Battlefield 4 Developers Would Love To Get Into Linux

[doom_Oo7]

- good IDE integration with a high quality debugger

As somebody once said : "Unix is an IDE. All of it."

Seriously, I'd take GDB over CDB anytime for debugging. Waith valgrind and gprof you're ready to go.

[AJSB]

WTF !?!

I wasn't expecting this...then again nothing is concrete.

Yeah, i bet this is actually worrying a lot some people in Tokyo and in Redmond...

I mean...a console that can be build by user from scratch or by reusing a current PC, with all the advantages of a PC than can evolve with time instead of became totally obsolete, AWESOME free and open OS, a controller that breaks all rules in a long time of console gamepads (and that seems better than any other gamepad ever made getting close to level of control of mouse+keyboard), a online gaming service/community that is free, that supports interaction between users, mods and even F2P games w/o paying fees....and now the icing in the cake...the Heavy Duty AAA franchises seem to be coming to SteamOS/Linux.

I said previously that i hate EA/DICE after BFBC2...and i continue to do so.
I said that i would not buy again more games from EA and/or DICE.
...but if they bring BF4 to SteamOS/Linux...i just might cave in...

...that is...*IF* they get their s++t together with Origin (total POS) or come back to Steam...they also must not screw up game controls like they did with PC version of BF3 and put back bots (like BF2/BF2142 have...not impossible to do...DICE said that there is a clear percentage of gamers requesting for it, they will put them back in a free DLC after game launch).

Interesting the info here about Frostbite engine ported to OS X...i didn't knew about it...and because Icculus said that it's a matter of days/weeks to port from OS X to Linux...i have now hopes for a BF4 under Linux

As for ArmA4, that's also very good news if it's true....but it will take some time till we get it because they just launched ArmA3...unless they "CoDify" it...or because sells of ArmA3 are not that great and feel the need to increase pace of ArmA4 dev...

...and BTW, the actuall sells (and not the units shipped to resellers) of BF3 in 1st month was 8 million units...

Now....what Activision/IW/TA will do/say ?
Can we also have CoD franchise for SteamOS/Linux ?

I bet we will and these are the 3 most famous military FPS franchises


PS: ...and the exclusive title will be HL3 obviously

[edoantonioco]

There's two major things linux needs is a killer game and compatibility with Windows games. In other words WINE needs to improve massively.

If linux achieve an excellent compatibility with windows games, so, why the developers would care to port the games natively to linux?. Afterall, wine works in linux, mac os, solaris, bsd..., so, the same windows (wine compatible) code would run in every unix like OS

[AJSB]

If linux achieve an excellent compatibility with windows games, so, why the developers would care to port the games natively to linux?. Afterall, wine works in linux, mac os, solaris, bsd..., so, the same windows (wine compatible) code would run in every unix like OS

Things don't work exactly that way with WINE....i used WINE in several distros with same hardware to play same Window$ games and what works for a linux distro doesn't mean will work in another distro or at least, not always with exact same results....now imagine with solaris, bsd,etc. and many many more Linux distros in the mix...

WINE will be ALWAYS a last resort to play non-native games (and other software) under Linux ....also a excellent solution to play games/programs that are not even compatible with modern versions of Window$...but that's it.

The ideal situation is to have Native games...and if possible static to avoid problems like "my distro doesn't have this or that" or "my distro only uses version xxxx that is now incompatible with previous version".

...not to mention that EvenBalance said that PunkBuster will NEVER support WINE (they do support Linux) because of technical reasons.

[vaudevillian]

I don't know peoples problems. I have a ati hd6850, in my Linux test box running triple monitors playing games on steam with pretty good frame rates. What is your damn issue with tinkering with Xorg settings and using catalyst drivers? This whole damn if its closed drivers I don't want to use it is just dumb. If you wanna play good games on Linux use the binaries. My cs source is running at 110fps triple monitor. As soon as the 8000 series come out and the 7000 series get more support in Linux, my Linux box will have the 2 7950s I am running in my win gaming machine.

[sarmad]

I don't know peoples problems. I have a ati hd6850, in my Linux test box running triple monitors playing games on steam with pretty good frame rates. What is your damn issue with tinkering with Xorg settings and using catalyst drivers? This whole damn if its closed drivers I don't want to use it is just dumb. If you wanna play good games on Linux use the binaries. My cs source is running at 110fps triple monitor. As soon as the 8000 series come out and the 7000 series get more support in Linux, my Linux box will have the 2 7950s I am running in my win gaming machine.

The purpose for people favoring the open source drivers is not to encourage companies to go closed source. So, sacrificing performance for the sake of supporting the open source is not a dumb thing.

[GreatEmerald]

The ideal situation is to have Native games...and if possible static to avoid problems like "my distro doesn't have this or that" or "my distro only uses version xxxx that is now incompatible with previous version".

No. Not static. Dynamic bundled. If it's static, you're in the exact same boat: "my distro only uses version xxxx infrastructure that is incompatible with ancient libraries". With dynamic bundled, replace the old library file with a new one and you're good to go.

