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EVE Online's Linux/Mac Client Goes Live Tuesday
The official EVE Online site has details of upcoming patch 'Revelations 2.3'. Along with a number of bug-fixes to the PvP-focused Massively Multiplayer Online Game, this game fix will offer up compatibility with Mac OS X and Linux. Though the Mac client is a native port, Linux will require the used of Cedega. The post suggests that if you'd like a preview of what the game will be like on your rig, you can download the client and tool around the test server. System requirements are also listed, as are the distributions of Linux they are specifically supporting: Ubuntu 7+, Suse 10+, and Linspire 6. Update: 11/04 14:32 GMT by Z : Fixed implication of native Linux client.
Oh god... no...why? Crap, the only thing that has kept me from trying that game was the lack of a linux port. And Tuesday? Lets see 3 weeks before finals.... Well it's official, I'm switching to business.
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WoW, really.
I know a lot of people who play WoW. All of us play it, across a mix of Windows and WINE and other systems, because one person we know had a Mac. We wanted to play together, so all of us went with WoW, even though some other games sounded interesting.
I hope the same thing happens for EVE, and they find a sales boost that goes beyond just the influx of Mac and Linux gamers.
(I won't be one of them; I have zero interest in PvP, or in playing a game which is built around real and lasting consequences for mistakes. I play a game like that about 14-18 hours a day already, and I want something different for my recreation.)
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Its not a native client. It uses a stripped-down version of the commercial fork of the now-obsolete xwine (what with normal wine having most dx things now), Cedega. People have been running the eve online client under wine and cedega for years now, I can run it under wine and get better fps than windows in some cases :P.
Anyway, the point is that they didn't actually take the time to write a native client, its simply packaged with Cedega, so this isn't really anything to praise them for.
I just thought I'd mention that because they don't until it actually starts installing.
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I can't speak for EVE since I am a Mac user and never played the game however the idea, game play and such seem an awfully like Vendetta Online who natively support Windows, Linux (64Bit too), and Mac and looks great. Not to mention a great backstory.
It is also quite cheap compared to other online games. Can anyone vouch for EVE being any better than Vendetta? Although I quit playing VO it was one of the few MMOs that still support PPC.
Cheers,
[J]
Don't worry, you gain skills even while offline, so you should have no problem studying for the finals, knowing that you're being 200% productive.
It probably isn't a real great MMORPG. You can look at this from many different ways: Maybe the great ones charge because they can, maybe charging allows them to maintain the infrastructure and manpower needed to run it, whatever. Point is that you generally find that the no monthly fee games aren't the great ones. A lot of the time it's a situation like Diablo 2. Where there's a lot of multiplayer, but it is little isolated worlds sort of, not the real massive worlds that everyone is in that you get from games like WoW. Kinda hard to maintain the servers you need for that if you aren't charging. Also you don't tend to get the real active development that you get in a per month game. Nearly all of them are very actively developed, new features all the time. It also goes on for a LONG time. Ultima Online, which was launched in 1997, is STILL in active development (new major engine update came out this year).
That's not to say that other games can't be fun. Just as a single player game is perfectly fun, so is one that's multiplayer but not so massive. Just don't think it directly compares to the really massive games. The no-fee games are usually more like Diablo 2 or maybe NWN than like EVE or WoW.
It doesn't change the rules to cater to the lowest common denominator, unlike WoW and other MMOs - it follows a specific vision, and users can either adapt or leave.
The openness and freedom of an old-school PK MUD combined with the concept of Elite/TradeWars/etc. make for an amazing, engrossing game.
Given its quality and lack of compromise, I'm surprised it's managed to survive so long.
Need I mention that WoW (and any number of Blizzard games) are already fully Mac compatible? Not Linux, admittedly... but it's a step in the right direction that's been going on for years.
Why would companies spend resources on a Linux version of their software if their software works with Wine just fine? Blizzard wrote a Windows client for WoW that is ported to Linux with Wine for free. What more can a company want than someone else doing the work for them for free? Any company that spends vast amounts of resources to port a product to Linux when it can be emulated with wine just fine probably isn't making good business decisions anyway, and won't stay in business long. On the flip side, Wine could very well be hindering games from being 'Linux native' because wine is capable of providing the performance needed to get the job done. There is no incentive to provide such software for Linux users because they can use Wine.
Because depending on wine makes you look like you don't care about your market and your relying on a third party such as winehq to make your game work.
If Eve brings out a patch that no longer makes it work under wine and 100 people send in hate mail then you can see why maybe a native client might be a good thing.
