Quoting: GuestThe problem with the "just ship all your dependencies" argument is how far do you take it ? A simple example, we need to ship libcurl. If we want https support, that typically depends on OpenSSL. Do we now have to ship OpenSSL ? What about the things OpenSSL depends on ?

Say we have a GTK3 UI somewhere. Do we ship the whole of GTK3 and all its dependencies ? That's pretty large. You're probably thinking "but everyone will have GTK3" - not so. Some people use setups which are exclusively Qt, or GTK2.

"Just statically link" is also a bad idea - that doesnt solve anything, and in fact it makes future compatibility WORSE because now you cannot replace the older versions of libraries at all. If there's a security issue in the old build, you're stuck with it. Not to mention if you are a complex game (like ARMA 3) then statically linking libs is a huge waste of VM space.

IMO, the Linux runtime linker (ld.so) needs support for two things:

1) Library versioning *at the load stage*, with embedded version numbers in the library files themselves. The method Mach-O uses of dual version numbers - library version and ABI compatibility version, should be adopted. It's easy to add to ELF.

2) Weak linking. This means that you can specify you want to link to a library IF it exists, but still run if it doesn't - you can check at run time if the library loaded or not. Currently this has to be implemented manually with dlopen/dlsym, and it's a lot of hassle.

#1 have existed on Linux since day one. This is where the semantic versioning of the shared library kicks in, unfortunately not everyone who writes shared libraries follows the rules for semantic versioning and simply put their actual version there.

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Quoting: silmeth

Quoting: F.UltraIf only writers of shared libraries would think more about backwards compatibility...

It would suffice if they followed semantic versioning with regard to their libraries’ APIs – one would know which shared versions are compatible. Some libs would have a few hundred new major versions every year – but at least it’d be obvious that every game needs its own separate copy of it in its own version.

At least until we dive into compiled C++ libraries where the version of the compiler that compiled the library and a game binary matters, as C++ has no stable ABI (so library compiled with newer gcc might, and probably will, stop working with old executable).

Following the semantic versioning would most definitely help yes, but I see many libraries that make completely unneeded changes to both API and ABI.

Once in a while I think that whenever a library writer creates a version that is no longer ABI compatible then they should be required to write a shim library for the previous version that uses the new version, that way security fixes and so on would still be applied to the users of the old version and distributions could install all the hundreds of shims when you install a library (since all the old versions are just small shims they should be very small in size so the overhead should not be that great) or perhaps as a libxxx-shim package just like we have -dev/-devel packages on most distributions.

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Quoting: kf

Quote- Unless running via a .sh (LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH DISPLAY=:0 stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 ./MainBinary), native extensions (.so) cease to load correctly.

Isn't this standard when you ship games that require specific versions of libraries? I've even seen many steam games do this even with the steam runtime avaliable.

Yes, it's basically the equivalent of how they on Windows have to bundle all their external dependencies and install them in the same folder as the game (and thus users have millions of the same DLL:s on their hard drives).

If only writers of shared libraries would think more about backwards compatibility...

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Quoting: chancho_zombieafter trying with a second visa debit card, over steam, it finally worked!! you are right @Comandante Ñoñardo, debit cards work!! but not all of them.

Are you sure that it's not some geographical security setting on your VISA? On my bank I can select and deselect various geographical regions where my VISA can be used, the default is enabled for my local country only.

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Quoting: MayeulC

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: MayeulCI remember a game that lasted me six months, singleplayer on civ V (biggest map, slow time). But not every game is like this.

Usually, playing with your friends as an ally is less boring, as they can see your troops.

This is also a good candidate as a "mail-chess"-like (see freeciv 2's website).

A bit sad to hear this. Would love to hear the complete technical analysis of what happens here. The function names, actual differences, etc.

Is it floating point related, RNG related, other? Wine doesn't seem to have a problem with this. Wouldn't using some parts of winelib help? (It is LGPL, so definitely linkable against).

Wine does not experience this problem, but it will also not fix it. Because the difference in the floating points are due to the compiler (yes different math libraries can also cause this but there is a basic difference on the compiler level) so one fix would of course be to force all windows devs to compile with gcc, but for some strange reason most windows devs prefer the Visual Studio compiler.

Ooh,that's right :)

Another solution could then be writing a hybrid: separate the game logic/simulation into its own library (or object file), and link it later (might need a DLL loader, but I don't think it's that complicated; and maybe a shim or two if the calling conventions are different).

In any case, I trust Feral to be competent enough to know the right thing to do (and choose whether to spend time on doing it).

Or rather the companies doing these multiplayer protocols should stop using the raw float values since they cannot be trusted (different raw values of a float can produce the same decimal representation which is the problem) and there is nothing that says that a new version of the Visual Studio compiler will produce raw float values that is binary compatible with the current/old ones. Would probably speed up things as well if they changed to something sane like i.e scaled integers.

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Quoting: MayeulCI remember a game that lasted me six months, singleplayer on civ V (biggest map, slow time). But not every game is like this.

Usually, playing with your friends as an ally is less boring, as they can see your troops.

