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Nidhogg 2 [Steam, Official Site], the sequel to the indie hit of 2014 may not come to Linux and the developer has listed reasons why. Hopefully people can help get this going.
It's not the usual type of thing we hear, in fact the developer actually gave out some interesting details.
Here's what they said:
As for the actual Linux build, basically, things are so far not very good with Linux runtime in software used (GameMaker: Studio),
- Gamepads may or may not work because there's a limited (embedded) database for them instead of having an editable config file like SDL does.
- Mice can be detected as gamepads (I think because some distros register a generic device + mouse# device for them?).
- Depending on undetermined factors (library combinations?), audio may cease to play.
- Depending on desktop environment, different interesting things happen with graphics - ranging from garbage data outside the game area (i.e. on empty "letterbox" areas) to actual texture corruption or literally having half of game screen missing for no good reason.
- Depending on more factors (GPU drivers?), other interesting things happen with graphics - e.g. delays can be required when changing between window and fullscreen or display buffer ceases to change size or becomes garbled.
- Unless running via a .sh (LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH DISPLAY=:0 stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 ./MainBinary), native extensions (.so) cease to load correctly.
- Compiled Steam builds are broken by default and will not hook up with Steam API unless moving files around and adding a steam_appid.txt (which is not supposed to be shipped with release builds).
- Related or not related to above two, sometimes Steam and/or Steam P2P native extensions cease to load for some users.
- When working with Steam Workshop, some users have GMS games unable to access downloaded items (permission issues?).
Overall it's a pretty tough decision to start making Linux builds if you know that they won't work for many people and you won't be able to do anything about that yourself (aside of waiting).
Hopefully things improve on this front by the time when current tasks on the game are finished.
That's quite a list of issues, although the one about running it via an .sh file isn't what I would say is an actual issue. Lots of Linux games use this method, including most Linux games available from GOG. I'm pretty sure all Feral games use that method too.
The other reasons are all likely quite valid and depend on GameMaker.
A shame, but I really hope they manage to pull it off. It certainly looks like a game I would enjoy, especially as it looks completely nuts.
Perhaps one of our lovely porters like Icculus, Ethan Lee, Knockout Games or someone else could arrange a port.
Thanks for letting me know, Luke!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: kfLD_LIBRARY_PATH tells the runtime linker to prepend the given locations to the paths where shared objects (.so files) are looked up from by the runtime linker. It is widely used but it shouldn't be when one has control of the binary. There is RPATH for achieving the same and it could get added to the ELF executable during linking. As this header could contain relative locations like $ORIGIN/lib it should be easy to ship a binary with its own set of libraries included.Quote- Unless running via a .sh (LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH DISPLAY=:0 stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 ./MainBinary), native extensions (.so) cease to load correctly.Isn't this standard when you ship games that require specific versions of libraries? I've even seen many steam games do this even with the steam runtime avaliable.
Quoting: F.UltraIf only writers of shared libraries would think more about backwards compatibility...
It would suffice if they followed semantic versioning with regard to their libraries’ APIs – one would know which shared versions are compatible. Some libs would have a few hundred new major versions every year – but at least it’d be obvious that every game needs its own separate copy of it in its own version.
At least until we dive into compiled C++ libraries where the version of the compiler that compiled the library and a game binary matters, as C++ has no stable ABI (so library compiled with newer gcc might, and probably will, stop working with old executable).
Quoting: silmethQuoting: F.UltraIf only writers of shared libraries would think more about backwards compatibility...
It would suffice if they followed semantic versioning with regard to their libraries’ APIs – one would know which shared versions are compatible. Some libs would have a few hundred new major versions every year – but at least it’d be obvious that every game needs its own separate copy of it in its own version.
At least until we dive into compiled C++ libraries where the version of the compiler that compiled the library and a game binary matters, as C++ has no stable ABI (so library compiled with newer gcc might, and probably will, stop working with old executable).
Following the semantic versioning would most definitely help yes, but I see many libraries that make completely unneeded changes to both API and ABI.
