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That's not an error, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is now out for SteamOS/Linux and I am downloading it as I type this. This is truly a knock-out year for Linux gamers and it's only May!
Warning: Radeon graphics cards are not supported, Intel integrated graphics chipsets are also not supported. This commenter points out why. Interesting to see AMD fix their drivers so quickly, I hope more bigger games come out forcing all graphics vendors to improve.
One thing I mentioned before is the coming of "SteamOS" rather than Linux, it is becoming more frequent quickly and I am actually okay with that. Linux has been a scary word for developers for too long, but no more!
There have been hints at this happening for months and I am extremely pleased to see it turn out well for us.
Be warned it's a hefty 15.8GB download, so prepare for a wee bit of a wait. Grab a beer a relax while watching that download bar, or just play something else...
About
The player is Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster slayer, a witcher. Entangled in the political turmoil that engulfed Temeria, Geralt helped quell the rebellion of the Order of the Flaming Rose. Soon after, he saved King Foltest’s life when the monarch was attacked by a witcher-like assassin. He continues to protect the king, serving as his bodyguard as Foltest strives to bring peace to his kingdom. The Order’s last bastions have yielded to the royal army, yet one more task remains - the Baroness La Valette announced her secession from the realm, and her fortress must be taken. A month after the attempted assassination, Foltest’s armies stand at the gates of La Valette Castle, preparing for a final assault. Still at Foltest’s side, Geralt is among them, unable to begin his personal quest to discover the mysterious assassin’s origin and identity…
Thanks to the new, ultra-modern REDengine, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings features both beautiful graphics and sophisticated in-game mechanics, drawing players into the most lively and believable world ever created in a video game.
Defining new standards for realistic, non-linear game narration, The Witcher 2 spins a mature, thought-provoking tale to produce one of the most complex and unique RPGs ever released on consoles. In addition to its epic story, the game features a complex combat system that uniquely combines dynamic action and tactical depth.
The great thing is that it's also 80% off to celebrate! Get it on Steam now, seriously go get it right now.
Check out the trailer if you haven't seen it before:
Direct Link
For those who own a boxed copy of it, with GOG.com supporting Linux this year I suggest you go here and reedem your backup copy on GOG. While you won't get a Linux copy yet I imagine in future you would.
You can also thank the developers directly on their official forums post on it.
UPDATE
It's no wonder people are experiencing poor performance issues, it looks like it uses a wrapper called "eON" from Virtual Programming who did the Mac port. This porting technology is new to Linux, so perfect performance isn't going to happen right away.
Personally I am displeased by this as the performance on the lowest setting for me isn't great and my rig is pretty damned powerful. I am actually glad I didn't pay full price as it's unplayable. I don't mean to be too harsh about it (I don't like to sugar coat things either), but when there's so many people claiming the same thing then something is up, but this "eON" tech is new to Linux, so there's always room for improvement.
If you scan around the files, you will note these:
eONprecompiledShaders32.dat
witcher2.vpfs
VPFS_registry.vpfsdb
Pretty obvious it uses their eON tech. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't run so terribly, I've said before that I am glad our purchases count for Linux rather than Windows, but for newer games it just doesn't feel right somehow.
What do you think to this information?
UPDATE 2
A developer from the porting house who worked on this has done a few posts in the Steam forum topic on it. You can see one such post here, there's also a funny one here where the developer is sadly making rather uninformed statments:
jaycee1980Remember the binary Nvidia and AMD Catalyst drivers only tend to support newer hardware.
I wish developers would research a little more before saying such things, as it doesn't do their reputation any-good.
Both teams need to do some damage control I think and get down to fixing issues ASAP. Two things to check is if Vertical Sync and UberSamping are both off as both are known to cause problems, but sadly for me I still cannot play on the lowest possible settings.
Not the best of launches.
Quoting: liamdaweSeems it's not actually a native app guys. The porting looks like it was done by http://www.vpltd.com/services/ who use "eON" which is a wrapper since they don't need source code access.
Looks like it wraps windows files into a Linux native binary somehow. A bit different to wine, probably somewhere in-between wine and Valve's "togl" library.
As I know it, eON is nothing more than a code-whise abstraction layer between Direct3D and OpenGL mapping the functions. It's not a wrapper but native, and very similar to the "togl" library, just as it seems more feature complete.
Every engine usually includes the abstraction layer for different technologies (OpenGL / Direct3D) itself, and it seems as if this one aims to replace that layer with a library having a full platform independend implementation of Direct3D function calls which makes porting (games) easier. So this is basically very similar to togl, and it is native. Since usually, that abstraction layer is in the engine anyway. The difference for engine developers is that they don't have to care too much for how a function of Direct3D is best implemented in OGL, since that's done by that layer.
Quoting: wleoncioI'm running it right now on Ubuntu 13.04.
I'd say my specs are good, but not top-of-the-line: Intel i3 with 6 GB RAM, Geforce GTX 650 (2 GB), Nvidia 331.20 driver.
On 1080x720 resolution, medium graphics run smooth like silk; ultra runs a little bit slower, but still playable unless you're a framerate nut (I'm not, but I think "medium" has a better performance/eye-candy balance). Gamepad (wired Xbox 360) works fine as well.
