Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mountain ManSeems a lot of developers are counting on Proton to give them zero effort access to the Linux market. The good news is that Proton works extremely well. The bad news is... hmmm... Is there bad news? I'm not sure.

The bad news is that Proton will never run all games, because it's not Windows.
Invasive anti-cheat in games prevent them from running under Proton, and this will never change.

The problem is that without Proton, developers had two choices: 1) Support Linux natively; or 2) Don't support Linux at all. Before Proton, the overwhelming majority of developers chose door number 2. I suppose you could argue that they're still choosing door number 2, but fortunately, it doesn't matter, because we can still play their games.

Like it or not, Proton (or similar) is the future of Linux gaming, because I don't see Windows ever getting dislodged from its dominant position in the desktop operating system market.

On the bright side, if you never buy a windows native game ever again, there are loads of games in backlogs that you can play via emulation. Lately I am on an Amiga kick. Also looking into why no one has made an open source engine for Linux for the SSI Gold Box games... apparently there is a Wi dows one called Dungeon Craft, but it is more of an engine for newer capabilities, rather than one for playing the original games.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: stormtux

Quoting: Eike[...]but Half-Life (Alyx) sure does.

Are you sure? On the Steam store I do not see the Linux icon or the minimum requirements for Linux .
https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/

Oops!
I'm quite sure people played through it natively, but I'm very surprised that it doesn't have the icon!

I played through it natively.

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Quoting: JordanPlayz158

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: DrMcCoyInstead, you need to make portability a feature of your code outright, you need to make the same single codebase run on all the individual platforms. No forks, just one portable repository that can run everywhere. That's not new knowledge either, we've known that for decades!

Proton totally nuked this concept.
There is only one platform for personal computer gaming and it's DirectX.
Even Apple gave up dedicated ports, they went fully Wine.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: GroganI don't sympathize at all, moreover, these "corporations" are adversaries to me. They hate their customers and don't deserve to have any.

You put something out, that people bought in good faith and are still using, you bloody well fix it. You don't just say "too bad, we're adding new shitware to our game and have decided to exclude you"

Pretty much. It is far worse in my mind to say you are going to support a port, and then drop support while still updating the other platforms, than it is to never support Linux in the first place.

I'll just make sure to not buy anything from them later. Granted I never got around to playing Payback 2...

Honestly, this is likely a coincidence but it is funny, literally yesterday Epic Games gives away PAYDAY 2 for free and on that same day, Linux support is dropped

I honestly don't know what happened, Epic Games used to be one of the more pro Linux development studios. Up until Unreal Tournament 2004, they'd have Linux clients. Then the debacle of Unreal Tournament III... Granted their naming for those are as horrible as Windows versions...

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: slaapliedjeI think the idea is

there is no idea, the average joe knows jack shit about computers, he probably dont know what an source code is, or open source and call game modifications "mods" even if the mod was done with full source code access.
we dont call that mods, its "forks".

i own a few physical media games, and let me tell you, i dont know how to rip their content to save my life.

So any of tge open source wngines that need data are useless to you? I still have my Quake 1 CD somewhere... totally easy to download one of the updated engines and copy tge files off the disk. Hell, I install Doom on my Amigas and Atari Falcon this way.

I don't talk to enough normal people these days, but pretty sure most don't mod their games that much, except maybe Skyrim, which is a meh experience without them.

no, the ones i own are for n64 and ds , i dont know how to rip then to backup and the n64 ones arent working anymore, so having then in physical media is useless from a preservation point of view.

to be fair i have some pc games as well.

Generally DeOxit will help with getting old carts working again. There are ways to rip such things, though I think at this point most of those will have been ripped / archived by now.

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Quoting: Frawo

Quoting: EikeWell, I could hardly believe the situation with native Linux games is that bad, so I tried it on my side. I redownloaded and started the first 10 games I got for Linux on Steam, from late 2012 to mid 2013.(*) Every single one of them is running without problems and without any tinkering on my 2023 system.

I recently tried EndeavourOS and couldn't get native games to run, in particular Payday 2 and Metro Exodus. Playing these games with Proton worked fine however. I checked drivers, vulkan and a few other things, but no luck. Never found out what was missing. Back on Manjaro, native games where running out of the box...

