Gaming on Linux [news and developments]

[Glaroug.531]

Native though?

Leszek states "It's a fully native port." near the bottom of this page.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Is it coming to GOG or it's again Steam only?

 

[Glaroug.531]

Darksiders and its sequel are in a unfortunate group of games which

require Steam authentication, regardless of whether they are purchased at retail or through other digital distribution services. An active Steam account is compulsory in order to authenticate and play these games on a personal computer.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Too bad. I wonder, what is more probable, such kind of games getting out of Steam, or CDPR starting making native Linux versions? ;D

 

[volsung]

As undesirable as steam authentication is, at least more games are coming out on Linux competing in equal terms with Windows. A common critic of linux gaming used to be "there are no relevant games available for linux" (a silly circular argument, mind you. You can't have games until you prove you have games?). I hope this will encourage companies to release non Steam linux games. We are just in the dark ages but hopefully moving forward.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Yeah, I'm not complaining about Valve pushing Linux gaming. If anything, it would be them who would move CDPR from indifference to some interest in making Linux releases. But in general this "game A came out" with "Steam only" attachment is still dominating.

 

[volsung]

We have to understand things in context, such as Valve supporting Linux and the impact and relevance for general Linux gaming.

I think it is extremely annoying when people make uninformed opinions on how Linux gaming is a vote of support for "Valve's PC gaming monopoly", and this and that. Such bullshit. It simply reflects the current state of PC gaming, for better or for worse. Even more laughable is when people complain about monopolies but believe Windows is the only way to go for PC gaming.

So while I am not especially excited about all these Steam Linux releases, I am happy that someone is offering average gamers an option as far as operating systems go. And as you well say @Gilrond, Valve has a strong influence in the gaming scene (they even make games sometimes ) and may constitute an official support for other companies to release Linux binaries with less risk.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

If anyone still didn't see these news: GOG started selling Linux games!

 

[volsung]

Awesome! I'm going to try Legend of Grimrock. Downloading the Deb file now, but I am on Debian so I'll report.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Now I feel like I'd prefer to have a bunch of those games on GOG rather than on HB, hehe (I have the Legend of Grimrock on HB from one of the bundles).

In such cases I usually avoid the package manager though. Luckily GOG also provide tarballs for the games!

 

[volsung]

Deb install worked OK surprisingly, the game runs perfectly but the audio is a noisy mess.

This happened before with other programs dependent on OpenAL but I fixed it by forcing the ALSA driver. Don't know what to do here. Any clues?

Edit: Fixed it. Changed ALSA to PulseAudio and it seems like it actually works. My current OpenAL sound related settings are:

drivers = pulse,alsa,oss
channels = surround51
sample-type = float32

Edit 2: Final report.. Legend of Grimrock installs and works perfectly. Only issue was the sound which was quickly fixed. REDPoint for GOG!

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

My OpenAL settings are usually like this:

$HOME/.alsoftrc

# OpenAL settings
drivers = pulse, alsa
mmap = true

mmap setting tends to improve performance.

I think float32 is already a default, so there is no need to set it. For more details, see /etc/openal/alsoft.conf

 

[volsung]

Oh I didn't mention it but the 5.1 surround sound actually WORKS in Legend of Grimrock. So if you have such a card, maybe you want that setting too.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Interesting. I never experimented with surround. I have a built in audio (Realtek ALC892) which has some surround volume bar, so I guess something is supported there. What exactly is 51 in this context?

I also have some audio from the Nvidia card (digital) but I never used that.

 

[volsung]

In this case surround51 means 5.1 channels, i.e. 5 speakers and 1 subwoofer. There's an OpenAL configuration tool that helps you calibrate your setup (speaker positioning for instance) and writes to .alsoftrc, but I think it uses deprecated settings.

I love playing games with surround audio. Anything less feels flat. TW2 has excellent environmental audio by the way.

 

[Glaroug.531]

Witcher 2 linux_public_beta 2 is here and there are indeed some lovely performance gains on nVidia hardware

We have just updated our public beta with the first beta of our new D3D9 engine. This now employs a technique similar to WINE's CSMT patches - all OpenGL work is now done by a single worker thread, which the D3D9 engine submits commands to. This means that there is only a single GL context, and this makes management a lot easier for the driver.

 

[Glaroug.531]

I must be seeing things, but I swear I thought this was an Ubuntu logo on Geralts sword when I loaded the forum site.

Buuuuuuuuut, it looks waaaaaaaaaaaaaay to similar to GOG's Ubuntu logo to be coincidence.

 

[volsung]

If Geralt had a computer, he would use Linux. And compile his own damn kernel.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Yeah, the way Geralt worked on the Raven's armor - he definitely would be a Linux user ;D

I must be seeing things

By the way, hopefully this weekend we'll get some answers about Linux support in the Witcher 3.

 

[ShivaSi]

I switched from Fedora to openSUSE last week just to be able to use the ATI videocard at full performance in gaming and virtualization. It would be so awesome to play TW2 on linux ...