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I bought Civ 6 for Linux purely because it was available on Linux. Bought from Steam. It does seem like they're pushing things in the right direction for Linux

I bought Civ 6 for Linux purely because it was available on Linux. Bought from Steam. It does seem like they're pushing things in the right direction for Linux gaming.

kungtotte 6y ago
One thing that's important for Linux gaming is that games played under Proton on Steam are counted as Linux sales, so publishers and developers get accurate statistics on how many Linux gamers there are. If the market is big enough, cross platform development is viable from the start.
- FrojoS 6y ago
  On the other hand, if the Windows version works fine with Vulcan, why go through the trouble of making a Linux version?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's probably easier to develop proton support for a Windows than to port the entire game to Linux.
    - kungtotte 6y ago
      Sure, but my point was that this shows the value in making a game that's easily portable to begin with. This is more for future games rather than converting existing ones.
  - rawfan 6y ago
    True. I've heard some devs are spending at least some time to optimize their games to work better with Proton.
    - fctorial 6y ago
      Wine/proton team could provide tech support service to firms trying to make their application wine compatible.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Precisely, and developing for Windows is much easier than Linux anyway because it doesn't suffer from the same "lets break userspace every 2 years" problem.
    - kungtotte 6y ago
      Yeah, there's never any issues keeping games working on Windows...
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        There are sometimes problems, sure, but compared to Linux, where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version, it's pretty damned good at compatibility.
        alternatetwo 6y ago
        Age of empires 2 works out of the box on windows 10 ... The game was compiled with Visual Studio 6.0 ... Even that still runs on Win10. So yeah, it's pretty damn good.
        account42 6y ago
        > where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version Ship non-system libraries with your application instead of assuming they will be in /usr/lib* and that's a solved problem. Valve even does that for you with the Steam runtime. This isn't any different on Windows - if you don't bundle your dependencies (including MSVCRT / .NET / whatever) then you will run into problems.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      I know that games are hectic and everything but I am still genuinely confused that porting a game is this complicated. The main meat and potatoes of the game is either nearly platform agnostic (Vk, OpenGL, or emulation) or usually similar in principle (audio). Maybe I've been spoilt by only working on open source projects where people try to write good code because it's public.
  - gpderetta 6y ago
    As long as the game runs fine and it is supported, that's perfectly fine for me. Most ports use ad hoc emulation layers anyway that never see updates once released, while proton see continuous improvements (but of course it can also regress). The better ports use the native APIs of course, but are few and far between.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  How so? At the time of sale it's not clear how the user will play the game, especially considering only a few titles are available officially for Proton.
  - kungtotte 6y ago
    Hm? All titles on Steam when played with Proton are registered as being played on Linux, not just the ones available officially, and if you do this with something you just purchased it will show up in Steam's statistics as a Linux sale. This lets the publishers and developers know that there's a market of Linux gamers because they can see that X thousand players play their game on Linux. So when they make their next game, hopefully they'll pick technologies that lets them release with proper Linux support and not "hope it runs under Proton"-support.
    - Kaze404 6y ago
      Do you have a source for this? I don't doubt that's how it works but it doesn't sound likely.
ekianjo 6y ago
Civ6 was a very poor port on Linux.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Oh god. I have pretty good specs and decided to try to switch my PC over to Linux. At the time all I really wanted to play game-wise was Civ 6. It had a linux port so I'd imagine it would be fine. Dear God was I wrong. I tries it on Ubuntu and it was the only "officially supported" distro. The game was flat out unplayable, FPS drops to the point where I was watching a slide show, UI animations lagged, and attempting to start a multiplayer lobby froze the game at a blank screen, my graphics card showed up as "Unknown Device" despite being dected fine by the Nvidia drivers. I tried for months to figure out was going on. I made sure my graphics drivers were straight, updated firmware, even upgraded to a much more recent kernel and tried different Ubuntu versions. Nothing would work and no one was able to help me out at all. The best lead I found was some very old comments about how the Linux port had atrocious CPU optimization and had basically no multicore support. Anyway maybe close to a year later, I tried again with Fedora, it ran a bit better, which I imagine to be the work of better updated kernel + system packages, but I had to keep it on the lowest graphics settings to make it barely playable. And this was on a system with a decent mid teir graphics card at the time, more memory than I've ever needed and a Ryzen 9. On top of that there were quite a few updates that completely broke cross platform play and apparently modifying version string resources could hack around that at the risk of desyncs. To this day most people ive met that play Civ 6 on Linux swear to me that it runs perfect, so I have no idea what was going on. I've also been told running it via Proton might actually run better but I haven't tried.
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    I didn't notice a difference to be fair. Though nowadays I have a dual boot and the battery life while running Windows is 4x better than on Debian. I think Civ probably consumes more CPU/GPU than it really needs to. Add me to the "it worked OK on Linux" group, though I suspect that a number of drivers could be improved for performance/power reasons. If of use, the laptop I used had an Nvidia 980M which was what I used to play Civ. The fan was blowing hard and the Desktop with a Nvidia 1080 (on Windows) does play faster (I tend to play 'huge' map). It definitely "worked" but maybe less performant.

