Quoting: alexThunder

Quoting: liamdaweWhat's not to be "butthurt" about that?

I thought you're feeling butthurt, because we should lower our hopes for a borderlands 2 port. I mean, I can understand your opinion about Colonial Marines very well, but I think that one doesn't belong to this news/article, does it?

That's the second time you've alluded that Colonial Marines is irrelevant to this editorial. Almost as if you had no idea who developed it.

Hint: Gearbox.

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Quoting: Half-Shot

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: scaineBottom line - it's amazing what Icculus does, but porting a game as an after thought is NOT easy and will never have the same quality as a game developed natively. Even Ryan Gordon isn't that good.

It's not a question of how good he is, he is certainly capable. The question is support costs, developers like Tripwire (Killing Floor) would have paid him to port it, not to support it. So once a developer thinks it's good enough Ryan will get his money and then they would part ways.

I don't think he charges amazingly high that gearbox could take a loss on it though, isn't it just the case of sending him the code and getting a game back? I mean there is bug testing, QA and more but thats the basic gist.

No idea what he charges, but he certainly does support the games. However, for long, I have no idea, or even if he's actually paid for providing that support. I assume so, but since Killing Floor has been out for Linux for over a year and it still has the same issues, it's anyone's guess.

In fact, taking a look - https://bugzilla.icculus.org/describecomponents.cgi, while anyone can file a bug report, it doesn't look like Ryan ever responds. And certainly, looking at Killing Floor, the texture bugs were reported over a year ago, but the bug's never had an update.

So, "best effort" might be putting it optimistically.

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Quoting: entropy

Quoting: manny

Quoting: entropyWasn't Gabe Newell saying recently that it turned out to be easy to convince publishers to support Linux? Gearbox obviously disagrees.

Engines my friend, engines.

Unreal engine3 doesn't have linux support out of the box. So porting takes more efforts and time.

I expect we'll get more support with UE4 games. I expect chances will be higher once they start using UE4 for games, (maybe a future borderlands3).

If Icculus as a single developer can port UE3 games, a big company like Gearbox should be able too without "wasting" too many resources.

Apart from that, I agree. Having engines supporting Linux as a target out-of-the-box might help significantly. Same goes for the other major game engines that have announced Linux support.

I am in awe of what Icculus does, but I've yet to play a single one UE3 game that didn't have horrible, often game-breaking bugs.

Examples :

Killing Floor - missing textures on all maps, West London is nearly unplayable as a result. I can see the invisible monsters. But I can't see through some scopes...

Sanctum 2 - Textures missing (minor), collision issues (player and monsters falling through the world) and many, many random crashes. This one is still in beta, but it's been like that for weeks without any updates.

Dungeon Defenders - Lots of random crashes, weird mouse sensitivity, poorer performance than what you'd expect.

As for his other non-UE ports, such as Psychonauts or Frozen Synapse, there are other smaller issues. Mouse tracking issues. Gamepad issues. Resolution issues.

Bottom line - it's amazing what Icculus does, but porting a game as an after thought is NOT easy and will never have the same quality as a game developed natively. Even Ryan Gordon isn't that good.

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Quoting: FutureSutureHow many of you actually contacted Gearbox in some manner to let the folks there know you're interested instead of just commenting here? If you haven't contacted Gearbox yet, then do so!

Liam's referred to this post in his reply to Randy Pitchford. Besides, Randy's agreed to raise it internally already, so the Reddit thread itself was enough.

But you're right. It can't hurt to have your voice heard directly.

Interesting though - here's a massive software house, who publish on Steam, who typically launch their Windows games with Mac compatibility and yet Steam Machines were announced last year, while the Linux client for Steam has been around even longer, over a year.

And the President of this massive, Steam-based software house only now is going to raise it internally?

That's... unbelievable.

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For interested parties, you can see a list of all the games Icculus has ported, or is still currently working on here - https://bugzilla.icculus.org/describecomponents.cgi.

I'm delighted by this news. I sank 70 hours in Borderlands 2 in late 2012 and early 2013, before ditching my Windows partition. That's about the same amount of time I spent on Skyrim during 2011 onwards - one of my biggest time sinks on Steam, apart from my frankly embarrassing 230 hours on Killing Floor.

There's an absolute heap of high quality DLC I could sink my time into if this makes the jump. Great news!

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I missed out on the whole Myst phenomenon (can you see what I did there?), but was curious enough to visit their Kickstarter and hopefully get on board second time around. Sadly, no Linux support. So this is good news, albeit I've "myst" the boat again (just in case you didn't get it the first time).

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Yep, it has a few bugs, but it's pretty playable as is. It does crash to desktop after the first level, but I've played the next four with an issue.

Well, not "without an issue". Without a crash, yes, but there are issues. Mainly, on the last level, there are tiles with red half-globes on them, but for some reason, the tiles don't actually support your character, so while the Lumes will run over them, you fall to your death.

And yes, the resolution can be changed, but it doesn't remember the change between games. And the MSAA will vanish all the text in the game, which sadly includes the menu text, so it's probably for the best that the graphics don't remember between games, or that would be pretty frustrating.

The core game though - excellent. Really enjoying it. Polish up the bugs and this will be a hit.

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Excited for this one. The hours I sank into Sanctum 1. Can't wait to play this.

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Quoting: maokei

Quoting: BdMdesigN

Quoting: No SecurityValve like's ignoring security feature's on Linux first SElinux now this how soon before Hackers take Aim at SteamOS SteamOS may end up being insecure Like Windows....
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/558751364755076566/#c558752449797254245

You are aware that the SteamOS is BETA software and Valve must first advance the Graphical optimization?
You are also aware that the Debian, all technical safety matters brings?
You are also aware, that's not two quietly required SElinux and there is also a substitute for it?

Correct me if Im wrong but the fixed the SELinux problemnot long ago.

Yep - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/issues/50#issuecomment-36927497. This was closed out about a month ago.

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Quoting: neffo

Quoting: GuestI've been using Steam for Linux since the beginning, and only got the survey on Linux for the first time... While I regularly get it when using Wine to run Steam.

Wine is recorded as Linux (and the Wine version is also recorded). I'd speculate that the reason you see it more is likely due to the fact that people running under Wine decline it more often than those in native Linux.

I'd like to see a citation for that. It's been argued the other way before - I didn't think Valve had published anything to the effect that "wine is recorded as Linux".

Quoting: neffo

Quoting: LordpkappaI never see a single survey in Linux, 2-3 times in Windows.

Same thing here. Linux users have a reason to answer the survey, Windows users don't.

So you think Windows users will actually cancel the survey? That's debatable - I reckon they'd just click "submit" to get rid of the annoying dialog box on their screens. Plus, there's a lot of Windows fan boys there.

I wonder if there's another reason us Linux boys and girls don't seem to get the survey as much. Maybe Valve are happy to milk the 1% mark until the Steam Machines go live, THEN give it an equal footing. That would massively boost the SteamOS/Linux figures, citing the devices as a "success".

As conspiracy theories go, I'm happy with this explanation. No, no, don't go picking holes in it... just accept it. Move along now.

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