"Blizzard wrote a Windows client for WoW that is ported to Linux with Wine for free"
So you didnt know that WoW was written on linux and working in beta before they moved it to windows then?
First of all, nothing is better than a native port. I don't care if it runs "fine" under wine. Maybe the shaders don't work, maybe there are graphical glitches. I want games companies to care enough to compile the damn thing for linux. All they have to do is just lose the dependency for silly windows libs, use OpenGL, its 10x better than directx in my opinion.
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That is not "full compatibility with Mac OS X". Their press release says "formal support for Mac OS X".
I installed the "Linux version" (just a .deb that installs a shortcut that then downloads a stripped Cedega engine and the game data), but it will not run for me. It displays the splash screen... and that's it. I got the same results when trying to run Eve under plain ol' Wine a yeear or two ago. Lame. The game is so beautiful, too.
And why would anyone bother writing native linux programs?
You'd end up with everything running through wine, which is hardly ideal... Wine programs stick out like a sore thumb alongside other apps on linux/mac. Wine will always be one step behind microsoft's implementation too.
What we need, is a clean stable cross platform binary specification and api set, especially now that pretty much everything is x86 compatible. Think of it as java, but using native code.
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Website says (for Linux/Cedega):
...Oh come on! I was really about to reactivate my account when i read this. EVE is one of the only great games my old pc is still capable of running. (mostly) with good fps.
Damn...will that curse buying an ati card and running linux ever end!
Video: NVidia 6600, ATI is not supported.
> They keep bragging about how a minute's play can wipe out months of work.
I would never get that far, I refuse to play any game for which playtime feels like work.
What's really needed is a cross platform binary standard and standard set of APIs...
If you could download one binary, and run it on any OS with an x86 compatible CPU. Like java, but using native code etc.
It would also make a lot of sense for games companies, write the game once and get windows/mac/linux/solaris/bsd ports for free, since your coding to the cross platform standard instead of any particular OS.
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Why only nVidia supported? How they can go to Linux and ignore decent cards with available drivers (ATI r3xx, Intel), instead supporting binary only (thus really unsupportable) nVidia drivers? Why they ignore owners of older Mac Books Pro (with ATI cards)? Why they code support for nVidia instead of generic OpenGL renderer?
:wq
There doesn't need to be vast resources devoted to porting a game from one platform to the other. They don't have to write the whole thing from scratch..
The majority of the work is already done, and if the system is well designed, the game is practically platform agnostic already. All the animations, the meshes, the skins, the sound and music files are all independent of one particular platform, and if the engine is developed properly, the resources involved are minimized.
Just the engine and a few other bits need to be ported and compiled for the other platforms. And in this day and age, when companies often release Windows, PS2/3 and Xbox versions of the same game, isn't it more practical to design the game as easily portable from the start? Then they can tap into the growing Linux and OSX markets with minimal extra development.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
They've worked with Cedega to bring 100% compatibility and official support. It also works on wine and crossover if you're happy with no official support. There is nothing misleading in the announcement, they never claimed to do more than this, which is all you need to get it running on linux or intel-based macs.
Lately I have been playing a free (as in beer, optional "premium" content model) MMORPG which has a native client for GNU/Linux too (no client for Mac though). It's Realm versus Realm only, so it's extremely basic for the rest (no crafting, no non-combat skills, etc) but it's very good at what it is: a glorified chess-board for 50vs50 battles (there are three realms, a bit like DaoC). It's an indy Argentinian game developed by 7-8 crazies but it's getting better everyday. They don't advertise it too much because, even if it's officially out of beta, it still feels like it. They want the first impression to be better to hook the most ;).
;).
The funny thing with an indy game (few players) with a GNU/Linux client is that half the English-speaking players (the rest being Argentinian/Spanish-speaking) are Linux users/admins or IT people. If anyone wants to try it out, find it through Google (Regnum Online) and Ignis is the way to go
Definitely shuts the "harder to code for OpenGL/Linux" FUD, as the engine is perfectly portable over Windows/D3D & Linux/OGL and they announced they would make a Mac version if they have a Mac. This is a homebrew engine and game designed and programmed by 7 people... and game companies can't do it? Right..
