EVERSPACE 2 out now, devs focus on Proton for Linux - Steam Deck optimizations planned

"After they spoke with Epic Games, they said it's clear Unreal Engine 4 won't get fixed up with the focus now on Unreal Engine 5 and ROCKFISH don't have the time to fix up the game engine."

fair enough

as you can read from the article, the game wouldn't be released for Linux at all were it not for Proton

But it isn't releasing for Linux... I know, I know, but I couldn't resist.

Atleast for me, it's not not buy game, but not support them on kickstarter. Is good idea buying game years before release from developer who proved he is not trustworthy?

Don't EVER PAY FOR ANYTHING ON KICKSTARTER AND ASSUME YOU'RE BUYING ANYTHING. Kickstarter is very, very clear in their notice that you are "Not preordering a product, but funding the possibility of that project being completed". It's on a big banner at the end of every project's campaign page. You are for all intensive purposes a "light" investor in the product and your return is a completed product rather than a stake in the company..... if it makes it to fruition. You are taking a risk on the project basically, not buying something.

Totaly irelevant. From my point of view it's just buying without legal protection from state, so everythink is based solaly on my trust in developer. Legaly kickstarter can't call it buying, but by my internal definition it's still buying.

This is something they clearly could have seen months, if not years ago, if they were really invested in their Linux version. I totally get that this is not their fault, but they could've seen it and warned people months ago, instead of just saying "oops" after the release.

Glad I didn't kickstart it, won't buy from these hypocrites.

I'm a bit disappointed that there won't be a native Linux version, but all-in-all I'm okay with the situation. Rockfish has proved to me, with Everspace 1, that they actually care about their Linux audience, which is all that really matters to me.

If I get a product that's guaranteed to work as well as it can on my favourite system, in the end, that's what I care about. Using Proton - and making sure the game works as well as it can with it - is a viable option to me and at least it means that the game won't stop working in a couple of years because of ABI changes.

Also, with how Epic and Unreal tend to do things, I wouldn't be surprised if Rockfish had been told that the issues in Unreal would be fixed before the launch date, so while better communication to us backers would have been nice, I can completely see how they might have been thrown under the bus by Epic.

TL;DR: A bit disappointing, but I still get the game with official support on Linux, so I'm good.

Also, with how Epic and Unreal tend to do things, I wouldn't be surprised if Rockfish had been told that the issues in Unreal would be fixed before the launch date, so while better communication to us backers would have been nice, I can completely see how they might have been thrown under the bus by Epic.

If it was something like that then yeah, someone there really needs to learn proper communication. If they said before that they were running into big unsolvable vendor issues during development and might have to drop their plans, that'd be hugely disappointing but at least open and reasonable. They led on with it until the last minute then just kinda said 'nah'. That's the part that has me more upset.

I'm OK with that. Epic's fault obviously that they don't care to make their engine use Vulkan properly, but it's also a lesson to any developers that assuming things will just easily work if they didn't investigate it from the beginning is quite wrong.

As a backer, I already have a game from GOG, so whether it's native or runs through Wine+vkd3d-proton is of little concern in practice, especially when native UE4 is so buggy in comparison. I'd take a well performing game over the fact that it's native but broken UE4.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 April 2023 at 2:58 am UTC

Porting it to UE5, would that help?

Probably, but it's a major chunk of work, so it's not worth investing the effort if it already works well enough in UE4.

The game does not reach 60FPS, at least in WQHD with a 67xx XT, even with DXVK/Proton. Is the performance the same under Windows? How are things on the Deck? As a German, I would like to support the studio. Unfortunately, we don't have that many in Germany (any more).

Performance isn't spectacular, but still good enough for me on RX 7900 XTX (Testing GOG version):

dxvk (DX11) mode:



vkd3d-proton (DX12) mode:



I agree though, that it's not high for such kind of hardware. I guess limitations of the engine show.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 April 2023 at 3:14 am UTC

For whatever reason, the game disables the option to choose between DX11 and DX12, but you can force DX12 mode with -dx12 parameter.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 April 2023 at 6:33 am UTC

To be honest Shmerl that's shocking perf on that hardware. It's not even that graphical intensive going on those screen shots.

To be honest Shmerl that's shocking perf on that hardware. It's not even that graphical intensive going on those screen shots.

The performance isn't great, but Everspace 2 is one of the more graphically intensive games I've come across. The seamless transitions from cave complexes to open space, or world surface is incredible - a truly, breathtakingly beautiful game. If you don't turn on any upscaling (which I doubt Schmerl did, given his previously stated opinion on upscaling ), it's a very, very demanding game.

