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Blizzard Reportedly Planning A Linux Game For 2013
It looks like the recent success of Linux gaming has caught Blizzard's eye. According to "a reliable source at the company" 2013 will be the year that "at least one of their very popular titles will see a release for Ubuntu Linux." From the article: "It's been a poorly-kept secret that Blizzard has a native Linux client of World of Warcraft. As recently as 2011, the World of Warcraft Linux client was still being maintained internally. The client has been around for years and done by their own developers as a form of testing for the popular MMORPG currently offered on Windows and Mac OS X. As for why they haven't released the client, it's come down to "targeting a specific version of the platform" with Linux being "unstandardized" due to the many different distributions. There's still some fundamental problems with gaming on Linux. With World of Warcraft working generally fine under Wine as well, the company is further unmotivated to officially support a Linux build of the game."
FTA: " As for why they haven't released the client, it's come down to "targeting a specific version of the platform" with Linux being "unstandardized" due to the many different distributions." Just do what valve does. I mean I'm not going to be playing WoW, but millions do.
Blizzard used to by favorite gaming company. Now I loathe them. The recent huge disappointment of Diablo 3, the no LAN play in SC2, and with how I heard they seriously dumbed down WoW, Blizzard won't be getting anymore of my money.
It's only "unstandardised" if you want to link against every last library.
If you treat it like OSX or Windows and ship all necessary dylibs/DLLs which aren't provided by default then it works fine.
Somehow companies like Mathworks have been managing this happily for well over a decade without making up weird claims about standardisation. Oh and hey, I've done it too. It's easy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I used to be like you, complaining that it was 'no big deal' to release a linux game. What could possibly be so hard about it? OpenGL, write once, run anywhere! Then ... I met GLX. And the documentation on opengl.org. And Gallium / LLVM. and Mesa. and ... well. i just try not to think about it too much. The doctors say I should be OK... eventually...
What do you do if your video card does not work well with the game you are trying to play for the distribution you are using? If your distribution does not have the time to back port the driver or the framework it uses, you are forced to upgrade your entire distribution if you want to play a game. This is a major inconvenience. Either dedicated supported hardware like what Valve is doing or some stable rolling update distribution is needed. Is there a good stable rolling distribution?
Browser game?! - really can't imagine that from Blizzard... I mean seriously, what tech would you use to make a high-end 3D MMO for the web? - HTML5 is still in it's infancy, and not fit for use for a high-end game project (due to having to distribute it as Javascript source, amongst other things). Flash/Stage3D is in a somewhat better state, but you still pay a high price in performance/functionality over native code.
:(
So I really don't think it'll be web-based. Sadly, given what they did to Diablo3 with the real-money auction house, Free2Play/Pay2Win seems highly likely, though
I haven't played since Lich King days but I used to be in quite a hardcore raiding guild. Half a dozen of us ran WoW on Linux as it actually gave a better framerate than Windows did. We cleared all content up to LK 25HC before I quit playing so my wife wouldn't leave me for ignoring her.
inquiring minds want to know
Guys, you're missing the point being made here. It's not that the application can't run under different flavors -- it's about supporting them. Every distribution has its own quirks, its own packaging manager, its own set of libraries that are included (and some that aren't). It's a support nightmare. Rather than writing installation instructions once, you have to write it a dozen times. Versions change constantly. Everybody here has experienced the joys of googling for someone's hack script to get something working... a patch here, a tweak there... yes, it's possible.
But from a support perspective, it's difficulty level = nightmare trying to help these people. And they'll expect your help. You just gave them a major application and said it works with Linux... so you better know every flavor, every variation, every configuration possible. And that, right there, is why Blizzard hasn't jumped on the Linux bandwagon -- too many support variables.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It will most likely work fine with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc, as well as Mint and Debian. Linux dependency management is very mature, and there will likely be minimal problems getting it working on other distributions.
Yay! 2013 is the 13th "Year of Linux!"
the year of Linux may be upon us. Gaming is the single reason I still run Win-dohs!
... but this year was the year of the Android/iOS gaming revolution!
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
The Linux community can support itself. All they need is to release a tar.gz binary package and the distributions will make their own packages and instructions. Blizzard can release it and say "Support yourselves, we're only releasing binaries. Have fun" and the community will do the rest.
I'll play valve. I'll buy DRM.
I even played and purchased all blizzard games in the past.
After they won a prior injunction against the makers of glider publishing their source code, I will never again buy any blizzard or activision product, or that of anyone who purchases and owns them.
This is the price of using the courts to prevent speech that does not cause physical harm.
Sorry blizzard -- nothing you do will ever save your name with me. I won't even play your games stolen or paid. Your company isn't just dead to me, it's got blood taint.
Probobly something along the lines of QuakeLive, which uses a browser plugin to launch a real engine and just integrates very well and seemlessly with the browsers.
... and now it seems people are crapping on Ubuntu ...
It's the whole "free as in beer" thing, the geeks can't get over the idea that Canonical wants to make money off of their beloved Socialist operating system. The horror.
But guess what? A lot of people don't give a shit about "free as in beer", they are perfectly happy with Ubuntu, and are perfectly smart enough to turn the search spy off if they care to (which most do not give a shit about).
Seriously, I'd like to see Ubuntu become THE Linux gaming platform just to piss all you self righteous elitists off.
Gaming for Linux (or, more specifically, binary blobs in Linux) have absolutely no future, since every distro has its own version of every library.
You know, you look at this the exact wrong way.
Linux can allow the game distributor to provide the exact versions of the libraries they want. All you need to do is plop them all into one directory, say $INSTALL_DIR/lib/, and then have the wrapper run script prepend that directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
And if that wasn't enough, the games company can even provide a bootable Linux DVD or USB stick which boots into linux and starts the game. Can't have much more control over the OS software than that!
Blizzard ...
Meh.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
With Canonical becoming ever less popular with the community, the gaming companies should form a consortium and roll their own linux distro. An innovative company, like Steam perhaps, could even take the lead and just do it themselves. Doing so could be a real headstart and leave the other gaming companies clamoring to catch up.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is close-source software likely to have problems with the LGPL if they link statically instead of dynamically? That's a question, not an accusation -- I don't know which libraries game makers are likely to use, and whether they are LGPL or something else.
They complain about Android all the time... We're past the point that Businesses and Consumers can't debate anymore.. The "almost-Linux" is the only way out of the coming lockdown.
> It's the whole "free as in beer" thing, the geeks can't get over the idea that Canonical wants to make money
There a many ways to make money.
Not all of them are like the Roman fire brigade.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Gaming for Linux (or, more specifically, binary blobs in Linux) have absolutely no future, since every distro has its own version of every library.
You know, you look at this the exact wrong way.
Linux can allow the game distributor to provide the exact versions of the libraries they want. All you need to do is plop them all into one directory, say $INSTALL_DIR/lib/, and then have the wrapper run script prepend that directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
And if that wasn't enough, the games company can even provide a bootable Linux DVD or USB stick which boots into linux and starts the game. Can't have much more control over the OS software than that!
So much THIS.
Releasing for a particular distro is lazy development and only serves to fragment the Linux market, not support it.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
...provide a bootable Linux DVD or USB stick which boots into linux and starts the game.
I remember doing that back in the days of DOS. Either it was a custom boot floppy with specific changes in config.sys and autoexec.bat, or it was just one custom boot floppy that contained the game as well.
What was once old is now new again.
Life is not for the lazy.
Linux the third major OS = HALF LIFE 3!
Presumably some libraries will call into the kernel. Is it the case that a particular version of (say) libc will work against any kernel? (I'm genuinely asking -- I have vague memories of hitting an issue like this trying to run a statically linked binary on an ancient Linux.)
That may work to some extent, and that is what is often done in Windows, but there is still the matter of the libraries being compatible with the hardware architecture, frameworks, and drivers. If the later is not compatible, and the user has to figure out how to get the right components or even update their distribution, that is a problem.
As far as a game company rolling their own distribution to play the game, I am not sure that is something a game company would want to do, unless it is for dedicated hardware (i.e. like what Valve is planning), but it is an interesting idea. Its akin to treating your computer as a traditional gaming console where each game contains the entire OS it needs to run the game. I could see that working. It may even have advantages of greater stability for users who use Windows or Mac, and has the advantage of working on any hardware platform.
well with windows vista,7, most of 8 are about the same and need little changed to make a app work on all of them.
XP mainly is stuck with a older DX and older driver model.
linux has the libs mess and distributions update much faster then windows does.
