linux, the very weak system for gaming

[zerothis]

why is it, that you always get errors, warnings and crashes everytime you install or run something on linux?

Wow, I don't know. I had those problem in Windows, but in the 15 or so years I've been running Linux games, I've seen less than a dozen errors, warnings and crashes associated with 'non-beta' games. For 'beta' games, I found the precise same version on windows was about double errors, warnings and crashes than the Linux version. And failure was a lot nicer in Linux. Windows most often gave me the Blue Screen of Death(TM) while Linux, at is worst, still allowed me to recover my desktop without a reboot. Fewer that three times has a game required a reboot of my Linux system. And those were 'beta' games that "don't run" on my system that I hacked to run anyways (S2 texture emulation for example). Perhaps you mean running Windows games on Linux using WINE? Ya, those sucked. I speak in the past tense because I no longer use Linux or WINE. Perhaps the newer versions of Windows are better than the old ones. That would surprise me also, the steady decline in speed, memory use, instability, and a huge variety of other categories from Windows 3.11 to XP is what lead me to abandon it altogether. Sorry, I didn't collect any precise data either



* Blue Screen of Death is a trademarked of Microsoft

[Flamaros]

The circle is already broken. Sure, you won't get big AAA games like Call of Duty 9, or Battlefield 4, but of the most of those types of games are complete disappointments to a large number of consumers. EA, Activision, Blizzard and Ubisoft have all jumped the shark, the only developers care about their customers are the smaller developers, many of which will already happily support linux if the linux community supports them.

There is already a large number of quality games on our operating system. What is missing is the ability to buy them in a consistant manner, at a fair price, a quality guarantee, and advertising. Steam will offer all of these, and whilst you might not see a surge of change when its released, the people who do try it will probably be happy with the service.

The rest of this topic is strange. If you want to dispute the fact you can develop working games for linux which will transcend kernel changes, please tell me, how can I still run ut99? Not all games that old will continue to work on Windows, nevermind linux. If anything, your closed source OS games are likely to stop working in some undetermined future, and when the vendors don't offer backwards compatibility, its only going to be more difficult to get around.

A lot of people have good intentions, but few that have power think only to the money, and the size of the company don't change this fact. Some big companies knows be nice with customers is good for profits and reputation, some others just don't see fairest than their nose and are focused on immediate profits.

The easy answer to run old games is the VM, there is also abandonware. Majority of editor want to save their licence to be able to sell them many years later on new platforms instead of puting them in the public domain. A solution is to do like Id Software who share old engine version to the open source community and go ahead with new licences and engines. With the Id solution Doom 3,... can be supported on new Linux version,...

And as gamer I can tell you that the majority of us don't stay our live on only one game, I certainly buy 3-5 AAA and 20-30 indies games per year.
Don't think AAA games won't run on Linux because if Valve have some good sells with their own games, EA,... will certainly want a part of cake.

[finalzone]

Why a developer will create a package? It can't help to debug.

Surprise for you, some developers are also packagers themselves. How hard is to follow the policies from major distributions aside tweaking?

Packaging isn't a problem for developers, but for the marketing department of editors. Marketing department like customize installers,...

Hence my example of Libre Office, Blender, Maya and Opera. Microsoft Windows have different installers too, among them msi (Microsoft Software Installer).
Even Apple OSX has two format from dmg to pkg. Some applications provides installation in specific format while including common files from system i.e. ur-quam master, a Star Control 2 fork game. Clearly marketing departmnent has solutions already available to them, it is all about politics.

[Flamaros]

Technical weaknesses are only temporary, linux is improved day by day. Private companies have no trouble to improve necessary things. Just look at Google with Android which integrates his changes to the kernel. I do not see why game studios could not do the same if needed.

The real weakness is the lack of interest of publishers to Linux. The studios are service providers and are led by marketing departments who do not know computers. In addition they are so concerned about sales and are afraid of pirates, they prefer to sell on consoles.
I really do not think you should worry about Nividia ... for drivers because if the big publishers want their games run on Linux they will also hand in paw. Do not believe that the drivers for Windows is simple, look at the changelog drivers.

Heterogeneity of Linux also fear publishers for testing and support, but this is largely because the staff is not sufficiently qualified. The consoles are also appreciated for their ecosystem completely mastered, although because of their very specific hardware development strokes are more important.

Let see how Valve will manage issues.

[Flamaros]

Surprise for you, some developers are also packagers themselves. How hard is to follow the policies from major distributions aside tweaking?

It was ironic, we did packages for Nintendo DS and iOS because some specifics tool provided by constructor are needed, for numerical signatures,... And you can see on those 2 platforms custom installers aren't possible. For PC versions of games we let the editor do, because of lot retail support (CD, digital sellers,...). Some distributors demand sources of games (to inject DRM I suspect, but they pretext to be able to make very small bug fix).
In the studio were I worked we let the editor to take care of the packaging and just do part that really impact our development like files compression.

[PyCoder]

hi all,

why is it, that i have like 50% better average gaming perfomance in windows 7 compared to lubuntu, for example, no matter, what i do? and why is it, that you always get errors, warnings and crashes everytime you install or run something on linux? i believe it is at the time, that developers make linux a gaming plattform, that is better than windows. every year i try linux again and it makes me sick that its still trash in gaming.

this is one video, that shows, what i tried to "explain" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-cnaJoGCw

More details?
Hardware?
Drivers?
Nativ games?
Wine?


