Linux Gaming: DXVK, Wine, and Lutris (Part 2 of 4) | Level One Techs

@wendell, Audio is cut out at ~05:06 for a few seconds, or is it just me? I re-played it a few times to rule out a hiccup on my part and it’s consistent.
Also I like the ramble about the toxic side of the community :sweat_smile:

That doesn’t work on the same level as the former solutions though, even though it is convenient if you just have one GPU and seems like an interesting project. As you write in the disadvantages, there’s no easy switching between the systems once the VM is boot up. For example I like working alongside having a game open, that wouldn’t work if I wanted to work on Linux and play on Windows :wink:

On a side-note: You should look at your commit comments a little. Commit comments are like a small part of documentation on what you did, your commit history looks like all over the place :wink:

It’s a specific rule targeting blockquotes in an article, so seems like it :smiley:

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I basically learned (tried) to learn markdown just to write that up.

I’m not a developer by any means and I’m very unfamiliar git, commits, etc.

It’s basically all over the place.

But, the reason I posted it was because it was the best solution for my needs and after a friend convinced me, I though it could help other people as well.

As I mention. I LOVE the Looking-Glass project. I can’t wait to see where that goes. But for now, this works best for me and might work best for other people!

it just seems odd is all

It does, seems kind of… squished, idk.

That’s totally fine, don’t get me wrong it’s nice you shared it :wink:
As I said, it’s a nice solution for people that have only one GPU, but it doesn’t solve the same problem I guess :wink: Guess it doesn’t need to either.

It’s definitely not a panacea. But thanks!

If you’ve got any tips on how to make it better I’m all ears.

@wendell

Take this with a grain of salt, but there has been some rumblings that Valve may be implementing some sort of compatibility layer into their upcoming Steam 3.0 client.

IIRC there are several commercial porters that already offer services like this (other than crossover) already, like Feral’s indirectX, Aspyr’s weird framework and eON, that infamously caused the witcher 2 flame war.

That involved developers hiring them though. Whatever Valve is doing (if they’re actually doing something) is for games that don’t have official ports.

yeah, granted the big 3 engines offer linux compiling support now too. I was just pointing out that codeweavers haven’t been the only factor for a long time

Speaking of which, was Codeweavers thing ever actually used for commercially supported games? I mean, it’s still Wine, and Wine has… “issues”… so, yeah.
Pretty much all the ports I’ve seen were more or less native or some kind of wrapper, haven’t seen Wine being officially supported anywhere.

codeweavers sold crossover as a user facing product, essentially a lutris or PoL that they guaranteed to work for their list of supported games.

I also theink they were involved in a lot of mac game ports at one point too, and they definitely sell crossover’s wrapper as a porting framework for commercial software (quicken and a bunch of medical/legal database software that didn’t have native windows versions for the backend)

image

apparently the mac version of world of tanks is crossover driven

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If this “Transitional period” for Linux Gaming, why is the steam market share lower for Steam on Linux than 3 years ago and there’s now less big titles that bothered making a Linux version? You can blame China all you want, but we had more native big titles released per year back then than we do now.

Also, the ability to run DOS and Windows Programs on OS/2 didn’t help OS/2 adoption.

What’s the source on that?
https://steamdb.info/linux/

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That’s a high quantity of shovelware, I’m talking about the high quantity of memorable games. Remember when there was a SteamOS Sale? Where they highlighted great games?

Literally every game I looked on that list doesn’t have a Linux Port.

Several of the games on that list do in fact have Linux ports. Specifically

Is that something you believe or do you have info to back that up? If you’re thinking of games like Bioshock Infinite – the Linux port came out quite a bit after the original release. Not very many AAA games have simultaneous releases.

It’s difficult to communicate to non-programmers just how much the graphics system has changed over the last couple years. For one, it’s several different teams working on their own thing with only loose coordination… so it is easy to imagine progress wasn’t the fastest.

I agree there are not enough but things are improving imho. Maybe if your argument that steamOS is declining… but that’s incomplete? SteamOs is declining because it isn’t needed anymore. Few people realize how much of a positive effect it has had.

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to that point, generative art didn’t just spring out of nowhere, and GLSL sucked when it was king

None of which I’m interested in. There was hope, you saw valve port their entire back catalogue and invested so much in porting tools, linux drivers, SDL, you saw Epic port Unreal to Linux and what came of it? Almost nothing and I’m sure valve will never make a game for Linux because they’ll never make games ever again.

Generally, no, this is not the case. The few AAA developed games that come to Linux are generally ported by third party groups. One of the most recent AAA games to get a release on Linux is Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was ported by Feral Interactive. Big publishers generally aren’t too interested in making a Linux port available, so smaller port houses like Feral and Aspyr pick up the tab for the publishers. The PC port of Rise of the Tomb Raider was released in 2016.

Bioshock Infinite was ported by Virtual Programming, and isn’t a completely native port. Virtual Programming has been working on ARMA III for Linux currently.

Right now, it’s just individuals like Ryan Gordon and others, as well as port groups listed above who are still responsible for making most of those ports happen. Though indie developers and b-tier developers have been doing Linux ports themselves when they can.

That is not entirely true. Valve does have that Artifact card game getting a release later this year:

And it will have a simultaneous Windows/ Linux and Mac release this November. What’s funny is that the game is using Source 2.

I’m not talking about a shitty Hearthstone clone, I’m talking about the first person experience they’re known for. Me saying “Valve will never make a game ever again” is like saying “Disney will never make an animated film again” and people say “Murr, what about pixar?” when it’s obvious I’m talking about their hand drawn films.

Until Valve makes another quality first person experience, they’re dead to me as a developer.

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I really enjoyed the video, for obvious reasons, but also for the aspects regarding the Linux community. This is really the message I want to hear to help build a more welcoming community, specially for game publishers.

Were in this weird time now where we got excellent tech on Linux (Mesa has never been that great, Vulkan does amazing things, …) but at the same time we lost support from a bunch of publishers that either had a negative first experience or were driven away by outright toxicity by the community.

I fully agree with Wendell when he says we’re in a transitional period, and we need to leverage the tools we have on linux to go through this period, and build something great.

Valve despite their apparent lack of activity, do contribute a lot to the Linux ecosystem. After all they are hiring Keith Packard, who promised great things during last DebConf. I just feel that if Epic did finally take a stance and actually supported Linux instead of leaving a semi-open source engine in the wild then we’ll have the real leverage to make publishers look at Linux again.

Meanwhile, Lutris will happily fill the gap. We only got one graphically demanding game on Linux this year with Rise of the Tomb Raider so DXVK is really a relief in that regard. We’re finally able to play most high profile games on Linux, with a mostly acceptable performance drop.

While we are trying to gain the interest of publishers, DXVK keeps the platform technically competitive and even helps in the development of Mesa or the Vulkan specs, which will then benefit native games.

All this recent activity has really changed the way I envision the project. I have started working on an upcoming release when all I had previously planned was the 0.5.0 release which is months away. I’ve recently been able to reproduce and fix bugs that needed to be fixed urgently so I hope the upcoming 0.4.19 version will improve the experience for a lot of users.