To be honest Shmerl that's shocking perf on that hardware. It's not even that graphical intensive going on those screen shots.

Even Cyberpunk 2077 performs better, lol, but it's actually very demanding - see GPU usage at 100%. So it's not just doing nothing, but I assume it's not really optimized well given the engine is UE4.

The performance isn't great, but Everspace 2 is one of the more graphically intensive games I've come across. The seamless transitions from cave complexes to open space, or world surface is incredible - a truly, breathtakingly beautiful game. If you don't turn on any upscaling (which I doubt Schmerl did, given his previously stated opinion on upscaling ), it's a very, very demanding game.

Yeah, that's without upscaling :) And I agree it's a beautiful game. I wonder what happens on lower end hardware though. It might be an issue without upscaling there.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 April 2023 at 4:32 pm UTC

For players on other stores like GOG, it does make things more complicated, since Steam is the only store to officially support a translation layer like Proton. However, you can try with Heroic Games Launcher.

Just to point out, GOG version of the game works very nicely in Wine as long as you enable the expected dxvk / vkd3d-proton.

Oh, and esync or fsync are recommended too for better performance.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 April 2023 at 7:36 pm UTC

Of course, it is sad to see that the native Linux version didn't make it. Liam's article on this is well written. I'm a backer of Everspace and Everspace 2. Everspace had the native Linux version as a stretch goal, and I was more than happy to support Rockfish Games, too.

Back then, we had no other choice, though; we depended on official and native Linux support as Proton was not a thing. So we tried everything we could to convince publishers and devs to give us native versions. We were loud, passionate, and we desperately wanted to play awesome games on our favorite operating system.

Do you remember the technical issues Everspace had? Even back then, Unreal Engine was in a bad state regarding Linux support. It didn't look good with the Linux version due to rendering issues and many other problems, and RFG were close to cancelling the Linux port, as it was just not justifiable to put in so much effort for a small userbase. And here they were in a conflict, a stretch goal was reached with that promise, but fixing the issues in the engine themselves would cost way too much.

Luckily, we seemed nice enough, so they put in the money and effort to finally pull it off. It was a man-year of work just on our side, so imagine how many hours they must have been put into this! We were an even smaller userbase back then, so we should be nothing else but thankful to Rockfish Games for that.

But it didn’t end here. Each update they did for the Windows version of Everspace had to be done again with additional testing for the Linux branch, as it was not the vanilla engine anymore, due to the manual fixes they had to maintain. Every time an extra, full test cycle just for us!

I played the heck out of Everspace, I love that game! I was so happy to be able to play it on my favorite system. I know this was not worth it for RFG from a financial point of view, but I hope we did help promote the game at least. We know this is not measurable, though.

Nevertheless, Rockfish Games learnt from this experience. And though they were confident in having a native Linux version of Everspace 2 as the Unreal Engine had better Linux support than the previous one, they said from the start they'll do the Linux version when the game was done. Everything else would be a waste of time and money affecting the content and quality of the game for the entire player base. It was not a secret they would focus on the game and the main platform first.

Remember Phoenix Point, where they had the first two closed alphas with native Linux versions but realized it's just not possible nor justifiable to maintain Linux versions of these alphas as they just took too much time to maintain? Okay, this one was even worse, as they got bought by Epic, and we didn't even get a Steam version for at least a year.

Sure, I'm biased; I'm a big fan of space games and especially Everspace. I also met the guys in person. So I know as a matter of fact, they have put in the effort to get the native Linux of Everspace 2 out. When Erik (giraffasaur, the community ambassador of Rockfish games) said they put in 2 months of work to get this done, they really did. And as they realized, it's technically not possible with the vanilla Unreal Engine, they already knew it wouldn't be worth maintaining and patching the Engine from experience with Everspace.

But it's also a different situation today. Thanks to Valve, the Steam Deck, and Proton, we can play Everspace 2 on Linux just fine, which is what they actually promised. So what do we want? Play a great game, where the team could focus on (new) content and improve the quality for all players even further? They still had technical issues with the Windows version, I'm pretty sure. Or do we want to be zealots that insist on a binary format and give the developers a hard time, and make a really bad case that might other developers not even consider supporting games on Linux through Proton? It's not fair punishing them for being unable to keep a promise that's not in their hands. They can only do their reasonable effort as much as it's in their possibilities and of course financially justifiable (this is common sense in any legally-binding software development agreement).

