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CCP To Discontinue EVE Online Support For Linux
maotx writes "CCP's recent support for EVE Online in Linux is now set to be discontinued this March. Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client. Feedback on the EVE Online forums, which includes the e-mail in which CCP announced this decision, suggest that the client was not preferred for Linux users as it did not support the Premium graphics client and did not run as well as the win32 client under Wine. For those who wish to stop playing EVE Online, CCP is offering a refund towards unused game time. Select quote from the e-mail: 'The feedback and commitment we obtained from players like you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system.'"
Most of those who use Linux aren't gamers, and probably use their computers for more worthwhile things. If I want to play Eve or WoW, I fire up Wine, or boot into my windows partition.
along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client. F
How can a failure to share expected growth as with the Mac Client be a good justification for discontinuing the Mac OS X client??
why they even released an official client if it performed better under WINE.
Considering how they have trouble getting stuff right in general, no big surprizes.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=975896
New slashdot layout sucks.
Just wondering. I always found the Linux lacking when compared to the premium graphics client under wine.
Sub par graphics and an inability to compete with its wine counterpart would contribute to its own death.
So...maybe nobody was using the client because it sucked? Well, if they make Wine a supported platform for their Windows client, that wouldn't be too bad. I remember when World of Goo was released, with Linux support promised (still not here), it ran perfectly on Wine.
It's still a shitty alternative to say, OGRE. But if you absolutely must use DirectX, just test on Wine the same way you test on WinXP or Vista.
I was about to ditch WoW + Crossover for EVE because of their support (and talking my WoW friends into doing the same). Now I don't know...
No sig for you!!
CCP is yet another Windows shop that would rather throw a lot of money at a crummy DirectX wrapper than look over the fence and embrace native Linux development.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
If your Win32 client works better in Linux than the Linux client, then you've got a problem. They should have just entered into a distribution agreement with Transgaming from the start to bundle their code with Cedega.
...if you're running Linux ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API, how can we expect anything more? Just to load and play a sound, you need a sound API, and codecs. For sound, you have alsa, OSS, and layers on top like NAS, ESD, pulse, SDL, JACK, whatever KDE went with that I forget, etc. Arguably, some or all of these may fail to meet requirements. For codecs, you have gstreamer, (probably) SDL, etc., and a nightmare of communicating to customers what extra libraries they'll need, even if one of these works. Linux will get people bothering to provide native support when Linux people bother to provide decent APIs and docs, and unify around them.
... as if millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
and do all of my development work on it... and periodically I reboot into Windows to play Fallout 3.
I like Linux for development, but the fact is that it is not as good of a gaming platform as Windows is.
Windows has better video drivers, and it has a tons of teams at Microsoft working on things like directx that directly support gaming. Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games.
Oh, and sound just works on Windows, did I mention that? That's pretty important for games. I have surround sound working on my Linux install, which took some doing, but as soon as I plug in my USB headset so I can use skype, the Linux sound system explodes. That means that even if left for dead was on Linux, I still wouldn't be able to play it.
Really, I don't see what the big deal with dual booting is and since people like me are just going to dual boot, I can't imagine why any game maker would waste money on a Linux port.
If I can play my game even marginally better on windows I have no reason not to get the windows version.
We love choice! It's 'teh power of open source"!
For the same reason it is a pain for commercial apps, it is a pain for OSS too. A disproportionate amount of effort in various projects is invested in spinning on API updates...
Most things have calmed down, but audio frameworks for some reason stay in a state of significant flux. Today's 'correct' API is pulseaudio, which will abstract the underlying mess, but who knows what tomorrow brings. I'm still haven't followed esd and arts lately to see if they have relevance. dmix and the like I bunch up in alsa which I think you don't touch directly as an app developer because a higher layer controls it...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Failed to show growth my ass. Ubuntu was by far the easiest distribution to get Eve up and running. Hell, I even got Eve to run on my netbook. It wasn't lack of interest. Tell the fucking truth: CCP couldn't get it right and they never released a native linux client. Their support was terrible. That's why they failed.
Niggers are what they are because of how apes behave. This is the philosophy behind Niggerbuntu. They also advocate humanity towards monkeys. Join Niggerbuntu today!
- GCC Plugin Wiki
That is the first that comes to mind. I believe Linus himself has been quoted as saying something along the lines of "We don't promise a stable kernel ABI and if that means breaking binary drivers, oh well, in fact we might change the ABI just to break them on purpose!". Can't find the quote though.
And if you still aren't convinced, just browse the comments right here at Slashdot every time there is a story about some driver somewhere. There indeed exists a group of people who want to purposefully mix shit up hoping to scare certain kinds of developers away.
I saw tons of webpage ads for Eve Online, but I never noticed anything about it running on Linux.
If I'd known that, there's a good chance I would have signed up, partially for the fun and partially to support games companies that support Linux.
Is the real lesson here that they didn't properly advertise their Linux compatibility? Or is it just that I need to get glasses?
I'm kind of surprised that there ARE enough Mac people still playing to fund development. And I'm not particularly surprised that the Linux client would be just as terrible to drive people away.
Say what you want about Blizzard, WoW-tards, and all that. But they don't leave major bugs unfixed and major features missing (Did they EVER bother to add the premium graphics to Mac or Linux?) on one platform versus the other.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
In CCCP, Eve Online discontinues you!
heh... get it?
I really wanted to play Eve but couldn't get the client to work (this was a while ago). Instead I got a good hit of nostalgia playing oolite, a copy of the old 8-bit Elite. I haven't tried out the crazy amount of expansion packs. If anybody knows anything similar or better please post below!
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
CCP is encouraging users of the Linux EVE client to upgrade to the OpenOffice.org Calc application.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
CCP is claiming that they can't count the number of wine users because wine reports 'as windows' and not as 'wine on Linux.' Bullet meet foot.
FTA,
What do you expect?
file "~/.cedega/EVE Online/c_drive/Program Files/CCP/EVE/eve.exe"
eve.exe: MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit
Throw away for a moment the fact that Direct X translation to OpenGl is super slow compared with native OpenGL.
Wine >> winex.
Cedega = winex + no development updates + horrible hacks and workarounds for certain games.
The Eve-Online client is still a windows program. It is unsurprising that the best windows API on Linux would work better. CCP picked Transgaming to do the "porting." They once had the leading implementation of DirectX on Linux, but their tiny team worked on their private and increasingly hacked up fork of ancient wineX code.
Duplication of effort and waste all in the name of greed. And now it's the Linux users who get to pay.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
But the by product of the kernel developers actions does two things:
1) Establishes a tone and attitude that one should randomize your API to fight off proprietary software.
2) Actually works... see also this article.
If you you agree with that attitude, that is fine and I respect that. However, this article is an example of that attitude working. You cannot be for things like binary games like WoW running on Linux and still promote an attitude of actively making their life difficult. If you are doing it under the idea that it will encourage them to open-source, you will have to accept when companies choose to abandon Linux instead--as in this case.
The same patch that released the Linux client also fucked up Linux compatibility. I went from being able to run 6 clients smoothly to choking on 2 with Crossover and Wine. I ended up selling off my extra accounts because I simply couldn't play them anymore. The native client was unusable (significant graphical errors, low framerate) for months after release, itself. This was quite a significant change from the previous situation, because Linux actually ran the game better than Windows did (about 30% higher FPS in my particular case) in their original (pre-classic/premium divide) client which made little use of the GPU.
I like CCP a lot and they definitely had good intentions, here. They made a terrible mistake by going with the Cedega team instead of the Crossover/Wine developers, though. I knew a few dozen other Linux users who also tried out their official client and then immediately reverted, so it is not surprising to me that they do not have the usage numbers to justify its development.
"The Client we paid developers to make for us was not up to par with a free client supported by volunteers."
Translation: our hiring team don't know their asses from their elbows.
So apparently, it worked better under wine, with better graphics to boot. Why didn't they just publish an install script which downloaded, installed and configured the version of wine that worked best, and install the game using that copy of wine?
In soviet russia, the CCCP discontinues you.
