America's Army Considering SteamOS / Linux Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 8 July 2015 at 01:40 PM EDT. 17 Comments
LINUX GAMING
America's Army: Proving Grounds may receive a port to Linux/SteamOS.

America's Army was natively supported on Linux more than a decade ago when Linux gaming was a much smaller scene, when open-source drivers were more or less non-existent for being able to run 3D games, and basically everyone just used the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The Linux and Mac ports of America's Army were maintained by Ryan Gordon but then he stopped being paid by the US Army for porting the clients of their free game to OS X and Linux, at which point they stopped past the America's Army 2.5 Direct Action update.


America's Army 2.5, the last on Linux


Today I received an unsolicited message from one of the America's Army developers stating that they're currently re-evaluating their Linux support stance, given the era of SteamOS and Steam Machines. No port would be immediate as they appear to be having a tough time getting "America's Army: Proving Grounds" out the door, but they're looking to see if there would be enough interest in seeing this free, tactical, "realistic" first person shooter back on Linux (and SteamOS).

America's Army: Proving Grounds is powered by Unreal Engine 3, which has unofficial Linux ports done by various game developers/studios after the upstream support got into a confusing mess. Proving Grounds has been in open beta for the past two years, which is why Unreal Engine 4 (with full Linux support) wasn't utilized. The most recent AA:PG update was "opt-in test #4" and released in mid-June with a wide-range of updates.

Would you be interested in seeing America's Army on Linux? It was a great game back in the day, but frankly haven't heard much about it in the past several years.

Update: The restoring of the Linux support has now been confirmed!
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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