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Cryengine 3.8.1 Adds Support for Linux, OpenGL and Oculus Rift
- dijit 11y agoSlowly 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 11y agoIf 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.
- satyanash 11y agoI don't think it's that easy. The amount of effort that goes into testing, supporting and getting a game running for another operating system is not offset by the amount of consumers you have in the linux demographic.
- eterm 11y agoThat's a technologist's falacy. Sure, they could enable a linux build with a "push of a button", but to have linux support they require a support department to support that build. Actually supporting something is a lot more than just the technology required.
- mrmondo 11y agoRelease it as a beta - perhaps even for a reduced price and let the community provide bug reports or even submit fixes if parts are open sourced. This has worked very well for non-game software so the same principles likely apply at least in part.
- charlesdm 11y agoThis is Blizzard - they would never do that. They don't want to erode their 'we only release stuff when it's properly finished' brand.
- johnchristopher 11y agoSupport period for unsuccessful games is wayyyy shorter than support for unsuccessful or buggy first release of open source softwares that can benefit from bug fixes and patches in the long run. Games are not in the long run.
- jebblue 11y agoI've found first release of open source software to often be more stable and release ready than commercial software I paid for.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
- tadzik_ 11y agoMaybe 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.
- ekianjo 11y agoPlayonlinux makes it easy to launch Hearthstone and play it on any Linux distro. I have a hard time to believe that Blizzard does not have enough resources to do QA.
- tadzik_ 11y agoI'm sure it does, they just not consider it economically viable.
- ekianjo 11y agoI just wish they could try once at least.
- jon-wood 11y agoWhat's to say they haven't, and decided the work involved would be too much for a commercial release. Blizzard are well known for their approach of not releasing things until they're ready, and they won't want to kill that reputation for a Linux port.
- hitlin37 11y agoit may not be easy, but with the progress made by other game engines in last few months, running your game on linux is now a reality and as easy as making it for PC (with little effort).
- tadzik_ 11y ago
- golergka 11y ago> they would literally only have to push a button to support linux What. Why do people think that? Even if you use Unity, the DirectX/OpenGL distinction still matters, not to mention all other platform-specific stuff. Of course, with Unity you _can_ develop a very simple and unoptimised game that would be able to compile on all desktop and mobile platforms with one click — but when you start to dig down and try to do things effectively, you end up with a lot of platform-specific code.
- tormeh 11y agoUnity is a game engine. I'd assume it handles all graphics calls for you - you don't really have to care about directx and opengl.
- golergka 11y agoUnfortunately, you'd be very wrong. As a Unity developer, I had to drill down to the float sizes on specific Android devices (some genius noname graphic adapter used 12-bit floats, and it messed up my custom shader). Game engines, as every similar kind of middleware, are an abstraction that is almost always leaky. It's still a great improvement over doing everything natively, of course.
- thefreeman 11y agoWell, they support mobile clients, so they had to deal with OpenGL anyway.
- to3m 11y agoThat's OpenGL ES, which isn't the same (though I believe the plan is to merge them one day). Mobile GPUs tend to have different feature support and performance characteristics too.
- hutattedonmyarm 11y agoWell, they support OS X, so they do have to support OpenGL. Both Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are native, not just wrappers
- scrollaway 11y agoThere's a lot of Unity games that don't release on Linux. Ori and the Blind Forest is another one that comes to mind (http://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/).
- cwyers 11y agoI agree with the overall thrust of your point (plenty of Unity games don't see a Linux release, and it's not as easy as pushing a button), but a game published by Microsoft Studios is not a very good example.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoBut how would they sell it? Their launcher is not on Linux so there is more overhead to it. It has just now come to Android and IOS, which makes sense that they would target those platforms first.
- tcfunk 11y agoI imagine it has less to do with Hearthstone and more to do with Battle.net and other DRM-related stuffs. But that's just a guess.
- orbifold 11y agoPretty much all Blizzard Games have been running very well under Wine for years.
- needusername 11y ago> Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity Oh, that explains why it's so shitty on Mac OS X.
