Guild Wars 2

I haven’t logged in for a while now, as others before me have said, there are many games for Linux that keep me busy, and I’m less and less willing to put up with wine, especially when the performance is poor… I do log in every once in a while to see what’s changed, but that’s about it.

Let’s be fair, some games do run well under Wine (for instance, i get steady 60fps playing League of Legends, with no real slowdowns), but GW2 isn’t one of them. Alright, not-so-crowded areas work fine, but WvW is just frustrating. And what’s left to do when WvW is out of the picture, and the pve content left to enjoy is a mindless grinding, or waiting for the next not-so-exciting-nor-long monthly event?

So yeah, long story short… Linux gamers are quite hungry for a MMO now, and the first AAA that will have a Linux client will both become extremely popular (as in a lot of free advertisement and a huge spotlight) and gain a growing base of players that other games are shunning… And if it won’t be GW2, it’ll be another game. Whoever gets there first wins the prize, and the others won’t be allowed to complain afterwards.
It’s like a “make a Linux client, win free costumers!” deal, in a market where the number of players does matter because of microtransactions.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or just a hint of Anet’s true nature, but… In Caudecus Manor explorable path 2, during the boss fight against Bridgette, I happened to dodge roll towards her and… Well, take a look at the screenshots.
I’m not sure if I ended up in some kind of map leftover, or if I actually was this close to the nightmare corpse city of R’lyeh, but I’ve tried to explore a little, and I didn’t find anything. I could see some underwater caverns if I kept floating on the surface, but once diving in, they’d disappear.

I’d really love to hear a dev saying something about this… It’s been 14 pages already!

Leios.8965:

Guys. Go to page 13 of this thread. Jazhara Knightmage.4389 posted that exact same comment there, deleted it, and then reposted it. There is clear evidence (seeing as how some posts say “@Jazhara Knightmage.4389” and then reply to a comment that ISN’T THERE).

I don’t know why anyone would do this, and it is mildly irritating. In this case, dissent is not a good way to bump the thread (if that was the goal).

Regardless, I wonder if it might be better to split this thread into two: one for the hardcore linux-user who wants a pure OpenGL port and another for those linux users who just want to have less of a hassle with installation and initial play of Guild Wars 2 with WINE. The latter thread could also include those pushing for a Cedega port.

Funny thing is, he didn’t even bother reading what i answered back then :\

And… To be honest, I’d rather split this topic in 3: one for native OpenGL port, one for Wine/Cedega/other “port”, and one for people who just want to troll and don’t care to read all the pages of this topic.

I’ll add to this rant.
It’s the very same thing that is happening to me, sometimes I die before the red cirlces even appear because of all the people zerging below. Or that disco ball pulling me being well invisible.
Seriously, why can’t the arenas be in a separate instance? It’s already annoying enough with the other bugs (not being able to move when the challenge starts, having a quaggan spawn along Liadri, …), but this way is just frustrating.

…Henge of Denravi and Isle of Jantir! And no, I’m not being sarcastic. