Month: November 2014

With it being Thanksgiving in the United States, I felt it was only appropriate to write this blog post thanking VALVE for showing love to the Linux Gaming community.

From the moment we saw images of Left 4 Dead working in Linux taken from a computer at VALVE, every Linux Gamer most likely filled with joy because finally there was a big player in the Gaming industry bringing their product to Linux.

In the fall of 2012 when the first Steam Beta was released, I don’t think any Linux Gamer was able to hold back their excitement.

Then when Steam was officially launched in early 2013, Linux Gamers were probably like little girls at a boy band concert.

So on this Thanksgiving holiday, we thank you for being the only big player to support us.  We hope all of you at VALVE have a great Thanksgiving long weekend.

 

Whenever a Linux gamer creates a discussion on a game forum, they are usually bombarded by Windows fan boys who believe their operating system is far more superior and will respond with the usual “they are not going to spend money to support Linux”.  For games that may have poor sales, I will agree that there probably isn’t much point.

However, if developers were to use a little more common sense, they would create their game(s) to be cross platform from the beginning.  When you create a game to use cross platform code, like OpenGL, it will allow the game to be released on multiple platforms without the need to recode the game.  This in turn equals less time and money required to port for each operating system and by releasing to multiple platforms at launch, you also maximize your customer base and profits.

The little guys, Indie Game Developers, get this way of thinking so come on big game developers, start doing the same.

Hello my fellow Linux gamers.  Before you start sending me hate mail please hear me out.

For years now we have been requesting Linux ports of our favourite games but the big companies never seem to listen and why should they when we keep using WINE or dual boot to run our games.

We all know the problems with WINE, low fps and game breaking at any time just by one patch being fixed for another game,  etc.

With dual booting you are giving the game developers the idea that there is not enough Linux users to care about making a port of their games.

We must all become strong and refuse to play our non Linux games for an entire month.  When big companies like Blizzard and EA see a massive drop in numbers, they will finally understand just how many of us there are and hopefully convince them to bring their games to our beloved operating system.

On January 2 of this year, Polygon.com reported the plans that the Pinball Arcade devs had for 2014.  One of those plans was to bring Pinball Arcade to Linux, most likely through the Steam Linux client.

The first Pinball Arcade newsletter of 2014 also mentioned that a Linux port is going to be made but then everything went silent.  They do now have a post on their FAQ page stating that Linux is on their to do list but it is not very high on the list.  They claim they rather devote more attention to the gaming consoles including the shitty Ouya.

What frustrates me and probably other Linux gamers the most is the fact that the current supported systems OS X, PS Vita, PS3, PS4, Android and Ouya are all *nix derived operating systems so in theory, creating a Linux port should be fairly simple.  Why they don’t want to make money off the million of Linux gamers is absolutely mind boggling.  Don’t they want the millions of dollars in extra sales from us Linux gamers?

We are now just over 30 days left of 2014 with no updates at all from the Pinball Arcade team on how or even if they are still going to support Linux before the end of 2014.  I love pinball and so I hope that they do release the game on Linux very soon.  With the huge uproar over what Microsoft did with Windows 8, I am surprised gaming companies did not start supporting Linux much sooner like Valve did.

I am confident that if Farsight gave the OS X source code to the Linux community, a fully working Linux port would be released within 24 hours, that’s how awesome the Linux community is.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft…With every new version of Windows, you have made your updates take longer and longer to install.

Using my current machine as an example which is a AMD A8-5600K w/8GB RAM, here are my results for average install times for 100 updates:

Windows XP – Less than 30min.

Windows 7 – 30 – 40 Minutes

Windows 8 – 3 Hours (no that is not a typo)

My current Linux Mint 17 that I just reinstalled yesterday after doing the above Windows 8 test only took around 30 minutes to download and install 500 updates.  What are the Microsoft programmers doing to make updates take so damn long to install?

I have been repairing computers for 10 years now so I have seen the install times for updates take longer and longer with each new Windows release.  Now I know Windows and Linux are not the same but come on Microsoft, surely you people can clean up your code enough to allow for a much quicker update installation.

Hopefully the next version of Windows will not only come with the START button back in place but also be programmed properly so people don’t have to wait hours for updates to install before being able to use their system.

For years, Windows was the ideal platform to make games for but over time things have changed, Mac and Linux both became better desktop operating systems.  As they progressed, more people and governments have moved away from Windows.  Some of the big gaming developers like Blizzard Entertainment and Valve followed suite by adding Mac as another supported operating system.  However, with more people moving to Linux over the past couple of years, only Valve have paid any attention and expanded to Linux.