We don't even have all the insight, we are not game developers. We are passionate gamers. It's okay to be sad about it. Backers expecting a native Linux version get a refund. That's even more than they have to do; you know how Kickstarter works. Normally, you do not get a refund. I fully understand the disappointment, it's okay to be disappointed and express that. But it's not okay to become harsh, unfriendly, and unreasonable. You feel how much passion they put into the game, so many details, such great-looking visuals. And I know they are unhappy with the results, too, since they already invested precious development time in native Linux support, and even get Flak from individuals in the Linux community. Of course, they are not happy either that they couldn’t keep their promise verbatim.

However, they do have a solution as they will officially support Proton. As the game just works almost flawlessly with Proton, we can play it! I already clocked 300 hours of it on Linux with Proton, and the game is just awesome! I'm happy to be a backer, I'm sad it didn't work out with the native Linux version, but I can play the game without booting Windows. That's what I want. Let's be fair, enjoy the game on Linux, and be thankful to get official support through Proton, so other studios are not demotivated to support gaming on Linux.


Last edited by Corben on 11 April 2023 at 8:26 am UTC

Of course it is sad to see, that the native Linux version didn't make it. Liam's article on this is well written.

I'm a backer of Everspace and Everspace 2. Everspace had the native Linux version as a stretch goal, and I was more than happy to support Rockfish Games.

Back then we had no other choice though, we were depending on official and native Linux support as Proton was not a thing. So we tried everything we could to convince publishers and devs to give us native versions. We are loud, we are passionate, we want desperately to play the awesome games on our favorite operating system.
Do you remember the issues Everspace had? Even back then Unreal Engine was in a bad state regarding Linux support. It didn't look good with the Linux version due to rendering issues, and they were close to cancelling the Linux port, as it was just not justifyable to put in so much effort for a small userbase. And here they were in a conflict, a stretch goal was reached with that promise, but fixing the issues in the engine themselves would cost way to much. Luckily we seemed to be nice enough, so they put in the money and effort to do it. It was a man year of work just for us! We were am even smaller userbase back then, so we should be nothing else than thankful to Rockfish Games for that.

And each update they did for the Windows version of Everspace had to be done extra again with extra testing for the Linux branch, as it was not the vanilla engine anymore, due to the manual fixes they had to maintain. Extra! For us!

I played the heck out of Everspace, I love that game! I was so happy to be able to play it on my favorite system. I know this was not worth it from a financial point of view, I hope though we did help promoting the game at least. We know this is not measurable though.

Nevertheless, Rockfish Games learnt from this experience. And though they were confident to have a native Linux version of Everspace 2 as the Unreal Engine had better Linux support than the previous one, they said from the start, they'll do the Linux version when the game is done. Everything else would be a waste of time and money, that would affect the content and quality of the game. It was not a secret they will focus on the game and the main platform first. Remember Phoenix Point, where they had the first two closed alphas with native Linux versions but realized it's just not possible nor justifyable to maintain Linux versions of these alphas as they just took too much time to maintain. Okay, this one was even worse, as they got bought by Epic and we didn't even get a Steam version for at least a year.

Sure, I'm biased, I'm a big fan of space games and especially Everspace. I also met the guys in person. So I know for a matter of fact, they have put in effort to get the native Linux of Everspace 2 out. When Erik (giraffasaur, the community ambassador of Rockfish games) said, they put in 2 months of work to get this done, they did. And if they realise, it's technically not possible with the vanilla Unreal Engine, we know it's not worth maintaining and patching the Engine from the experience with Everspace.

But it's also a different situation today. Thanks to Valve, the Steam Deck and Proton. It's not like back then, when we were depending on native Linux versions. We can play Everspace 2 on Linux. So what do we want? To play a great game, where the team could focus on content and quality? They still had technical issues with the Windows version, I'm pretty sure. Or do we want to be zealots that insist on a binary format and give the developers a hard time? It's not fair punishing them for not being able to keep a promise that's not in their hands. They can only do best effort as much as it's in their possibilites and of course financially justifyable.

We don't even have all the insight, we are not game developers. We are passionate gamers. It's okay to be sad about it. Backers expecting a native Linux version get a refund. That's even more than they have to do, you know how Kickstarter works. Normally, you do not get a refund. I fully understand the disappointment, it's okay to be disappointed and express that. But it's not okay to become harsh and unfriendly. You feel how much passion they put into the game, so many details, such good looking optics. And I know they are unhappy with the results themselves. It's not nice for them either to disappoint us with not being able to keep their promise.