The server windows os are based on the desktop ones under the hood.
Ok so a lot of people seem to be critical of the "Ubuntu is not the summation of linux!" but come on seriously, a real game development company isn't going to maintain their own libraries to run the game, that's what the distribution is for. So they picked one distro to support and went with it. If the solution for every single commercial developer is to "just release your own libraries" then I'm sorry to say we might as well just relegate this whole Linux thing to a neat geeks OS. Because that's the same kind of crap they're facing with Microsoft, except they probably make a lot more money on M$ derivatives. This touches on something that Linux so desperately needs, standardization, not that we should all run the same standard libraries or that everything has to be correct, but things need to be planned out more effectively to support a huge swath of companies that develop products that are hugely dependent on the OS.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
bootable works till the video / sound / network drivers get out of date / are missing what in your system.
MS will hit anittrust rules by trying the app store only view.
The most recent version of glibc supports kernels up to seven years old. The most recent kernel should be able to run any statically-linked ELF binary (and can, if configured for it, still run 32-bit a.out binaries).
So it's really a non-issue for anything that's being actively maintained, as long as they're willing to include a full copy of the libraries they use (and anything those libraries link to), or just statically link the entire thing. It's a bit of extra overhead, but considering just how many resources a modern game needs to load and use beyond the basic system libraries, it should be pretty much unnoticeable.
For something that isn't actively maintained, you might run into odd compatibility problems, but if it's 100% statically-linked (or includes the entire dependency tree for every library it links to), it should generally still be able to run fine unless something fundamentally changes about the system (i.e., X11 -> Weyland could cause issues).
Well, before I start, I'm not (or rather for a long while no longer) a WoW fan, but I did briefly try it again recently. So, you know, I'm only having a superficial impression. I don't think I'll bother much with it, but...
I think that as far as "dumbing down" goes, it really sounds worse than it really is, when you do the Vulcan thing and think about it logically.
1. Most of the stuff you'll only notice if you've played it before and have any particular attachment (even if just for nostalgia sake) about the old system. Truth is, I most other recent games are just about as "dumbed down".
You can play TOR for example as a DPS Trooper with little more than Grav Round, Full Auto and High Impact Bolt as the only three buttons you'll ever have to press. Heck, you could play it with Grav Round only, if you don't mind losing a little DPS. Trust me, that's actually less skill needed than WoW even now. (And obviously the Bounty Hunter is the same deal, just with different names on the buttons you press.)
2. For that matter, it's not really dumber than WoW used to be to start with. Anyone remember the pre-Burning Crusade raids that some classes only needed one button to get through? Ironically, for all its reputation of a noob class, the Hunter was technically the most "complex" to play since it needed a whole THREE buttons. Yeah, you also needed to set the hunter mark and send the pet, so, yeah, that's a whole two whole extra buttons :p
(Not to mention you had more typing or talking to do than the raid leader, what with having to tell everyone that yes, the pet was on passive, every time anything went wrong, no matter who started it or what actually happened. You could be still running back from the cemetery when the rest of the group did something stupid, and they'd still insist that it's somehow the pet not being on passive that caused it. I mean, it wasn't even in the dungeon, but it must have caused it. Somehow.;))
Yeah, it didn't really start as a sort of modern day chess or go or other complex thinking game. Nor had the geekiest and smartest population. Really, it was from the start a game that 6 year olds can master.
So let's get on to what really changed:
3. So now for a bunch of quests you don't have to run back to the quest giver to get the next step of it. Well, it takes some getting used to it, but at the end of the day, it's not like running back and forth was actually the fun part.
4. You don't have to keep buying skill upgrades every 2 levels; they now increase in effect with your level. Not only it's like how a bunch of other games were working already (e.g., COH), but basically if you've been on the game long enough to have a valid whine about being used to the old system... guess what? Paying a few coppers to buy the skills on a new alt wasn't really a balance factor any more anyway.
Plus, again, running back to wherever your trainer was, and then back, was hardly something that added any fun.
5. The talent trees. Well, the issue with those is two-fold:
A) Most people were going for cookie-cutter builds from some site anyway. Not just in COH, but generally. Whether it's actually talent trees (e.g., TOR, RIFT, etc) or putting points in some skill (e.g., STO), most people just want something that works, not to solve a puzzle. If there had been some way to tell the computer "just go by this build off that site" automatically, most people would have just done it. And in effect that's what the new system does.
