A Developer's Perspective On Porting Games To Linux

[Azrael5]

I vote for Alone in the dark. I remember playing it on my 386 SX (no coprocessor) back in the day.

Look at this: http://youtu.be/WWS9cATCSEo

[Grogan]

Too bad Painkiller and Deadfall Adventures don't actually work correctly. Pretty hard to take them seriously... that's some of the worst rubbish I've ever seen.

It's probably OK if you have Nvidia (so I've heard), but performance, stability and load times (shader compiling) are ridiculous on AMD (fglrx or radeon + Mesa 10.x). Deadfall Adventures actually causes me to have to hard reset at least somewhere in just about every level. Step in the wrong place and blammo. It completely locks up a rock solid Linux system... that's pathetic. (but possible due to direct rendering) You can't even ssh in. Turning the graphics settings down to ugly levels does not help.

Sorry, that's not acceptable by any stretch. Games have to work on AMD graphics hardware as well.

I'm trying to get away from Windows and not buying any more games that require it. That said, Deadfall Adventures is a very enjoyable game, too good to waste on rubbish performance on Linux. So I have to play it in Windows. (It's 100% in Windows... graphics settings at their highest and I have not experienced any problems or performance issues.

[Hamish Wilson]

I vote for Alone in the dark. I remember playing it on my 386 SX (no coprocessor) back in the day.

I think he meant the more recent ones.

[Azrael5]

I think he meant the more recent ones.

I mean the entire serie before the latest one I don't like (I prefer alone in the dark the new nightmare because of the better grafic). Someone was making reboot... as shown in the video I issued 2 posts ago.

[ChrisXY]

Deadfall Adventures actually causes me to have to hard reset at least somewhere in just about every level. Step in the wrong place and blammo. It completely locks up a rock solid Linux system... that's pathetic. (but possible due to direct rendering) You can't even ssh in. Turning the graphics settings down to ugly levels does not help.

Sorry, that's not acceptable by any stretch. Games have to work on AMD graphics hardware as well.

Sorry, but this lockups are driver bugs and not the game's fault. The unfortunate truth is that the linux graphics drivers just haven't been stress tested enough by countless demanding games. Try it for yourself: Use the latest mesa code and get some alpha and beta games like upvoid, overgrowth, etc.. You'll probably be able to hit a few bugs with hyperz or the shader compilers. Even supertuxkart git with mesa git has bugs (but they're not in a stable release of mesa so there's that).

Try to get a log if the lockup e.g. with netconsole and submit it to bugs.freedesktop.org

[deanjo]

Too bad Painkiller and Deadfall Adventures don't actually work correctly. Pretty hard to take them seriously... that's some of the worst rubbish I've ever seen.

It's probably OK if you have Nvidia (so I've heard), but performance, stability and load times (shader compiling) are ridiculous on AMD (fglrx or radeon + Mesa 10.x). Deadfall Adventures actually causes me to have to hard reset at least somewhere in just about every level. Step in the wrong place and blammo. It completely locks up a rock solid Linux system... that's pathetic. (but possible due to direct rendering) You can't even ssh in. Turning the graphics settings down to ugly levels does not help.

Sorry, that's not acceptable by any stretch. Games have to work on AMD graphics hardware as well.

I'm trying to get away from Windows and not buying any more games that require it. That said, Deadfall Adventures is a very enjoyable game, too good to waste on rubbish performance on Linux. So I have to play it in Windows. (It's 100% in Windows... graphics settings at their highest and I have not experienced any problems or performance issues.

When multiple developers recommend nVidia cards for linux games, there is a reason for that. You can't blame the game developers for issues that hardware vendors have to fix in their drivers. In short, complain to the right team if you want a better experience.

[Larian]

Sorry, but this lockups are driver bugs and not the game's fault. The unfortunate truth is that the linux graphics drivers just haven't been stress tested enough by countless demanding games. Try it for yourself: Use the latest mesa code and get some alpha and beta games like upvoid, overgrowth, etc.. You'll probably be able to hit a few bugs with hyperz or the shader compilers. Even supertuxkart git with mesa git has bugs (but they're not in a stable release of mesa so there's that).

Try to get a log if the lockup e.g. with netconsole and submit it to bugs.freedesktop.org

With all due respect, that thing about Deadfall Adventures locking your system up not being the game's fault is a load of horse puckey. I run it with Nvidia drivers and it's still an unplayable crash-fest. The game is listed on Steam as being early access as of this writing. (I've yet to have problems with Painkiller.)

With other titles such as Metro: Last Light, everything is buttery smooth, so I'm going to have to say that DA's problems are just the results of a buggy, admittedly unfinished port.

[Grogan]

Developers don't get to dictate hardware.

I have a lot of games that work well, and I wasn't born yesterday.

[Grogan]

Try to get a log if the lockup e.g. with netconsole and submit it to bugs.freedesktop.org

See, that's the thing, it's a hard lockup. There is no net... the machine neither responds to ping nor higher level requests.

Nothing else does that in Linux or Windows. (But yes, I'm sure it is the drivers allowing that to occur. Give something like a game (more or less) direct access to hardware and all bets are off.)

It's not just the open source drivers, I also mentioned fglrx.

[deanjo]

Developers don't get to dictate hardware.

I have a lot of games that work well, and I wasn't born yesterday.

No but hardware suppliers have to provide proper support for their product. Without that you can't expect others to magically fix something that is not even their problem to begin with.

Hardware suppliers ultimately decide if their product is supported well or not. If you decide to support a hardware vendor with a history of bad support in hopes of things getting better well that's basically a Hail Mary. I wouldn't go out and buy a vehicle with a poor history of service and part availability hoping thing will get better, same applies with pretty much any other consumer product I purchase. If I did buy something on the hopes that the situation will improve, I would consider it a charity donation without expecting any improvement in the short term (or possibly ever) as a direct result of my donation.