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With attitudes like this, I hope you all enjoy ya 2nd rate experiences while paying full price. You all deserve what you get. Hope this isn't a clear picture of how most Linux gamers feel otherwise the future won't be fun at all :(

The devs who do this clearly don't give a damn, and will serve you up crap after crap while you all beg for more. This shit has been going on for MAC users for ages now, go look and see if any them seem happy with the wrapped titles after all this time. The real mac gamers are dual booting windows, I only just stopped dual booting bout a year ago. I don't want to do it again in future.

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Two things:

1) 9-10 FPS? I installed the linux version fron Steam, use the configuration I have for running it under wine and get 30-40 fps at 1280x1024. I played some of my saves, seems stable enough except for crashes on quitting. Sure you turned Ubersampling off? My gear is hardly top notch gaming stuff (AMD X2 250, GTX 260, 4GB RAM, LCD with nax res. 1280x1024, no gamepad).

2) Before we stop buying bad ports we should stop buying games without a linux port at all. As long as we manage with wine or dual booting, there's no real pressure on game companies to put any major effort in porting their titles to linux (and we'll have to see if Steam can make a difference here). That's why companies like CDProject or 4A deserve some trust that they will improve their ports over time, since they seem to believe that there's a future market for linux games and they are willing to invest in that future.

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Quoting: liamdaweSystem Shock 2 uses Wine and works flawlessly for me. I'm perfectly fine with older games coming to Linux using Wine since they otherwise wouldn't be ported.

SS2 works great! I agree completely.

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System Shock 2 uses Wine and works flawlessly for me. I'm perfectly fine with older games coming to Linux using Wine since they otherwise wouldn't be ported.

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I hope Valve's hardware partners are on board with wanting more time to polish, and not too miffed that they end up waiting for the controller

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Quoting: AnonymousFuck Wine. If they want any of my money, they had better have clear labeling on what is a real port, and what uses Wine or DOSbox or any other kind of not-an-actual-port "technology".

I doubt they'll label it. Many of their Windows and Mac games use dosbox and aren't labelled.

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Quoting: killxden

Quoting: predator8bitKnowledge of wine? I have a bad feeling about this...

Why? If it is good implemented, you wont notice the difference. Also 99% of their games are old, so there wont be any performance issues. This is a good thing imo. It will make the Linux games list grow with really good games.

Hmmm, you are true, yes.

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Quoting: AnonymousAs far as I know Steam OS is still aiming for a mainstream release this year. This news is about hardware, not software.

Bingo. It remains to be seen what Tropico 5 will do about it's port that is waiting on SteamOS.

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As far as I know Steam OS is still aiming for a mainstream release this year. This news is about hardware, not software.

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Quoting: Cheeseness

Quoting: SkullyWine devs themselves state that you can expect 50% performance in wine.

This is a Wine thing, and not necessarily applicable to all wrappers.

I don't think Liam is saying that anybody should put up with lesser performance on Linux, just that whether or not they're happening via wrappers is irrelevant - it's the issues themselves (poor performance, poor stability, whatver) that we should be reporting, regardless of whether it's "native" or not.

Bingo. Wine is just one example used in the article.

Don't put up with poor performance, report the bugs and make it better. Push for native if and when you can, but do not shun and talk down on developers who don't have the man-power to port natively.

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I'm no game developper but in my Wine tweaker experience the name of the game is OpenGL. It showed me that windows games which supports OpenGL performs better under wine.

If the developpers could drop DirectX it's already an awesome win.

After that, the technology that permits the port is not much of a problem. As long as it is transparent for the user, it doesn't matter for me.

I just want to play my games on Linux! :)

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Fuck Wine. If they want any of my money, they had better have clear labeling on what is a real port, and what uses Wine or DOSbox or any other kind of not-an-actual-port "technology".

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Quoting: predator8bitKnowledge of wine? I have a bad feeling about this...

Why? If it is good implemented, you wont notice the difference. Also 99% of their games are old, so there wont be any performance issues. This is a good thing imo. It will make the Linux games list grow with really good games.

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Quoting: predator8bitKnowledge of wine? I have a bad feeling about this...

Yep... Also here.

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Quoting: SkullyWine devs themselves state that you can expect 50% performance in wine.

This is a Wine thing, and not necessarily applicable to all wrappers.

I don't think Liam is saying that anybody should put up with lesser performance on Linux, just that whether or not they're happening via wrappers is irrelevant - it's the issues themselves (poor performance, poor stability, whatver) that we should be reporting, regardless of whether it's "native" or not.


Ideally we want native ports, but that's not going to happen for a lot of legacy titles. If we're being offered Linux support (proper support, with bug fixes and maintenance), then that's the important thing, and having presence on Linux will be more likely to lead to greater commitment, which I reckon will translate into more native ports longer term.

I can't see CD Projekt pulling teams off The Witcher 3 to port The Witcher 2, but having the latter out there on Wine makes the former much more sellable and could justify a native port in a way that the W2 on its own might not have been able to.