B) You haven't actually lost much. In addition to the choice every 15 levels now, many of which are actually new extras, a bunch of the old talents everyone took for a given spec are now automatic passive skills, that you get automatically when reaching a certain level. So, you know, you haven't actually lost them or anything, and they were not that much of a choice in the first place anyway. Now you just get them automatically instead of having to click through the tree.
C) Basically it doesn't let you mak
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And if that wasn't enough, the games company can even provide a bootable Linux DVD or USB stick which boots into linux and starts the game. Can't have much more control over the OS software than that!
It is a GPL violation to create such bundle, assuming that they use binary drivers (and open source ones aren't really capable at this point).
Coding etudes
The 3d driver situation on Linux needs to be addressed. Something along the lines of having up to date drivers in the basic repositories would be ideal, but even just having a download option on the vendor site would suffice.
One problem: what to do when a security vulnerability is found in one of the bundled libs? The distributor of the game might not be so fast on updating the whole game bundle. And letting the users/package maintainers manually replace the libraries is bound to be unreliable and error-prone.
A video game company using a bootable solution would likely keep the OS distribution up to date, so it is always using the latest stable video / sound / network drivers.
They won't hit anything, they are no longer being monitored by the FTC.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
"targeting a specific version of the platform?"
.deb for ubuntu, and it will filter into derivatives like mint.
.tar.gz with the compiled binaries and make file with install instructions, a README and INSTALL files.
what?
Release a
Most GNU/Linux libraries are pretty standard, and version compatibility is pretty wide.
For everything else, release a
From this, every other distro will be able to make their own packages.
Redhat and Fedora are more or less the same thing really.
Seems Firefox has had some problems: http://blog.gerv.net/2011/01/why_firefox_on_linux_is_not_accelerated/. The salient quote being: "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now."
Also doing some more basic compositing and doing a full out 3D game are things that are a bit different in terms of complexity and problems.
I'm going to say Blizzard probably knows what they are talking about. They have quite a few graphics developers, quite a few QA people, quite a few sysadmins, and so on and oh, they were the ones who wrote the client. They probably have a reason for what they are doing.
Gaming for Linux (or, more specifically, binary blobs in Linux) have absolutely no future, since every distro has its own version of every library.
Static compilation solves this easily.
At this point, the nVidia binary driver is the only driver out there that provides what you get on Windows, which is to say all the latest features, good speed, and stability. Anything else makes compromises of varying amounts. Now for a simple game, this might be ok. Some games stick with 2D, use SDL, and call it a day. They'll work with the SVGA X server if it comes to that, perhaps just with some tearing/slow graphics. However for a modern 3D game that makes use of some fancy features, that doesn't cut it.
Well that situation is a problem. For one it is a problem simply because not everyone has an nVidia card but then of course there's the whole religious crusade some people have against closed source, particularly with regards to drivers.
With pro applications, you can just say "Quadro or GTFO" and require the binary driver. People will deal with it. With this? All it would do is get them all kinds of hate mail.
Also, funny enough, when you talk OpenGL, nVidia is the only one who really does it well in Windows too. Not long ago at work we had a system that was running HFSS. That does not require OpenGL, but will use it if available to accelerate graphics. The system had an ass slow graphics card (it was a server repurposed to be a workstation basically) and so a new video card was wanted. We picked up a cheap AMD 7000 series card... and ran in to a strange problem: In remote desktop, HFSS worked fine. On the system itself, no dice.
After going around and around a sneaking suspicion creeped up on me. I pulled the AMD card and stuck in an nVidia card. Everything started working.
nVidia produces top flight OpenGL drivers, which on Windows are as fast as their Driect3D drivers (which are really fast). Everyone else... much more hit or miss.
Dear Bliz devs:
I've bought every expansion as soon as I can.
I run WoW in wine.
If we get an official port, me and all my friends will buy some of those white elephant knick knacks you like to sell.
I see no big issue out of it. It is much like Oracle only used to certify their database on RedHat.
Blizzard wants to be able to say if you have XYZ configuration, then it will work. If it doesn't work, then here's our 1-800 number, our email support system etc etc... for which you are entitled to contact since you bought the game and your system meets the requirements.