Once in a while I think that whenever a library writer creates a version that is no longer ABI compatible then they should be required to write a shim library for the previous version that uses the new version, that way security fixes and so on would still be applied to the users of the old version and distributions could install all the hundreds of shims when you install a library (since all the old versions are just small shims they should be very small in size so the overhead should not be that great) or perhaps as a libxxx-shim package just like we have -dev/-devel packages on most distributions.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPHonestly, it should just be like on Windows - look in the executable folder first, done.
You can literally already do that in Linux. It's just not enabled by default (because that would be a huge security nightmare.
What you can do is set the RPATH field in the ELF binary, i.e. the game dev needs to do that on their game binary before release.
You can do that while compiling, or afterwards with patchelf. If you do
$ patchelf --set-rpath '$ORIGIN/lib' ./foobaryou modify the binary foobar to automatically search for the lib folder in its own path for libraries.
EDIT: And I was ninja'd again, great :P
Last edited by DrMcCoy on 31 August 2017 at 9:16 pm UTC
Quoting: TheSHEEEPYeah, the worst part about linux is that app/lib version mess.
Honestly, it should just be like on Windows - look in the executable folder first, done. Would solve all problems, at least for closed source distributions.
Having . in [LD_LIBRARY_]PATH is a terrible idea. Easiest way to spread viruses.
That aside, the real problem is in fact that they try to force a windowsish distribution on an operating system that has a proper package manager. The libraries on linux actually have pretty decent abi versioning, which means multiple libraries can co-exist and each application would choose the highest compatible version. Dependency-hell may be an issue for packagers, but the end results are damn nice for users.
Imagine for a moment if Linux games were also packaged like the rest of the system... No more 100 duplicates of .so files like on windows!
Last edited by ShabbyX on 1 September 2017 at 5:29 pm UTC
Quoting: TheSHEEEPThat aside, the real problem is in fact that they try to force a windowsish distribution on an operating system that has a proper package manager. The libraries on linux actually have pretty decent abi versioning, which means multiple libraries can co-exist and each application would choose to higjest compatible version. Dependency-hell may be an issue for packagers, but the end results are damn nice for users.
Imagine for a moment if Linux games were also packaged like the rest of the system... No more 100 duplicates of .so files like on windows!
First of all, those duplicates were an issue many years ago when disk space was a problem. It simply isn't any more. This is a non-issue. Games nowadays can take any amount of space from 100MB to 60+GB. A few MB more in dependencies simply will not matter.
Also, yes that package managing stuff is nice. But only in theory, where it actually works.
In practice, games (and other software) are not constantly developed and updated with latest versions of libraries. And they shouldn't! Don't change a running system.
So at some point, version X of a dependency WILL rotate out. And then users have to find custom solutions, which is annoying as hell and will cause more people to switch to Windows for the product than it will cause them to fiddle around with their system. Fiddling around is nice for us proggers, but not for average users. This has happened SO MANY TIMES with open source libs that actually are maintained by someone - and so many times more by closed source software.
So either package maintainers have to carry ancient versions of their libs around (possibly even fixing critical bugs in them still if they appear) - and with that outlook, who still wants to maintain packages "properly"? Nobody.
Or developers are forced for a life long update-my-dependencies-game, including possible API changes and whatnot. Hooray.
No, I'm sorry. This package managing stuff may have noble goals, but in practice it is a terrible crux for developers that are actually paid for their work. And it throws more than just a few stones in the way of spreading linux.
lucifertdark Sep 1, 2017
Quoting: GuestMy kid and many others have tens of native Linux games and they work without problems. Arguments of this developer are false, win,mac and linux are different platforms and requires different programming knowledge. This developer is just just lazy and stupid, sure the Linux gaming market is bigger than the mac gaming market. The developer should play Rocket League with Debian testing Xfce and not write shit.He did not say it's impossible to create proper games for linux. He says they have trouble bringing their specific game because it uses a specific engine. That engine claims to support linux, but has those mentioned bugs.
Maybe icculus could help GameMaker ^^
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