I'm a Linux Gamer and the performance is excellent!

I nerver had problems/warnings/crashes etc pp with UT, Quake II - III, Doom III, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Savage, Savage 2, Heroes Of Newerth and these games run nativ!

And i never had problems with games like Diablo 3, World Of Warcraft, CS 1.6, CS:S, Battlefield 2, Neverwinger Nights, L4D on wine!


I belive you are just a frustrated windows user and you can't handle oder you don't understand linux!

[jojos10]

A lot of people have good intentions, but few that have power think only to the money, and the size of the company don't change this fact. Some big companies knows be nice with customers is good for profits and reputation, some others just don't see fairest than their nose and are focused on immediate profits.

The easy answer to run old games is the VM, there is also abandonware. Majority of editor want to save their licence to be able to sell them many years later on new platforms instead of puting them in the public domain. A solution is to do like Id Software who share old engine version to the open source community and go ahead with new licences and engines. With the Id solution Doom 3,... can be supported on new Linux version,...

And as gamer I can tell you that the majority of us don't stay our live on only one game, I certainly buy 3-5 AAA and 20-30 indies games per year.
Don't think AAA games won't run on Linux because if Valve have some good sells with their own games, EA,... will certainly want a part of cake.

With EA, Activision, 2K etc we can be happy that we have most of their multiplatform games on Windows, currently I cannot imagine them bother Linux, It's just too big nonsense for me, to see those AAA (AutoaimAutohealAutosave) on Linux elsewhere than in Wine
IMO Valve guys were always different from these, maybe not going only for the most profit (well, they don't need to do games like this, they have profit from Steam itself), just look at the number of updates of their games, like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead 2, by count only the Blizzard games are comparable.

[gamerk2]

Again: From these companies perspectives, why bother with a Native Linux Port? The people who want to game on Linux will, through Wine. So you aren't going to see any significant increase in sales by spending a significant amount of time/money making a native linux port.

[Paradox Uncreated]

Not everyone has the skill to config linux. If you do though, you can get latencies down to 0.3ms, and games will be smooth like asm-coded custom hardware arcades. And ofcourse you can put all kinds of modern gpu features on that. I did that with doom3 and I have never played anything as amazing. And that was even with X, and Wayland is going to be better.

If you are into windows though, which has more SOFTWARE, there is nothing wrong with linux as an OS, then try disabling all the drivers you can. That will reduce latency on windows. And you will have a similar experience. Not as low latency, but close enough to atleast match Amiga 500, which for many is a benchmark of responsiveness. (some crackle at 1.5ms latency). Also windows has some really old drivers for instance, if you run XP which many say has the lowest latency. Try to get updated drivers.

And mac is typically better for professional work, software wise. 1.5ms latency unproblematic, but games doesn`t seem to run that well, yet, or maybe there is some option I haven`t seen yet. (turning off 3d-desktop?)

Peace Be With You.

[dyrvere]

I have no idea what the thread starter is talking about, the few games I've tried on Linux, be it 3D or 2D, have been running flawless on my system. Might be 'cause I run them on a Desktop with Proprietary drivers on Nvidia cards, both through my custom DWM and on KDE 4.xx in Arch Linux (multilibs) well aware of the usefulness in the "ldd <program>" and "readelf -d <program>" commands.

And the performance has always been top notch, fact better than on Windows 7/8 with not much of any glitches, unless I run some unmaintained crud from the 90's or WIP games from a git/svn repo.
Might also be because I'm aware of when a game needs lower/stable clock cycles or affinity to just one CPU core to run good. Only three things I see that really speaks against Gaming on Linux taking off are the following: Sound Architectures, help me good there's a plenty and all of them come with their own PROs and CONs. SLi/Crossfire performance/support. (Nvidia and AMD will certainly need to investigate this) And to be fair, it would be nice if the open source drivers were a real option. But with the Binary Blob it's playable. And the final biggest gripe: POWER-CONSUMPTION! Gaming on a laptop sure isn't recommended by me just yet.

I have now since gotten rid of Windows because all my favorite games run and look fantastic these days, granted I have their dependencies installed (distributed dependency files sometimes are needed)
Few games I play on Linux/Wine from time to time.
Amnesia TDD
Penumbra Package
Overgrowth
Solarus (Zelda)
Darkplaces (Quake)
Skulltag (Doom)
Trine 1 and 2 <3
S.T.A.L.K.E.R SoC/CoP
Metro 2033
And a few other Humble Bundle thingies.
Dosbox is also running a lot better for me on Linux.
So I do wonder where the supposed overhead is coming from for you casuals/trolls complaining. Missing Dependencies, Old Drivers, Buggy Desktop Environments, Buggy packages, BIOS versions or Faulty Hardware? I recommend you work your way through the list in that order.
It's a normal thing to do when fighting with slow games on Windows, Linux distributions aren't better in that regard when stuff is running crappy, but at least you won't have to worry about anti-virus software destroying the games installation...