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Can't really say about Waveform, I got it on Steam, and it looks to be English only.
That's usually the first thing I check: the French localization. And it is a very uncommon occurence that I leave it on (without going through it myself if I have the time and the game looks good enough for my daughters). Hopefully they update the game and it is a nice surprise indeed, but I certainly won't bet my life on that... You'd be surprised how people are content with crappy, verbatim translations (and how devs sometimes don't seem to give a hoot when you notify them of a sloppy job).
But I could tell you a truckload of stories. See Harvest: Massive Encounter for example. Over 10 mistakes, typos and horrors (not errors, horrors) just on the title screen.

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7453"If anyone else is up for this, great, I'm definitely going to have a go at this soon. But there's a different problem entirely first - it doesn't have page for most of those games, so we'll need to do that first as well.

Fantastic. I'd be keen to contribute (and cite it in future writings).

Quoting: "Anon, post: 7453"Hm, I can't find it, is it on flibit's twitter or someone else's?

flibit's tagged in it, but it was the developer who tweeted, I believe. It was also discussed elsewhere (but I can't remember now).

Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7455, member: 223"There's some truth to that... But OTOH
* You have to pay translators
* You can't be sure that they're good

The thing is though, the Humble Bundle guys are probably in a prime position to assemble a translation team (in house, external, community driven, etc. - whatever method used, the ongoing/regular nature would help bring responsibility/accountability that could ensure decent translations) that they could offer/contract out to bundle participants. It would be pretty neat to see them raise the bar for indie games a bit by encouraging/requiring participants to have a minimum set of translations.

Waveform's translations were crowdsourced and that turned out really well by all reports.

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There's some truth to that... But OTOH
* You have to pay translators
* You can't be sure that they're good

Cost and uncertainty. I've been re-translating here and there for... well, zilch, whereas the devs had paid the original localization (and I won't go into the details or this post is going to become a dictionary of insults).
You can't say you'll find good translators working for cheap or free just by lifting the stone at your feet, unfortunately.
Then, yes, there are devs who aren't interested in that business. At all. Even if it would make perfect sense for them (see Runic).

Then there's the ridiculous kind. See Mojang for the details - where you release your next update when a moron has translated "nether" by "fluffy" in his target language. And I'm not even kidding.

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Interesting info and ideas.

QuoteHow much pressure/control should Humble try to exert over developers in that sort of situation? Could this be solved through better title selection? Are there ways to just make supporting ports more attractive? Are developers hearing about the problems with their ports? These are all questions that I hope the Humble Bundle guys are continually asking themselves.

Exactly the same happens on Windows when sales slow down for a title, updates slow down too. Some developers aren't selling their games out of the bundles, so their interest on updating is zero. Even the games being sold after the bundle won't make enough sales to make it count. There are a few devs really committed to their users that will make updates no matter how new sales go, but this happens on any platform, I guess.

Another issue that doesn't get much talk is localization. That's important in some countries. Even if I'd like to get some games for some people, or just hook them up I can't because the web is English-only and the lack of localization on several games.

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Hm, seems like PCG would be a good idea for this, but what info should we exactly include there? Status of ports, dlc support?

If anyone else is up for this, great, I'm definitely going to have a go at this soon. But there's a different problem entirely first - it doesn't have page for most of those games, so we'll need to do that first as well.

Hm, I can't find it, is it on flibit's twitter or someone else's?

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Desura is still more interesting than Steam from my point of view :
- Desura is Linux distribution friendly (I have OpenSUSE and I don't plan to move to Ubuntu)
- Some games are available in Desura, not in Steam (RuneSoft games, for instance)

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I'm liking where this discussion is headed.

PCGamingWiki.com might be a decent place for keeping track of the status of Humble titles. I'd be keen to help get the word out about such a thing (and try to make sure it's noticed by the Humble Bundle guys).

Hamish makes a really important point which I hadn't pushed so strongly in my article - the recent Windows only promotions (moreso the THQ bundle than the AF promotion as that was a) very clearly distinct from other stuff, and b) selling a look at Double Fine's prototyping workflows instead of just games) can be seen to be compound with already outstanding issues.