If they don't support the game, then sure, they don't deserve support from the Linux community, but if they do (and it sounds like they're working on fixing the situation up), then what value is there in shunning them?

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Good article and fine addition to the discussion.

Let us be grateful for the contributions to our platform. Wither 2 looks like a great contribution.

Publishers should not release too buggy games, for whatever reason. People will be annoyed if they buy something that does not work, or performes under par.

We should ask for native versions of good games. But lets be polite. We should also ask for rewrites of good old(er) games for the sake of utilizing new and better hardware for better experiences.

Question. I have a system. Linux 3.14, hd6970 running catalyst driver 14.10, opengl 4.4. Should I buy Witcher 2 or wait?

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Knowledge of wine? I have a bad feeling about this...

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It seems there are comming a lot of wine ports on gog ;-)

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Seems like a cool job, but I have no interest in moving to Poland.

Also, I really hope that "Knowledge of what Dosbox and Wine is." is a bare minimum requirement. "Knowledge of what [it] is" sets a really low bar. I'd hope they'd go for something more like "Extensive experience configuring software to run in Dosbox and Wine".

If anyone from GOG is reading, feel free to use my work on getting Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor running on Linux with ScummVM, Dosbox and ZEngine. http://www.thezorklibrary.com/installguides/

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There is a MASSIVE difference between accepting games that use dosbox, and games that use a wrapper.

Without dosbox, no one can play those games any more at all. Everyone gets the same deal for their money. The games are also crazy old and performance is non-issue.

With wrappers tho, windows users are clearly getting a better deal for their money. First class support/optimization ending in clearly a better overall experience. Maybe, just maybe it would be acceptable if they sell it that way for 75% off the windows price, since at best we would get 75% the experience. Wine devs themselves state that you can expect 50% performance in wine.

LINK - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU5MjA

Stefan Dösinger is one of the CodeWeavers employees largely responsible for the graphics work in Wine.
QUOTE - In general on a dual-core machine running Wine you can expect about 50% performance under Linux with Wine compared to directly running Windows, but it's largely dependent on the actual game and driver. When using the NVIDIA binary Linux driver you can more likely expect around 60% the performance of Windows or if using the open-source Radeon driver there is a 30~40% performance expectation. - QUOTE

Soo should you pay full price for that???????????????????????? really???????????

At least no one has managed to make a wrapper for dx10 or dx11. So newer games ain't gunna get wrapped. :P

EDIT: Don't get sucked in Liam, or your site will end up slideshowgamingonlinux.com

All this does is undermine all we have gained in the last year or so, you really want to go back in time where we winemulate everything again, but just don't have to set the wine bottle up ourselves??

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Quoting: edgleyUsing wrappers like Mono and Valves DX to GL calls is a far superior way of dealing with ports than using Wine.

Wine is reverse engineering of closed source libraries. If you rely on that for your game to run, you are going to have a bad time.Not to mention Wine, even in "bottle" format, requires a much larger overhead than almost any other compatibility layer. You are saying, "I need all of the Windows compatibility to run this one library which I'm using".

QuoteI've seen reports from people actually stating Windows games ran in Wine have at times worked better for them on Linux than they did in Windows and hearing that has actually become more common.

Source? With a properly configured Windows XP or Windows 7 install (on the exact same hardware) I have *never* had this. Many games run okay in Wine now, thanks to the countless number of man hours invested in the Wine project from individuals, for free (and some not for free, but companies paying people to develop open source projects is a different matter entirely).

The issue isn't with the intended implementation, but with the attitude surrounding it.

If developers to continue to use closed source products like Direct X, you are essentially allowing companies like Microsoft to continue to control who can and can't access said products. This conflicts (not completely though, of course) with the general principals behind Linux and has potential to cause serious abandonment of alternative open source projects. If a developer can cop out and use DX, why wouldn't they?

This issue seems to be almost entirely driven by two groups of people, gamers and those like Canocial.

I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't switch to Linux just because I have a tight wallet. I come from a gaming heavy background, and this has moved to Linux. But I would rather keep my principles and never play a (computer) game again than give them up to play the latest CoD.

For the sake of programming slack, I don't see any reason to say this is acceptable; though berating a developer because they do not want to support your platform of choice is equally not acceptable.

I do hope that whoever GOG hires can make that clear to GOG as well.

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Really nice to see this turnaround, Liam! :D


One comment regarding Wine - it contains a lot of workarounds which are designed to replicate particular behaviours of particular Windows versions or to enable a particular game to do a particular thing.

The end result is a hugely impressive piece of work that allows us to run most Windows apps, but from the perspective of providing support for one game, there's a fair bit of non-relevant cruft in there. Stuff like eON has the potential to be more targeted, more streamlined and more performant (that it isn't at the moment is disappointing, but not so relevant).

It also seems like a huge balancing act to keep regressions out and Wine as a platform stable, and it's not guaranteed that modifications to Wine made by developers to benefit their own application will necessarily be mergeable. Though there are submission guidelines, coding practice guidelines, unit tests and automated test services to make that easier, not all devs/porters (although this sort of thing is more packaging than porting IMO) will be in a position to focus on them if they also have a game to ship.


