
Cryengine 3.8.1 Adds Support for Linux, OpenGL and Oculus Rift - jrepin
http://cryengine.com/news/update-from-the-team-cryengine-381-is-here-adding-opengl-linux-and-oculus-rift-support
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SwellJoe
I buy and play an order of magnitude more games these days now that there is a
reasonably large library of games on Steam with Linux support. I don't know if
it moves the revenue needle for them enough to notice it, but I spent about
$10/year on games (sometimes I'd go more than a year between buying a game)
before Linux support became a common thing. It's a heck of a lot more than
that now, and would be higher still if more games I wanted to play were
available for Linux.

I have Windows 7 on my laptop, but my desktop machine (which has a huge video
card) only runs Linux. So, gaming happens on Linux or not at all (almost; I
play Civ V on my laptop sometimes).

~~~
INTPenis
There are even games outside of steam, private distributors like Rimworld or
steam-alternatives like GOG.

People have grown sick of the phrase "this is the year of the linux desktop"
but I can't help remember when all the games I could play were nethack and
tuxracer.

~~~
knodi123
oh yeah, tuxracer! haha, wasted way more time on that than I'd be proud to
admit.

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dijit
Slowly removing microsofts AAA game monopoly!

this is a great thing, as a person who only runs linux, I'm super excited at
the idea of getting the older games updated to this version and potentially
running on Linux. :)

~~~
asddubs
If only. Take e.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity,
so they would literally only have to push a button to support linux, and yet,
no linux support.

~~~
tadzik_
Maybe they have learned other developers' lesson that a it takes much more
than a push of a button to get a Unity game on Linux.

QA takes time. Middleware may or may not be available. Launchers may not be
there (especially in the case of Hearthstone). A lost of indie/kickstarted
projects are still considered "Linux Scams" because they assumed that it'd be
that easy.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>are still considered "Linux Scams"

This is the biggest concern. The linux community is crazy hostile. Heaven
forbid your game doesn't work on some wonky setup that would be 100%
unreasonable to support. We also see this in Android where reviews for games
are sometimes, "Zero stars, doesn't work on $49 $obscure_chinatablet."

Even if a company picked a reference Linux distro, like the current Ubuntu, it
would be still displease a lot people, especially if the game only worked
correctly on closed video drivers. There's really no winning in such a
fragmented environment, unless you're willing to invest a serious amount of
your budget here. Its not just "push a button."

~~~
cwyers
What people seem to have a hard time understanding is that Linux is not an
operating system, it's a family of operating systems. Someone running Gentoo
with OpenRC and Xfce, someone running Debian with sysvinit and GNOME and
someone running Arch with systemd and KDE are all "running Linux." This is
more difficult than Windows or OS X, where you can rely on the low-level
system plumbing staying the same from machine to machine (versions of OS X are
all closer to each other than Linuxes are to each other and there's a lot
fewer of them).

~~~
jon-wood
Valve are doing a lot to help here by distributing Steam with a known set of
libraries that will be used by any games launched via Steam. There's still
going to be some variation, but developers can at least know which version of
key libraries they can rely on

~~~
mrec
I think their new refund policy will also help a lot. Being able to try a game
to see if it works, and get your money back hassle-free if it doesn't, ought
to take a lot of the anxiety out of the fragmented-target-OS issue.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Sure, the refund happens but now the devs have to contend with all the pissy
reviews on their game's store page because the game didn't work with their
very specific use cases. Its easier to just not bother unless you want to
devote significant support and development resources to making the game run on
any linux frakenputer.

"Crashes when using wayland. FAIL!"

------
mrmondo
About time. I am so sick of rebooting into Windows just to play the odd game.
I find myself spending a lot of the time rebooting for windows updates,
removing spyware or finding myself rebooting into OS X / Linux when needing to
do work (ssh, git etc...)