I use a i7 with a smaller graphics card (nvidia gtx 580) and can only run this game in low settings (properly), since medium is performance whise pretty bad. I don't care much, the game is awesome... i can live with having not-too-good graphics. If I do remember right, I did turn down graphics on Windows to low as well.
Quoting: GuestAt least the tutorial works fine here (Arch Linux 64 bit, nvidia GTX 660 2GB, Xfce). It slightly stutters from time to time but nothing bad.
Unfortunately their keymap handling is broken, like in Metro Last Light, and the game thinks my keymap is qwerty when it is in fact bépo, making it hard to know which keys I’m supposed to press.
Edit: I got stuck when the tutorial asked me to press 'Z' to locate the herbs, I pressed the key corresponding to Z on a qwerty or azerty keymap, but nothing happened.
You can actually set the keyboard mapping you want in the options ....
QuoteI wish to note that while I am one of the developers from VP who has worked on this game, I am posting to this forum offering my support entirely on my own time, and of my own volition.
I've been asked to respond about the post concerning "WINE uses Windows drivers and we use Linux drivers". This was a misunderstanding by a non-technical member of VP. He confused WINE with OS X Boot Camp, and has been corrected now
We are aware there's going to be potential rough spots with our port as this is our first big Linux release, but we are looking to improve the technology wherever possible. I've also been authorised to explain a bit further about our eON system, and why this has been used to port Witcher 2 to Linux. So here goes.
eON is a middle ground idea between what WINE does, and a native port. It is tuned and customised to each game we port - we do not simply slap a Windows binary into it and ship the game. For example, we often customise the D3D9->GL code path in various ways to cater for the title. Shaders are often rewritten to native GLSL, etc.
There are various reasons why a 100% native port is not feasible or possible - middleware, financial and technical constraints etc. This does not mean that a non-native port is always going to be inferior. The alternative would often be no port at all.
Personally I am excited that VP are looking to help bring more games to Linux - not just because I get paid to do it!!
This is not working for me. Just crashes and gives crash report... =(
Crash reason: SIGSEGV
Crash address: 0x2a0
I hope they fix the issues pretty fast...
Quoting: mintguyPurchased it yesterday evening and downloaded this till today.
This is not working for me. Just crashes and gives crash report... =(
Crash reason: SIGSEGV
Crash address: 0x2a0
I hope they fix the issues pretty fast...
I forgot to mention that I am using an Optimus setup and tried to play with bumblebee command "primusrun".
Quoting: mintguyI forgot to mention that I am using an Optimus setup and tried to play with bumblebee command "primusrun".Did you try it with optirun?
I sometimes have different results with the two commands.
Quoting: vaRPlease, liam, stop the hired guys from posting. Same thing on the forums. This won't work with decent pc specs and is just awful. CDProjekt should be ashamed.
Censoring replies from anybody, unless they behave poorly, would be a really bad thing.
Quoting: AnonymousQuoting: mintguyI forgot to mention that I am using an Optimus setup and tried to play with bumblebee command "primusrun".Did you try it with optirun?
I sometimes have different results with the two commands.
Yep. Tried optirun and primusrun. But no luck for me. =(
The funny thing is that it starts with the integrated Intel chipset. Sadly without most of the textures and unplayable choppy framerate but it is a start...
I hope they fix it for Optimus setups.
Quoting: SilviuQuoting: vaRPlease, liam, stop the hired guys from posting. Same thing on the forums. This won't work with decent pc specs and is just awful. CDProjekt should be ashamed.Censoring replies from anybody, unless they behave poorly, would be a really bad thing.
Wait, so vaR is suggesting that CD Projekt RED is hiring folk to post positive comments about their Linux experience?
Well, vaR, I hate to pop your bubble, but that's not happening here. If you think it is... well, good luck with that tinfoil hat.
As for me, I've been contributing to this site for over a year now and my experience on The Witcher 2 has been superb. It has two issues - it crashes on the tutorial for me, and sometimes it will announce a crash when I quit out of the game (which is irrelevant really). But the quality of this game is amazing. I'm really enjoying it so far and as others have said, this is still early days for CD Projekt RED and Linux. I expect that they're building Linux support for The Witcher 3 at an even more integrated level now and hopefully GoG support will be just round the corner.
Happy times!
Christian
Copying what I said in the Steam forum topic on it since a VP developer has been posting in there:
I never get the "I'm not a PR guy" reasoning. If you do a major release then have a PR guy ready, that shouldn't be a secret key to success. That should be a bit of common sense.
If you don't do some form of public testing then crap like this will happen, I tell this to every developer who doesn't do a public beta and then sees posts like this.
I've seen the "no houses around to test for Linux", as pointed out the LinuxGameCast (Venn) do a fair bit of testing and could have helped, there's also http://www.gamingonlinux.com which could have helped test...but nope neither crew where approached to even do minor testing. Again no outside testing was done AT ALL.
Having THE top end newest generation Intel i5 and an Nvidia 560ti and I see crap performance on LOWEST settings is bloody unacceptable to me. That instantly tells me along with the multitude of other people seeing the same issues that the testing before-hand was utterly flawed.
There are also reports on the Steam forums that some of the people claiming to have great performance are level 0 Steam accounts (meaning a brand new account), it's starting to sound fishy to me: Found one here, level 0 and hidden profile claiming it's on par with Windows.
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