are times where games do not run on Arch despite using the steam runtime. It is known.
It's curious that Wine outperforms Windows on some CPU-intensive tasks, but is far slower for certain others. The article just gives the numbers, but doesn't give a deep analysis. Perhaps cache issues?
> auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related)
I wonder if open-sourcing the game would see those same support tickets come in with patches.
Part of linux has always been about patching it up yourself. Rather than being a time sink for the developer, these linux bugs could actually be a way to crowdsource code improvements.
I know there are intellectual property concerns that prevent open-sourcing commercial products, but maybe there's some sort of hybrid solution to be found.
I hate that Linux philosophy for a daily driver. I remember being age 16, 17,18,19 23,26, and 27 and being told to figure it out. Every time I'm vastly more fluent and the community is just as unhelpful.
There's nothing intuitive about computers, a human came up with the rules. The negativity is cancerous.
As bizarre as it sounds, it is looking like the "Linux gaming standard" is really the Windows API. And that's where we are.
ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL/Vulkan, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are certainly available on GNU/Linux.
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
Just as Cocos-2dx, Unreal and Unity are, the main engines used on Android games.
However, having 2% of users responsible for 50% of support requests + extra development effort, is what puts GNU/Linux off their plans.
If you're referring to [1], you might be interested in reading [2] as well.