What is your damn issue with tinkering with Xorg settings and using catalyst drivers? This whole damn if its closed drivers I don't want to use it is just dumb. If you wanna play good games on Linux use the binaries.

No. If you want to play good games, play them with OSS drivers. Only if they're not enough, switch to the proprietary ones. Right now I'm using the openSUSE RC version, and it's so new it doesn't support the NVIDIA blob just yet. Which isn't a bother to me ? many of the good games I play work fine on Nouveau (even when Nouveau is generally seen as the worst of the big 3 OSS drivers). Right now I'm playing UFO: Alien Invasion, which is an amazing strategy game, is GPL, uses no DRM, runs natively, uses SDL2, the developers fix bugs promptly, and I get to share my experiences with them in real time. So without any proprietary components, I get to play good games on Linux.

And then we have DOSBox which allows playing a lot of good games, and Wine that does likewise, just will a bit more hit-and-miss (still runs good games like Heroes of Might and Magic III just fine ? in fact, due to the virtual desktop functionality, Wine runs Heroes of Might and Magic IV better than on Windows when on 1080p monitor).

[vaudevillian]

No. If you want to play good games, play them with OSS drivers. Only if they're not enough, switch to the proprietary ones. Right now I'm using the openSUSE RC version, and it's so new it doesn't support the NVIDIA blob just yet. Which isn't a bother to me ? many of the good games I play work fine on Nouveau (even when Nouveau is generally seen as the worst of the big 3 OSS drivers). Right now I'm playing UFO: Alien Invasion, which is an amazing strategy game, is GPL, uses no DRM, runs natively, uses SDL2, the developers fix bugs promptly, and I get to share my experiences with them in real time. So without any proprietary components, I get to play good games on Linux.

And then we have DOSBox which allows playing a lot of good games, and Wine that does likewise, just will a bit more hit-and-miss (still runs good games like Heroes of Might and Magic III just fine ? in fact, due to the virtual desktop functionality, Wine runs Heroes of Might and Magic IV better than on Windows when on 1080p monitor).

Which is fine for what you want, but there is many of us who want triple A titles which need the video card proprietary video drivers to take affect of the whole video card, for different games and features. All these developers are noticing thanks to valve and valve is drm and you have to live with it. I bet most of the games that are gonna be ported or developed for linux will be developed with SteamOS in mind and all support well be for SteamOS. There is gonna be DRM in there for sure. You want more games for Linux you get more DRM. I am fine with this personally. I wanna see AAA titles running full tilt, that is going to mean proprietary drivers.

[DDF420]

I have read a few times how much better linux is to windows for gaming because valve says so. Did anyone bother doing tests themselves ? Most of you are so anti windows it is hard imagining any of you using it .

Anyhoo thus far windows still outperforms Linux on every gaming test i have done.

I can get on average a 20to 30fps improvement by using a custom Linux kernel over vanilla ( in my case a custom zen kernel with ,1,000Hz timer frequency,voluntary kernel pre emption,Auto use SCHED_ISO policy for X set, Nvidia tweaks = MSI interupts NVreg_EnableMSI=1 and PCIe3 NVreg_EnablePCIeGen3=1) but it's still 10 to 15 FPS behind windows with TF2/heaven/valley.

Anything else i can do ?

[sabun]

I have read a few times how much better linux is to windows for gaming because valve says so. Did anyone bother doing tests themselves ? Most of you are so anti windows it is hard imagining any of you using it.

I have tested this myself a couple of times. Tried Ubuntu 13.04 vs Windows 8 for Heaven, L4D2, and Dota 2. With Nvidia, performance was similar on both systems (with only Dota 2 having less fps during action scenes on Ubuntu 13.04). With Intel HD 4600 on this i7-4770 I have and Mesa 9.3, my fps was always 20fps less than running it on Windows 8 with Dota 2.

While my experience with AMD graphics and Intel graphics have been pretty horrid with Ubuntu and Linux in the past, Intel has come to a point where they are catching up to Windows performance. AMD's drivers really are just hit and miss. Some games perform the same, some don't. I stopped using my HD6850 and gave it to a friend.

With my current GTX680, my games always perform the same as on Windows 8. I dual boot at the moment to use Unity3D and Corel VideoStudio X6 in Windows 8. While it's not exactly as Valve has said in my case, it is very clear that Nvidia love Linux a lot more than AMD do. Intel seems to be loving Linux more and more with each Mesa release (on the graphics side).

Before anyone may get angry or offended, my results are my own. They only represent my own experiences thus far, but I can definitely say that gaming on Ubuntu and Linux in general has greatly improved compared to when I first started using it in 2008.

To get a glimpse of my similar performance, you can check out my mediocre comparison video here which shows Heaven running on both Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 8 (using the Nvidia GTX680). Just skip to 4:57 to see the end results:

No special tweaking done on either system. Both were set to performance.