Guild Wars 2

Hello folks.

I already use Ubuntu for work years ago. And today, I finally give up on Windows and came to SteamOS for gaming. I am seeing a big number of new games coming to linux because of the new Valve politic (SteamOS and SteamMachines), and this made me decide.

So I was wondering, maybe we can have a port for GuildWars 2 to Linux? I don’t know if we have a opengl version of the game (that’s maybe the most hard work to do in the porting).

I know, the game is playable in the wine, but without official support We don’t have guarantee this will keep working. Plus the wine method don’t use 100% of available resources and we have a lot of bugs.

If this is not in the job list of ArenaNet I want to suggest this, the new gaming linux market will grow a lot on next years. So that those who are not prepared will be left behind and have a lot of headaches in the future.

For now we (linux users) don’t have a good AAA MMO, but some titles are in developing (Entropy is the next one). Explore this market can be a good investment in the future.

Sometime ago, before the release, I’ve read a post from ArenaNet devs, that the port to consoles was in discussion for the future. If it’s true, the SteamMachines can be a initial target for the devs

+1 for the Linux or SteamOS port.

It has already been suggested and discussed many times.

I think Linux gamers are too small of a population to justify the time and effort to make an OS friendly GW2. MAC gamers are lucky enough to have beta support at the moment.

In my opinion, all games should just be played on a Window’s PC, regardless of how much you may dislike Microsoft.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I think Linux gamers are too small of a population to justify the time and effort to make an OS friendly GW2. MAC gamers are lucky enough to have beta support at the moment.

In my opinion, all games should just be played on a Window’s PC, regardless of how much you may dislike Microsoft.

Why all games should be played on a Window’s PC? I really don’t believe the costs are a cause. Today the users of steam for linux are close to 2% of 75M steam users, 1.5 million users, starved for good games.

In the next 6 months, with the release of steam machines, we can easily reach 5% of total users, and much more to come. With a close-to-exclusive MMO for SteamOS, Guild Wars 2 can grow up heavily your user base.

From what I read about Steam OS they are making it so that Windows games will work on it rather than the game companies making a port. So just give time and Valve will fix it so that it will work. The amount of time and effort needed to port a game on to a different OS is flat out ridiculous (trying to port even a small program is a pain in the ass!).

Suddenflame.2601:

From what I read about Steam OS they are making it so that Windows games will work on it rather than the game companies making a port.

By streaming the game from a Windows PC.

Suddenflame.2601:

From what I read about Steam OS they are making it so that Windows games will work on it rather than the game companies making a port. So just give time and Valve will fix it so that it will work. The amount of time and effort needed to port a game on to a different OS is flat out ridiculous (trying to port even a small program is a pain in the ass!).

The SteamOS will only support windows games in streaming mode, so you only will be able to play having another computer with a running Windows.

The amount of time depends directly of how the game was been written, a game like GuildWars 2, is easily ported, because there is a independance between Direct3D api and the game API. All features in the game were writen from scratch for the game. Just replacing the Direct3D calls to opengl calls will do the port.

The biggest proof is the Guildwars 2 Wine version, all graphic features are working flawless, just need more performance tweaks to be perfect.

The wine work is just replace Direct3D calls for opengl calls and Windows calls to Linux calls.

As far as I know the current MAC version was written the same way, replacing Direct3D calls for opengl calls. If that’s true, to make a linux version, just need some tweaks in the MAC port.

Healix.5819:

Suddenflame.2601:

From what I read about Steam OS they are making it so that Windows games will work on it rather than the game companies making a port.

By streaming the game from a Windows PC.

No they want the games to work on the Steam OS without the use of a Window’s PC. It was reported on PC mag and Forbes. All reports on it have not been released as its still in design phase so you can’t know its by streaming from a Windows PC (which means they gave up after only 3 weeks since that report came out which isn’t long at all) unless you got inside knowledge.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I think Linux gamers are too small of a population…

I think it’s the lack of games on Linux is the reason the gamer population is small…
If I could have all/most of my games on Linux, I would ditch windows without a second thought.

But since the OpenGL kittened up at some point in time with becoming popular… and DirectX prevailed… Gamers were pretty much locked into Windows…

:/ Running things through Wine doesn’t always work…

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamController/

+

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/

+

Guild Wars 2

+

Living Room

No more =’D

We’re talking about a Direct X 9.0 game here with relatively poor multi-core support and still written for 32-bit software.