This is also a good candidate as a "mail-chess"-like (see freeciv 2's website).

A bit sad to hear this. Would love to hear the complete technical analysis of what happens here. The function names, actual differences, etc.

Is it floating point related, RNG related, other? Wine doesn't seem to have a problem with this. Wouldn't using some parts of winelib help? (It is LGPL, so definitely linkable against).

Wine does not experience this problem, but it will also not fix it. Because the difference in the floating points are due to the compiler (yes different math libraries can also cause this but there is a basic difference on the compiler level) so one fix would of course be to force all windows devs to compile with gcc, but for some strange reason most windows devs prefer the Visual Studio compiler.

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: EhvisI remember one game where the developer had a Unity3D game running within a day, but had dependency problems when starting from the Steam runtime.

STASIS is suffering from this right now. The engine needs newer libstdc++.so.6 than provided in SteamOS so it doesn't start there. So another advice: check your dependencies on older distros if possible and either ship the libs with the game or link them statically if you can.

Actually this is a very specially sad case. SteamOS supplies 6.0.20 but the Steam runtime supplies the 6.0.21 version that STASIS requires so the problem with STATIS is that it doesn't use the Steam runtime but the system one and that Valve somehow messed up their own distribution by supplying an older version for the OS than what they themselves support via their runtime.

For STASIS it should work on SteamOS if they changed their start script to look in the Steam runtime path for libraries before looking at the system path.

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The stock exchange story does not hold water at all. Witcher 2 was released for Linux on 2014-05-22 and the blog post talked about the CDR share plummeting on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2014. Well this is the actual closing prices of the CDR share on the Warsaw Stock Exchange from the release to the end of 2014 and as you all can see the price went up, not down (it closed the year at +12.45% as compared with the day the Linux version was released).

| 2014-05-22 |      14.85 |
| 2014-05-23 |      14.66 |
| 2014-05-26 |      14.89 |
| 2014-05-27 |       14.8 |
| 2014-05-28 |       14.8 |
| 2014-05-29 |      14.89 |
| 2014-05-30 |       15.2 |
| 2014-06-02 |       15.4 |
| 2014-06-03 |      15.38 |
| 2014-06-04 |      15.32 |
| 2014-06-05 |      16.15 |
| 2014-06-06 |       16.5 |
| 2014-06-09 |      16.75 |
| 2014-06-10 |      16.58 |
| 2014-06-11 |      16.27 |
| 2014-06-12 |       16.5 |
| 2014-06-13 |       16.1 |
| 2014-06-16 |      16.25 |
| 2014-06-17 |       16.3 |
| 2014-06-18 |       16.7 |
| 2014-06-20 |      16.73 |
| 2014-06-23 |      16.35 |
| 2014-06-24 |      15.88 |
| 2014-06-25 |      15.44 |
| 2014-06-26 |       15.3 |
| 2014-06-27 |         15 |
| 2014-06-30 |      15.24 |
| 2014-07-01 |      15.07 |
| 2014-07-02 |       15.2 |
| 2014-07-03 |         15 |
| 2014-07-04 |      15.07 |
| 2014-07-07 |         15 |
| 2014-07-08 |       15.3 |
| 2014-07-09 |      15.23 |
| 2014-07-10 |      15.08 |
| 2014-07-11 |      14.95 |
| 2014-07-14 |      14.72 |
| 2014-07-15 |      14.85 |
| 2014-07-16 |      14.84 |
| 2014-07-17 |       14.9 |
| 2014-07-18 |      15.25 |
| 2014-07-21 |      15.33 |
| 2014-07-22 |      15.42 |
| 2014-07-23 |       15.6 |
| 2014-07-24 |       15.5 |
| 2014-07-25 |      15.63 |
| 2014-07-28 |       15.5 |
| 2014-07-29 |       15.5 |
| 2014-07-30 |      15.41 |
| 2014-07-31 |       15.3 |
| 2014-08-01 |      15.06 |
| 2014-08-04 |      15.25 |
| 2014-08-05 |       15.4 |
| 2014-08-06 |      15.08 |
| 2014-08-07 |      14.47 |
| 2014-08-08 |       14.5 |
| 2014-08-11 |       14.9 |
| 2014-08-12 |      14.77 |
| 2014-08-13 |         15 |
| 2014-08-14 |       15.3 |
| 2014-08-18 |      15.25 |
| 2014-08-19 |      15.69 |
| 2014-08-20 |      15.85 |
| 2014-08-21 |       16.2 |
| 2014-08-22 |      16.05 |
| 2014-08-25 |       15.8 |
| 2014-08-26 |       15.7 |
| 2014-08-27 |         16 |
| 2014-08-28 |      15.23 |
| 2014-08-29 |       15.5 |
| 2014-09-01 |      15.45 |
| 2014-09-02 |      15.55 |
| 2014-09-03 |      15.85 |
| 2014-09-04 |      15.89 |
| 2014-09-05 |      15.98 |
| 2014-09-08 |         16 |
| 2014-09-09 |       16.6 |
| 2014-09-10 |      16.75 |
| 2014-09-11 |       16.9 |
| 2014-09-12 |      16.61 |
| 2014-09-15 |       16.7 |
| 2014-09-16 |      16.89 |
| 2014-09-17 |         17 |
| 2014-09-18 |      16.74 |
| 2014-09-19 |      16.76 |
| 2014-09-22 |      16.73 |
| 2014-09-23 |      16.61 |
| 2014-09-24 |      16.59 |
| 2014-09-25 |      16.61 |
| 2014-09-26 |      16.59 |
| 2014-09-29 |      16.59 |
| 2014-09-30 |      16.59 |
| 2014-10-01 |      16.59 |
| 2014-10-02 |      16.63 |
| 2014-10-03 |       16.7 |
| 2014-10-06 |      16.95 |
| 2014-10-07 |      16.97 |
| 2014-10-08 |      16.74 |
| 2014-10-09 |      16.86 |
| 2014-10-10 |       16.4 |
| 2014-10-13 |      16.15 |
| 2014-10-14 |       15.7 |
| 2014-10-15 |      15.46 |
| 2014-10-16 |      15.56 |
| 2014-10-17 |      16.15 |
| 2014-10-20 |      16.26 |
| 2014-10-21 |      16.46 |
| 2014-10-22 |      16.42 |
| 2014-10-23 |       16.5 |
| 2014-10-24 |      16.65 |
| 2014-10-27 |       16.7 |
| 2014-10-28 |      16.68 |
| 2014-10-29 |      16.67 |
| 2014-10-30 |      16.65 |
| 2014-10-31 |       16.7 |
| 2014-11-03 |      16.64 |
| 2014-11-04 |      16.84 |
| 2014-11-05 |      16.73 |
| 2014-11-06 |      16.95 |
| 2014-11-07 |      16.57 |
| 2014-11-10 |      16.45 |
| 2014-11-12 |      16.39 |
| 2014-11-13 |      16.28 |
| 2014-11-14 |      16.44 |
| 2014-11-17 |      16.48 |
| 2014-11-18 |       16.9 |
| 2014-11-19 |      17.73 |
| 2014-11-20 |       17.7 |
| 2014-11-21 |      17.95 |
| 2014-11-24 |      17.99 |
| 2014-11-25 |      17.98 |
| 2014-11-26 |      17.85 |
| 2014-11-27 |       17.5 |
| 2014-11-28 |      17.53 |
| 2014-12-01 |      17.42 |
| 2014-12-02 |      17.98 |
| 2014-12-03 |      17.87 |
| 2014-12-04 |      17.39 |
| 2014-12-05 |       17.4 |
| 2014-12-08 |       17.3 |
| 2014-12-09 |      16.58 |
| 2014-12-10 |       16.8 |
| 2014-12-11 |      16.15 |
| 2014-12-12 |         16 |
| 2014-12-15 |      16.22 |
| 2014-12-16 |      16.22 |
| 2014-12-17 |       16.2 |
| 2014-12-18 |      16.54 |
| 2014-12-19 |      16.19 |
| 2014-12-22 |      16.15 |
| 2014-12-23 |      16.37 |
| 2014-12-29 |      16.36 |
| 2014-12-30 |       16.7 |