Whatever you say, they have made an effort to make it easier to play the game on linux machines. Be fucking thankful that somebody is making an effort to reach into your tiny market, instead of whining that it's not perfect. Even if its not a native client, the game should run fine. People with decent computers can run 4 clients at a time in windows. If it was easy to make linux clients, and the money companies could possibly make by creating them was high enough, everyone would do it. The problem is theres not enough linux users, with the hardware, inclination, whatever, to make it financially worthwhile. Once theres enough of you, willing to pay for games and not whine like hell about not being treated the same as windows users, companies will begin to enter the market. Linux is a tiny market compared to windows, seemingly populated by even harder to please nerds, and you wonder why companies don't bother making linux games? Most of the comments here are more likely to put a company off bothering with a linux client. Overall I doubt this is the begining of a trend. The sort of game eve is means that a higher proportion of potential users will be linux users anyway, so they have a bigger potential market to reach than other games / mmo's. Regardless, come try eve. 99% of you will hate the game, eve is the harshest, most cutthoat, brutal mmo you can play, and for that other 1% it will be perfect. The real difference between eve and other mmo's, is the ability to affect the world and other players. Imagine losing every peice of your equipment every time you died in wow, or a wow with completely player run towns, real wars over territory involving several thousand players, a complex almost entirely player run economy, a real and working player mercenary market, and almost every bit of your kit being manufacturerd by other players. CCP can almost be seen as providing a framework for the game, the game itself is created by the players.
The majority of the work is already done, and if the system is well designed, the game is practically platform agnostic already. All the animations, the meshes, the skins, the sound and music files are all independent of one particular platform, and if the engine is developed properly, the resources involved are minimized.
I'm guessing in this case they designed their game for Windows and Linux/OS X were an afterthought. If they designed their game for portability there would probably be a native Linux port. I dunno if a company like Loki can survive now, but even then with a MMORPG patches have to be released simultaneously or you risk pissing off some of your customers (and really it's unfair to them to do that). Holding back your patches to have all the platform on the same page risks the customers growing tired of waiting for new content. I would guess for a MMORPG its really better to have an in-house team to manage the Linux port, but that is expensive vs the amount of people playing the game on that OS. If Linux has 3% of the total userbase then only a fraction of the 3% would playing the game.
Unfortunately the new EVE client is actually just the Windows client plugged into winelib (hopefully optimised a bit too). Better than just trying to run it on Wine though, which has traditionally been a pain in the arse.
I'm actually glad that they're going for the Cedega/WINE option, because like this I can run it quasi natively in Solaris. If it were a real Linux binary, I'd have to run it in a lx zone and bounce everything back to the X server via TCP/IP.
It's called opengl for 3d graphics... wxwidgets for gui... it's not the opensource communities' fault if M$ keeps going around breaking some of them each release (opengl in vista)...
Eve is written in stackless Python. So its not as windows dependent as one might think.
### What we need, is a clean stable cross platform binary specification and api set
Well, in case we ever get that, you can bet that it will be based on Win32.
This is why I think Wine is a bad idea. It's a cop-out. The fact that you can hack up programs to run on something other than Windows is no excuse for failing to support the platform. Wine gives developers less incentive to make platform independent software, and that's a BAD thing.
Glad you corrected the Linux client in the summary, but you need to do the same for OS X.
You're still implying that a Ciderized version of a Win32 application is "native" on OS X. It isn't, it's just another Wine-based port.
I thought Cider was basically Cedega-for-Macs? No actual code was ported, they just created a DirectX compatibility layer for Mac.
Or am I wrong here? I'd love to think so, but I'm not sure.
If Wine Is Not an Emulator, then a game built on a native Wine platform would be.......
Wine is an implementation of Windows APIs. It might not be a native port in the truest sense (not using native APIs DIRECTLY), but the code is running natively on your platform.
If you really want to get technical, most games "natively ported" to Linux rarely make direct use of features unique to Linux. Loki was IMHO the best, but is porting to SDL much different than porting to Wine? How does not porting all the features of the original game (NWN cut scenes, mod tools) count towards a "native port"?
Heh, Linux games with "native" Windows ports _probably_ won't touch much of the Win32 API directly either...
Anyway, ports are ports, PCs, consoles, whatever. They're rarely "native" to anything but the first platform they were developed on.
OpenGL isn't broken in Vista.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
As to the user base. Of the entire 95% that Windows is reputed to have, not every windows user is a gamer. I think you are severely over estimating the market.
The Windows majority is made up of 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP and a few Vista users. So not all are going to be able to use the currently available games for a start. In other words, of no use to the game publishers. XP is somewhere around 70% of the total PC market, and is the largest platform for current games. So lets start from there.
First, subtract the percentage of business only PCs where the user is not only not going to not have time to play games at work, but they can not install anything on their work PC ever. This will be a majority of the 70%
Then subtract the number of 3 year and older PCs that people are still perfectly happy to use. A Pentium 3 and 256 meg of memory is not going to get you much in the way of game play, but it is fine for most if not all the uses that most people make of their PCs at home.
