Aspyr Media state no news about the 'feasibility' of Civilization VI on Linux until after the holidays

A very cute cat. Fantastic blue eyes. Yeah, what were we talking about again?

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Sgt.Romeo9I mean come on it doesn't take two months to determine the feasability of a port, it takes two months to make the port.

You are really underestimating the amount of time it can take to port a game to another platform.

They however are doing a feasibility analysis and not a port.

I also think that what they say is not making any sense. If you spend two months on a feasibility analysis you must have either stalled the whole process or burned through a huge amount of engineering time without any certainty of success for an OS that will probably not make you that much money all the while your expected revenue decreases since potential customers buy the product for windows and the price you are going to be able to get for the product decreases (I saw it for 31 Euros today in a regular store - not one of the gray market shops).

It just does not make sense.

They just have gone back to being a Mac only shop and don't want to say it too bluntly to Linux users.
So I guess that when I will be playing the Windows version of the game on Wine in 1-2 years, they will still be exploring the feasibility of the port...


Last edited by gurv on 23 December 2016 at 1:04 am UTC

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Sgt.Romeo9I mean come on it doesn't take two months to determine the feasability of a port, it takes two months to make the port.

You are really underestimating the amount of time it can take to port a game to another platform.

No, it's not that I underestimate the amount of time it CAN take to port a game from Windows, especially if you porting the game and the complete engine in one go. I'm also well aware of the setbacks one can experience in the porting process whether you having issues with assembly language (not that you should be, because you should be using 64bit), or issues doing graphics debugging getting the OpenGL right coming from Direct3D, or heck even having issues in your code making sure you use unicode as oppose to ansi, I get all that.

That being said this isn't being ported from Windows its already been ported, and this is why my sentence read at the end: it takes two months to make THE port. referring specifically to the port of Civ6 which already exists on MacOS. What a lot of people don't understand is that you don't port a game to Mac or to Linux you port a game away from Windows, and your port especially the code should reflect that.

The thing with porting is you're not remaking the game. You're simply adapting the game to run natively on a different platform. That's why you start with the APIs that are native to that platform, getting those plugged in. Once that is done you are literally going to fix errors and problems until you run out of errors and problems to fix. And with MacOS and Linux using the same APIs pretty much and with your code hopefully being portable and extendable when initially porting, adding Linux should not be that big of an issue. All these issues should have already been solved when doing the MacOS port.

Other than that, that whole sentence was meant to be read in a way of: If someone told you this company they know ported a game in two months as oppose to this company they know where contemplating porting a single game to a platform over a two-month period. Me personally I'd be more inclined to believe the first one. I wouldn't believe that a company would spend that much time thinking about anything, after all time is money. The sentence was meant to sound ridiculous because I believe that sentence is simply to buy time. As voyager2102 and gurv pointed out aswell.

I don't think this is about the feasibility of the Civ6 port I think this is about the feasibility of Linux ports in general because Aspyr realise that soon they will no longer have OpenGL for both MacOS and Linux, they know that they are going to have to use Metal on MacOS and Vulkan on Linux in the future and when it comes to porting, most of your time is spent in the renderer this results in a port for both MacOS and Linux taking much longer in the future. This is what I personally believe Aspyr is contemplating. Oh well I've rambled on enough, here's hoping they discover MoltenVK. MoltenVK should result in a happy ending for both MacOS and Linux users.


Last edited by Sgt.Romeo9 on 23 December 2016 at 6:14 am UTC

I still think you guys are looking at it the wrong way.

Just because a game has been ported to Mac doesn't suddenly mean it's easy to port to Linux.

Who says that checking the feasability of a port doesn't mean a ton of work has already been done? What if they have come up against major issues they are trying to solve? The word feasability can mean a great many things.

We don't have enough information to make wild claims about Aspyr dropping Linux or anything else.

The sooner Mac goes, the better.

Quoting: liamdaweI still think you guys are looking at it the wrong way.

Just because a game has been ported to Mac doesn't suddenly mean it's easy to port to Linux.

Who says that checking the feasability of a port doesn't mean a ton of work has already been done? What if they have come up against major issues they are trying to solve? The word feasability can mean a great many things.

We don't have enough information to make wild claims about Aspyr dropping Linux or anything else.

If you check the "feasibility" of a port after you already poured engineering hours into actually doing most of the work then you should consider changing your approach to how you do your work. Yes, they can hit a major problem... even a major problem that needs to be kept secret... there might also be aliens and mind control involved - the problem is Occam's Razor: there are sadly very simple explanations that fit the facts much better than indulging in wishful thinking and hoping that what they say - even though improbably - is true... because that's what we want it to be.

And btw: It's not about making wild claims - it's about questioning the validity of how the situation is being presented to us as that does not match up with what we know about how such things tend to be done.

They could clear this all up in an instant by just saying "We're stuck at <insert technical problem>." or "We're not spending too much effort on it right now because we didn't even manage to get cross platform multiplayer to run and have to focus on our main market first" or whatever the actual problem might be.

I think you are misunderstanding what "feasibility" actually means. It means to see if something is possible and you won't know that until you go through and do the work. Something may seem entirely possible until you get half way through and come up against roadblocks, I've been in that same situation plenty of times when it comes to coding. If they're stuck on something, they may be trying to work through it and they don't know if it's currently possible to fix the issues, hence their wording.

As for not telling us the exact issues, they may not be able to, even if they want to. They still have the original publisher/developer to deal with. Such details aren't usually thrown out to the public.

I say it again: We don't have enough information to really make any claims. Anyone saying they haven't started porting or are dropping Linux etc etc are speculating.

I hope they don't let us down and I'm not blindly sticking up for them, I'm just trying to help people understand the situation better without wildly claiming things against them.

I made a petition to help show Aspyr that a port is wanted. They may already be planning on releasing a port, but publicly they said they are looking at the "feasibility" of a port, so that is not exactly a confirmation. I want to show them our support without being attacked by anti-Linux trolls, in order to help them make the right decision and port Civ VI to Linux. I think a petition would be more visible to them than the Steam forums, as the petition is connected to their contact email, and it may get their attention better.

Here's the thread I made for this topic in the Native Linux Gaming forum.
Petition: Aspyr, please port Civilization VI to Linux

And here's the direct link to the petition itself:
Sign this petition to show your support for a native Linux port of Civ VI

Update: Holy crap, wish I knew what can of worms I was opening. I want no part of any controversy, I thought I was doing a good thing. Looks like I may have been mistaken. I wish to rectify this. What do you guys think, and do you think I should scrap the petition? I have no desire to upset or insult anyone, I had no idea about prior events like the "blizzard incident" and I wish I had before doing this. So, do you all think I should remove it? I mean I can just let it run it's course also, and let it go at that. What do you all think?


Last edited by Joeyboots80 on 30 December 2016 at 8:40 am UTC