I run SC2 under win7 without any problems, however, if I installed it and it crashed upon startup I could call them up and have a Blizzard tech provide me with assistance. If I called them up and said, "I'm running this under the win32 emulator that's part of OS/2 Warp, they'd politely tell them that it is an unsupported and untested configuration and might give me some sort of "best effort" support, which wouldn't equate to much and then eventually refer me to some forums...
Imagine the uproar that would take place if they released something for Ubuntu version X, and all the people running either version Y or some other distribution would flame Blizzard... "You're not supporting *my* distribution..."
For a garage startup [...] you can do something with SDL libs which are fucking fantastic across all platforms.
But how would a garage startup derive revenue from a 2D game? I thought that for at least the past several years, it has been the expectation among end users that all newly developed 2D games must be free to play because they're competing with the free-to-play SWF games on Newgrounds and Kongregate.
drivers need to be in the kernel tree or packaged by your distribution
One problem here is that a 2-year-old LTS distribution isn't necessarily going to have drivers for new hardware released since the distribution went gold. How do you recommend to work around this?
Ultima because it hated DOS's memory manager =)
What a wonderful game too.
When the next Xbox rolls around, you can be sure M$ (yep I go there)is gonna squeeze game makers hard.
By "game makers", are you referring to the big professional studios developing for Xbox Live Arcade or the semi-pro studios developing for Xbox Live Indie Games?
Software in boxes is dead.
How is this true when the best available ISP in some parts of the United States limits users to 10 GB per month, and some PlayStation 3 games are already three times that?
[Microsoft Corporation is] no longer being monitored by the FTC.
The U.S. is not the only major industrialized country, and its FTC is not the only competition regulator in major industrialised markets.
How would the freetards recommend financing the development of a video game with professional-quality production values?
Steam works great in Gentoo Linux, I would expect Gentoo to be the absolute worst to get it running on, but it works!
A video game company using a bootable solution would likely keep the OS distribution up to date, so it is always using the latest stable video / sound / network drivers.
they maybe thought about that.. but then came to realization that it wasn't really linux support then - it was standalone support.
seriously the last game worth booting for was pirates! for pc(xt).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Blizzard: So we're thinking about supporting linux, just one distro but you can try and get it running on whatever you want.
Linux Users: How dare you.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
in what branding? package management?
they all use the same libraries, and the one last thing they all have diffrent is the init/start up/control scripts, and that doesn't effect games. Guess what, that is getting standardized too now (systemd).
As long as you have the right dependencies on the package, its all gravy. packages are just renamed compressed archives, and they can easily be repackaged in 20 lines of bash, something that runs on all linux machines.
I think GPL'ers get real mad and raise pichforks when things like TIVO do this without contributing. But yeah its a bad attitude to have. But you can work around it or just take the legal risk and pay em off.
Does that model work for genres other than the violent first-person shooter?
And there's already a bunch of ways to do something like this! I stumbled onto CDE a while ago when I thought "WTF, Ubuntu has the Common Desktop Environment in its repos?!".
I think that has allot to do with better wine development and support from the linux side then the game itself, I remember running 30fps on a geforce 6800 and athalon FX55 yet now-adays with medium graphics settings i'm sure I could pull off allot better.
It takes time for these young and fresh technologies to grow and mature and sometimes they go through growingpains, think activeX all over again. They'll eventually fix it or switch to something more reliable once its exploited terribly.
Though personally I know myself and many others who have very bad security practices on their linux desktops. I mean logging in as root all the time etc instead of creating a user account ( I stopped this a few years ago). Most gamers are pretty lazy this way and I kind of shudder to think of how some servers are configured...
Ahahaha.... you believe that? I remember back when Win2k was new and XP coming out... a whole heap of my 1999/2000 purchased Windows 98 games would not run on anything newer. They were never updated.
Once it is shipped, most game publishers (looking at you, EA) don't give a shit about support for new platforms.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm not 100% sure what financing model your talking about (shareware?) but I don't think its a genre specific issue. Shareware would work better for puzzlers, platformers, top down shooters, and other casual games that just pop up and say please enter $5 here for the next 5 levels. Zuma, Bubbleshooter and its clones are shareware which I personally had to re-aquire for someone of their website who lost it because these games do have a dedicated following amoungst certain demographics. I think it would actually work the best for any game with a real story plot that could suck you in, like "Beneath a Steel Sky" or Myst types. Think, The Longest Journey, or one of those. I bought them anyway, but I would have bought them sooner if I had played a demo and been sucked in for 1 hr.
sure, so... why isn't anyone doing it?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
"systemd can go die in a fire along with it's retarded friend d-bus."