The other side of the coin is that it's up to the developers to decide whether to look after their Mac/Linux ports or not, and it's obvious that for some devs, once they disembark the Humble money train, Mac and Linux are no longer a priority.

How much pressure/control should Humble try to exert over developers in that sort of situation? Could this be solved through better title selection? Are there ways to just make supporting ports more attractive? Are developers hearing about the problems with their ports? These are all questions that I hope the Humble Bundle guys are continually asking themselves.

Quoting: "Anon, post: 7450"Btw., anyone have any idea what Flibit's lolno is? Or did he drop any hints about it? I'd love to know what is it since he's so secretive about it.

The developer pretty much mentioned it on Twitter a month or so back, so if you hunt around, you could probably work it out.


Edit: It may also be worth noting that there seems to be a bit of a correlation between titles that have outstanding issues and developers who didn't respond to me whilst I was researching for the article.

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Quoting: "liamdawe, post: 7449, member: 1"Well at least some of the titles are going to be worked on, considering HIB now has a full time Linux porter maybe they will get him to fix up older ones?

Hm, could someone shoot him an email? It'd be nice to know whether his going to fix up older ports or just the ones he said he'll work on. Either way, it will surely be better in the future because of this.

Btw., anyone have any idea what Flibit's lolno is? Or did he drop any hints about it? I'd love to know what is it since he's so secretive about it.

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Well at least some of the titles are going to be worked on, considering HIB now has a full time Linux porter maybe they will get him to fix up older ones?

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THIS is the main reason why the THQ bundle was such a shock, because frankly things are becoming a bit of mess, so giving people less of a reason to take us seriously is really distressing. This is not to say that we have not been given a lot, but the half-hearted here are really beginning to give the committed a bad name by association. Not all of this is Humble's fault, but if they were a school there would definitely be concerns about them sending out this amount of delinquents, to coin a phrase...

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For me the potential value of Steam will be demonstrated if I start seeing games that were ported to Linux for Steam become available through other services or directly from the developer. If there is one place where Humble Bundle was always a problem it was with the fact that many games disappeared after being in the Bundle; ironically enough many of these missing games may come out on Steam now. But the problem for me still persists as I want to play games on Linux and not games on Steam (which I could in theory live with) or especially Steamworks (which I can't). I have heard people assure me that this will happen and we will see something of a trickle down (to use a rather noxious metaphor) of titles appearing at other places, but 2013 will be the time to prove it.

I am glad for Liam commenting on the future of free drivers, but to be honest for me the free drivers have been fulfilling my needs for over a year. Every title I have thrown at them except Bastion (which I need to look into again) has been running great and this is all without Marek's recent awesomeness upstream or OpenGL 3. And this includes games like Trine 2, Amnesia, Torchlight, and Rochard which may not be the ultimate in graphics (well, except maybe Trine 2) but certainly are not leaving my hardware alone. For me it is Nvidia that is irrelevant, with great experiences with both my AMD hardware and my brother's Intel GMA on proper in-kernel drivers. I am certainly not interested in going back to the blobs anytime soon.

Thankfully Desura does seem to be more appealing in many ways to traditional Linux developers so it has an advantage there. It is great to see Runesoft putting in such interest for instance, and I hope that will be a relationship that developers want to continue. Desura has also not burned as many bridges as Valve has, and while Greenlight has been soothing some wounds, I do hope Desura can leverage that to keep it successful. It has certainly not been doing a bad job for itself, the need for a new proper client release aside.

We will see how many Kickstarters succeed but I honestly have no idea what will happen there. Things could go so many different ways.

So while not being all that enthused about things going in the next year, I can consider myself to be vaguely comfortable about things as matter stand.

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Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7443, member: 223"No idea about Ronimo.
As far as GSB is concerned, to put it bluntly: cliffski doesn't give a hoot.
[URL='http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=6842#p53390']Mandatory post in Positech forums.[/URL]

And you're supposed to put up with that and kindly stfu.

