ROCKFISH Games have now launched EVERSPACE 2 and it looks awesome! One of their original Kickstarter promises did not make it though, with Native Linux support being cancelled as they will support it with Proton instead.
Despite repeatedly mentioning a Native Linux build would come, even as recently as mid February, they decided not to go through with it. Why? They said Vulkan support in Unreal Engine 4 is "broken and incomplete" and it gave between "50% - 80%" of the performance compared with just running the Windows version in Proton. There were other issues, like VRAM leaks causing crashes. 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.
They shared a screenshot as a quick example showing the Native build with Vulkan, their Windows build with DXVK and the Windows build with VKD3D-Proton and the performance difference speaks for itself really:
The good news is they plan to ensure it does work well with Proton and they will continue to optimize it there. Any Kickstarter backers not happy can request a refund too which is good to see.
As for Steam Deck, dedicated optimizations for it are also still planned.
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.
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That seems a bit exaggerated. I have dozens of games; all except I think three are native. The three non-native I've had a bad time trying to use with Proton. Almost all the others work fine. Now I think my experience with Proton has been weird--clearly most people have a much better time. But my sample of native games is much bigger, and I haven't had trouble with any of them.Anything half-assed will be inferior. But a good native port will outperform a good proton wrap any day simply because no translations are required. I have a beefy enough PC that I genuinely don't care (I'm "over myself") but there are plenty of gamers out there who will feel the pain from Proton's performance penalty, whether it's 5%, or 20%.
And that is the issue.. 99% of Linux ports are inferior and has been inferior from the start..
(Hmmm . . . I also have a couple of very old Dosbox games, so I guess those are non-native and they work OK)
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That seems a bit exaggerated. I have dozens of games; all except I think three are native. The three non-native I've had a bad time trying to use with Proton. Almost all the others work fine. Now I think my experience with Proton has been weird--clearly most people have a much better time. But my sample of native games is much bigger, and I haven't had trouble with any of them.Anything half-assed will be inferior. But a good native port will outperform a good proton wrap any day simply because no translations are required. I have a beefy enough PC that I genuinely don't care (I'm "over myself") but there are plenty of gamers out there who will feel the pain from Proton's performance penalty, whether it's 5%, or 20%.
And that is the issue.. 99% of Linux ports are inferior and has been inferior from the start..
(Hmmm . . . I also have a couple of very old Dosbox games, so I guess those are non-native and they work OK)
Not exaggerated I have almost 600 games on steam and when I sort my library by only linux compatible games I have 95 in my steam library .. alot of those games I have to do work arounds to even get them to work or they don't boot at all and even when I do get those games to work rather through work arounds or just working out the box there is performance left on the table for many reasons mostly do to alot of the older ports still only using openGL because they haven't had updates in YEARS. which is the main issue with native linux ports is they tend to break over time once they stop receiving updates and tend to just work in proton for me and I would speculate many others also have this experience. Look 99% of us want games to just work and we can give two craps how that happens.. if its a native Linux binary so be it.. it its through WINE/Proton so be .. we just want the best experience regardless and due to the way Linux is updated that is NOT native Linux binaries as once a game stops receiving updates they do and will break
Last edited by tohur on 13 April 2023 at 8:15 pm UTC
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What childish atitude?Insulting a well-established gaming studio because Epic's failed promises led to said studio not releasing on our platform. Childish.
Also, ignoring the extraordinary lengths that the studio went to trying to work around those failed promises.
There’s nothing childish, this is a consumer hobby. People paid money for an idea and didn’t get their purchase. Telling people they should just buy the game and be happy with it because “developers work hard” is childish fan talk.
Ah, no. Context is king. First, I didn't say "be happy with it". Criticism is valid and should be encouraged. I said insulting the devs is childish.
Second, there are plenty of devs on Kickstarter who absolutely took the piss. My point here is that RFG didn't. I'm getting tired of saying it, but read Corben's history of how we arrived here - RFG went absolutely above and beyond to make the Linux port and were shafted by Epic.
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You cant argue epic lied them, when they had engine at least 3 years in handsI give up with you. If you can't understand that a) pivoting the engine even just a year into development is a massive undertaking and that b) they were told they didn't need to pivot anyway because Epic were fixing the engine issues (and then didn't) then we're done.
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The memory leak is not related to wine, it's the WebM player plugin of the Unreal Engine they are using now in the release version. The videos before started working after a while, because Valve reencoded them and shipped them via pre-cache. I think no new videos were added for a while. I think you also got a Steam key for the EA first, right? And now you are on GoG?
No, I was using GOG version (early access one) since I selected that option as a backer.
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What childish atitude?Insulting a well-established gaming studio because Epic's failed promises led to said studio not releasing on our platform. Childish.
Also, ignoring the extraordinary lengths that the studio went to trying to work around those failed promises.
There’s nothing childish, this is a consumer hobby. People paid money for an idea and didn’t get their purchase. Telling people they should just buy the game and be happy with it because “developers work hard” is childish fan talk.
Ah, no. Context is king. First, I didn't say "be happy with it". Criticism is valid and should be encouraged. I said insulting the devs is childish.
Second, there are plenty of devs on Kickstarter who absolutely took the piss. My point here is that RFG didn't. I'm getting tired of saying it, but read Corben's history of how we arrived here - RFG went absolutely above and beyond to make the Linux port and were shafted by Epic.
Either way the damage is done for me, I have a huge back log of games that run on Proton and I didn’t switch to Linux with the belief that Proton is good enough. It’s personally my choice to buy Linux native software. Microsoft and their control on gaming has hindered enough and I choose not to participate. Good for you all though!
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