Prodeus, the crowdfunded first-person shooter that blends together new and old design styles, will no longer be doing a Native Linux version and instead will ensure it works nicely with Proton.
The team at Bounding Box Software had been quiet for some time on their plans here, seemingly ignoring all questions about Linux for many months so it's good to finally get a proper answer. Still, for those of you still sticking to only Native Linux games, this probably stings a little.
Here's what they said:
We are making sure the game runs on Proton and will be doing a pass at reaching full green status on the Steam Deck once the game is fully out. Unfortunately, we won't be able to make a Native Linux build, there were far too many issues and we couldn't get it to run properly. The Proton version of the game has a much smoother experience and the tests on Steam Deck showed great promise. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.
Update: in their Discord, a developer added this clarification:
A little clarification on the Linux News. Right now the Unity tool chain for making native Linux builds is still experimental. While they say you can do it, it does not work all that well and, as stated above, there are graphical errors and various other issues that make the game unplayable. A Linux build may still be a possibility in the future but at this time it is on hold until Unity's Linux tool chain is in a better state and we have the resources to dedicate to figuring it out properly.
It does in fact already run extremely well with the Proton compatibility layer both on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, take a look at one of my earlier videos of it on Deck below:
Direct Link
Prodeus is set to be released at some point soon it seems, with a release date announcement due to be revealed at the upcoming Realms Deep 2022 that will take place from Friday - Sunday, September 16-18 2022.
Available to buy on Humble Store and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I generally don't mind proton, at all. The problem is that it does kind of screw over non-Steam storefronts a little bit, not that there was much competition. It's true enough that most people, myself included, have the majority of their digital game library in Steam anyway so it's not that big a deal for most in practice.
I imagine it's pretty likely that like a lot of these projects, they treated linux as a stretch goal and didn't even try to support linux until long after bad choices were unknowingly made in terms of being linux-friendly later -- a lot of said decisions are little more then 3rd party library choices and general considerations when building the game/app, or larger ones like frameworks, but not things easily changed later. Dollars to donuts says when they started looking at making it linux compatible it was as simple as "this might actually be hard to get working" vs. "what happens if we try it in Proton (and seeing it works with little to no effort)". It's not always entirely the developers fault, take the very popular .Net stuff that Microsoft openly claims is cross-platform -- which it is, but not in a way that anyone would assume that actually means.
Quoting: iWeaker4YouQuoting: SpykerUnfortunately this is a trend that will go on in the future.
Making native Linux games is hard especially when you have to deal with third party engine which may not handle Linux as well as Windows.
or Linux libraries... it change very frequently and break many applications, it's hard to maintain a software if you can't maintain a stable system, or avoid manipulating the userspace
Simply put No.
Windows has the same issue, and to fix it they bundle specific DirectX versions, DLL versions and other things like visual c++ with each game. That is a lot of bloat to be fair but it causes less problems in the long run. Ever installed a windows game via steam? Maybe you have seen it when it installs those packages when you first start the game.
That said it would work the same way with libs on Linux, but 5 minutes google seems to be to much to ask for most devs these days.
Quoting: iWeaker4YouQuoting: SpykerUnfortunately this is a trend that will go on in the future.
Making native Linux games is hard especially when you have to deal with third party engine which may not handle Linux as well as Windows.
or Linux libraries... it change very frequently and break many applications, it's hard to maintain a software if you can't maintain a stable system, or avoid manipulating the userspace
Do note that many of those are not "Linux" libraries and that the games uses them on Windows as well (SDL, OpenAL and so forth). The difference is that these are supplied by the distribution on Linux and by the game devs on Windows and Windows devs does not know how to properly bundle libs on Linux so they depend instead on that the distro provided libs maintain ABI compatibility.
Unfortunately not many lib deverlopers think about keeping ABI compatibility, one major culprit here is SDL, thankfully there are external devs trying to fix this like https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl12-compat that is a lib that is ABI compatible with v1.2 of SDL but that uses the newer 2.x distro supplied lib for the actual implementation, aka a shim.
And what we need is more such projects (or for lib devs to follow how glibc handles backwards compatibility).
Quoting: F.UltraUnfortunately not many lib deverlopers think about keeping ABI compatibility, one major culprit here is SDL, thankfully there are external devs trying to fix this like https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl12-compat that is a lib that is ABI compatible with v1.2 of SDL but that uses the newer 2.x distro supplied lib for the actual implementation, aka a shim.
The shim you linked to is a project that is part of the official SDL github account and has many commits by icculus and other SDL developers, so it is debatable that only external devs care about compatibility issues.
Nowadays I have upgraded to a humble but fascinating for me GeForce GT 1030, and my experience with Proton being better than a Linux native build can't be more obvious that is a lie.
XCOM 2, Slime Rancher, Inscryption, Everspace, The Last Campfire, etc.
All games that not only runs much more fluid, but that they start immediately on Play, which it's not often the case when using Proton with all the updates and new games.
A shame Prodeus.
Only reason I backed was linux-native ... the alternative (as I was interested) was wait till release, wait till sales and pick up a windows game for cheap...
Yes teh game is fun, yes it runs well in Proton but that wasn't why I handed over my money early..
I won't be buying any of their future games and I will only buy full-price if native AND released, otherwise sales.
bad form... really bad form.
Last edited by Naib on 6 September 2022 at 6:50 pm UTC
randomgamerguy1997 Sep 6, 2022
Quoting: KlaasQuoting: F.UltraUnfortunately not many lib deverlopers think about keeping ABI compatibility, one major culprit here is SDL, thankfully there are external devs trying to fix this like https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl12-compat that is a lib that is ABI compatible with v1.2 of SDL but that uses the newer 2.x distro supplied lib for the actual implementation, aka a shim.
The shim you linked to is a project that is part of the official SDL github account and has many commits by icculus and other SDL developers, so it is debatable that only external devs care about compatibility issues.
Sorry if I worded that incorrectly, it wasn't my intention to mean that only external devs care about compatibility issues. And you are quite correct, sdlcompat was started by iccolus, don't know why I remember it being started by a 3d party... Sorry about that.
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