It's OK to be disappointed by a bad port, and it's OK to want a refund, but there's no reason or value in being rude about that. Make sure that what's wrong is being communicated back to developers so that they can make fixes and/or avoid making the same mistakes in the future. If they choose not to, then they'll eventually wind up not being able to make money. If we choose to not give proper feedback, then there's no chance that they'll receive it.

The alternative is that comments like, "let this be your one, and only venture into the world of Linux," end up being the only voice out there (in the context of The Witcher 2, that would probably also mean no Linux support from GOG).

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Witcher 2 has a Linux port now? The Mac port was just a Wine wrapper with horrendous performance, so I wouldn't expect much from them. Maybe on Witcher 4 which will be developed with Steam Boxes in mind from the start...

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Quoting: liamdaweThere isn't a single source for that wine performance note, it is something I have observed from a fair few people. To me personally I ran Starcraft 2 under Wine for many months and played it to death without a single issue and performance as far as I could tell was exactly the same as Windows 7.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't games that run fine -- I have been playing EvE Online for over 7 years and most of that has been via Wine. The Linux port was a crappy Wine wrapper and they eventually said it was to much hassle and it ran better in straight Wine anyway. (Edit: Although captains quarters is *still* broken due to the Aurora engine libraries being neigh on impenetrable and the developers not caring).

However, this is not the case in the vast majority of cases and it's unlikely to ever be because of the nature of Wine. Reverse engineering is never going to hit spot on and developers need to realise what they are relying on when they do this.

I'd much rather 10 games were ported to Linux properly (either using cross platform libraries and just recompiling, or using translation layers like Mono) than 1000 ported terribly using substandard methods and poor attitudes.

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There isn't a single source for that wine performance note, it is something I have observed from a fair few people. To me personally I ran Starcraft 2 under Wine for many months and played it to death without a single issue and performance as far as I could tell was exactly the same as Windows 7.

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Using wrappers like Mono and Valves DX to GL calls is a far superior way of dealing with ports than using Wine.

Wine is reverse engineering of closed source libraries. If you rely on that for your game to run, you are going to have a bad time.Not to mention Wine, even in "bottle" format, requires a much larger overhead than almost any other compatibility layer. You are saying, "I need all of the Windows compatibility to run this one library which I'm using".

QuoteI've seen reports from people actually stating Windows games ran in Wine have at times worked better for them on Linux than they did in Windows and hearing that has actually become more common.

Source? With a properly configured Windows XP or Windows 7 install (on the exact same hardware) I have *never* had this. Many games run okay in Wine now, thanks to the countless number of man hours invested in the Wine project from individuals, for free (and some not for free, but companies paying people to develop open source projects is a different matter entirely).

The issue isn't with the intended implementation, but with the attitude surrounding it.

If developers to continue to use closed source products like Direct X, you are essentially allowing companies like Microsoft to continue to control who can and can't access said products. This conflicts (not completely though, of course) with the general principals behind Linux and has potential to cause serious abandonment of alternative open source projects. If a developer can cop out and use DX, why wouldn't they?

This issue seems to be almost entirely driven by two groups of people, gamers and those like Canocial.

I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't switch to Linux just because I have a tight wallet. I come from a gaming heavy background, and this has moved to Linux. But I would rather keep my principles and never play a (computer) game again than give them up to play the latest CoD.

For the sake of programming slack, I don't see any reason to say this is acceptable; though berating a developer because they do not want to support your platform of choice is equally not acceptable.

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I like companies that support Wine as a Linux alternative, for example GGG with Path of Exile. Path of Exile works excellently on Wine aside from the problem of hlsl -> glsl shaders causing a lot of stuttering on non-nvidia cards (because AMD/intel cards apparently can't deal with on-the-fly translation well). And yet, the developers have an official wine thread on their forums and answer questions and fix bugs when their updates break Wine. They don't actively spend resources on a Wine port (regrettably), but yet recognize Wine as an almost first-class platform.

Better this way than no game whatsoever... although a native port is always great.

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It's also the matter of convenience of not having two Steam installs for example, one in wine and one not. So many good reason to have developers use it over having no port.

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I think performance and reliability matter more to the end user. Many of us would want 100% native, of course we would.

I recall playing Transgaming version of the Sims when that came out and that played pretty darn well imho, and that was wrapped around winex iirc, when you dont have problems, you dont focus on whats under the bonnet so to speak.

If the Witcher 2 played as well on Linux as the Valve games do then this article probably wouldn't exist.

Bottom line, lets get as many games as possible now, once we hit a certain threshold, all new games should be cross platfrom from the word go. Then we can enjoy a better future.

Next up, how to convince EA to release the source code for Linux version of Alpha Centauri so we can make it better :D

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Actually, It`s bad news. As I understand, releases AAA games on Linux are connected with Steam Machine and Steam OS. With delaying Steam Machine we have delayed games.

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