~~~
tormeh
Install steam for Linux. There's enough good games that, unless you are an
enthusiast, gaming on Linux only is completely acceptable. I'd recommend
Civilization V, dreamfall chapters, spec ops: the line (way smarter than it
looks), witcher 2, team fortress 2 and braid. Those are the kinds of games
that are officially supported for Steam on Ubuntu these days. Most of the rpg
classics (torment, baldur's gate etc) on gog.com also works on linux, if
that's more your thing.

~~~
mrmondo
Thanks for the tip. Last time I tried steam on Linux it only supported Ubuntu
and only has 32bit packages with broken i386 compatibility dependencies but
that's probably changed now I'm assuming. I've actually really been enjoying
Elite: Dangerous recently and they've just come out with an OSX client which
is great.

~~~
SwellJoe
I run Steam on two different 64 bit Fedora machines (one with AMD, one with
nVidia). It might have installed 32 bit compatibility libraries, but I don't
mind and didn't notice, if it did.

Civ V and all of the Valve games are excellent under Linux. Rust is a little
flaky, but I get the impression it's a little flaky under Windows, too.

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anon4
Unfortunately, Oculus removed Linux&OSX support. Or at least put it on
indefinite life-unsupport. [https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-
rift/](https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/)

------
tormeh
Whenever I see news about opengl these days I only think about how great
vulkan is going to be. I know the spec won't be out until late this year, and
drivers will probably need a good 6 months, but still everything opengl
already feels outdated.

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malkia
Next step must be making the tools run on Linux/OSX.

I've been using Linux as a desktop at work, and it just works.

(Good HW configuration seems to be the key though, and Windows still is the
leader of running almost on anything x86 out there)

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mladenkovacevic
Things are looking good for October when the pre-order Steam Controller and
Steam Links should ship out :)

I don't play games on my desktop computer anymore because I prefer to do work
there. After giving my old Xbox 360 to my nephew I've been hesitant to get
another console, choosing instead to wait out Steam's living room experience
(Steam's where most of my games are anyways). It'll be fun to fill some of my
work breaks with a little bit of light gaming on the couch.

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hitlin37
supporting your game engine for Linux is great for overall PC game ecosystem
and not just Linux. Also, for a casual gamer, its a win as they can probably
buy a 20$ game and run it on a Linux laptop without needing to buy the PS
machine. I mean, most of us run a i5 8gig laptop as a dev machine anyway.

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shmerl
Not surprising. Demand is coming from developers, so all major engines are
supporting Linux now. Those who don't will be less competitive.

Some middleware solutions however still lag behind. For instance Umbra 3D
still has no Linux support: [http://umbra3d.com/](http://umbra3d.com/)

I wonder how Witcher 3 developers plan to port it to Linux without Umbra.

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erikb
Oh yes, another major step taken! I love how the whole world switches to
Linux. Now I hope they start to leverage the GPU driver companies into better
Linux support. At least on my computer it's still complicated as hell to get
everything running and even then the performance is quite below of what
Windows drivers would get done.

~~~
microcolonel
With Vulkan, there will be a lot less to providing quality drivers; Of course
Intel has been really good with their drivers for about five years or so(and
we know there's already a Vulkan driver for Intel hardware that will be
released along with the spec)

Their linux OpenGL drivers often outperform their Windows drivers.

As for AMD, the open source Radeon drivers are pleasant to work with, and on
some hardware perform as well as Catalyst.

~~~
erikb
That's quite interesting. The reason I bought my laptop with a secondary
NVidia card was because I heard AMD on linux should be aweful. Did that change
or did I hear it wrong or something? Getting a secondary NVidia card working
is a pain in the butt, at least from my experience.

~~~
MrRadar
AMD is better at providing documentation needed to write open-source drivers,
nVidia is better at providing a high-quality closed-source driver. From what I
understand nVidia's closed-source driver is still the best for gaming and
other intensive 3D applications followed by AMD's closed-source driver.

The open-source drivers are not on the same performance level as the closed-
source drivers, though the AMD open-source driver can be classified as
"usable" (or better) in most contexts whereas the nVidia open-source driver
has many issues since it depends far more on reverse-engineering the GPU's
programming interface. Intel has the best open source driver of all of the
desktop vendors (since the open source driver is their official driver) but
its use for anything 3D is constrained by the relatively weak performance of
their GPUs.

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lentil_soup
There's more in-depth information on the release notes:
[http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/EaaS+3.8.1](http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/EaaS+3.8.1)

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outworlder
> While you will still need Windows to use the Sandbox Editor

Bummer.

I suppose it's a good step forwards though.

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fsloth
Microsoft has pretty strict conformance tests for all DirectX drivers. Is
there anything comparable qualitywise for Opengl drivers on Linux?