And don't forget the tentacled friend pulse-audio.
http://www.ryzom.com/en/ did this. And disregard my reply at shareware I didnt explode your comment (damn abbevation didnt capture the 2cnd line). I rather liked Ryzom for the short time I played it. It didn't get my full support though because I didn't have the money for it and was just checking it out for curiousities sake, but it was very close to WoW as far as MMO's go. There's probably a few other examples out there.
I don't think its a distribution model thats really had serious acedemic thought in the circles of EA and Vivendi and Activision and such. I think it would gain more traction if it was a FOSS client for more then just Linux though, linux users tend to be more frugal people in general. Hence the Obvious trolling of "Freetards".
There are a few that contribute allot in the form of code or other assets though back to the companies they "freeload from".
In some cases the ad-revenue for some sites alone that support linux are worth it.
actually worked for Blizzard for a while... lol
i ask because the projects you mentioned don't seem to have heavy OpenGL functionality like a game might need. .. .then there is sound.... anyways...
a lot of games in particular are bleeding edge users of graphics effects
and +5 interesting to boot.
well i guess i am done here, so many people with so much experience and knowledge.
If the economy isn't good cash-strapped Govs may decide to supplement their budgets with hefty fines.
"They all use slightly different versions of libraries, each of which introduces slightly different bugs and issues into the environment."
this is far far better than microsoft's use of repackaging the C++ re distributable (why is that not part of the OS), with slightly diffrent versions on every app that includes it with the installer.
In practice, I've NEVER ran into a problem, installing debian packages in ubuntu, or ubuntu packages in mint, etc.... entirely unported in binary. Even running built for ubuntu binaries on arch linux, with official packages. Given arch is rolling release, its going to have some extreme glibc version mismatches.
"You still need a deployment build environment and a test platform for every target - which would include every sub-distro you want to support, as they all have different package sets right down to libc, every "branch" (testing, stable, etc) and so on. "
no they don't, and no you don't. glibc has a very very very wide range of compatibility version number wise. More so than the MS C/C++ re distributable libs.
There are many proprietary pieces of software which work great cross distro, flash, skype, nvidia drivers, etc...
don't tell me they are all tested on every distro, on every build. They are not.
I keep on hearing this argument, and I am going to call "bullshit".
It will most likely work fine with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc, as well as Mint and Debian. Linux dependency management is very mature, and there will likely be minimal problems getting it working on other distributions.
Steam on Linux beta, designed for Ubuntu, requires quite a lot of magic to get installed on Debian. Definitely within capabilities of a Linux enthusiast, but too much hassle even for a veteran who polished his system a couple of years ago and now just expects everything to work fine.
but people tend to want to ignore that when they pay for a game or pay a subscription. So this is more than likely the area where Blizzard is concerned.
As in, they are going to charge and most people don't care for "best of luck" when they are buying something. I doubt Linux users will be any different.
If you have seen their forums it is amazing the number of problems people have on supported platforms
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Gentoo is often the most up-to-date Linux. There are some benefits to their model. Most of them went away when we all started using the same architecture, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Biggest non MMO PC game I have seen yet is Max Payne 3 at 30 GB, RAGE is second at 21 GB. Most games are 7-8 GB, roughly the size of a dual layer DVD that Xbox games are made on.
I was referring to Metal Gear Solid 4 for PlayStation 3, which is about as big as the Max Payne 3 you mentioned.
With USB 3 and cheap flash, we could see scenarios where you go into "Future GameStore" with your 128-512 GB USB 3.0 stick you bought for $20 and have your game loaded on it at 90MB/sec.
A customer brought in her MP3 player and the store wouldn't sell her music for it. So if stores aren't willing to sell music to be loaded onto a carried-in storage device, what makes you think they're willing to do that for PC games?
Look, let's put it like this. For you, who not doubt know the system, and studied the spell rotation, and may have solved the puzzle of how to shave 0.5 seconds off a cooldown to get a better attack chain... yeah, I can imagine you'd get some satisfaction out of that.
