Escape Simulator drops the Linux build to focus on supporting Proton
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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.
I'm a software developer that releases for Linux. I know it's a pain. I'm just in the camp of thinking we should fix it instead of giving up.
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On the one hand, it's a shame in general, as Proton has truly been a pesky thorn on the foot for Linux gaming. There's a world of difference between having native, first-class support, and basically running every game on an emulator that is on a lease.
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On the one hand, it's a shame in general, as Proton has truly been a pesky thorn on the foot for Linux gaming. There's a world of difference between having native, first-class support, and basically running every game on an emulator that is on a lease.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Yes, its such a thorn being able to finally drop windows and play all my games on linux.
God won't someone save us from this terrible miscarriage of justice. If we cant have perfection, then we don't deserve anything at all!
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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.
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.
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Yes, its such a thorn being able to finally drop windows and play all my games on linux.
God won't someone save us from this terrible miscarriage of justice. If we cant have perfection, then we don't deserve anything at all!
you're missing the point. the linux gaming market is increasing, but proton is in some ways a crutch keeping proper linux support from games because its much easier to support just one platform rather than two.
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Linux has proton, Mac OS doesn’t.
macOS has Apple Game Porting Toolkit which is just another Wine distribution for which developers made easy installers for. GPT + Windows version of Steam is how I played Counter Strike 2 against a Mac user just recently.
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
That said, I didn't really expect someone with that Lemmy handle to know such things.
I've been messing with that tool on and off from the day it was available to developers. I'm well aware of it. It's ass.
It's been a few months since I've used it so maybe it's gotten better? But this is Apple and gaming, so I don't have high hopes.
It's not at all comparable to proton other than it does the bare minimum to make a game work. All of the tools and tweaks that go into proton are what make it so good. Maybe for CS2 someones put in the work to make it ok. But whether it's through crossover, wiskey, or whatever else it's been awful for me. Maybe version 2 is better. But even then I doubt it will be as seamless or good as proton is.
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you're missing the point. the linux gaming market is increasing, but proton is in some ways a crutch keeping proper linux support from games because its much easier to support just one platform rather than two.
yes yes, if its not the perfect solution, then we should have no solution. its a tired old argument.
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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.
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yes yes, if its not the perfect solution, then we should have no solution. its a tired old argument.
i don't think anyone in this thread is saying we shouldn't have proton, but just that it is holding back actual linux development. I for one love my steamdeck and use proton all the time.
but facts are facts, and there are less games being developed for linux because of proton.
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i don't think anyone in this thread is saying we shouldn't have proton, but just that it is holding back actual linux development. I for one love my steamdeck and use proton all the time.
but facts are facts, and there are less games being developed for linux because of proton.
I have several native Linux games but I use the Windows version on proton because it's more reliable. The games used to work great but not so much anymore.
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On the one hand, it's a shame in general, as Proton has truly been a pesky thorn on the foot for Linux gaming. There's a world of difference between having native, first-class support, and basically running every game on an emulator that is on a lease.
It's not an emulator it's an abstraction layer for the DirectX API etc. They're similar in ways but not quite the same.
As for the difference in native support, well actually having such a later might mean longer support. Some older native games may not run well on future systems as libraries and the kernel change, whereas so long as proton runs, the older games should continue to work.
Proton also adds functionality that wasn't really in the native Windows, i.e. superior suspend and certain input mapping features.
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i don't think anyone in this thread is saying we shouldn't have proton, but just that it is holding back actual linux development. I for one love my steamdeck and use proton all the time.
but facts are facts, and there are less games being developed for linux because of proton.
i don’t think anyone in this thread is saying we shouldn’t have proton,
Really?
On the one hand, it’s a shame in general, as Proton has truly been a pesky thorn on the foot for Linux gaming
Cause that implies wanting to get rid of it. You don't tend to fondly keep as a momento the thorn in your foot.. you rip it out and get rid of it.
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I have several native Linux games but I use the Windows version on proton because it's more reliable. The games used to work great but not so much anymore.
Yeah, outside of Stardew Valley and minecraft, my experience with linux native games has been.. unpleasant. Meanwhile, the proton version of the same games have never given me issue.
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Linux is pretty easy too release something for, the real fucking pain is MacOS
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It's not an emulator it's an abstraction layer for the DirectX API etc. They're similar in ways but not quite the same.
As for the difference in native support, well actually having such a later might mean longer support. Some older native games may not run well on future systems as libraries and the kernel change, whereas so long as proton runs, the older games should continue to work.
Proton also adds functionality that wasn't really in the native Windows, i.e. superior suspend and certain input mapping features.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Yeah, it's annoying to not have it native, but having Proton also means there's just one thing to maintain support for. If a major system library changes you patch Proton, not a thousand different games and programs.
Until Linux gaming starts making use of some form of standardized containers or maintain proper LTS environments there will always be a need to keep each game updated individually to maintain compatibility when old libraries gets deprecated. About time somebody gets that going (and no I definitely do not just mean flatpack)
Edit: apparently there's a Steam Linux runtime based on containers, maybe if we can get that standardized it would help
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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"
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Linux is pretty easy too release something for, the real fucking pain is MacOS
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
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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"
Steam Deck uses ext4 with casefolding so upper / lowercase in filenames don't matter. Is casefolding getting in your way?
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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.
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yes yes, if its not the perfect solution, then we should have no solution. its a tired old argument.
You keep hallucinating this, as if you were an AI...