I really doubt Linux support is anywhere on a to-do-list in terms of technical support.

If SteamOS becomes big enough, sure, it could happen. At the moment it pretty much comes down to WINE though. As was pointed out, that’s not always a perfect solution, and unfortunately Valve isn’t going to be able to do that much better just because they’re Valve. Perfectly emulating Windows APIs is a fundamentally infeasible task, in part because those APIs are full of legacy hacks to fix old in-house applications that some Fortune 500 company or other is still relying on for some reason. If a game happens to depend on enough API quirks, it can be very difficult to get it to work successfully.

Best bet if you don’t want a separate PC running Windows would be an OnLive-style streaming service. They still have a long way to go though.

ANet is relatively small – compared to Valve and so forth.

I would think that Valve is moving to Linux as a sort of loss leader – they can afford to take a risk like that (and use money/reputation to change market perspective). For Valve, if the push to Linux fails they stand to lose a lot; but likely not everything. I’m not sure if ANet could afford to throw their weight behind such a big risk.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to be able to play games on Linux (and I hate that I’m stuck using Windows) – I do think it’s a bit unreasonable to ask someone like ANet to invest in it right now. In other words: I would much rather have GW3 than a failed attempt at Linux.

Also, I heard that Wine was pretty stable for GW2?

Also as far as the existing Mac OpenGL IP goes, from what I read on the forums Mac users have no end of problems – it looks like the GW2 OpenGL renderer isn’t as stable as the DirectX one.

Yeah, the Mac port uses a commercialized version of WINE from Transgaming. Currently we have framerate drops down to the 1-5 fps range (not drops of 1-5 fps, drops to 1-5 fps) when you have a group of people (varies in size needed depending on the machine) casting spells. It makes pretty much every medium to large group event impossible to play (WvW, EoTM, Marionette, Wurm).

Before this we had issues where the patcher was messing up and we had to find a work around to manually patch the game to the latest version. It took ANet support about a month or so to fix that.

And before that we had the usual disconnect/crash in Lions Arch issues. And so on.

Essentially, the Mac beta is barely supported (and they never tell us what bugs to expect, we have to discover those on patch day…its like Christmas every patch). You’d probably end up with the similar levels of satisfaction using a WINE wrapper (the mac forums are also pretty good at helping out with custom WINE wrappers since we keep trying to see if we can tweak the wrapper better than ANet can).

Oh and last fall during PAX ANet basically came out and said the Mac port was back burner and they’re not doing any active development on it. So yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Linux port unless SteamOS is huge or Valve pays them a bunch of money to port it.

I think SteamOS doesn’t have enough future as itself to make need for a SteamOS/linux – client.

don’t get me wrong. SteamOS is a promosing and good development, but it is not without criticism. Steam is allready considered too much as a monopolistic company by some. e.g. the decission to put skyrim on steam only was widely critised.

That is why I think SteamOS is a great way to prove that Linux as a gamingOS has more potential to serve the market of regular users (I know that many games including GW2 run excellent on Linux, but the people doing it are considered geeks, even among gamers and are not mainstream gamers). But if that point is proven I see SteamOS being replaced by a more traditional Linux distrubtion that is specialised in mainstream gaming.

So the future of linux gaming is too unsure yet and SteamOS is in my view more a proof of concept then a good mainstream replacement for windows PC’s.

klarkc.3754:

The biggest proof is the Guildwars 2 Wine version, all graphic features are working flawless, just need more performance tweaks to be perfect.

The wine work is just replace Direct3D calls for opengl calls and Windows calls to Linux calls.

As far as I know the current MAC version was written the same way, replacing Direct3D calls for opengl calls. If that’s true, to make a linux version, just need some tweaks in the MAC port.

Unfortunately for us OSX users, this is not exactly true. The game engine is written for DirectX9. The OSX port uses a translation layer (Cider) to translate the API calls from DX9 to OpenGL. It doesn’t change them in the engine, it intercepts them and replaces them. This comes with considerable performance losses and potential for incompatibility (see the massive performance problem since the last patch), a number of limitations (related to memory usage) and various workaround needs for interface and window management.

A native OpenGL client comes with is very own host of problems though (which version of OpenGL to support, OS specific implementation problems etc.).

As much as I would love to see a native OpenGL version of GW2, I don’t see it making a lot of sense for Arenanet to divert resources to it until SteamOS sees a major gain in market share. And since it’s intended mostly as a living room device/console alternative, the need for controller support introduces yet another host of problems.

klarkc.3754:

The wine work is just replace Direct3D calls for opengl calls and Windows calls to Linux calls.

