The RPG 'Pathfinder: Kingmaker' is out with critical bugs in the Linux version

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: recioalexOn the steam forums, 1 hour ago the devs said there will be a patch for this on 8 hours "We're not leaving the office until this is solved. "

That does make them sound good, but let's remember issues like this are there because enough testing simply wasn't done. Frankly, loading it up once on Linux would have shown them the issues.

It's not that easy...
The developer might already have it running with a working savegame, and maybe not having any savegame at all is the problem. Once a savegame is created it might work.
I think it is good that they released it on Linux too, even with these bugs.
It shows they want to have it on Linux. Also that they are working hard to fix it is good too.
The problem is studio's need bigger testing audience that can really restart and play the game from beginning to finish.
I know exactly one developer that really plays his game from beginning to some end livestreaming and swearing. It takes him almost a month to run through it. The linux version is just an export for him.
And he has yet another update of his game (Fortresscraft Evolved, developer DJ Arcas/ProjectorGames).
The downside is that nightlies and beta builds are not exported, because to him, creating the export is easy, but to get two different platform versions correctly uploaded into steam is a big nuisance.
If anybody has a hint on how to automate that correctly for a primarily dotnet windows developer...

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: liamdaweApparently the Linux bug wasn't as easy to solve as they thought. Might be waiting a while.

Which just showcases that probably absolutely nobody tested this game on linux prior to release.
Absurd, really. If you cannot test a build at all before release, don't release it yet...

I had enough bugs hunting me for months that work perfectly fine on my testing platform, but yet in production it seemed to creep up. It was very hard to find, I had to plough through megabytes of straces that I obtained through wonky uplinks.

No amount of unit testing or stress testing would have revealed that bug. And in my case I had complete control over platform and kernels. There were no hidden gotchas.

Now expand that to numerous of different linux platforms, filesystems, kernels, drivers, libraries.

The only thing that can be said is that there was not enough testing done by the beta testers to hit these snags.

And has anyone experienced the game not loading at all. just freezing with the fancy in-game cursor?

Maybe too early to ask - but is it any fun? Skimming Steam reviews one theme is "the DM hates me" though this is "only" balancing. Mostly I'm intrigued by the RPG+city building/strategy aspect but this seems to be hard to do right - e.g. PoE's stronghold management felt (for me) always tacked on without really fitting with the rest of the game.

Quoting: ArdjeThe only thing that can be said is that there was not enough testing done by the beta testers to hit these snags.

Did it have Linux beta test at all? I doubt it.

Quoting: Ardje

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: liamdaweApparently the Linux bug wasn't as easy to solve as they thought. Might be waiting a while.

Which just showcases that probably absolutely nobody tested this game on linux prior to release.
Absurd, really. If you cannot test a build at all before release, don't release it yet...

I had enough bugs hunting me for months that work perfectly fine on my testing platform, but yet in production it seemed to creep up. It was very hard to find, I had to plough through megabytes of straces that I obtained through wonky uplinks.

No amount of unit testing or stress testing would have revealed that bug. And in my case I had complete control over platform and kernels. There were no hidden gotchas.

Now expand that to numerous of different linux platforms, filesystems, kernels, drivers, libraries.

That is nothing but apologism.
If you control both platform and kernel, then the problem can obviously not lie in either.

Which is the exact opposite of their problem, which was that NOBODY (at least I haven't read a single report of anyone who did NOT have the bug) on linux (or at least its most used distro) was able to get save games working.
That the fix is already out after barely 24 hours shows that this was a simple to solve bug, supporting my point even more.

A single person using a recent Ubuntu (and not a VM) testing the game would have been enough. Nothing fell through any "cracks" in the testing environment, except if you consider not having a recent Ubuntu setup a "crack".

I'm a programmer myself, and I think you do us an extreme disservice by trying to sugarcoat incompetence and put it all on the testers. After all, you can't blame the testers if nobody told them to test on linux.
This bug could have been found by any developer who tested his own build appropriately.

My guess? They used a build server to cover the linux build, fixing only bugs that caused a build failure and rarely or never actually ran the linux version.

I'd say it's all good now, but there are still so many bugs left and the game seems to be plagued with absurd difficulty scaling (level 2 parties facing enemies with 40AC and nonsense like that)... it's such a shame, really. Once patched properly, the game must be really good. But I don't think that will happen before the end of October - and by then they'll be lucky if the ratings don't drop below 60%.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 28 September 2018 at 1:09 pm UTC

Quoting: jedinjaAnd has anyone experienced the game not loading at all. just freezing with the fancy in-game cursor?

It happened to me, it seems to be an issue with the static SDL version linked in Unity. I solved it applying the same fix that worked for PoE2, change the launch command to load your system SDL library, mine for example looks like this: SDL_DYNAMIC_API=/usr/lib64/libSDL2.so %command% If it's the same problem that should let you get into the game.

With that change, the fix that Avehicle7887 provided for the sound, thanks again, and the recent update that makes saved games work finally I can get into the game and play.


Last edited by Devlin on 29 September 2018 at 10:20 am UTC

A bit late to the article, but I just wanted to say that this game runs rather poorly on Windows as well. Save corruption, crashes, freezes.

I've been running it under windows without issue so far, however I'm only just starting the kingdom building part. Haven't had time to download and install under Linux because my SSD is filling up, need to schedule a upgrade sometime.

Runs a lot better with the new patches. I will test it in Linux at some point as well.