"But another huge boost to the game’s popularity has been cross-platform play — meaning you can play with your friends who are accessing it on a variety of devices and platforms."
And it can run on iOS and soon Android as well.. but not Linux.
That's a bit of a shame, kind of curious to try that game out now but I can't imagine gaming on Android / iOS is something comfortable.
Just weigh the benefits and costs of supporting Linux and it's obvious why they made that decision. How many million people are not playing Fortnite because they don't support Linux? I bet it rounds to zero.
Epic doesn’t really support Linux that well - they mainly support Linux as a cross-compile target, running the editor natively is a bit more hairy and extremely poorly documented.
It doesn’t run currently on Android and BattleEye doesn’t work on iOS either they don’t bother with anti cheat on mobile you just do root / jailbreak detection as you can’t really cheat without them as you need to hook into the memory and the network stack.
There is a single developer who writes changes to UE4 for Linux support. And he doesn't work in Epic.
UnrealED doesn't work on Linux, AFAIK only HTML5 build pipeline could be run on Linux, so you could make changes to code, but you can't test them if you're using "officially supported" platform.
Do you run in windowed (macOS-native) fullscreen or (what I assume is) direct-to-graphics-card fullscreen? The windowed fullscreen performance was abysmal compared to when I switched to the other. I forget what the default was, but it's worth investigating.
On Windows it's probably more performant either way, but at least with the above change I was able to at least run it playably on my 2017.
I'm not a big gamer, but i recall in the late 90s - early 2000s timeframe there were several big-title FPS games available on Linux (Quake series, Unreal, Half Life). Whatever happened to that momentum? Not enough demand, I guess?
Not sure what you mean. Video drivers on Linux are finally coming together for all the main players. Nvidia's proprietary drivers are still good, Radeon's free drivers are very competitive and Intel free drivers are still great (though suck for gaming).
Yeah, just stop your X server and run this opaque binary, answer these questions about kernel modules, restart X, and hope your display config isn't completely messed up... super easy!
Note: helper packages (i.e. installer cleanup and kernel mod builder) are in both contrib and main repos, so I highly recommend setting up APT-preferences.
Except that Intel still doesn't make a graphics chip worth anything when it comes to running 3D games like Fortnight. And AMD opensource drivers are far from having nVidia-like feature and capabilitiy parity with their Windwos counterparts. Sadly.
What is missing from AMD's drivers? They are great now IME, I'm using them to play games. (Note I have older GCN hardware - there seem to be more bugs with more recent hardware where they are still making bigger changes)
For a while my employer was buying motherboards with a graphics chip that requires gma500 drivers. Forget which but it was an Atom platform of somewhat recent vintage. gma500 ain't dead yet, sadly
I don't dare update my display drivers unless I have 3 days without a deliverable because of the disaster it usually is.
Usually (yes, more than 50% of the times) it will break my displays (fail to detect both monitors, switch to some weird resolution etc), and always it will break CUDA/CUDNN so I have hours of work making that work again.
I have a completely standard setup: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, NVidia GPU, Intel CPU.
(I've been using Linux since Slackware 0.9, so yes I do know how to configure things. I'm sick of it not getting better since then).
I suggest you switch to btrfs and use volume snapshots. That way you can take a snapshot just before you do a major upgrade (like a driver update) and if things don't work out you can instantly restore your system so you can keep working.
Historically, drivers were often not available at all, at least not ones that actually exposed the real power of the hardware - and performance is usually lower.
See this set of recent benchmarks for instance, which show Linux performance lagging behind W10 by 15-25%.
These days, the performance diff is mostly from relatively low effort ports. I'm not really complaining about them - they have to earn money.
But in most cases it's not primarily a drivers problem anymore.
"But another huge boost to the game’s popularity has been cross-platform play — meaning you can play with your friends who are accessing it on a variety of devices and platforms."
And it can run on iOS and soon Android as well.. but not Linux.
That's a bit of a shame, kind of curious to try that game out now but I can't imagine gaming on Android / iOS is something comfortable.