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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...
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.
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.
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 preer to keep my real identity and my slashdot life separate.
Sorry.
But for extra fun, firefox, libreoffice and openoffice seem to be able to manage too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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!
Realize I was dumb for buying an ATI graphics card?
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 $INSTALL_DIR/lib/, and then have the wrapper run script prepend that directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
And if that wasn't enough, the games company can even provide a bootable Linux DVD or USB stick which boots into linux and starts the game. Can't have much more control over the OS software than that!
So much THIS.
Releasing for a particular distro is lazy development and only serves to fragment the Linux market, not support it.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Ok so a lot of people seem to be critical of the "Ubuntu is not the summation of linux!" but come on seriously, a real game development company isn't going to maintain their own libraries to run the game, that's what the distribution is for. So they picked one distro to support and went with it. If the solution for every single commercial developer is to "just release your own libraries" then I'm sorry to say we might as well just relegate this whole Linux thing to a neat geeks OS. Because that's the same kind of crap they're facing with Microsoft, except they probably make a lot more money on M$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Vendor site? Nope, wrong, drivers need to be in the kernel tree or packaged by your distribution, vendores should only provide source and/or documentation.
This "vendor needs to provide binary drivers" model was popularized by window, and actually adds more burden on the hardware developer, and results in less OSs having proper support.
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..."
Steam works great in Gentoo Linux, I would expect Gentoo to be the absolute worst to get it running on, but it works!
"systemd can go die in a fire along with it's retarded friend d-bus."
And don't forget the tentacled friend pulse-audio.
"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".