A Developer's Perspective On Porting Games To Linux

[stqn]

Deadfall not so horrible after all

Hm, I see I commented on Deadfall freezes here, so a clarification: it seems that the game needs a lot of RAM on ?high? settings, and having a lot of it could reduce significantly the freezes. Reducing the graphics options also solves this problem.

[Ladgurie]

Homeworld and Joint Task Force.. in modern grafical way.

[stqn]

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).

They are ridiculous on nvidia too, at least for the first run (of Deadfall). For some reason the game was released with a non-playable (because of the huge freezes) playable intro. So you have to wait until it is finished, then restart the game, and then it?s playable. If you?re getting the same freezes on every run on AMD then yeah, I feel your pain. I also get freezes ingame during shooting scenes, the perfect moment to get shot and be killed.

Oh and the mouse sensivity is fucked up so I can?t really play either with my trackball or mouse. Yet another programmer who thinks it?s a good idea to get raw mouse events (and break alt-tab at the same time).

[smitty3268]

The AMD cards are not crashing because of a "nvidia hack" they are crashing on oGL code, an open standard.

Are they?

Well, yes, a lot of the time they are.

But a lot of the time developers figure out that they coded things wrong and didn't follow the OpenGL standard. NVidia's implementation is pretty famous for allowing incorrect code to run, while AMD follows the standard closer and will correctly crash.

As i said before, some apps are doing nothing wrong and the blame lies entirely with AMD. But other apps are doing things wrong, and the blame lies with them.

[Azrael5]

The AMD cards are not crashing because of a "nvidia hack" they are crashing on oGL code, an open standard.

are there solutions?

[deanjo]

Broken support for a standard feature is one thing.

Using nvidia specific hacks that don't work elsewhere and aren't part of any standard is another. That would be like blaming nvidia for lacking mantle support and crashing when a game tried to use it.

There are different applications that fall under each of those categories.

The AMD cards are not crashing because of a "nvidia hack" they are crashing on oGL code, an open standard.

[smitty3268]

Sure it does. There is no reason why a developer should have to remove a feature because of one vendors broken support. Cure the disease instead of treating the symptom.

Broken support for a standard feature is one thing.

Using nvidia specific hacks that don't work elsewhere and aren't part of any standard is another. That would be like blaming nvidia for lacking mantle support and crashing when a game tried to use it.

There are different applications that fall under each of those categories.

[deanjo]

There's no denying that Nvidia is a better supported option on Linux, but that doesn't give people license to write things that only work with the proprietary Nvidia driver and take everyone else's money anyway.

Sure it does. There is no reason why a developer should have to remove a feature because of one vendors broken support. Cure the disease instead of treating the symptom.

[ChrisXY]

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

netconsole is not high level

[Azrael5]

Use mesa drivers... and see fi compatibility problems will be fixed. AMD support is very inaccurate.