This is a terrible trend and we should stop supporting it.
Compatibility layers should be for games that are already made and not receiving any updates.
Everything else should be encouraged to support Linux natively.
Stop lowering your standards to avoid conflict.
Linux is pretty easy too release something for, the real fucking pain is MacOS
Seriously. I'm getting into game development and it's eye-opening how many difficulties are really skill-issues among nincompoops.
Mad respect to the devs of the past. They're the real heroes and we have relatively fewer of them around these days.
Every month xcode updates and breaks everything. Every two years I have to cycle a million certs that have different names depending on what apple docs your are looking at. Apple is pain
Apple can stuff eucalyptus tress up their asses.
I don't own this game, but twice I have switched positive reviews to negative for doing this.
Then your an absolute moron. This should be praised, they could have said fuck linux entirely but instead they said "hey native is costing us too much time, so instead we will just work on making sure our windows code is proton compatible"
That should be the goal, tired of worthless native purist assholes pushing developers away from Linux entirely by being little bitches about it. Game working is game working if proton is the easier path for the developer then cheer them on.
Why? Proton works really well nowadays. As long as it runs, who cares if it's native Linux?
At my studio we maintain a native Linux version with a custom game engine, and it indeed takes a lot of time. I don't consider Proton a viable option as we lost the ability to integrate with Linux-specific stuff such as Wayland APIs or better input, but I can definitely see the appeal of switching to Proton... if your team uses Windows. If you have some developers on Linux, you naturally get a Linux build (if using cross platform APIs ofc) and it's actually faster to cross-compile a Windows build every once in a while (skip the slow ntfs I/O) and ship that. But it requires getting more of the team on Linux :)
But it requires getting more of the team on Linux :)
Get them a Steam Deck and target only Steam Linux Runtime 3.
Ah, yes... if only. I've upgraded internally SLR 1.0 -> SLR 3.0 but we can't deploy it until a bug is fixed in the Steam client that causes, when we enable SLR 3, all Steam Decks to run the Linux build. Yes, Steam Decks run the Proton version, solely because the save file has different letter casing (yes I know it's so annoying haha). We've spent quite some time on this and there's no way to fix this without some folks losing their saves, and that is absolutely not an option. Soooo for now desktop Linux is stuck on runtime 1.0, and Steam Deck users are stuck on Proton. "fun" :/
we can’t deploy it until a bug is fixed in the Steam client that causes, when we enable SLR 3, all Steam Decks to run the Linux build. Yes, Steam Decks run the Proton version, solely because the save file has different letter casing
Sounds more like the bug is on your side caused by whoever had the genius idea to use different file names for Windows and Linux builds.
there’s no way to fix this without some folks losing their saves, and that is absolutely not an option.
For me the fix looks very easy: Use completely new file names. The old saves are only read and new saves get the new file names. Stay on the current SLR/Proton setup until the saves are migrated to the new naming format for the active user base. Make a dedicated "beta" branch for legacy saves in a year or so to not screw over inactive users. Make announcements and pinned forum posts.
Steam Deck uses ext4 with casefolding so upper / lowercase in filenames don't matter. Is casefolding getting in your way?
Fair. I'll take a working Windows build with proton over a janky Linux port any day of the week
In a decade, most games will be cross platform but compiled for ~~windows~~ proton and people will have forgotten why. Then somebody or some group will come up with "cross platform compilation" and the circle will start a new only to return to proton or some form of it.
As much as I would love Linux native builds of games, this also makes a lot of sense. I consider it a completely acceptable solution to the problem.
As a cross platform developer I consider this incompetence.
That's not necessary a bad thing. The world is full of less experienced programmers. But they're making it look like it's a hassle to release for Linux when in reality you can foresee and plan for this from the start, without much overhead down the line.
I completely agree.
I do not reward or support incompetence when the party in question is demanding my money for their product.
Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers? This is a business decision, nothing else. Most likely, some MBA looked over the numbers, saw a few hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux, and decided that Proton was good enough. Most likely, no programmer was even asked whether Linux support should be dropped.
And yes, even if you know what you are doing, every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested, and that costs time and thus money, which is something every experienced cross platform developer should know.
Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers?
Because supporting multiple platforms, especially in gaming, isn't magic or rocket science and almost always comes down to the setup of the toolchain.
This is a business decision
Very possible. But I go by their actual statement: "maintaining the native build across many distros was taking time away from developing new content". My point is regarding the "maintaining [...] across many distros" and not the "taking time away". A good toolchain would make these differences extremely minimal.
hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux
Extremely unlikely. That would mean more than 10 developers working fulltime purely on Linux support since the release of the game. According to their team page on their website they have 7 developers in total.
every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested
This is why experienced developers decouple the game from the platform specific stuff and test them separately.
The game is made in Unity so most of the platform specific stuff should already be production ready. Unity literally markets their engine as "Industry-leading multiplatform support" with the motto "Create once, ship anywhere".
So my argument still stands. And as I said, it's not a bad thing. The only thing I dislike is the indirect implication of Linux being a hassle when it would be nicer if they would take more responsibility for it.
The game has been released 4 years ago. An average worker in the US works 1770 hours a year.
10 developers working full time over 4 years (and this doesn't even include the time they spent building the initial release) would work a total of ~70 000 hours, not "hundreds or thousands" of hours.
In fact, even thousands of hours would be only a single man year.
They've released 23 content updates so far, bugfix patches are probably much more. Even just building, superficially testing and deploying a release easily takes 4-5h. And this game is not just a plain and simple flat screen game, but one that supports SteamVR, something that's not remotely trivial on Linux.
Even a single non-trivial bug can cost 20h of total work time from support handling the report, a dev reproducing it, the bug going trough refinement, bugfixing, code review, testing, deployment and so on.
I guess you haven't worked in a real company before and don't know how project management and processes work. Stuff takes a lot of time.
And believing that Unity just magically abstracts all OS-specific bugs away is very naive.
And it's ridiculous to claim that they are dropping Linux support after 4(!) years because they are too incompetent to figure out how to support Linux. Obviously they could support Linux just fine from a technological standpoint.
comes down to the setup of the toolchain.
Unless you're developing graphics-heavy application that uses platrofm-specific API for optimisation. Like a video game for example.
Are you talking from experience?
Not a game, but I was involved in making a graphics heavy app. Significant amount of times we had to grapple with question " that's a nice feature you are making, will this work on all the platforms", and significant amount of times the answer was "obviously, unquestionably no".
You should get some experience using modern game engines so you can see firsthand how easy it is to develop cross-platform games.
Supporting multiple platforms is a job for the engine developers.
And you should get some experience developing something more complicated than a simple unity project.
Done.
But they’re making it look like it’s a hassle to release for Linux when in reality you can foresee and plan for this from the start, without much overhead down the line.
They have the overhead to support macOS, though:
Please don't do this
It makes perfect sense to do this. You have no idea how much extra work it is to maintain a Linux-native version that works predictably across the entire range of Linux machine configurations. Factorio has one guy, raiguard (hallowed be his name), in charge of the Linux build, and he wrote a blog post about the unique challenges of supporting the Linux native build.
Proton is already known to be perfectly capable of running most games as good as or even better than Windows. Game developers can defer the issue of compatibility and focus on developing the game instead of having to implement client-side decorations for GNOME users.
Do you remember the days before proton? Like the time I couldn’t play Terraria for months because they didn’t have anyone in their dev team who could update the Linux version to keep it working. The workaround was to get the windows version working through wine.
Using wine to play windows games is something we have done for years before proton made it easier. It’s a very Linux thing to do. Even some old ports were just using wine wrappers.
Do you like the half-maintained and rarely updated Linux builds more? I sure don't.
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