I think Wine uses and needs windows libraries. You can not simply map DirectX <> OpenGL

I really don’t know why game developers are still using Direct3D for developing. Today with so many devices and multiplataform tools, the use of a multiplataform engine is a must have.

I am sad =’(

I already saw some other games that implement OpenGL support after the release, like WoW, in this one, the time to rewrite the engine is the same to launch a Exp. I am still thinking that the work is worth.

Naqaj.6219:

klarkc.3754:

The biggest proof is the Guildwars 2 Wine version, all graphic features are working flawless, just need more performance tweaks to be perfect.

The wine work is just replace Direct3D calls for opengl calls and Windows calls to Linux calls.

As far as I know the current MAC version was written the same way, replacing Direct3D calls for opengl calls. If that’s true, to make a linux version, just need some tweaks in the MAC port.

Unfortunately for us OSX users, this is not exactly true. The game engine is written for DirectX9. The OSX port uses a translation layer (Cider) to translate the API calls from DX9 to OpenGL. It doesn’t change them in the engine, it intercepts them and replaces them. This comes with considerable performance losses and potential for incompatibility (see the massive performance problem since the last patch), a number of limitations (related to memory usage) and various workaround needs for interface and window management.

A native OpenGL client comes with is very own host of problems though (which version of OpenGL to support, OS specific implementation problems etc.).

As much as I would love to see a native OpenGL version of GW2, I don’t see it making a lot of sense for Arenanet to divert resources to it until SteamOS sees a major gain in market share. And since it’s intended mostly as a living room device/console alternative, the need for controller support introduces yet another host of problems.

Seems that the MAC version is suffering the same issues of running the game through the Wine.

In my computer I suffer from about 50% of less performance running the game in Wine compared to Windows (latest wine version), plus a heavy FPS instability if max out the game graphics. But all features are working.

Not sure if this thrad is still important. I would want to add my support of a native Linux version.

The game already runs on OSX. The port to Linux shouldn’t require a complete rework of the game. And ArenaNet could make a statement to support Linux as a gaming platform.

Unfortunately the game doesn’t properly work with WINE very well.

SpaceKookie.1782:

Not sure if this thrad is still important. I would want to add my support of a native Linux version.

The game already runs on OSX. The port to Linux shouldn’t require a complete rework of the game. And ArenaNet could make a statement to support Linux as a gaming platform.

Unfortunately the game doesn’t properly work with WINE very well.

Anet barely supports the OSX beta client which is a port. Have a look at the Mac forum. The Mac forum’s one support specialist is doing it as a side job and has not posted in almost a month. I would not hold much hope for a Linux client.

I can think of over a 1000+ coding issues that need addressing before this request is considered. I’m not against supporting other OSs, but I am against it even being thought about until some significant bugs are fixed and improvements made to the EXISTING game.

Old topic, but:

Valve released “togl” a while back, which I believe makes porting DirectX9 games to OpenGL pretty trivial.

Wine 1.8 should come with CSMT patches built-in (I believe), which works really well for GW2. Currently using Playonlinux with Wine 1.7.4-CSMT, and performance is pretty good: (30 fps in Lion’s Arch, same in zergs with best performance preset, and very playable fps in other open areas – I turn shadows to the lowest setting, and optionally, character model limit/quality to lowest). The one problem is the game crashes occasionally (usually at the end of a Tequatl run, but it hasn’t crashed at that point in a while). Memory leaks are also a problem.

SteamOS has unofficial and modified DirectX libraries, so games will run even w/o emulating them.
Problem is compatibility which Valve is working on.

If SteamOS will get more and more popular as a Free Operating System which can run Games, including newly released ones – Windows will get a headshot.

That only now depends on Valve and how they’ll update it.
In couple of years we should see other distros using DirectX libraries so people who will want to play “Windows” games, will be able to play on any distro they’ll want.

Honestly, I was waiting for that day till Windows will get shot in it’s knee.

Since the Mac client is just using a wrapper, there’s no reason why the same couldn’t be done for SteamOS. It really just depends on user demand, which itself depends a lot on how successful SteamOS becomes.

However right now you can run it on SteamOS by streaming it from a Windows PC (if you have a spare Windows box). I do this all the time with my Mac and it works flawlessly. Much better performance that actually running it with the official Mac client!