- ekianjo 11y agoThis is super great news too: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jramey/2015/06/18/it-s-all-about-the-team-at-e3-the-super-bowl-of-computer-gaming https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jramey/2015/06/18/it...
- jebblue 11y agoI'm in total agreement, Linux really is the future of the desktop (though Microsoft seems to be improving some things so I'll give them that). If I were Canonical I'd be worried they come out with Microsoft Linux and ditch Windows by 2020.
- shmerl 11y agoI'm more excited about new games coming out for Linux from day one.
- frik 11y agoMicrosoft's E3 presentation put a nail in the coffin. There was a huge XBoxOne sign on the stage and many XBoxOne exclusive and time-exclusive games. There was no "Windows 10" sign. Windows exclusive games, nada. New Microsoft Game Studio games (Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, etc. anyone?), nope. Kinect 2 was absent. And after the HoloLens Minecraft showcase, it turned out the field-of-view is tiny and the device twice as expensive as their console: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/18/8809323/microsoft-hololens-field-of-view-kudo-tsunoda http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/18/8809323/microsoft-hololens... On the other side, the PC gaming platform is thriving, especially in certain parts of Europe and Asia. The PC was able to render Witcher 3, Watch_Dogs and The Division in all its graphical glory without the need for a Console-downgrade. Also many former PlayStation exclusive titles are released on PS4 and PC. And Steam and GoG are big too. So great, despite the little effort from Microsoft itself.
- mrmondo 11y agoAbout 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 11y agoInstall 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 11y agoThanks 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 11y agoI 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.
- noelsusman 11y agoSteam on Linux is pretty craptacular overall but it does work on my 64bit Fedora with no additional effort besides installing it. Some games even work better on Linux (e.g. Kerbal Space Program).
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- tormeh 11y agoWhenever 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.
- hitlin37 11y agosupporting 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.
- BonoboBoner 11y agoDoes it run Crysis? Apparently now Linux can.
- lentil_soup 11y agoThere'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
- erikb 11y agoOh 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 11y agoWith 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.
- madez 11y agoI have to agree that the free and open radeonsi driver is so much more hazzle-free than catalyst on either platform. Still, the driver reliably kills my system in some games, in others texture is missing.
- erikb 11y agoThat'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 11y agoAMD 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.
- fsloth 11y agoMicrosoft has pretty strict conformance tests for all DirectX drivers. Is there anything comparable qualitywise for Opengl drivers on Linux?
- jebblue 11y agoI use OpenGL on nVidia proprietary on a GTX 660. I run many Steam games and some of them are Unity: 7 Days To Die, Beasts Of Prey, Dying Light, Metro Last Light, they all run great. In past years back when I ran Windows XP for games and dual booted into Ubuntu I ran Unreal 2004. One day it crashed (as it did sometimes ending in the BSOD) then I booted into Ubuntu and ran the Linux version and it ran faster and smoother and never crashed. That was the moment I decided it was time to go full time Ubuntu Linux.
- dogma1138 11y agoNot 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.
- SwellJoe 11y agoI 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).
- Lord_Zero 11y agoA lot of people say that gaming is really the only thing keeping them from making a permanent jump over to their favorite distro. Were slowly moving in the direction of not only multi-platform gaming, but a lot of regular desktop apps too as development becomes easier and easier to deploy out to multiple OSes.
- INTPenis 11y agoThere 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 11y agooh yeah, tuxracer! haha, wasted way more time on that than I'd be proud to admit.
- archagon 11y agoIsn't Crytek not in good financial shape? Seems a bit risky to rely on them right now.
- supercoder 11y agoNo doubt Steam / Value are offering enough incentive to make it worthwhile.
- dogma1138 11y agoSomehow 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 11y ago> 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 11y agoNot 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.
- mladenkovacevic 11y agoThings 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.
- shmerl 11y agoNot 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.
- outworlder 11y ago> While you will still need Windows to use the Sandbox Editor Bummer. I suppose it's a good step forwards though.
- anon4 11y agoUnfortunately, 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/
- malkia 11y agoNext 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)