Then subtract the laptops, which are making up a significant amount of the Windows market at the moment. Playing a resource hungry game on a laptop is not a good idea. Unless you are feeling really cold.
Consoles are easy to use, comparatively cheap when you take the cost of a gaming PC into account, so even more Windows users are going to get a console instead, and they have about five years of use with the console as opposed to a year or two before the gaming PC looks a bit slow.
Now you have quite a small chunk of the 95% Windows market. That is the market that the gamers inhabit. At a very rough guess, the gaming market is much closer to 10%.
So now, the Linux/Mac markets don't look as insignificant.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Lots of Linux users who *could* but don't want to dual boot just to play a game are going to be attracted to any MMOG that offers them official support. Smaller games (like EVE) have more to gain, because there's a lot larger pool of people who might sign up who haven't, where as large games like WoW have pretty much saturated the market of people who'd like to play it. Blizzard offering official support wouldn't give them many new subscribers, it would just please their existing Linux using playerbase.
You're not in the target demographic of the Mac. I'm not going to say what the target demographic actually is other than that it's the people for which the best applications for their jobs have traditionally been on the Mac.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
EVE (and anything else) would work fine with ATI drivers if they didn't suck. Cedega has done everything possible on their end, the rest is up to ATI.
Please AMD, just sack ATI's software side. Burn it down and start fresh.
Buy an Nvidia card and the curse is over.
We've switched HermMunster's coffee for pure metamphetines. Let's see if he notices...
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
You are right, and the summary is bullshit in this matter. There is nothing 'native' in the Mac version. I am downloading the Cedega port right now, wondering if it will perform better that running through wine - I kept Windows on my PC for the sole purpose of playing PvP in Eve (it performs good enough for PvE and trading/manufacturing).
Yes it is, M$ disabled it as it can't work with Aero.
Okay, explain how I'm playing City of Heroes then, an exclusively OpenGL game.
Check your facts.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Windows Vista and OpenGL-the Facts
An article posted on OpenGL.org explaining the OpenGl works perfectly well on Vista, with Aero. Relevant quotation would be: Windows Vista fully supports hardware accelerated OpenGL;
OpenGL applications can benefit from Window Vistas improved graphics resource management;
OpenGL performance on Windows Vista is extremely competitive with the performance on Windows XP. Well done for not even managing 25 seconds of research on something you're claiming to know.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
... paid money for software, we'd have a different PC industry. As it is, the projects costing tens of millions of dollars keep getting made for the benefit of the folks who pay money for software. Ever wonder why that is?
(Before I get downmodded to Hell and back, I'd like to point out that I have commit access on Megamek. That is probably among the top 3 games on Sourceforge, given that rank among all apps is in the mid-40s. It doesn't have any of the 3D bells-and-whistles you'd expect from a PC game these days because, uh, we didn't have seven figures to hire a team of artists for two to three years. Anybody want to cough up a few dozen man-years of labor, or the equivalent in cash, to make things pretty? Oh, a couple dozen more man-years of labor to test the 3D code on a few hundred possible combinations of hardware, driver, OS, and distribution would be helpful too.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
EVE has been won by BOB/MC. A new client won't fix that. Play another game in which the outcome is still in play.
Society is nothing but collaboration.
Why if Blizzard can have WoW run on PPC and Mac Intel, CCP does a half assed baked job and only ports it to Intel Macs. Why do I have to ditch my quad core PPC G5 to just play one game because the company wasn't intuitive enough to port it in universal format. Screw that. I'll keep playing wow but im not going to run to the apple store and buy a mac mini or an imac when my machine has suficient cpu power to run Eve...
This is a half assed job... im happy for the rest of the mac community who will be able to play this awesome game, but im pissed off CCP didnt have the balls to go all the way...
K.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Well it never worked on the Betas and RCs, and I know of one game that they had to transfer all code to DirectX to make it work... but then I'm a Linux user.
Maybe it was certain opengl features they disabled... I know I'm not the only one that has had problems with it...
All they have to do is just lose the dependency for silly windows libs, use OpenGL, its 10x better than directx in my opinion.
I'm writing a game right now (in OpenGL) and let me assure you that it isn't 10x better. It's really not better at all. DirectX is absolutely the 500 pound gorilla in this space. It has its own model formats, its own optimized texture formats, its own shader formats (which are automatically optimized for the major graphic card types) and its fixed-function pipeline absolutely blows OpenGL's FFP out of the water. It's not even in the same league.
