The Quality Of The Witcher 2 Linux Port Is Upsetting Many Gamers

[schmidtbag]

Wow, they actually paid attention and went out of their way to fix something. I don't recall that ever happening before.

[anth]

It is working OK for me on an i5 4440 with R9 270. I'm running Linux Mint 16 with the open source drivers, using OIBAF last updated in about mid April.

I suspect that much of the problem is due to it needing a CPU with fast single-thread performance but haven't tried taking any measurements that might confirm that.

I've never run it on Windows and don't have that installed on anything capable of running it so can't make any comparisons.

[liam]

It's no worse than the OSX port, though that's really an aside.

The issue here is not about The Witcher 2. This is about the reality of developers porting games to Linux, an ostensibly new platform for most of these people. Linux has come to prominence as the potential future for PC gaming in only the past year -- many of these companies are just now starting to investigate Linux as an option.

What does this mean for us as Linux gamers?

It means that there are going to be a lot of shitty ports over the next year or so. We'll need to start to accept that -- we need to be respectful to developers who make the jump (the risk, one might argue) to release on Linux. We can't tell developers they're terrible, or their decisions are terrible, while they're trying to provide for the platform that you choose to use.

Does this mean they shouldn't strive to improve? Of course not. But it means that we shouldn't be shitty towards these developers, we shouldn't be over critical of them. Despite what some people might believe, The Witcher 2 port is not a money-grab -- there may be a lot of money to be made in the Linux sector in the future, but right now it's not nearly what people may think it is. All they had to do would be to slap a discount on the game on Steam and it'd rise to the top; they didn't even have to do the port to get the sale. But it shows that they're interested, and paying attention.

You need to learn to walk before you can run -- even Valve ran into that issue with their initial releases. They're finally at a position where their Linux releases are on par with their Windows releases, but even that varies between drivers and chipsets. And Valve has far, far more resources than many of these developers do.

Hopefully this movement to Linux is only in the early stages. What we should hope for is for the major gaming houses to start hiring at least one driver developer per vendor (so, at least AMD and Intel) who can work on making their game run as well as possible with each driver including adding features their game needs. This is basically the Nvidia strategy, but far more scalable.
The engine companies should probably do the same.

[GreatEmerald]

Wait, why is there another Windows wrapper besides Wine? Who in their right mind would create such, when Wine exists?..

[Dukenukemx]

Wait, why is there another Windows wrapper besides Wine? Who in their right mind would create such, when Wine exists?..

Lets see...

First install Wine, but don't install 64-bit Wine cause nothing works otherwise. Then comes the fun part where you go to WineHq and try to figure what Windows files are needed to run your game. After a lot of blindly installing things, the game eventually works, but very slowly. Most games I run usually eat 50% of the performance that would otherwise be on Windows. That's if you get lucky and don't run into issues like mouse warping in Mass Effect. But in the end screw it and install PlayonLinux. Except the Wine forums will tell you how stupid you are for not looking at the FAQ before posting problems with Wine, since you're using PlayOnLinux. You stupid stupid wanker.

Or... I could just install Witcher 2 with their wrapper and avoid all that mess. It's still a better solution then Wine.

[sarmad]

It's a port for an older game and they are giving it at a discount of the already discounted price, so we shouldn't expect them to put so much efforts into the port, especially that Steam Machines will probably have a hardware that will run the game well anyway, so not much incentive to improve the performance. Hopefully they will put more efforts into Linux in their new titles.

[Vim_User]

Lets see...

First install Wine, but don't install 64-bit Wine cause nothing works otherwise. Then comes the fun part where you go to WineHq and try to figure what Windows files are needed to run your game. After a lot of blindly installing things, the game eventually works, but very slowly. Most games I run usually eat 50% of the performance that would otherwise be on Windows. That's if you get lucky and don't run into issues like mouse warping in Mass Effect. But in the end screw it and install PlayonLinux. Except the Wine forums will tell you how stupid you are for not looking at the FAQ before posting problems with Wine, since you're using PlayOnLinux. You stupid stupid wanker.

Or... I could just install Witcher 2 with their wrapper and avoid all that mess. It's still a better solution then Wine.

Or they could just wrap it in Wine themselves, like other developers already have done? And get better performance this way?

[smitty3268]

Lets see...

First install Wine, but don't install 64-bit Wine cause nothing works otherwise. Then comes the fun part where you go to WineHq and try to figure what Windows files are needed to run your game. After a lot of blindly installing things, the game eventually works, but very slowly. Most games I run usually eat 50% of the performance that would otherwise be on Windows. That's if you get lucky and don't run into issues like mouse warping in Mass Effect. But in the end screw it and install PlayonLinux. Except the Wine forums will tell you how stupid you are for not looking at the FAQ before posting problems with Wine, since you're using PlayOnLinux. You stupid stupid wanker.

Or... I could just install Witcher 2 with their wrapper and avoid all that mess. It's still a better solution then Wine.

You've just described exactly why people port using Winelib, rather than telling people to just install wine. It's exactly the same thing.

Anyway, i suspect someone a while back had the bright idea of creating a wrapper lib to help port apps to OSX and it just grew and never went away. They probably think they can better sell themselves by keeping their own code rather than just reusing wine like others do. Remember, this was ousourced to some independent contractor who has to sell himself in order to keep getting jobs. I'm sure he's much more confident going in and changing his own codebase rather than digging into wine, too, when it comes to bugfixing problems. The key thing that wine gives is wide support over a huge number of apps - since he can tailor this specifically to just the needs of this single app he's porting, it probably isn't so bad.

[randomizer]

It should theoretically run better if you turn off desktop effects, although I don't know by how much.

[sireangelus]

Lets see...

First install Wine, but don't install 64-bit Wine cause nothing works otherwise. Then comes the fun part where you go to WineHq and try to figure what Windows files are needed to run your game. After a lot of blindly installing things, the game eventually works, but very slowly. Most games I run usually eat 50% of the performance that would otherwise be on Windows. That's if you get lucky and don't run into issues like mouse warping in Mass Effect. But in the end screw it and install PlayonLinux. Except the Wine forums will tell you how stupid you are for not looking at the FAQ before posting problems with Wine, since you're using PlayOnLinux. You stupid stupid wanker.

Or... I could just install Witcher 2 with their wrapper and avoid all that mess. It's still a better solution then Wine.

sigh. Or you could make a game, have the wine wrapper already configured and statically linked to the game and ship it.

I am one of those that loved the company, their policy on drm etc... And then they do this- first the tw2 release, that was not really optimized for the time- i have yet to reinstall it on my pc to try it on windows and see at what level is it now- and now they tried to sell a port with a buggy wrapper as a native port.