Grimrock

afettouhi wrote:Weird that for reason all the HIB that the linux gamers seem to have bigger wallets than you window gamers .

Weird reason? No, they are actually simple. Microsoft's OS's cost a lot more then any Linux on the market.

afettouhi wrote:Weird that for reason all the HIB that the linux gamers seem to have bigger wallets than you window gamers

Weird that for reason all people can install Linux legitimately for free but Windows costs bigger money ...

http://www.linuxliteos.com/

Seems like I not only have a bigger wallet than you but also a bigger IQ

Dear friends of tux, while I totally sympathize with the open-source movement and the idea of making software portable... but here exist a reasonable alternative with WINE with very good DX9 support (and, even Liam from GOL is fine with Wine now).

And since today, even better, Linux has native DirectX9.0 support, by that no tinkering with problematic or non-existing linux libs anymore required, the industry standard D3d9 is now native to the linux ecosystem and LoG2 therefore (mostly) natively available for Linux!
Linux Graphics drivers and Mesa Library now support Direct3D 9 natively

Linux, BSD, UNIX, Windows and other operating systems are simply tools.

I'd love a port to Linux also, but more than one solution already exists. Is there a reason that for the purpose of Grimrock 2 you cannot use Wine as was suggested? If you can't afford Windows and are a student, you may also be able to get it from Dreamspark. Server versions seem to work fine, especially after a little bit of tweaking. Yes, you can set your system up to dual boot. No it does not take much time to reboot.

By not buying the game you are not hurting anyone except perhaps yourself if you really wanted to play it.

Can you really blame them when linux has such a small marketshare on the desktop market? There are no bux in tux for game developers so it makes no sense to invest in it.

Might as well demand that Grimrock be developed for the NES. The market share for games is so small that it's not worth it.

Likewise, I wouldn't really recommend windows server either. Linux has its pros but gaming isn't one of them.

Should Almost Human develop for Suse, Fedora Core, Gentoo, puppy or just release the source code so you can compile on your LFS rig?

Not to mention the support ... I do customer service for an automation company and one Linux customer can easily fill my workday while I could help 50 windows based customers in that same time. Just not worth it. When you use linux, you're on your own. Isn't that the whole reason why you installed it in the first place?

Use Wine, cadega or whatever other emulation package there is. That's the game. And if you're not willing to pay for a great game, please join the discussion in the non-DRM thread.

any6 wrote:Can you really blame them when linux has such a small marketshare on the desktop market? There are no bux in tux for game developers so it makes no sense to invest in it.

Might as well demand that Grimrock be developed for the NES. The market share for games is so small that it's not worth it.

Likewise, I wouldn't really recommend windows server either. Linux has its pros but gaming isn't one of them.

Should Almost Human develop for Suse, Fedora Core, Gentoo, puppy or just release the source code so you can compile on your LFS rig?

Not to mention the support ... I do customer service for an automation company and one Linux customer can easily fill my workday while I could help 50 windows based customers in that same time. Just not worth it. When you use linux, you're on your own. Isn't that the whole reason why you installed it in the first place?

Use Wine, cadega or whatever other emulation package there is. That's the game.

I mostly agree with you. Sadly, linux is on on hand the most complicated environment to address and has on the other hand the smallest target audience (~1.5% marketshare). For good luck we have now native linux d3d support, could simplify things a little bit! But...

any6 wrote: And if you're not willing to pay for a great game, please join the discussion in the non-DRM thread.

...what do you mean with that? DRM-free has totally nothing to do with a unwillingness to pay for something???

badhabit wrote:\
I mostly agree with you. Sadly, linux is on on hand the most complicated environment to address and has on the other hand the smallest target audience (~1.5% marketshare). For good luck we have now native linux d3d support, could simplify things a little bit! But...

Which makes Linux both vastly more expensive to develop for with a very slim market to sell to. It is very difficult up to impossible to turn a profit on linux games.

...what do you mean with that? DRM-free has totally nothing to do with a unwillingness to pay for something???

Grimrock 2 is DRM-free which means, if you manage to get a hold of it one way or another, you can install it without any hassle.

I always let out a little chuckle when I hear "but Linux users pay the most on Humble Bundles - of course you need to develop for them" because when you actually look at the pie chart for how much money was made from each platform - the linux segment on the pie chart is always tiny (a few percent) of the total money raised (Example from the current HB).