Not quite correct, and the summary event links to another /. article dated 2007. The poster must've been in quite a hurry not to spot that (or the current date on his calendar for that matter).
... Except Brighter Minds never developed World of Goo in the first place -- that distinction belongs to the tiny 2D Boy dev house. They note on their blog that the Linux version is coming along. Sure, it's been slow as molasses, but I'd say that it might actually be "likely to happen some time soon". :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
When I install the Windows client, I can play. When I install the Mac client, I can play. When I get the Linux installer, I get:
Oh, I see, so apparently my pygtk installation isn't right. Whereupon I say "fuck it", since I want to play a game and not spend an hour in Gnome/Gtk dependency hell just to find out what dependency hell is lurking on line 18 of cedega_installer.py.
which of 8 million versions of Linux are they supposed to support?
As an avid slashdot reader, I would have expected their profits to triple as soon as they released a linux client, since SO MANY people use linux (and not windows), and it's so much easier to write supportable code on linux.
Instead, it seems almost as though supporting a linux installation is a tremendous waste of time because it's an inconsistent bitch to program for, everyone runs a different distribution that is somehow quirky or incompatible, and the community will literally attack your effort until it becomes so unmonetized that you are literally losing money to provide software.
It seems to me that they may have realized that wine makes it unnecessary to waste any cash on linux development, since it's a win-win. On the plus side, you get to develop the software in windows where you've got real development tools and libraries, since games are harder to write than perl scripts, and then you don't have to worry about getting support tickets from some moron running gentoo-- plus it's absolutely free to let "software advocates" put in all the crappy work porting your product through wine. If it breaks, it's Wine (or Transgaming)'s problem, not yours! Bonus!
Hell, look at what happened with JavaFX-- even Sun, developers of Solaris, can't yet get JavaFX running in opensolaris or linux because of how difficult it is to get that smooth graphical jazz running in X with all its assorted crapitude-- but they've already got it humming on Windows and Mac-- or Google, getting Chrome and Google Talk out the door on Windows first, and pushing out Google Earth for linux as a wine-based solution.
So the linux community is not large enough to support the money necessary to make the port, and then if you somehow do, they attack you for not open sourcing your code!-- just like what happened with Loki and Corel.
I would say CCP made an intelligent and well informed move with all factors taken into account. Unix has been around since the 70's, and somehow, it's never had a gaming market of any note. This has never ceased not to amaze me.
it did not support the Premium graphics client and did not run as well as the win32 client under Wine.
And you wonder why it wasn't as popular as the unofficial client.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Especially when one has to shutdown, reboot, etc. Annoying. If we want to go back to Linux, then we have to do it again! Yes, we can get another computer but still... I hate rebooting. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I recently cancelled my two accounts for EVE because I was getting disillusioned with the game in general and CCP's motives in particular. Things that struck me as odd in the game:
1. The enormous amounts of time need to train skills in the game to be anywhere near able to play on a level playing field with experienced players. This has nothing to do with true skill at the game. Although CCP claims that this is to make it easier for new players to compete with olde rplayers, I suspected pretty early on that the real motivation behind this was that CCP uses this as a mechanism to get people playing longer, i.e. to make more "guaranteed" money from players as they try to compete with more experienced players.
There is no real rationale in the game for the so-called Tech 2 (and soon Tech 3) skills. They just make things longer to complete.
There is already a term in the EVE universe about this "timesink", an activity designed to make the player spend enormous amounts of time waiting to be able to do something during which CCP makes extra money out of the players.
2. Lack of content. The player versus computer missions are so similar to one another, and so lacking in anything interesting that doing missions is referred to as "grinding", i.e. something unpleasant that takes time, like doing homework, filling out taxes etc. Mining in the game is so boring that many players actually get an extra account simply to do this because it is so boring.
3. Terrible UI. The game's UI is so spectacularly bad that it is a wonder that anyone can achieve anything with it. In effect it usually means having so many windows open that you're left with a tiny portion of the screen in which you can actually play.
