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.
Yes, but by standardizing API's and kernel goo it would make it easy for so-called proprietary vendors like CCP to support Linux. According to som in the Linux community it is fact better to provide random API's that change all the time--that way proprietary vendors get scared off.
The fact that Linux is so hard for vendors like CCP is seen by some in the Linux community as a feature, not a bug. Hopefully, those very same people in the community are cheering CCP pulling out of native Linux support, as it clearly shows their plan is working as intended.
Ohh my God, another "Linux architecture is hard, therefore vendors have problems" apologist.
Listen, CCP was never hiding behind a fact that so called "Linux client" is just a Windows client with Wine wrapper. And frankly, with Wine or Crossover Games you would have more success than Transgaming (which from mine point of view is completely shite). Transgaming based client has hard time with ATI video cards, with exsotic sound card settings, etc. Of course you can tweak it, but what's the point then? They have nice forum where people already exchanging with ideas how to get EVE running on Linux.
There are one space sim (rather funny one), which has real *native* client. NEVER had problems with that, even on open source ati drivers on Radeons. So propably it is not that hard to do that...natively.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
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.
They use D3D because OpenGL is not particularly good to program with. OpenGL 3.0 is not the much-heralded "fix" to the crap specification that it was supposed to be.
I work better in OpenGL than D3D, but that's my own familiarity with the API rather than the quality. OpenGL has huge gaping problems. A few basic issues...
-everything's a fucking GLuint, so you have to wrap and cast everything to make it halfway tolerable (at which point it looks so close to D3D that, for the important platforms, you might as well have already done it in D3D)
-GLSL sucks, with weird and arbitrary rules
-GLSL shaders can't be compiled (there are ways to do this but they are best described as "skiffy" and less charitably described as "broken")
-no way to query for GLSL functionality (for example, the noise() function always returns 0 on most cards because almost nobody actually implements it)
-no coherent SDK-type documentation; crap organization of what documentation exists
-VBO trashes pointer setup. WHY?
-developing GLSL on nVidia cards is crap, because it's translated into Cg and doesn't correctly report errors on bad code
-developing anything generally is crap, because there's no analogue to the D3D caps structures that tell you what work on a given machine.
-using binding to do everything means you can't make what should be really, really simple assertions about the state of your render pipeline between two draw calls (this is just plain fucking unacceptable!)
Microsoft may be rah-evil or whatever your nearest GNU zealot wants you to believe, but D3D is a vastly superior API. It's pretty hard to fault developers if they choose to use the better API for targeting their primary platform, if they decide that being cross-platform isn't of interest to them.
You want more developers, have an API that doesn't suck. It is perhaps a very sad statement that WINE's implementation of D3D is a better gaming API than anything native that's currently available on Linux (yes, it uses OpenGL under the hood, that's fine--OpenGL is a decent binding to the hardware but absolute shit for actually developing stuff).