Well, he did supposedly help with it. But I can't say I am particularily fond of the GSB devs.

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No idea about Ronimo.
As far as GSB is concerned, to put it bluntly: cliffski doesn't give a hoot.
[URL='http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=6842#p53390']Mandatory post in Positech forums.[/URL]

And you're supposed to put up with that and kindly stfu.

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Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7441, member: 223"Jamestown: nope. Never answered my tweet about it either (even though he was active on Twitter at the time I asked)
Frozen Synapse: Red is available (at least on Steam) and can be used in game, just choose the campaign.
SpaceChem: Can't tell, see [URL='http://steamcommunity.com/app/92800/discussions/0/828923952121455084/']this thread[/URL] for extra laughter (or teeth grinding/facepalm/rage/whatever suits your fancy). Noteworthy too: they use a launcher. Nice sh. Forcing apt-get and gksudo down your throat. Checking for debian-specific versions of the dependencies. Way to go...)

God, that's just ridiculous. I still didn't bother to download SpaceChem via Steam, but it seems like I also have too many bits for it. I thought that the packaging would be better this time, since they previously distributed only 32-bit debs (with a conversion script for 64-bit). Oh, well...

So, Jamestown, SpaceChem, GSB, S&S. Great. Has anyone poked Ronimo or the guys behind GSB about this? Although I don't expect much of GSB...

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Jamestown: nope. Never answered my tweet about it either (even though he was active on Twitter at the time I asked)
Frozen Synapse: Red is available (at least on Steam) and can be used in game, just choose the campaign.
SpaceChem: Can't tell, see [URL='http://steamcommunity.com/app/92800/discussions/0/828923952121455084/']this thread[/URL] for extra laughter (or teeth grinding/facepalm/rage/whatever suits your fancy). Noteworthy too: they use a launcher. Nice sh. Forcing apt-get and gksudo down your throat. Checking for debian-specific versions of the dependencies. Way to go...)

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2013 will be interesting indeed :)

I am still not sure about steam to be honest, they call it open beta but only release a .deb with so much hard coded ubuntu lines in there I do worry a bit about that. Desura may not be perfect, albeit I have had no real issues with it, it by far is more linux distribution friendly then steam right now. That is one of the reason I am not yet buying a Linux game on steam itself as I have no idea how long I can run it on opensuse, to me it feels more like steam for ubuntu then steam for linux. However the success of steam on linux depends on a lot more then valve games, others will have to join them else I think most new linux games on steam will come from HiB launches.

In the Windows world there is steam but also Desura, GoG and many other distributors. I don't see desura go away on linux and the games on there will benefit as much from all the new gfx drivers updates as those on steam. I do wonder how Gameolith will venture, news games keep getting added but there is little exposure of Gameolith in the big media, especially compared to GoG who offer a similar service.

As for gfx drivers, when I first made the step from Windows to Linux one of the things I used most was Wine/Crossover, during that time I found out how bad ATI cards where supported so I went out and got a nvidia card, downloaded the blob and never looked back, be it using Wine or linux in general. I don't see that change in the near future, ATI/AMD are much more open software friendly I totally agree but in the end what counts is if it works and on a desktop with a none-integrated gfx card nvidia seems to be the ticket for a near future. As gfx card performance becomes more important how will X be able to handle that, how will the kernel guys react when nvidia/amd will be looking for more performance and wanting their blobs to do more then the kernel license allows them ?

Talking about Wine/Crossover, I do wonder how they will fare in 2013, games are one of the biggest reasons people use wine and as soon as new games come out they features not working are added to the bugzilla and often very quickly fixed, that will change once people can get native games for linux but on the other hand Crossover might get more busy with making packages like they did for Limbo. I don't mind to much if I d/l a game if it 100% native or not, what matters if it works or not.