4. Player versus player. The one area of the game which really is interesting is almost totally off bounds to new players, who don't have the trained skills to be able to compete. There is also an increasing tendency in Eve for players to congregate in huge gangs, called "blobs" which makes casual play for a solo player extremely difficult, and this trend is only increasing.
5. Technical issues, referred to partially in the parent post, and somewhat alluded to in the topic title. Network disconnects are frequent, overburdened laggy servers are a frequent problem and UI glitches are very common. What often makes things worse is CCP's attitude towards its own failings. CCP trumpeted its development of a unique technology to fix the server lag issues, but they have simply worked around the problem by assigning more resources to areas of the game that are usually more frequented, leaving other areas sometimes even more starved of resources than they previously were.
I can't get over the feeling that CCP are a bunch of technically gifted con artists, given to the same PR misleading statements and untruths that other companies are. I think the main reason they stay in business is because they appeal to the geekiest of gamer who appreciate the game's complexity and are willing to turn a blind eye towards all the inconsistencies in it.
eve Linux is just eve windows with the wine wrapper. you will still be able to run eve threw wine. and Linux is a good gaming platform but Linux uses opengl and most games use windows and there d3d.
Linux users will still have Eve Offline to entertain themselves, or even better, I regularly enjoy the original, "Offline."
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"Eve Online does the impossible by making deep space boring .." - Zero Punctuation
For WINE and NATIVE... CCP did a piss poor job, it the native client was a bad joke. Thank god I given up on Eve all together.
News at 11.
Who the fuck did you have to kill to get that 100mbit fiber?
If you didn't kill anyone, who provides it and what are the terms?
so...they borked the *nix port, but managed to get the apple bsd based ver working....then drop support for *nix because it runs ok in an emulator.
there's some lateral thinking for ya.
First up your point about the sheer proliferation of different ways of playing sound on Linux and lack of docs is a strong one but things have been slowly improving over the years. The author of Pulseaudio has written a good guide as to what to use. The list of APIs is still bigger than 3 but in most cases it becomes clearer on what to target.
ALSA comes in (yeah I can hear the groans) two forms. A small "virtualisable" subset referred to as safe ALSA and full ALSA.
OSS is usually considered legacy. There most certainly is OSS4 (which is not) but that does not have the traction on Linux and most people only have an OSS3 -> ALSA layer so its dangerous for new apps to target it.
NAS is not that popular. I only come across it in Linux audio conversations like this. I don't think anyone feels they have to target it.
ESD is obsolete but was VERY popular. New apps should not be targeting it now though.
Pulseaudio. Interesting but has suffered due to partial implementations in some popular distros that users felt caused more problems than they fixed. For regular users I do think it is key for Pulseaudio to work past its problems though - it offers a lot of promise and is probably Linux's best chance to date of offering certain features. New apps can target it directly (for best support) or just use safe ALSA.
SDL (for sound). Interesting if you are writing games but in most other cases you would use something else. Its presence has never been a problem as it quickly became clear it was for games.
JACK. This is for professional musicians. If you have to target this then you are going after a high-end sound market. Most sound playing apps are not in this case.
KDE 4's Phonon. If you are only targeting KDE4 then I guess you should be using this.
gstreamer. If you are interested in codecs (e.g. playing vorbis music files or theora video) rather than decoding/encoding files yourself you should probably be using this.
For games use SDL. If you are only targeting KDE4 use the KDE4 stuff. For codec support use gstreamer. OSS and ESD should no longer be targeted in first tier Linux audio support. Pulseaudio will probably become more popular (so you can consider targeting it directly) but safe ALSA will probably have the broadest user base for a while.
it did not support the Premium graphics client and did not run as well as the win32 client under Wine
IMHO they should have planned better (applies to any game company). As a game developer why they don't start off writing their own cross-platform API compatibility layer is beyond me. This should be foresight because a game should be available across multiple platforms, not as an afterthought. Even if they could define the same interfaces on every system and provide a custom implementation for each function in it, then they could create one set of tests for that interface to ensure it works on every target system. The game code would be layered on top.
AND a plain DVD to install? They are all image ghosts and if you reinstall, it wipes ALL harddrives and puts windows and windows ALONE on the disk.