But... let me give you an example of what a day in the life of a real newbie is like. And I swear I'm not making it up.
This is quite literally what happened the second day of trying to get mom addicted to WoW.
So I log in and invite her to a group, and she's a ghost. Well, that kinda thing happens. She runs straight past me to her corpse, resses, and keeps running straight into the next group of troggs, and starts swinging her axe at them. Plants, runs back to her corpse and does it again. And plants again.
Well, I figure she's getting into character as a dwarf warrior with a big axe. After all, the previous day she had exterminated every single rabbit and squirrel within range. In retrospect, I think even that was just a case of not yet grasping what she was supposed to kill and what not.
Well, anyway, I had rolled a priest for just that kind of occasion, so I switch characters and keep healing her on the next try. It wasn't easy. She kept fighting with no regards to any self-preservation, like someone trying in all earnest to earn her place in Valhalla or maybe Sto'vo'kor (Klingon Valhalla;)). She done me proud, she did.
Then I ask her where was she going. Says she doesn't know. I ask her to follow me to go repair and replace her equipment, she asks where am I. I'm kinda surprised at that point, because her character was some 10 yards from mine and looking at me. I start jumping up and down and ask whether she sees me now. No, she doesn't.
Well, to cut a long story short, at some point she had apparently yanked the mouse while using the right mouse button. I swear to the FSM, she was literally seeing just the top of her head and maybe 2 ft in front and behind, and maybe 3 ft to each side. She was running into those troggs just by sheer virtue of not seeing them.
You'd think that including a line about being able to turn the camera would do the trick, but... it actually took another 15 levels or so, and drowning about a dozen times, before it turned out she doesn't understand wth is that "camera" I'm talking about. For her the only camera she knew about, was that thing on her desk she had photographed squirrels in the park with. She kept looking in her in-game bags for anything that might be a camera.
THAT is the kind of problems the newbies have, not min-maxing stuff in a talent tree. When you're that green, you don't even understand wth they're asking you to do, much less feel any accomplishment for clicking randomly and then turning out it's the wrong choice. And, as I was trying to illustrate, you have much more pressing problems than that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slackware is still the distro to install the defaults are pretty good and its easy to unzip a few tar.gz's or use the slackpackaging system of which theres now an aptitude like repository for. And you can still get away with frankensteining your distro with like 3 different versions of software its pretty resiliant to hacking and pretty hackable.
Just release it for Debian based distros by default because almost all Linux users use a Debian based distro anyways, and have the source code readily available for the rest to modify and get running as they wish.
On the contrary. I already mentioned that there are choices that matter, and choices that don't really matter. And that WoW did increase complexity in the areas that actually are part of the game, like raid tactics (used to be you didn't need pretty much any), while reducing the complexity of, yes, that kind of metagaming.
I don't see how that counts as a dichotomy.
I'd be all for more choices in the actual game, but I can't say I see what's the mourning about when it comes to choices that were at best illusionary (like whether you really want to buy your next tier of spells) and at worst just a metagaming exercise that nobody but the alpha nerds were into (like the talents.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
because you know, if they didnt, they might actually need Mesa.
Steam works great in Gentoo Linux, I would expect Gentoo to be the absolute worst to get it running on, but it works!
Can you use "emerge steam", or do you have to install the deb package and resolve conflicts and dependencies manually?
Urban Terror uses ioquake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioquake3#ioquake3 which might be allot easier to manage on linux then whatever blizzard uses. The quake engines were always superbly hacker friendly.
Since the release of Warcraft II, I was a die hard Blizzard fan. All the way through Warcraft III, Diablo, Diablo II, up to Starcraft II. I run these games on GNU/Linux with Wine, and it's great. However, with the release of Diablo III and forcing online-only game play, I'm done with Blizzard. I think it's great that they may be considering a title for the GNU/Linux platform, which is gaining ground for a great gaming platform, however Blizzard's current focus has been shifted away from providing a quality game to making as much money as possible. And it's very unfortunate as its past products have been top notch.
what can i say. some of us are too old to play games -- arthritis, bad eye sight...
Doesn't Unity (the game engine, not the desktop environment) have a web plugin? the War For The Underworld Kickstarter project had a demo of their game on their website which looked graphically on a par with World of Warcraft (which isn't really that hard; it is 9 years old now, and there's only so much tarting-up you can do with expansion packs).
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