I bought Civ 6 for Linux purely because it was available on Linux. Bought from Steam. It does seem like they're pushing things in the right direction for Linux gaming.

kungtotte 6y ago

One thing that's important for Linux gaming is that games played under Proton on Steam are counted as Linux sales, so publishers and developers get accurate statistics on how many Linux gamers there are. If the market is big enough, cross platform development is viable from the start.

FrojoS 6y ago
On the other hand, if the Windows version works fine with Vulcan, why go through the trouble of making a Linux version?
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's probably easier to develop proton support for a Windows than to port the entire game to Linux.
  - kungtotte 6y ago
    Sure, but my point was that this shows the value in making a game that's easily portable to begin with. This is more for future games rather than converting existing ones.
- rawfan 6y ago
  True. I've heard some devs are spending at least some time to optimize their games to work better with Proton.
  - fctorial 6y ago
    Wine/proton team could provide tech support service to firms trying to make their application wine compatible.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Precisely, and developing for Windows is much easier than Linux anyway because it doesn't suffer from the same "lets break userspace every 2 years" problem.
  - kungtotte 6y ago
    Yeah, there's never any issues keeping games working on Windows...
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      There are sometimes problems, sure, but compared to Linux, where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version, it's pretty damned good at compatibility.
      - alternatetwo 6y ago
        Age of empires 2 works out of the box on windows 10 ... The game was compiled with Visual Studio 6.0 ... Even that still runs on Win10. So yeah, it's pretty damn good.
      - account42 6y ago
        > where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version Ship non-system libraries with your application instead of assuming they will be in /usr/lib* and that's a solved problem. Valve even does that for you with the Steam runtime. This isn't any different on Windows - if you don't bundle your dependencies (including MSVCRT / .NET / whatever) then you will run into problems.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    I know that games are hectic and everything but I am still genuinely confused that porting a game is this complicated. The main meat and potatoes of the game is either nearly platform agnostic (Vk, OpenGL, or emulation) or usually similar in principle (audio). Maybe I've been spoilt by only working on open source projects where people try to write good code because it's public.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  As long as the game runs fine and it is supported, that's perfectly fine for me. Most ports use ad hoc emulation layers anyway that never see updates once released, while proton see continuous improvements (but of course it can also regress). The better ports use the native APIs of course, but are few and far between.
Kaze404 6y ago
How so? At the time of sale it's not clear how the user will play the game, especially considering only a few titles are available officially for Proton.
- kungtotte 6y ago
  Hm? All titles on Steam when played with Proton are registered as being played on Linux, not just the ones available officially, and if you do this with something you just purchased it will show up in Steam's statistics as a Linux sale. This lets the publishers and developers know that there's a market of Linux gamers because they can see that X thousand players play their game on Linux. So when they make their next game, hopefully they'll pick technologies that lets them release with proper Linux support and not "hope it runs under Proton"-support.
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    Do you have a source for this? I don't doubt that's how it works but it doesn't sound likely.

ekianjo 6y ago

Civ6 was a very poor port on Linux.

the_only_law 6y ago
Oh god. I have pretty good specs and decided to try to switch my PC over to Linux. At the time all I really wanted to play game-wise was Civ 6. It had a linux port so I'd imagine it would be fine. Dear God was I wrong. I tries it on Ubuntu and it was the only "officially supported" distro. The game was flat out unplayable, FPS drops to the point where I was watching a slide show, UI animations lagged, and attempting to start a multiplayer lobby froze the game at a blank screen, my graphics card showed up as "Unknown Device" despite being dected fine by the Nvidia drivers. I tried for months to figure out was going on. I made sure my graphics drivers were straight, updated firmware, even upgraded to a much more recent kernel and tried different Ubuntu versions. Nothing would work and no one was able to help me out at all. The best lead I found was some very old comments about how the Linux port had atrocious CPU optimization and had basically no multicore support. Anyway maybe close to a year later, I tried again with Fedora, it ran a bit better, which I imagine to be the work of better updated kernel + system packages, but I had to keep it on the lowest graphics settings to make it barely playable. And this was on a system with a decent mid teir graphics card at the time, more memory than I've ever needed and a Ryzen 9. On top of that there were quite a few updates that completely broke cross platform play and apparently modifying version string resources could hack around that at the risk of desyncs. To this day most people ive met that play Civ 6 on Linux swear to me that it runs perfect, so I have no idea what was going on. I've also been told running it via Proton might actually run better but I haven't tried.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  I didn't notice a difference to be fair. Though nowadays I have a dual boot and the battery life while running Windows is 4x better than on Debian. I think Civ probably consumes more CPU/GPU than it really needs to. Add me to the "it worked OK on Linux" group, though I suspect that a number of drivers could be improved for performance/power reasons. If of use, the laptop I used had an Nvidia 980M which was what I used to play Civ. The fan was blowing hard and the Desktop with a Nvidia 1080 (on Windows) does play faster (I tend to play 'huge' map). It definitely "worked" but maybe less performant.