They said they will officially support Proton. As the game just works almost flawless with Proton, we can play it! I played already 300 hours of it on Linux with Proton, and the game is just awesome! I'm happy to be a backer, I'm sad it didn't work out with the native Linux version, but I can play the game without booting Windows. That's what I want. Let's be fair, enjoy the game on Linux, and be thankful to get official support through Proton.

The Linux community just needs to accept sometimes its just best to support proton because what many folks don't realize or care about is Linux is a moving target.. always being updated and always changing and they will point out the Steam Linux Runtime but that does NOT always make it smooth sailing for a native port plenty of games that have native ports prove that as some break over time because they haven't received updates in a long while.. thus the Steam Linux Runtime does no work as folks thinks it does.. Where as yes Proton is targeting windows support and that itself is somewhat a moving target .. not as much as Linux but Valve makes sure games works in it so devs only need to target that and only make tweaks where is needed to keep up.. Proton is the future of Linux gaming as long as Windows is the primary desktop os on the market rather people like it or not


Last edited by tohur on 10 April 2023 at 7:37 am UTC

I disagree. As I work in Software Development you have two competing problems as a company:

1. Make promises to get buy-in ahead of time or the project never gets off the ground.
2. You simply don't know what you don't know until you get to that point. The reality being that UE5 was not available when Everspace 2 started development and they were able to port Everspace 1 to Linux before. Imagine the surprise when you finally get to that work, only to find that the promise you had to make to get funding now no longer is viable from a technical standpoint without starting the entire project over on a new engine.... which is infeasible this late.

This issue doesn't happen as much in Tech due to the fear of customer churn on very expensive services. By comparison, once Game Devs (and Engine Devs) get their money, it's on to the next project since that up-front revenue does nothing but fade off over time. And, sadly, this part of the issue falls squarely on gamers' shoulders. As long as gamers continue to pay for things despite what GameDevs and Engine Devs do, there won't be any incentive to stop.

Sorry but you don't understand, the point isn't only a technical one.
You seem to find excuses where there are none...
When you promise a Linux version (or macOS), you do it from the start to avoid the maximum of issues, that was repeatedly said on this website from many people.
You don't start to "port" your game on Linux 1-2 months before the full release.
They never spoke about their difficulties about the Linux version, and yet they announce on the release day that there won't be Linux native, it's just dishonest.
They lied to us dude, it's simple.

Bonus (as I posted in the forum "Crowdfunding page suggestions"): https://www.youtube.com/live/CxYPVee36sY?feature=share&t=3250
Dare to tell me this guy is honest...

But yeah, this time I learned the lesson: never a trust a dev even if they released their previous game on Linux. I'm tired of it and, UE4 issues or not, I don't think I'm the only one.

Most likely is that doing the port once the game was complete worked for the first game, so they though in error that it would be the same with the new game, especially since they switched to Vulkan which works great on Linux. Of course they should have checked how well UE4 handles Vulkan on Linux before but then there are always lots of things that one could do.

In the end I don't really understand the outrage here. Are you guys on the "I will only buy native games" side arguing that they should have released the native version with horrible performance and have every Linux gamer switch to the proton version anyway due to the performance difference?

exit: of course I understand the outrage, I mean it was a kickstart goal that was met so they didn't deliver what was promised, should have worded that part differently.

Atleast for me, it's not not buy game, but not support them on kickstarter. Is good idea buying game years before release from developer who proved he is not trustworthy?

No argument here, I would never buy something with a faint promise on say Kickstarter.

For whatever reason, the game disables the option to choose between DX11 and DX12, but you can force DX12 mode with -dx12 parameter.

on steam, if you click the cog settings for the game, go to properties, under the general section there's a drop down selector for dx11 / dx12. No need to use launch parameters.

For whatever reason, the game disables the option to choose between DX11 and DX12, but you can force DX12 mode with -dx12 parameter.

on steam, if you click the cog settings for the game, go to properties, under the general section there's a drop down selector for dx11 / dx12. No need to use launch parameters.

That's weird - when I click "Play" to run it via Steam, I first get a window saying "SELECT LAUNCH OPTIONS" where it allows me to choose whether to use DirectX 11 or 12. I've never needed to fiddle with launch parameters.

They literally have the option in the game UI, but for whatever reason disabled it and it can only be forced externally.