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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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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.

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7418"I enjoyed reading this, but one thing - Jack Claw was never on Mac in any fashion.

Ah, my first real correction! This is what I get for forgetting to double check stuff sourced from Wikipedia against my own download page >_<
I'll be making an update soon. Thanks for pointing it out.
The source for the Mac port as done by Alternative Games was [URL='https://github.com/Frozenbyte/Jack-Claw/commit/22af434f21fa527dadc39235f90841616a513b28']added to the repo[/URL] though (which could potentially count as it being "on Mac"). Binaries definitely haven't been made available to Humble Bundle purchasers.

Quoting: "berarma, post: 7419, member: 131"I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read.

Shank 2 was ported by Alternative Games president Tapio Honkonen. Icculus wasn't involved in that one according to the Humble Bundle guys (and he didn't mention it when we were corresponding about the article).
Jack Claw Linux binaries are on your Humble Bundle download page if you have purchased a bundle containing it. They were added 10 days after the bundle launched.

Quoting: "mongrol, post: 7422"Do you have any stats on the actual open sourcing of various games over the releases and the kind of licenses used?

Yeah actually, I touched on that in my [URL='http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humbleStats.php#changing_bundles']shallow analysis of the first 10 Humble Bundles[/URL]. It's towards the end of the "[URL='http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humbleStats.php#changing_bundles']The Changing Shape of Bundles[/URL]" section.

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Do you have any stats on the actual open sourcing of various games over the releases and the kind of licenses used?

(crap captcha btw)

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I finally tried most games in this bundle, at least the ones I'm more interested in, and it's starting looking good now.

Legend of Grimrock worked great from start, good port and nice game. Shank2 didn't work with the gamepad but it's now fixed in the last update, it's now better than Shank. Closure and Snapshot work smoothly too.

Dungeon Defenders is the problem in this bundle, the introduction and loading is very slow, then the fullscreen problems and crashes in the game. This port needs more work. On the positive side, it started without using any workarounds in the FAQ.

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.

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I'm still waiting to play this game when fixed.

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I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read.

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I enjoyed reading this, but one thing - Jack Claw was never on Mac in any fashion.

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Thanks for the stats on who ported what - most interesting there for me. :)

As for your little editorial there on the whole THQ thing, I agree with most of what you said even if I am a little less favourable of HB than you are, and I especially like the talk about how things went toxic and why. All and all a well rounded perspective.

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I was going to Tweet to you, but I guess posting here is just as good: An excellent article in general, sums it all up quite nicely.
It was also very interesting to read more about the porting process. I always was curious about how it goes and why.

It's a shame that we can still only speculate on many issues concerning the current HiB, especially about the reduced number of sales.
I suppose we'd need some data directly from the users if we're to ever be able to find out the true reasons why it happened...

From a technical standpoint, besides an occasional typo and missing word, only one thing bugs me some: the pie doesn't have any associated numerical value.

Other than that, a very good read. Keep em coming. :cool:

Edit: Oh, and Happy New Year!

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Apparently shortly before I put out the review they announced that they are indeed planning to put out a DLC and that the Linux version is coming to Steam:
http://www.rochardthegame.com/en/2012/12/24/happy-holidays-from-the-rochard-team/

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Just got a message from the icculus.org bugzilla that the health indicator problems (and potentially the other on screen display bugs) have been fixed up ready for the next build. So things are indeed progressing.

Now we just need to see about improving performance.

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Post cleaned up and accepted.

I hope it does come, well it probably will. The game itself is far better than the first one in terms of graphics, game play and player base.

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I haven't tried Cultures yet, but I've definitely enjoyed the open-source [URL='http://wl.widelands.org/']Widelands[/URL]. If you liked the original Settlers, you should give this one a try!

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Quoting: "Hamish, post: 7401, member: 6"I agree with much of what you are saying, but they actually have quite qualified hands on their team such as Sam Lantinga and Forest Hale.

I'm sure they have them working on other things more related to programming, or I would think they aren't so qualified when it comes to software distribution.

For now, Desura and HB are my preferred game distribution channels, even with their mistakes. I can buy DRM-free games and they don't mess with my system in unpredictable ways.

I'm pretty worried this ends like some much other half-cooked tries to get gaming to GNU/Linux, saying the platform isn't ready when it's them doing things plainly wrong.

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Mostly formatting irking me - but I think I could just be being a little pedantic here. ;)

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