Linux

I haven't heard this and i like to think i don't miss much. Do you have a news article to back it up?

Personally without backup of your suggestion that Microsoft are considering doing this, I call complete BS. Microsoft can only lose by going to the effort of separating games off onto consoles completely because they would completely alienate the hard-core computer gaming enthusiast pushing them into using linux because of Microsoft and - in the long run - losing market share. The whole Microsoft windows 8 store has already started this as they refuse other developers to run their own store like steam, hence pushing the creation of the steam piston (which I fore sore when i heard valve were experimenting with Linux, it was the logical conclusion).

I’m not saying Microsoft won’t do it. I’m not saying they won’t cause this reaction anyhow because of their push towards a walled garden like that of a mac with windows 8. I’m just saying it would be F***ing stupid on their part.

But then, Gates isn't running the show any more is he.

Edit for slight rant additions :D

I feel the greatest desire to join you in the linux freedom, I may even do it once i next rebuild my machine on the next upgrade... I'm just waiting for a suitably beefy AMD 10 or 12 core and i'm there. I see no point in doing the upgrade sooner.....

I will have to dual boot with windows still for eve and a few other things though. I would be doing so now, but suse isn't bloody picking up my wireless. Can't figure it out.

Not really.

Just phone to Valve and let EVE to enter steam linux.

ok. but look at Blizzard and World of Warcraft or Diablo3 client - it have an opengl option and does not require any directx installed in wine environment, with opengl WoW is stable and fast


This thread will never have a chance to be read by CCP, and whole this forum part.

I think - Nobody cares in CCP about Linux, Valve Steam growth and new PS4 (yes, Dust514 - would be ported to new linux based x86 PS4 ? Good question)


If CCP cares - they can simply check client OS with launcher - calculate and publish statistics by OS-type in devblog,
-do some work about testing new patches under MacOS and Linux,
-make something with their own 3d game-engine to have more options and support both DirectX and OpenGL,
- they could do some work about multithreading of ExeFile.exe to gain more perfomance and to stop lags in grid with 1k+ ships and lot of wreck persists,
-add OpenCL for physics,
-do better caching with use of memory (resource cache on disk - what for is it if I have 8+ GB Ram ?)

@Fam Trinly

Blizzard is not a great Linux supporter as one would think. Yes their games run great with wine. But I would not want to wake up one morning just to find out that I'm perma banned just because I'm using wine (PlayOnLinux version). This happened to people playing Diablo 3. And it wasn't just few people that one could thing they are cheaters. You still have a big green warning on winehq next to Diablo 3 about this issue. Nothing like this happened with EVE and we have here 10th anniversary.


And about CCP not caring about linux or reading linux related stuff on this forums. One year ago there came some patch where when you saw a Tengu, your client insta crashed. This did not affect windows users. Just us wine users. So CCP could just not care about this issue. But they did care. Thanks to CCP Snorlax, who came to save us poor linux users, the crash was fixed in few days. Whole story:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=100279&find=unread

So yes. If CCP did not care about linux, they would not let CCP Snorlax to spend his time on fixing that problem. And this story shall not be forgotten. Because it shows that we have a true hero in CCP ranks! :-)

...Is that period of the year again?

Your AFAIK doesn't go as far as you think it goes. While it is true that EvE uses stackless Python, there is still a part of EvE that is written in C/C++, that's why there is the occasional c++ error/crash that you can experience and the fact that the vcrun libraries from MS are required.


What would you prefer: running the client as it is now or having an OpenGL version which is not optimised at all, because you know it takes quite a bit of time (read monies) to build a proper working graphics engine. Even if they do build a proper engine, it would take a couple of years before it's ready to be send out into the crowd. Also I'm pretty sure that there would be a need for a code checking of the stackless python to make sure it actually runs on Linux, Mac and Windows without the need to have special cases to handle the different platforms. As an example you can check out the famous T3 bug from last year, which was due to the way how the python code was accessing the disk which Linux didn't particularly like.


Here's some napkin math and pessimistic speculations:

1. 5 year in man hours needed - it was mentioned at fanfest last year that 5 man year was required to upgrade the current graphic engine to DX11, then take into account that those devs already know how to use the DX framework so this is most likely an underestimation
2. 50000€ per man year needed - I wouldn't be surprised that it's actually more
3. 5% of player base uses Linux - I wouldn't be surprised that it's actually less
4. 400000 supscriptions - I believe that's current approximation

That would give an approximate base of (5*50000)/(0.05*400000) = 12.5€ per Linux user to contribute to fund the implementation of an OpenGL engine. It might not sound like much, but I'm not convinced that there are a lot of Linux users that actually want to cough up that money. Especially not for a game that already runs perfectly fine on their computer and for which they already pay. Then you have to realize that this base value is most likely an underestimation and it quickly doubles, triple, quadruples if you would go for more appropriate values of the input. It will also take several years before the engine will be ready. Who in this game is truely willing to spend money for something they might actually never use?


Rather period of the month.

?

It doesn't?

DX11 and OpenGL are both frameworks that allow you to make fancy graphical applications without explicitely knowing how to tell the hardware how to do it. When a team that already knows the DX framework needs approximately 5 man years to upgrade the current framework to a newer version of the same framework, then that tells you that, to a certain extent, changing framework will be approximately the same amount of time (most likely more due to that team needing to learn the methodology of that new framework). Technically they could simply forego upgrading to DX11 and switching to OpenGL instead (I would not really be oposed to that), but I'm not very optimistic about them doing that, nor will I pay extra for them to do that. I consider it a very bad return of investment when I believe that my current investment could be better spend on improving the game itself and ironing out glitches in the client.


Where do you think that subscription money goes to? It's mostly used to pay developers to keep working on the game, client and servers, not purely to keep the servers up and running.

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Someone who doesn't understand that there's limited resources, will keep insisting on throwing resources at problems/issues/ideas until it's fixed, regardless if those resources are available or not. Companies however can not put themselves in such positions or else their ship will sink. A company like CCP unfortunately does not have an abundance of resources available to do just that.