As much as I prefer to play native, I do love the fact that I can always use Proton as a fallback when the native version doesn't work anymore or gets dropped.

Maybe some 32bit libraries? (just a shot in the dark, I would think at least those two are 64bit native).

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: slaapliedjeWeird, pretty sure Monaco worked for me when it came out.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/113020/discussions/4/630802343848424492/#c666824800759604947

Huh, well I have 58min of play time, but suure enough it crashes, even after making the change to the shaderfile.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: ArdjeI am actually just glad if they keep supporting proton.
The fact is: proton is the only middle ware that guarantees support for the next 20 years. Not because it acts like windows, in fact it doesn't. Unlike windows, proton guarantees a fixed API and bug compatibility.
None of my original Linux games still work, but their windows counter parts work without problems or patches on proton. And no, they don't work on windows 11 either.

Well, I could hardly believe the situation with native Linux games is that bad, so I tried it on my side. I redownloaded and started the first 10 games I got for Linux on Steam, from late 2012 to mid 2013.(*) Every single one of them is running without problems and without any tinkering on my 2023 system.

(*) My PAYDAY: I got some new collectible cards. :D

It's mainly older titles, 2000s and earlier. But for a Linux game from Steam that doesn't work: Monaco.
I booted it up sometime last year, and it instantly crashed.
As it turns out, it's a known issue since launch, that they never fixed. The entire issue is solved by modifying a shader file.

Weird, pretty sure Monaco worked for me when it came out. One problem with gaming on Linux is we have two major vendors for gaming... and two completely different implementations of OpenGL / Vulkan. Windows has targets for DirectX. There is just enough of a difference on Linux that we have had porting houses specifically say they don't support one or the other, and it causes an already small market share to split.

If nvidia would just adopt Mesa... though I feel there could be issues with that. Playing with my AmigaOS4 box, it amusingly only wirks with Radeon cards, since they can access source code to get it to work.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: slaapliedjeI think the idea is

there is no idea, the average joe knows jack shit about computers, he probably dont know what an source code is, or open source and call game modifications "mods" even if the mod was done with full source code access.
we dont call that mods, its "forks".

i own a few physical media games, and let me tell you, i dont know how to rip their content to save my life.

So any of tge open source wngines that need data are useless to you? I still have my Quake 1 CD somewhere... totally easy to download one of the updated engines and copy tge files off the disk. Hell, I install Doom on my Amigas and Atari Falcon this way.

I don't talk to enough normal people these days, but pretty sure most don't mod their games that much, except maybe Skyrim, which is a meh experience without them.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: ElectricPrismAnyways -- this is more a problem with SaaS (Software as a Service) -- because it's not really clear what I'm buying when I spend money-- A Physical Copy -- Is a Physical Copy

i hate this mindset since an idiot told me that i need an physical copy of an software in order to "own" it...
in my opinion having the source code to an software and the right to use/modify/distribute worth much more than being able to just use it.
but no, according to him i need an physical copy of the software, in an cd or catridge format otherwise i dont own it...

I think the idea is that if you have a physical copy, you have access to install it at anytime. With digital platforms they could close down, or the internet goes out for a long period of time, etc.

Granted you have shit releases like Postal 3, which I bought a physical copy, but all it did was redownload the whole thing through Steam... so it took a long time to install off the two DVDs it came on, plus the time it took for my slow internet to refetch it all.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: slaapliedjeYou know what would be hilarious? If WSL2 and some Mac layer actually got to the point of being performant enough for gaming... and everyone just switched to doing Linux Native games, as they'd just work on Windows and Mac anyhow.

as things are moving the future looks more like:
driver developers start focusing more on WSL than linux (at least for the desktop hardware) we end up having more performance virtualizing linux than runing natively, linux aways having just an subset of windows games and being perceived as the inferior platform as an result, and even if someone made an game exclusively to linux so people dont feel like "why use this system if windows can do everything this can+ more", people would just use WSL to access the content.

Ha, the problem is that performance of wsl2 is pretty trash. I am convinced it is sort of on purpose to give Windows users the perception Linux is slow for any GUI stuff.

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