Dying Light & Dead Island Definitive Edition might soon work on Mesa

There's some activity on the Mesa-dev mailing list with patches that will enable both Dying Light & Dead Island Definitive Edition (and it seems Dead Island Riptide Definite Edition too) to work on Mesa.

You can see the initial Mesa-dev mailing list entry here. From the entry:

QuoteWith this change, both games work on Mesa and render correctly. Note that the games require OpenGL 4.4+, and so it is necessary to launch them with MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE and MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE set to OpenGL 4.4 (GLSL 440) or higher.

Contrary to popular belief, this problem actually had nothing whatsoever to do with compatibility profiles. Forcing Mesa to create a higher version compatibility profile with MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5COMPAT or allow_higher_compat_version results in graphical glitches, so don't use that.

There's been a bit of back and forth between the author and a few other Mesa developers, but another developer has confirmed it does indeed fix Dying Light.

Going by the replies, it seems the games do something with SDL that causes the issues, from this reply:

QuoteIn any case, it's clear that the game functions best with a core profile and there's no obvious intent to use a compat profile, just some silliness with the SDL context creation where they didn't set a couple of variables to tell SDL to get them a specific version. The game's API calls are clearly those of a modern OpenGL application.

It hasn't yet been accepted into Mesa-git, but hopefully it will be so Mesa users can enjoy these games. If you're interested, I do suggest reading the replies to the original post. There's also this patch which is also needed, which sets the 'allow_glsl_builtin_redeclaration' option for the games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.