The Arma developers have confirmed that an external team is working on the Linux version, and that it won’t be native.
For me, I don’t really care what a game uses anymore, as long as it is stable and performs well on reasonable hardware. If it does that, then fab!
For some developers it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time and money into porting something, when the income gained from it may not come close to their expenses, and we should be okay with that. As I’ve stated before, many times, we are still a tiny platform.
For a game as heavy as Arma 3, it may not even be possible to do it non-native, and they realise this.
The news comes from their latest blog post:
QuoteInsights into our Steam configuration have fueled some speculation that we'd like to clarify here and now. We are indeed experimenting with 2 ports of Arma 3. An external team has been investigating whether it would be possible to create (non-native) client ports to Linux and MacOS. Being external, this does not affect the core development team while it focuses on the Expansion. We should make it really clear that at this stage there are still very many uncertainties. We do not yet know when we'd release these, what their update cycle would be like, or any other specifics. In fact, it's still possible these ports will never see the light of day. There are several technical and licensing challenges to overcome. But, the chances of such ports have gone up from 0% for Arma 3. We'll be sharing more when we can!
How do you feel about this? No word on who it will be, but we have a good idea.
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Why are everybody complaining about a game that hasn't even been ported yet and it is unknown who will do the port and whether it will be ported at all? Let's wait for the port to be released before we start b*tching. Personally I have no problem with VP or the eON wrapper. The Witcher 2 release was a disaster but they kept working on it and it improved immensely. For what we've seen for the past one year VP have drastically improved their wrapper's performance so we have little reason to believe that trend will not continue. People complain that the Witcher 2 still drops in the 30's and 40's and Bioshock: Infinite performs worse than in Windows because of the wrapper yet nobody mentions the fact that Dying Light was unplayable on release and still has severe performance issues. Borderlands 2 never got official Intel or AMD support. Cities: Skyline had it's fps nerfed upon release and although very playable at the moment is still far from the Windows version.
A game being native means nothing for how well it runs if it isn't properly optimised. Using a wrapper is the only way a plethora of games have a change to make it to Linux (it's the only realistic way GTA 5 might ever find its way to Linux). Bioshock still runs circles around Dying Light in terms of Linux performance. If you have some problem in principle with wrappers - I can accept that. I don't understand it (I dual boot) but I'm aware different people have different narratives. However saying that native games' performance is vastly superior to ones with wrapper is just not fair.
Personally, I'm completely fine with a quick and dirty solution if it does the job. That "tiny market" remark was well in place. 1% of the market doesn't get to make demands - it takes what it can. Don't agree with me - ask the Mac guys and how much influence their 10% of market share got them. How quickly people forgot the time when World of Padman was the most advanced game you could play in Linux without Wine...
A game being native means nothing for how well it runs if it isn't properly optimised. Using a wrapper is the only way a plethora of games have a change to make it to Linux (it's the only realistic way GTA 5 might ever find its way to Linux). Bioshock still runs circles around Dying Light in terms of Linux performance. If you have some problem in principle with wrappers - I can accept that. I don't understand it (I dual boot) but I'm aware different people have different narratives. However saying that native games' performance is vastly superior to ones with wrapper is just not fair.
Personally, I'm completely fine with a quick and dirty solution if it does the job. That "tiny market" remark was well in place. 1% of the market doesn't get to make demands - it takes what it can. Don't agree with me - ask the Mac guys and how much influence their 10% of market share got them. How quickly people forgot the time when World of Padman was the most advanced game you could play in Linux without Wine...
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...any news?
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If they use Vulkan they can probably make it work quite well, however I have little Faith OpenGL in wrapper form will perform well for this game.
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As of 10/01/2015, Arma III worked via Steam on Debian Openbox with Nvidia drivers for GTX 970. However, it froze the computer after about 30 minutes. I have yet to try it again.
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