Many kickstarter games should appear in 2013: Banner Saga, Double Fine, Forsaken Fortress, Legends of Aethereus, Legens of Eisenwald, Leisure Suit Larry, Nekro, Planetary Annihiliation, Project Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Two Guys Spaceventure, Wastelands 2, Xenonauts.... But with Kickstarter attracting the "bigger" companies I think it will be harder for the real indies to stick out as the masses are slowly expecting AAA quality stuff from kickstarter or else they won't bother.

Looking back I would personally think that kickstarter was more exiting then steam in 2012, but yes 2013 will be an interesting year

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Hm, here's a list of Humble games with DLC, any idea which ones have and which ones haven't?

Dungeons of Dredmor - on Linux
SpaceChem - not to my knowledge
Steel-Storm - on Linux
Swords & Soldiers HD - not
Frozen Synapse - no idea
The Binding of Isaac - technically it is now
Gratuitous Space Battles - not
Dungeon Defenders - technically all of it is
Jamestown - no idea
Revenge of the Titans - on Linux (via website)

That's all I know and I think that's all the games in the bundles so far.

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Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7436, member: 223"I know that much, I was one of the first to try this method and comment about in in Runic's forums. ;)
Still, the number of mods you can get to run this way is VERY limited. A good 80% of those I tried failed, plain and simple. I couldn't even get the French translation to run - a pity, as I'm pretty sure my daughters would have liked the game, but they're not exactly up to speed with English yet. And boy am I glad I did a backup before every change to the zip file. :/

On feature parity, there's also GSB. Want the DLC? SOL.

Oh, I wasn't aware. Well, no need to mention it then, but yeah, it's still poor.

I only mentioned that since that was the only one I played that also didn't have the dlc. And also, Jamestown, which is a shame since I love that game (the 4-player COOP is super fun). Anybody ever get any answers out of those devs? I only hit up Ronimo (Swords & Soldiers devs) about Awesomenauts on Linux, and they didn't say either way. Any idea what other games lack the DLC? I know that Dredmor's works on Linux (but the latest build of the game is broken :( ), and so does Revenge of the Titans'.

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7435"Actually mods work in Torchlight, but you have to shove them in the data packages right now.

I know that much, I was one of the first to try this method and comment about in in Runic's forums. ;)
Still, the number of mods you can get to run this way is VERY limited. A good 80% of those I tried failed, plain and simple. I couldn't even get the French translation to run - a pity, as I'm pretty sure my daughters would have liked the game, but they're not exactly up to speed with English yet. And boy am I glad I did a backup before every change to the zip file. :/

On feature parity, there's also GSB. Want the DLC? SOL.

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Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7431, member: 223"Also, Torchlight and its infamous bugs (and non-support of mods).
Indeed, the level of support is quite... variable. Most unfortunate.

Actually mods work in Torchlight, but you have to shove them in the data packages right now. Ukrle has said that he'll be fixing Torchlight early in 2013, so you'll unfortunately have to wait.

I find it funny that one of the best ports is the one that was delayed for three months - I've had almost no problems except one that's related to a bug in compiz (weird mouse clipping issue).

But there are still serious issues in many ports. I won't complain about DD, since that's still recent, but Cortex Command, Isaac, SMB, GSB, Psychonauts, Fieldrunners, Torchlight, Eufloria and Waking Mars. To my knowledge, Psychonauts, Torchlight, Eufloria and Waking Mars will be fixed in the future as stated by the devs, with Psychonauts, Torchlight and Eufloria having an ETA for a better version in early 2013 and Waking Mars being fairly stable now.

Then there's the lack of feature parity, like in Swords & Soldiers - at first I actually fell for the 'because of steamworks' excuse, but since they have a Win/Mac version outside of Steam with DLC and multiplayer support, well... Hopefully they'll add multiplayer and DLC now that's Steam is on Linux.

I feel like we should pester the devs to do one of the two things: fix it or drop it. CC doesn't even work, and yet they sell it with Linux support (and do not answer to any questions related to Linux lately).

Also, if anyone's up for providing a wiki somewhere for checking which games support XDG that would be nice - let's see who doesn't and ask them to add support. Puppy Games has responded saying they might at a later date but are unsure because it would break support for old save games.