The only way nowadays to manage not to do that is to buy the retail version.
Which is $100 or more.
"Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system."
In fact we are so convinced that we release crippled versions of our software for Linux, hoping that the OS would magically fill in the gaps.
Doesn't affect me, but that is one company I would avoid for any and all products going forward.
He hits it on the head. EVE as a single player experience gets old pretty quickly. Grinding missions, eh...not that fun after awhile. The real content is what you make yourself, writing your own MMO story when you join a player corp. PvP is ridiculously simple to get into and a new player with a few basic skills can be an important part of a small fleet. Sounds like the parent expected it to be more like Wow and the like...guess what? It's not WoW! Thank God for that too.
Now we Mac people are in the same boat as the Linux people - the OS X port of Eve also isn't a native port. And if you look at the forums even a little, it shows. It's one of just two pieces of OS X software I know that have crashed on me repeatedly, in short intervals.
So while I welcome the fact that they've made ports at all - most companies don't even do that - the fact still remains that the Transgaming shit is nowhere near a native port in quality.
Even though they failed as a business, some of these days I wish for Loki back. Fortunately, the OS X world still has a few (2 I think, but might be 3) companies doing native ports.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As long as you're testing under Wine, I don't see why targeting it so much worse than a native client. It's a relatively stable target, you don't have to worry about differing libraries, OS, ABI, etc, you just write once, compile once, and it works for all eternity on all systems for which Wine is written.
You don't lose out on performance, the way you would with a VM or emulation or something. You can package it and put in a repo just like anything else... I'm really not seeing the downside (maybe future lawsuits against the Wine project?)
What exactly do you see as the problem?
I excised Microsoft from my home 4 years ago first using Fedora, Centos and later Ubuntu. During that period every time slashdot had an Eve history I would check their website out, say "cool, internet spaceships, does it run on linux?"... then dismiss the history and read the next one.
I recall googling for Eve in Linux a couple times, found info about running it with Wine and dismissed that considering it a hack, I was not going to pay a subscription to play a game in a non supported way (feared that WoW ./ history where linux players were being kicked for running with Wine)
I tried Eve a couple months after their Linux client was released and got hooked. After experiencing lag and slow FPS I upgraded my trusty years old sempron with GeForce 6200 to a decent Athlon X2, GeForce 8600. A week later I tried premium client under Wine and that was that. I never went back to the "official" linux client.
My point here is the progression that led me to use it with Wine. Now I know it works just fine, is not a hack and it run even more stable than in Windows. There must be other linux users out there thinking the same way I do.
CCP would have never had me as a 3 account customer if they don't release that crappy linux client. Now I am hooked and not quitting unless they screw the client so much it doesn't run with wine anymore.
Why am I playing Eve instead of WoW or any other MMORPG?... They are the only ones that released a linux client.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
After hearing there was a Linux version of EVE online, I decided to try it out using a free 7 day trial I found on PVP. After downloading the client and getting my registration in order, I entered my username and password and waited... ... and waited... ... and waited...
As far as I could tell, the client never would let me in, so I let my trial expire and moved on. I couldn't be bothered to pony up some cash for a subscription if their client wouldn't let me in. If others had the same experience as me, it's no wonder there weren't that many Linux players. I probably would have gotten my wife hooked on it as well, as she likes sci-fi. Unfortunately there's two less EVE Online customers, all because of a bad trial experience with a client that didn't even give me a taste of what it was about.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out for EVE Online, but not terribly surprised either.
I have to say the Linux client worked WONDERFULLY... It ran much faster on my Slackware box than on my XP box!
The problem was that the game documentation sucked and therefore my game experience sucked because stuff was so aggravating to figure out.
I would have kept up my subscription but, their documentation and support just blew... Maybe they should look more at that as the reason for lack of growth...
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Its really sad, I got EVE on 14 January.
I created that account as a free trial.
After 5 months of tinkering to cancel my xbox live subscription so I could play EVE.
So I finally did it!, I took the step to play EVE.
I had fun, And fun, Then came the news.
My final words (to CCP):
"I cried CCP, I cried..."