Arma 3 Is Officially Being Worked On For Linux By An External Team, Won’t Be Native

I too don't care if it's native or not. I just want it to have a decent performance. I don't know if I'm going to buy this one however, my hardware is pretty outdated and I don't think it can handle such as game even natively on Windows.

Well, may be is not the best of the news, but at least is something. Being considered for a port is by it self a very good new, so it's OK for me, because somehow I tend to think that in future games portability will be something built from the ground up, and out of any kind of argument, not something to take into consideration just if it fills up.

As I suspected, VP might indeed be behind this, I don't have much of a problem with this anyway, it's better than nothing after all.

How unfortunate. I would prefer that devs at least try to mess around with Linux instead of outsourcing, doubly so if it's a non-native port we're talking about. At the very least, it builds experience in-house which can then be applied to future games and content. Techland's presentation on porting clearly showed that things would have been easier if the porters (and Linux) had been part of the main development process instead of having to deal with whatever changes the rest of the programmers thrust upon them and playing catch up. I can only imagine how much harder the work of the external studio will be in keeping the game updated and running well. Given the generally resource-heavy nature of ArmA I can't say I have much hope for this experiment of theirs.

As liam points out, we're a tiny fraction of the market but it's still a very chicken and egg sort of situation despite the good things Valve has done for us. Market share is a great motivator in getting developers to port to us but I think that so is experience with the OS in general. The Techland guys seemed to be happy with their overall experience on Linux and I think that they'll push for their bosses/colleagues to integrate Linux into their workflow because of that experience. If more developers were familiarized with the environment things would definitely be easier for us Linux gamers.

But, ah, maybe I'm showing too much wishful thinking on that last point.

So an windows unoptimized game will come to linux inside a wrapper than will make it to loose performance, to run on unoptimized graphic drivers on an OS where it was never optimized to run.
Looks interesting.

I have enough native games in my library and over 30 more native games on my wishlist that I will purchase and play at some point. I don't have the time or the money for games that aren't native.

This makes me excited because maybe DayZ will make it over.

Very honest and clear reply. i wish more devs were as forthcoming about their future plans. Hopefully it pans out and well get to play it on Linux.

Well, I prefer native version, but I will give it a chance. Maybe if we throw some money at them, they will make Arma 4 native :)

I don't think I am very likely to buy this anyway as I am more of as single player gamer and it only has a 3 episode campaign for $66 CAD but either way I am glad that the Linux version is being worked on. Hopefully the experience ends up making Bohemia want to get more into bed with Linux later in the future.

Well, it took some time but at least BI noticed there is something like Linux. :D
A3 is more more optimized than A2 ever was and I managed to play A2 under wine using OSS radeon, so maybe one day I won't need to reboot each time. Bright future unless I get hit by bus tomorrow. :D

:( sorry i'm here with a big nope :(
None of the eOn ports performance well compared to native windows version. TheWitcher2 while playable still has drop downs below 30fps in some scenes. Bioshock Infinite is instable without workaround (eg: removing all frequency changeing) and is hovering at 60fps and below. While this is certainly playable this is not what my rig is capable of. If i check the cpu usage as a diagram none of my cores is fully used and my gtx 970 can't be the bottleneck @ 1080p.

Bioschock infinite after crashing is even able to hardlock my pc. With rt patch i wasn't able to ps -afx to find the process id. That means that they have putten threads on a nice level where they don't belong and risking the stability of the system.

Sorry while i give kudos for VP getting EON at least in a playable status im not in any way happy with their ports. Neither The Witcher 2 nor Bioschock Infinite. Will i spend money for ARMA 3 or DayZ (based on the same engine) if it is ported by EON? Nope.

What is meant with native in this case? That it is not supported by BI or what?

I'm also a bit confused about the meaning of native in this context. You could interpret as either:
1) not by the core team
2) wrapper

I would like to guess 1 instead of complaining already that it's 2.

Perhaps you can double check with them Liam?

Well, I prefer native version, but I will give it a chance. Maybe if we throw some money at them, they will make Arma 4 native :)

My thoughts on this might be the same: Porting an released title can be non-native if the performance isn't that bad because the publishers will get less earnings due to lower prices and interest. If they make a native -probably more expensive- port they might get discouraged if they loose money and won't release other Linux titles.
Future titles should be native to show comparable or maybe even better performance than Win versions. I hope that Vulkan API and the "final" SteamMachine releases will kick-start Linux gaming later this year.

Looks like I am not getting it.

I know who is porting it, and 2 games from them failed, one failed utterly.
So no, I shall pass this one out. ALL OTHER native games for me are working fine. I did not buy the this zomby/parkour emulator yet.

So, no...

So... I am not into Arma series but as far as I know it is a precision based tactical shooter which should rely on decent framerate. I do not see any reason to be fine with a non-native port in that respect. Yeah, playing a single player action RPG like The Witcher 2 or a single player FPS like BioShock Infinite around 60 FPS while Windows versions are waaay higher than that would be okay. But I cannot accept to play a system demanding competitive multiplayer shooter via wrapper. Sorry. Come on, Real Virtuality engine most probably has no OpenGL renderer; how can someone bear D3D > OpenGL wrapper in a multiplayer game?

<wishful thinking>
It would be awesome if in this time and age, developers would develop with cross-platform deployment in mind right from the start. One should think it's ultimately cheaper than porting a platform-dependent game after the fact, either in-house or by outsourcing.
</wishful thinking>

Realistically - as long as the thing runs acceptably I don't care about what makes it run. If I can install and use it just like a native application, I am good. And by that I mean that I really don't want to have to tinker with Wine, ever. I really can't be bothered going through a trial and error procedure every single time I want to get a game to run. But give me something I can toss on my hard drive and have fun with, and I will be a happy panda. :)

Btw., a badly done native port can be just as much a performance killer as any wrapper, so...

So an windows unoptimized game will come to linux inside a wrapper than will make it to loose performance, to run on unoptimized graphic drivers on an OS where it was never optimized to run.
Looks interesting.

Well, maybe VP guys could kick in some offline optimizations, too :)
As long as it runs well, with no input lag, I'm fine with it. The price point may be a little too high for me, though.

What is meant with native in this case? That it is not supported by BI or what?

I'm also a bit confused about the meaning of native in this context. You could interpret as either:
1) not by the core team
2) wrapper

I would like to guess 1 instead of complaining already that it's 2.

Perhaps you can double check with them Liam?

Native, in this context always means the same thing. It is not a native Linux program, a program written for another OS. Using wine, or some sort of wrapper, to run a Windows program is non-native.

That's what I like about Bohemia Interactive: their way of open communication. Whether having the game ported by an external team, whether having the game being non-native is a good or bad thing I will judge later, if and when the game is released and there's actually something to judge. Till then I just appreciate that first of all Bohemia is apparently thinking of bringing their game(s) also to Linux and that they still communicate openly with their community.