Now I won't even mention flash games, because that's a different issue entirely.

Of course, the many great Linux ports should not be forgotten - but the bad ones need to be remembered, because what the hell, it's been months without a fix for many of those and quite often absolutely no statements. Even minor issue are important, and this isn't XBLA where they have the excuse of not wanting to spend $40k on distributing patches.

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Quoting: "Bumadar, post: 7429, member: 93"interesting read, I know its probably not possible to really find out, butI do wonder of all those linux games several are simply converted to linux so that the game can join the HiB, but how many are really maintained and fixed ? Dungeon Defenders tbh is a piece of junk right now, Walking Mars I just noticed has a new version (1.1) so that might now not lock up, downloading as we speak, but there are several more. Just feels a bit that when the HiB is over, give it 3-4 weeks, the focus is gone.... quantity vs quality

I touched very briefly on this in the conclusion. I would have liked to have really gone into detail on this subject, but records of outstanding bugs and when stuff was fixed has been difficult to come by. Depending on how things go, I may cover this in a future update.

This is a very real danger though - the potential for Linux to be seen as a place where it's OK to throw titles out and not maintain them seems high, and it would be more detrimental than a lack of titles.

In a recent conversation I had with icculus, he said that there are some things that are being looked at which he couldn't go into detail on (not that these are necessarily things that he would be in control of, being a contractor and all), so perhaps there is some resolution on its way (hopefully some that isn't done merely because a title is appearing in another bundle).

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Updates have been made. Thanks for the comments, guys :)

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There are many Kickstarter campaigns for RPGs that support Linux:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?70204-List-of-Linux-friendly-Kickstarter-projects&p=303865#post303865

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Also, Torchlight and its infamous bugs (and non-support of mods).
Indeed, the level of support is quite... variable. Most unfortunate.

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After reading the review I been trying the demo. Liamdawe, the movement turns is when there is room for monsters to move, when I had a pack of 6 mobs and killed one in the front row, during the movement turn the back row would move forward. I would have expected the movement turn to be part of the combat turns myself, so either move or fight so to speak.

It needs a lot of polishing, more stats, party design more custom, clearer classes, stuff like that, but then for a 0.2 alpha version it has a lot of potential and I had a good enough time to alpha fund it

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interesting read, I know its probably not possible to really find out, butI do wonder of all those linux games several are simply converted to linux so that the game can join the HiB, but how many are really maintained and fixed ? Dungeon Defenders tbh is a piece of junk right now, Walking Mars I just noticed has a new version (1.1) so that might now not lock up, downloading as we speak, but there are several more. Just feels a bit that when the HiB is over, give it 3-4 weeks, the focus is gone.... quantity vs quality

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Quoting: "Bumadar, post: 7425, member: 93"OMG that is so wrong, trying to use free look in a dungeon master clone !!!

;) (just joking)

Hehehe, I'm not a purist. And I think it would be a useful feature instead of having to walk in all directions to find the hidden mechanisms.

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7424"I just hope for one thing - that people start using the bloody XDG specs and stop throwing their save games randomly around. Thank god that at least Icculus, Urkle and Flibit adhere to them.

There have been some complaints about the lack of standards across distributions. We should let them know these exist.

Icculus is involved in developing a spec for fullscreen mode apps. That's an interesting one too.

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I thought the Jack Claw version was a user-driven effort instead of an official port, I didn't know Alternative Games was behind it. It didn't work very well when I tried it. And for Shank 2, I was convinced Ryan's name was there somewhere. How wrong I was, I guess it was for Shank. I should have my facts. Thanks for your clarification and your excelent reports. I like to know who's doing the hard work.

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Quoting: "berarma, post: 7421, member: 131"EDIT: Forgot to mention 3D mouse free look doesn't work well in Legend of Grimrock, looking direction jumps randomly and it's almost frozen. Not important but I'd like to see it work.

OMG that is so wrong, trying to use free look in a dungeon master clone !!!

;) (just joking)

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