Unfortunately the other big boys have been ignoring the Linux operating system and what is even more frustrating is their lack of caring about their current and potential customers in providing a statement on why they are ignoring the other operating system.

Anyone who knows Linux will agree it is a more stable and secured operating system, not to mention faster as well.  I just got my system back up and running after doing a test.  What I did was reformat my system with my copy of Windows 8 that I purchased a year ago to use in VirtualBox and after about 3 hours, Windows was still finalizing the first 100 updates just installed.  It was painful, so painful I didn’t even allow the finalizing to finish but instead rebooted with my Linux Mint 17 KDE DVD and started the install.  In just over 30 minutes, not only was the operating system installed but also the 500 required updates.

With benefits like speed, stability and security, should Linux gamers move back to Windows…I say HELL NO!  Linux gamers must remain strong and resist the temptation of going back to Windows and we must also refrain from using WINE to play our favourite Windows only games.  By refusing to play those games, the developers like Blizzard will see a huge drop in player numbers and hopefully will finally accept that they need to support our great operating system.

I stopped playing World of Warcraft at least 2 years ago.  I will admit that I do sometimes accept the 7 day free play that Blizzards sends me but it has pretty much been 2 years since I played full time.  I would also love to purchase Starcraft 2 but with no Linux support I will continue to give my money to Valve.

On November 13th, Blizzard Entertainment released the latest expansion to their most successful franchise, World of Warcraft but unfortunately the launch did not go as well as everyone had hoped.

Apparently when the expansion went live for North American, their servers started being attacked by a DDoS (Denial of Service).  Blizzard has been very good at providing updates over the past couple of days but it appears that is not enough to all the immature customers they have aka Windows gamers.

For those wondering why I am using the term Windows gamers, it is because Blizzard Entertainment, for whatever reason, is a Microsoft ass kisser by only really supporting Windows.  Sure they do have an installer for the Mac operating system but from what I have heard, it is nothing more than their Windows client wrapped in a Windows type of emulator.  I don’t use a Mac so I can not confirm it for myself.

So back to my claim of Windows gamers acting like children.  Although Blizzard is doing their best to not only address problems with the new expansion but also the massive DDoS attack, the gamers can not seem to do anything but act like a 2 year old, constantly complaining and swearing at Blizzard.

Some of them claim it is their right because they are paying customers but it makes me wonder how they would react if they were in the shoes of Linux gamers, a very large group whom have been requesting a Linux port of Blizzard games for the past 10 years.  10 years Linux gamers have been ignored and yet you don’t see them carrying on like a 2 year old.

Windows gamers, GROW UP!

For at least a decade now, gamers who use Linux as their primary operating system due to it’s awesome stability and security compared to Windows have requested over and over for Blizzard to release a Linux port of their games.

In the beginning, requests posted in the forums, which by the way is pretty much the only way of submitting requests, would instantly be locked or deleted by forum administrators. This of course made it very difficult for Linux gamers to get the word out to the actual decision makers at Blizzard.

Since the forums were redone some years back, the auto deletion and lock down of forum topics regarding Linux request have stopped but the message still gets lost if you will from all the Windows fan boys who have nothing better to do than bring negativity and stupidity to the topic.

One of the most common reply Windows gamers like to mention is on the various distributions of Linux. What makes this such a stupid reply is the fact that it does not matter what distribution a person uses since behind the graphical interface, most are pretty much the same.

Now I am no Linux guru by any means but many Linux programmers have stated that it would not be difficult to make the games work on all distrobutions by simply adding a command to verify any required packages are installed first and if any is missing, the installer auto downloads and installs it.

Another stupid comment is Linux gamers can use WINE and thus an official Linux port is not needed. Unfortunately, most Windows applications do not run the same as they would if there was an actual Linux port. Take Valve’s Left 4 Dead for example. Before it was released on Linux, a lot of gamers could not play it through WINE. Myself, the game could barely get through the opening movie. Now with the Linux release, I can play the game without any problems and in fact Valve found the game ran better than in Windows.

Another misconception is on something called “Market Share”. The problem with using Market Share is that you can not properly calculate what the current value is since Linux is a free operating system. You also cannot rely on values provided by websites since most of those sites are places a Linux user would not visit.

There have also been many gamers who have stated they only put up with Windows just so they can play their favourite Blizzard game(s).

So why does Blizzard hate Linux?  Well that is one question Linux gamers have been wondering for MANY years but which Blizzard has always refused to make a statement about.  Are they cowards, afraid they may receive backlash or is it something else?  No one knows for sure and we may never know.