~~~
dogma1138
Not ATM, there's also a fuss about using closed source drivers/components.

Wine is major performance and feature hit since it attempts to translate DX
API calls into OpenGL, many of the commercial GameOnLinux solutions are
technically wine with slightly better profiles.

Engines with dedicated Linux support are still well kinda messy, graphically
wise they might still have to make sacrifice mostly because OpenGL was in a
political limbo for a decade and didn't kept up with DX graphical API.

But the biggest issue in many games for me was actually the controls, audio,
and network code. DX is much more than just graphics and OpenGL doesn't cover
audio, controls and network code. So unless your engine has discrete code to
deal with that e.g. uses Steam Workshop or what ever Unity calls their set of
API's you'll get quite a shitty experience.

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BonoboBoner
Does it run Crysis? Apparently now Linux can.

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archagon
Isn't Crytek not in good financial shape? Seems a bit risky to rely on them
right now.

~~~
supercoder
No doubt Steam / Value are offering enough incentive to make it worthwhile.

~~~
dogma1138
Somehow doubt this is the case, Crytek said they are following CDPR's
footsteps and they are reforging their core business strategy to become an
online publisher.

GOG at this point seems to be an actual threat to Valve's Steam, they got the
right business model at this point to pull it off. If they'll still would've
been as Good if they were in Valve's shoes i don't know.

But no DRM on any game, and an offset for regional pricing which means It's
finally makes sense to me to buy games in GBP with a very good customer
support policy makes me wish i could transfer my giant Steam library to GOG.

~~~
cwyers
> GOG at this point seems to be an actual threat to Valve's Steam

GOG Galaxy is such a load. I tried reinstalling some games after I replaced a
hard drive -- in order to get one game to work I had to dig into the GOG
folders and manually run the installer myself. And then I had to redownload
another entire game again to get the synced saved game files, because GOG
Galaxy seemed to neither think that it was important to download my saved game
files the first time or to make the saved game files available for download
separately for the main game. There are very, very few people willing to put
up with the level of inconvenience GOG Galaxy presents versus Steam just for
the lack of DRM, so long as Steam keeps its DRM unobtrusive enough for most
people not to notice it.

~~~
dogma1138
Not talking about GOG Galaxy at this point, but about GOG in general, steam
was a steaming pile of crap the for quite a while i remember the outrage of
having to install it to play HL2 and some other games like COD(2?) even when
they came on a disk. I also remembering steam breaking entire game
installations (which came on a freaking CD back in 2000 and change), losing my
save files, changing localization of games, and heck even giving me grief when
attempting to launch a game from a region other than it was purchased from.

Not to mention the thing i hate the most about steam is it getting it's
nickers in a twist and refusing to go into an offline mode or launch games
while in offline mode that weren't launched for X amount of time.

To this day every time i travel i keep cracks for all of my steam games that i
might want to play while on a plane or in a hotel with poor internet
connection, or just somewhere in the middle of nowhere like my GF's parents
summer house in Iceland.

And the sad part? most of the people i know who both use steam and travel
allot are still doing the same for any game which might have some weird pseudo
online-DRM which cannot be launched without steam from the steamapps folder
directly.

GOG in general has a much better user policy than steam, the regional price
normalization alone is worth it this means that Europe and more importantly
the UK which paid much more on games than the US due to currency exchange rate
actually get a rebate to match the USD game price.

You also have 30 days refund for any purchase no questions asked, and ofc no
DRM. And the fact that even with GOG Galaxy you can still do anything you want
without a client makes this service better than steam.

How long will they be able to keep up with such generous user oriented
policies i don't know, but for sure it looks better than steam atm.

