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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.'"
Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client
Because you failed to read the sentence correctly.
CCP doesn't support Linux, but wine has done a good job of making sure it runs well. I've been playing for a little over 2 years and have never had any problems with wine.
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API
That's a troll argument. It doesn't have to be unified, as long as the systems talk to each other -- which they do.
For games? Use OpenAL. That's a no-brainer, that gets you 3D surround, and handles plugging into whatever they've got, hardware or software, any OS. Then the user, or the distro, can configure OpenAL to use ALSA natively, or use Jack, or whatever other layer they want to put in there.
whatever KDE went with that I forget,
KDE wrote a wrapper for all of the above, plus native ALSA (on Linux), and whatever Windows/OS X provide.
For codecs, you have
the same set of codecs you have on Windows, if you're licensing them. Or, if you'd like to save yourself some money, you use Vorbis/FLAC, available both in native libraries and through gstreamer/SDL.
This is as retarded as people claiming that the fact that both GNOME and KDE exists means Linux will never be a good desktop. OH NOES, choice, whatever shall we do. JUST PICK ONE! And no, you don't need the community to pick one for you -- close your eyes and play pin-the-tail-on-the-audio-library.
They all work. The existence of others, especially when the one you want (OpenAL) will plug into all of them, is not something you even have to think about.
a nightmare of communicating to customers what extra libraries they'll need
Or you include those libraries with the game -- it's really not that difficult to configure the game to use your libraries instead of the system libraries. Or you distribute a demo under a license that allows redistribution, and let the distros work it out -- when people want the full game, they put in a key and download the rest of the content.
But really, how is it a "nightmare", even if you had to spell out dependencies? How is it in any way harder than "communicating" what version of DirectX you need on Windows?
Linux will get people bothering to provide native support when
when people who might potentially port start looking at what's already there, and how hard it's not. If an indie game with close to no budget can provide native Linux support (think: every Introversion game, every Penny Arcade game, a few from Chronic Logic...), I would think that a company with 300+ employees could find one who knows at least as much as one of those guys.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Wine isn't an emulator. Seriously, wine is a native implementation of the win32 api. Saying that wine is an emulator is like saying mono is a .net emulator, or that glut is an OpenGL emulator. An API isn't code, its a specification. Win32 is a specification not code, Wine is just an implementation of that specification on Linux.
They, uh, did.
That was why it worked better in Wine. Cedega wasn't anywhere near good enough.
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API, how can we expect anything more?
That's odd, I could have sworn that I had access to OpenAL, SDL, and probably others in addition to DirectSound and oh wait, what's this? Windows has another way to play sounds? Say it ain't so!?!
This is a complete non-issue and I sure hope whoever modded you up gets smacked in the metamod. The solution is as simple as using either OSS or SDL, preferably the latter. You can ship SDL libraries with your application, and elect not to use them if the user has appropriate libraries, if you choose. Ship your application with SDL configuration as well, tell it to use every possible sound output in some rational order, and it will pick one. I suggest starting with pulse, then esd, then alsa, then oss. If you like you can try some others down below there (KDE has "arts" BTW. It's poop. Or maybe there's something new and even worse in KDE4?)
It's even a bigger non-issue if you just make it easy to package, and offer a demo. Make it so that the distributions willing to distribute non-free applications can at least distribute your demo within their licenses, and you don't even have to distribute the game or the patches. The distribution will do it for you.
P.S. SDL is not a codec, although you can play video through it. Nice try. You can use ogg audio or video for free, and bundle the libraries with your application. So this is another dumb argument that we see all too often.
The documentation argument would be good if Microsoft's documentation weren't complete shit. The biggest developers get help from Microsoft, and everyone else just makes it work somehow to some degree because they have to.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... or that glut is an OpenGL emulator.
Given your other examples, you probably meant mesa in place of glut.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
CCP is a Microsoft house. Sure, individuals use other things within, but they're Microsoft from their high performance computing partners right down to the OS their EVE servers run and the Microsoft SQL servers they run.
That's all fine and so is claiming that it they can't justify spending money on the Linux client. At least they gave it a try. However, they also admit that they can only tell if an actual official client is connecting. If you run through something like WINE (or Cider on OSX), they don't bother to tell. And since their official versions for both linux and OSX are complete ass, people often only run their accounts via Windows clients in virtual machines.
So their claim that "the growth for the linux client just wasn't there" is wholly inaccurate as they're not taking into account the number of people who WOULD use the official linux client if it wasn't a piece of shit and was actually playable.
Just to clarify the difference in running clients here and WHY we run Windows clients in VMs instead of the official OS-specific clients, let me give an example of my experience:
My main system is a dual quad-core Mac Pro with 16gb of RAM and a GF 8800.
Running the official OSX client gives me around 15 to 25 fps, depending on where I am (in/out of station).
Running the Windows client on Windows XP SP3 inside of a Parallels guest on OSX gives me 45 to 65fps.
That's right. I get easily double and possibly triple the FPS running the native Windows version nested inside the OS in a guest on OSX with all the surrounding apps active than I do running the official client wrapped in Cedega.
And on top of it, the Windows version running in this manner actually works. I can leave the window/focus without it crashing almost every time. Instead of encountering random crashes every few minutes or hours or days, I have encountered one crash. Ever. Even the "log off" button works.