With that said, yes, OpenGL is great and it has its advantages, but in order for OpenGL to approach the level of integration and rendering quality that you get for free in DirectX, relies on you to do all the heavy lifting. And there really is a lot of heavy lifting. OpenGL is great if you really, truly want unadulterated control over every aspect of rendering, but you can do that in DirectX too if you want with minimal fuss. On the other hand, if you are not a John Carmack and really would like to let the framework handle most of the hard work for you, DirectX offers that handily, while OpenGL is rather unsatisfactory.
Random and weird software I've written.
You're not in the target demographic of the Mac. I'm not going to say what the target demographic actually is other than that it's the people for which the best applications for their jobs have traditionally been on the Mac.
I question whether this is true still today. The only piece of "artsy" software I can think of that's Mac-only is Final Cut, and frankly I prefer Premiere.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Of the ten, ONE of them will be a linux user (who already has EVE on his PC rig [and prolly the same machine])!
i can has an MMO that doesn't require hours of endless grinding? PLEEEEEEZE!!1!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
We already have what you describe, it's called "Wine"..
However, it doesnt satisfy the "clean" or "stable" requirements... The win32 api is a horrendous pile of legacy cruft mixed in with new crufty apis that do the same thing in a slightly less messy way, but without removing the old crap leaving multiple chunks of code effectively doing the same thing.
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Those are source level APIs, requiring your code to be compiled for each platform it's intended to run on. This is fine if you have the source and are willing to compile it for your platform, but commercial game developers won't go for that.
What we really need is compile once, run anywhere.
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Yep. Mod Parent Up.
I'm really tired of games coming out saying that they are 'Native OS X' when they are actually Windows binaries running in Cider (which is essentially Wine). There's two issues for me with this:
1) Windows binaries running in wine certainly do not have an OS X feel to them, and are sometimes buggy and usually slow. However this is being seen as 'good enough' when it really shouldn't be. It's 'good enough' for the hobbyist, but it shouldn't be good enough for any company that considers themselves a real game company.
2) Cider isn't giving all that much back to the wine project; which while I can see why they wouldn't, I think it's a matter of social responsibility that they do.
### However, it doesnt satisfy the "clean" or "stable" requirements...
Stamp ECMA or ISO on it and you have it 'stable' (might maybe one day happen due to all those anti-trust lawsuits), but I seriously doubt that we will ever get 'clean', since it simply wouldn't have much benefit. What is needed is a way to run Windows apps on other operating systems, you don't get that by a clean API, but by the one that was used by all those applications and that is Win32 in all its messiness.
Now from a practical standpoint the difference between a official ISO/ECMA/whatever Win32 standard and just try&error reimplementation in the form of Wine won't be much of course.
These do recompile for multiple platforms, hence why they prefer to use opengl.
Port it to OpenGL + other toolkits?
Why not just use OpenGL in the first place?
Once that's done, is 90% of the work done to port it to Linux? Just curious.
Great. The spreadsheet application is about to go live!
I don't know what the sever software is written in. The client is the python. You can tell its not a standard windows program because of some of its bad behaviors.
RTFA - it's not live until Tuesday 6th when they patch the servers.
Why game companies can never seem to trust whatever forums they have about this...
No "I'd buy this game if you had platform X"
No "My friends would want to play but..."
Ever seems to make it
Nice straw man; your parent's post said nothing about it running on the O X that the iPhone uses. This is about supporting the Macintosh platform.
I play WoW, natively I might add, on a PowerPC based Macintosh. It is running the same OS (10.5.0) that today's Macs are shipping with. It has 3GB of RAM and a NV6800U. It is still under warranty. It is as powerful of a machine as some of the currently shipping Intel Macs.
In short, EVE Online does not have full compatibility with OS X. I commend them for their attempt to support the platform, even if it is Intel only and kludgy, but people should know that it's not full compatibility and the story, as well as their info pages, should make a point to reflect that fact.
Personally, I will not be playing this even on my Intel Mac. I like the ability to use whichever machine I'm sitting at. The fact that they release a gimped Mac client means little as I could already run this under BootCamp or Parallels. Since they have chosen this route to port their game, there will never be a native Mac client and PowerPC Mac users should just stick to WoW. Hell, Intel Mac users may just stick to WoW for that matter.
CCP has been married to DirectX from the start. That pretty much makes it Windows dependant. Since they're basically rebuilding the graphics engine anyway for a big update, you'd think it would be a perfect opportunity to make native clients for multiple platforms. But instead they decided to move to DX10. Yay.
Both the Linux and Mac "clients" are the Windows client in a bundled Cedega/Cider package.
What bullshit.