Blizzard's Diablo III On Linux?

[Desti]

It doesn't matter if Blizzard makes a Linux native client or not. I don't buy games that require a connection to play single player. Look how well that went for Starcraft2: people banned from playing single player campaign.
Not to mention, beta players report single player is rather boring. But that may be strictly because of the scope of the beta.

That is not right. Blizzard banned people who have used cheats to get online archivements for the campaign. They have never banned anyone who uses cheats in offline modus.

[asdx]

Exactly and that's why I won't buy it. I would rather buy Torchlight 2, just to support Diablo competition.

Torchlight 2 doesn't have a Linux version either, why not support a free software game or engine instead?

[nightmarex]

I would buy DIII for Linux in a heartbeat.

That being said when you factor in $$$ the existence of wine maybe a bad thing as they can figure users will just use that and save the effort of porting. Makes me slightly pissed actually.

[Thaodan]

Also, isn't it said they have internal linux clients or some such? The client still has some references in it:

strings Wow.exe | grep -i Linux
IsLinuxClient
Linux

Also, WoW players as an example, already bought the game and already play (through wine) the game. It works, but performance is something else. plenty of issues often. Now a native client would make many Linux users very happy. But they won't gain many sales. So hardly any incentive for them to release their client without support, or anything really. Sad, but true.






Very excellent point. How does blizzard knows their is demand? Ask your 'store' clerk? Right, that'll get right to blizzards stats. Well, let me click the linux download button in the blizzard store. Oh right. NO go. But if we out our cries on the blizzard forums, with petitions and such! Oh .. blizzard ignored that too. So then really, how do we 'demand' such a feature? We can't can we?
That said, even if the linux group is 1% of all 6 mil wow players. Would that be enough to care? Even if they take into account the amount of mac players maybe? Or take into account that by fact, there's only a small subgroup of technical people who would be interested in one? And finally, if they would look at the amount of wine users, as potential Linux gamers, what about windows gamers who just don't know about wine or know how well it works (or lack thereof).




It uses OpenGL, so that shouldn't require any porting (or hardly any). OS X has it's own sound system. So it would have to be ported to OpenAL/SDL. Granted those technoligies work on all 3 platforms so should have been the default choice anyway Then there's input, but that can't really be that much porting.

Now with in/output sorted, what's left? Their game engine probably needs to read/write files, but I'm guessing that they are using the standard POSIX stuff for that? So that's sorted. Threading? shouldn't be an issue with POSIX either. Wow doesn't use cocoa or other strange libraries I don't think. So easy. itunes and movie capturing can be disabled build time (the windows client doesn't have it).

So how much time would it take them (ignoring the fact that wow once worked on linux during beta and could still be used deeply internally)? Well ttimo ported ET:QW by himself. So ... not that much I don't think.

Why in the world not release a client for the <1%? Cause management doesn't care.

I have to old Linux Client of the Vanilla Beta on my pc (ver 0.9.12) i done the same that you done on the release Windows Client i found that they had the following extra files for Linux:
Linux/WowConnectionNetRTSignal.cpp
Linux/OsFile.cpp
Linux/InputSDL.cpp
Linux/Path.cpp
Linux/Time.cpp
Linux/OsClipboard.cpp
Linux/OsNet.cpp
Linux
LinuxBox
Linux/SCmd.cpp
Linux/SErr.cpp
Linux/SFile.cpp
Linux/SLog.cpp
Linux/SReg.cpp
Linux/SThread.cpp
Linux/SLock.cpp
Linux/SInterlocked.cpp

I also found they used SDL as render: CGxDeviceOpenGL/SDL/CGxOglDeviceSDL.cpp