I don't deny that Linux users are willing to pay, but I can also see the issue from a developer's perspective. Steam suggests that 1.2% of their users are on Linux. Even some of those will also have a Windows partition, so let's round to 1% of potential gamers are on Linux and have no access to Windows. I obviously have no idea of the sales figures for LOG2, but let's just assume from a source llike this that a.n.other "averagely successful" indie company sells the equivalent of 30,000 copies of their game at full price. A basic assumption is that you could get an additional 1% of sales by adding linux support - which is an additional 300 sales. Given the time cost of developing the port (re-writing all of the graphics in OpenGL for a start, plus lots of time fixing platform-specific quirks) and then the dozens of hours required for providing support on the forums after release. Well, surely anyone can see that, while it might not be a bad idea, it is also not an obvious money maker.

At the end of the day - I would love to see OSX and Linux ports of LOG2. As an outsider, it looks like there is definitely value in building a community around supporting OSX and Linux (who will buy future games). However, I for one certainly won't hold it against AH if they decide that they would rather spend the next 3 months developing their next project or making an expansion dungeon for LOG2 instead of using that time to just port to Linux/OSX!

JohnWordsworth wrote:I always let out a little chuckle when I hear "but Linux users pay the most on Humble Bundles - of course you need to develop for them" because when you actually look at the pie chart for how much money was made from each platform - the linux segment on the pie chart is always tiny (a few percent) of the total money raised (Example from the current HB).

I don't deny that Linux users are willing to pay, but I can also see the issue from a developer's perspective. Steam suggests that 1.2% of their users are on Linux. Even some of those will also have a Windows partition, so let's round to 1% of potential gamers are on Linux and have no access to Windows. I obviously have no idea of the sales figures for LOG2, but let's just assume from a source llike this that a.n.other "averagely successful" indie company sells the equivalent of 30,000 copies of their game at full price. A basic assumption is that you could get an additional 1% of sales by adding linux support - which is an additional 300 sales. Given the time cost of developing the port (re-writing all of the graphics in OpenGL for a start, plus lots of time fixing platform-specific quirks) and then the dozens of hours required for providing support on the forums after release. Well, surely anyone can see that, while it might not be a bad idea, it is also not an obvious money maker.

At the end of the day - I would love to see OSX and Linux ports of LOG2. As an outsider, it looks like there is definitely value in building a community around supporting OSX and Linux (who will buy future games). However, I for one certainly won't hold it against AH if they decide that they would rather spend the next 3 months developing their next project or making an expansion dungeon for LOG2 instead of using that time to just port to Linux/OSX!

some remarks: steam actually measures the real usage ("catched using Linux/window") and not the installed linux partions so it's really 1.2 to 1.5% (also, real the linux gamers will buy for linux if possible).

I agree in general, most often the work of porting for linux might commercially wise a problematic decision.

On the other hand in this case for Grimrock and AH, the grimrock engine is already ported and adapted for linux, I can't believe that petri broke by extending the engine the basic compatiblity framework, maybe the reason is another one: potentially the performance is even worse under linux than under windows where already performance problems exist. I suspect the performance of the engine might also the reason why we have not seen up to now a release of the announced iOS version for Log1 (despite leaked images).

badhabit wrote:On the other hand in this case for Grimrock and AH, the grimrock engine is already ported and adapted for linux, I can't believe that petri broke by extending the engine the basic compatiblity framework, maybe the reason is another one: potentially the performance is even worse under linux than under windows where already performance problems exist.

Linux has (or had?) no native DX9 driver and is (was?) forced to translate any DX9 instruction into OpenGL before any gfx output got produced. Naturally this cripples performance and there is nothing a DX9-based engine can do about it.

Now if there are new native DX9 drivers for Linux their performence might exceed that of DX9 on Windows, depending on the DX typical overhead created. We need more data to tell if this assumption holds.

Anyway: LoG1 for Linux and later OSX use OpenGL, not DX9. AFAIR even the early LoG1 windows versions had OpenGL which was cut later during low render mode performace tunings. Since LoG2 was aimed to be a windows launch i'm pretty sure that AH did not spend time on the OpenGL part during development.

badhabit wrote:I suspect the performance of the engine might also the reason why we have not seen up to now a release of the announced iOS version for Log1 (despite leaked images).

The reason was the low to very low gfx performance of available iOS devices. This might have changed with current hardware.