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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.
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[J]
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.
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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> 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.
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.
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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.
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.