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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.'"
why they even released an official client if it performed better under WINE.
Sub par graphics and an inability to compete with its wine counterpart would contribute to its own death.
I tried out the Linux client, and was unable to make it work despite having the game working under wine. I really wish that CCP had simply contributed the necessary bug fixes directly to wineHQ (or crossover), rather than a proprietary spinoff.
BBH
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.
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.
I attempted to use it. I found that it did not work very well. The UI was vary packed and difficult to use. I had to remove the chat window just to see the ships controls. All in all, it was so poorly done that I didn't use more than a few hours of the 14 day trial account.
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 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.
Exactly. Ever since the first install of the linux client on my machine, I've preferred to just run the Premium client in wine.
Valve can see how many people are running Steam in linux by the type of virtual sound card wine uses. What a bummer that they apparently measure how many linux users are online by the client they downloaded.
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.
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.
- 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.
... as if tens of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
;)
Fixed. This is Eve Online we're talking about after all, and not World of Warcraft...
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?
You still fail. They aren't getting rid of the Mac client.
They expected the number of users of the Linux and Mac clients to grow. The mac user base has grown, but the Linux user base appears to have stagnated.
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.
Nobody is losing Eve via Linux/Mac at all. All they're using is a horribly supported, pitiful binary version of Cedega that ran 1000x worse than via Wine. It couldn't even support DirectX9, it was that bad. Wine on the other hand, is working on supporting DX10 soon.
I wish they'd take all that supposed effort in the "official linux client" and sent it towards Wine, really.
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.
Eh, not really. I don't know but I'm skeptical as to what Wine contributors could do to persuade them.
CCP is a company that does some truly groundbreaking programming, but mostly on the server-side and not so much on the client side. They do things a little slower client-side.
I suggested such on the forums over there, but CCP is in the business to make money...I'm not sure if they see the "long enough down the road" concept of making money via supporting Linux as a business case or not.
They, uh, did.
That was why it worked better in Wine. Cedega wasn't anywhere near good enough.
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.
You have to read it in context with the first sentence. The sentence says that CCP is discontinuing support for the Linux client because it isn't doing as well as the Mac client. The sentence doesn't say they will be discontinuing the Mac client.
Wow...
Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client.
Why is this so hard to understand.. Both released same time. One showing continual growth, the other doesn't and gets the axe. It doesn't say anywhere they held the performance of a platform with a larger install base as the baseline to judge Linux against (what an absurd concept). They just wanted to see _continual growth_. If they didn't want Linux client growth, they probably wouldn't being running these ads on Slashdot every other day. You can't say they didn't try.
Also, since there's really not a lot of difference between BSD and Mac, hardcore linux users can easily partition and install BSD instead and run a modified version of the Mac program. What's one more distro to install?
ROFLMAO
Windows kind of has a POSIX API, and Linux kind of has a POSIX API, so why don't we just run a slightly modified version of the Windows client on Linux?
Linux is open source, so why don't modify the source code to run on it?
Leverage the POSIX layer in Windows to install the latest service pack on Linux, thereby fooling the Windows client into thinking it's really running on Windows?
Install Windows into Linux, forcing them to assimilate?
Z/OS is sort of similar to AIX, which is a UNIX, and Linux is "unix-like", so why don't we run Z/OS under Xen, then we can use mainframe-like power to evolve a native EVE client from random bit soup?
I still think yours wins.
No, I didn't use it, even though I was probably one of very few who had even heard of it (publishers, take note -- if you don't market something, how do you expect the customers to come flocking to you?)
The reason I didn't was that it wasn't a native client. It was just a Windows executable running under Wine (in this case transgaming's tweaked winex, which is still wine).
If you don't invest the time to make a port, I do not see why I should invest the time to play it.
In soviet Russia, there's one more C
Man, I wish I had some Mod Pts to negate that Troll. Well said. I don't think we're very popular round here, sir. ;)
Bravo and well said!
But curiously it appears the post is modded as "Troll" instead of "Insightfull", methinks some Slashdotter's clicked the wrong moderation option...