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Worrying Aspects of Linux Gaming
jones_supa writes: Former Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has written up a blog post about the state of Linux Gaming. It's an interesting read, that's for sure. When talking about recent bigger game ports, his take is that the developers doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL. He points out how it took significant resources from Valve to properly optimize Source engine for Linux, but that other game studios are not walking the last mile. About drivers, he asks "Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf bugs in Intel's slow open source driver. Surely this can't be a sustainable way of developing a working driver?" He ends his post by agreeing with a Slashdot comment where someone is basically saying that SteamOS is done, and that we will never get our hands on the Steam Controller.
Please move to gaming. It's the final blockade to me switching all the family and friends to Linux.
The old people were happy getting away from win 8 and back to a desktop that works, but the younger ones still can't accept Ubuntu.
Linux can and will in my opinion finally crush the other two os's - they are both fixated on the walled garden with "apps" to feed them.
Save us Linux, you are our only hope //the holograph figure turns and sees something, then fiddles with the holograph controls//
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I can't help but imagine you as a preacher in a Baptist congregation.
"I have SEEN the FACT-ORY LINE!"
Dry Land does exist, I've seen it!
Game developers are not Linux advocates. It is not their role to invest their time and money to displace Windows and Mac OS X with Linux.
Game developers create and sell games. Whether it is a Linux, Mac or Windows sale is irrelevant. A gamer who prefers Linux, but keeps Windows around for games, is already a customer. Letting that gamer move from Windows to Linux does not pay for Linux development, you are replacing a Windows sale with a Linux sale, there is no new money.
It is not game developers who are holding back Linux gaming. It is Linux enthusiasts who play Windows games that hold back Linux gaming.
Sure, the ports might not be optimised perfectly, but I don't care. You know why? Because I don't have to reboot to play them. Being able to use the desktop I like and still have games, even if not perfect, is way better than having to use a desktop I dislike or reboot every time I want to fire up a game.
Same reason I deal with wine, except the Linux ports generally "just work" which is also worth losing a bit of optimisation.
I still can't do the consoles. I bought one from every generation except the latest xbone / ps4 iteration. I just can't do it. I find the controllers bad for anything except fighting games and I generally like more complex games. Games that lend themselves to planning over days and often tabbing to a browser for insights.
I hate however having to boot to windows to play games. It drives me nuts. So I have a couple of linux native games I play but I mainly stream them from a windows machine via the steam client. It "just works", so my everyday machine is a dell latitude in a docking station running linux mint and I have an over the top gaming rig running windows in the garage. WOL and autostart steam. then a shutdown script. done.
Chicken meet egg. Egg meet chicken.
Both of you meet your chaperone, Valve, who are actually doing something to solve the problem of nobody bothering to port to Linux because "there are no other games on it", and thus nobody bothering to optimise for games "because nobody is porting to Linux".
More has happened in Linux gaming in the last couple of years thanks, almost exclusively, to the push from Valve than has happened in all the years before.
Something like a third of my 800-game Steam library runs on Linux now. That's bloody amazing. And they are all double-click-and-it-just-runs from the Steam client.
Those publishers too lazy to do this - are you telling me that they don't spot bugs in nVidia drivers and report them on Windows? Are you saying they don't spend a lot of their time working around bugs in drivers? Because for damn sure I've seen a lot of big releases have to patch like mad on day one when they hit all the ATI and nVidia and Intel bugs, and get bad performance reviews on certain chipsets etc.
Valve are DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Whatever you perceive the current state to be, that's something to be applauded. And, to my eye, they've done a damn good job and not once have bitched about Linux beyond "look at this odd performance bug we found where a manufacturer never bothered to turn the optimisation on for Linux machines".
Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and the Unity engine both have Linux versions already. So does Valve's (obviously). EA's Frostbite engine has an OpenGL version, so that's part of the way. There's no market. Not a significant one, anyhow. Most people that are in the market to buy games either have a console, handheld, or a Windows/OSX PC. The vast majority. Then you've got the people like me, who dual boot all of their systems (so we're already customers, anyhow).
Then, over in a tiny little corner, you've got the Linux users with a gamer-grade PC, no OS but Linux, no console, and pockets lined with cash earmarked for games if only publishers'd release them on their OS of choice! Except it's "user", not "users". Yeah, that one guy standing in the corner. That's the market: people that want to buy games, want more than the (mostly Indie) games that have been released for Linux already, but won't (or can't) switch to a platform that has a larger selection.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Companies barely optimize for Windows at this point (have you seen the minimum requirement for assassin's creed unity?).
Heck, some games have slowdowns on -consoles-.
And you expected them to optimize the Linux version?
Baby steps here cowboy.
It is kind of weird reading all of the negative comments about the steam Linux experience because mine has been largely positive. After spending about a decade screwing around with wine to get various games to play often with limited functionality or weird graphics bugs, playing natively through steam has been amazing. I don't know what the Civ V experience was like on windows I guess but it looks great even on my 2 year old laptop. Beyond the indie stuff, I find it absolutely amazing that any AAA titles are getting ported to linux *at all*. Could it be better? Probably. Seems to me that is going to take time as the Linux gaming user base needs to expand to the point where it makes financial sense to go that extra mile. I'm willing to be patient and buy the ports as they come in, because that's likely the only way it is going to get better.