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Quoting: Greaser

Quoting: Lakorta

Quoting: Guppy

Quoting: razing32

Quoting: Guppy

Quoting: razing322) Germany ? The heck is happening ? I thought only games with Nazi imagery got banned (for obvious reasons)

The obvious reason being a pathetic attempt at hiding their shameful history from public view. Remember nazi in game are always the villans so there is no chance of the game glorifying it :P

Sorry but have to disagree.
I met germans and I think they apologize too much.
What the Nazis did was a horrible atrocity , but I don;t think Germany today is Germany then.
How many horrible things were done in Europe , Africa , Asia since then yet Germany is held up as the example for human wrong doing. Doesn't seem fair in my mind.

I'm not saying blame Germans today for what happened then, I'm saying censoring media because they contain bits of history your not proud of is a dangerous and slippery slope. Instead own up to it, tech that it's bad and *why* it's bad.

They/We do. Germans are taught about Nazi Germany in school. It's just that Nazi symbols are forbidden unless they're for educational purpose.

And this is what I never understood.
For example movies have an educational purpose the same way as a game could have.
The Nazi Symols in movies aren't censored in germany.
But in general they're unconstitutionally and chargeble. So why is that?

Movies that handle the german history serve the art and games aren't subordinated to art yet officially.

Furthermore games are interactive and movies not! Sounds stupid right?

That's the official justification in germany.

Because it will be a long way before society at large will label games as art and the only exception in the German law are for "art or science, research or teaching".

The law itself is a remnant from the Allied occupation after the end of WWII. Of course Germany could remove these laws since the occupation ended decades ago but which politician in their right minds would suggest "we should really allow the nazi symbols again".

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Quoting: razing32Cool if it gets released on Linux , but , is she fighting in high heels ? By the end of that castle , crystal skin will be the last of her problems...

I found the "knees inwards" defensive position far more troublesome to be honest. That looks really, really, cringe worthy.

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