Book of Demons no longer getting a native Linux port, developer plans on 'supporting' Steam Play (updated)

[quote=Guest]

Quoting: Furyspark

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: subThey're just letting "Proton" handle things for them and see it as the easy way out.

I don't really agree with that remark. If you replace 'Proton' with 'SDL', 'OpenGL', 'PixiJS', or something similar, that'd be awkward. Game developers don't *need* to know certain stuff, as long as they can make their games work well.

There are differences between those things and Proton, of course, but if it's sensible to use Proton, I don't really feel bad about them doing that, as long as, of course, they're supporting it properly.

The whole proper support thing is what I've issue with. My suspicion is that there won't be - it sounds more to me like they haven't really done much, just relying on "Proton" to make it work.
I could be wrong. They might have tested it proper, they might continue to test and make sure it works. They might even check with wine proper. But I doubt it.

That's fair. I suppose it is call for some mistrust on their efforts. Still, if they prove they can make it work alright, I'll appreciate that. If they won't, that's reason for not buying their (future) games. I'm personally not inclined to buy games at launch anyway.

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Guest

QuoteWith each flavor of Linux came different issues.

And WHO excatly told them to support EVERY flavor? Just support Steam OS and/or Ubuntu. And for the most part it will work on any Distro.

In theory, yes, they should only support Ubuntu and SteamOS, but in practice users of different distros complain in the forums, give negative reviews and return their games as much as they have problems. So it doesn't help giving this advice, those users feel entitled to the game as much as any user of the support distributions.

I empathize with the developers on this. With Steam Play being much more uniform across linux distros, they'll have less trouble.

I realise this is necro, but steam provides this comfort to devs on regular linux ports. One of the big downsides of cracked steam versions of games is that they don't have the compatibility, your distro probably doesn't have the deprecated, 2 year old libcryto, etc..., but steam download provides you these libraries and uses those instead of system ones so the game runs without flaws. Targeting Steamos/Ubuntu with official support is which everyone does. It means it also runs on debian by default. Users of other distros usually come up with their hacks, which usually involve symlinking an older library (or compiling it).

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

Quoting: Botonoski

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows. Also, blobs (let it be drivers or games or whatnot) were always the blob devs chore to keep updated, even on windows. When you turn on your windows gaming pc, your first few minutes are usually spent going over anti-virus, gpu, motherboard and cpu manufacturers website downloading their latest blob. Maybe they even upload it to some central windows server, so you don't need to search for it in the browser, but that is the equivalent of providing a .deb or .rpm file instead of .zip or a .run that will most likely corrupt your installation at some point. These library problems largely go away if the developer provides some libraries that they compile for you. (Just like Feral does in their ports) That way you can play old games.

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: Botonoski

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows.

This is true enough but not really a counterexample. Wine is specifically designed to operate as old versions of Windows. Windows could be better at running old Windows programs than Linux is at running old Linux programs, and yet Wine could be better still. And of course it traditionally isn't as much of a problem on Linux because active parts of the open source software ecosystem get maintained and updated along with the OS, so there is very little "old" software. But with games and other closed things, it's a bit different; maybe we need a "Wine" for running old Linux software.

Also of course incompatibilities have gotten significantly worse since Windows 7. But Microsoft used to work hard on making sure old stuff still ran.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: Botonoski

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows.

This is true enough but not really a counterexample. Wine is specifically designed to operate as old versions of Windows. Windows could be better at running old Windows programs than Linux is at running old Linux programs, and yet Wine could be better still. And of course it traditionally isn't as much of a problem on Linux because active parts of the open source software ecosystem get maintained and updated along with the OS, so there is very little "old" software. But with games and other closed things, it's a bit different; maybe we need a "Wine" for running old Linux software.

Also of course incompatibilities have gotten significantly worse since Windows 7. But Microsoft used to work hard on making sure old stuff still ran.

Actually that's not a bad idea. It could be a Compatibility Mode, or a Classic Mode, not unlike what Microsoft or Apple does.

I guess I missed this thread. I got BoD for cheap, on sale plus a coupon because I own Darkest Dungeon, and DD got a coupon if you own BoD.

Yes, it does run on SteamPlay, and I will admit that I have bought a very few other Windows games that run perfectly. This is one very fun game, and has attracted a large community, with very responsive devs.

I, at least, highly recommend it. AFAIC, the three best indie games of 2018 were Book of Demons, Slay the Spire, and Towers of Time, all three of which I very highly and heartily recommend.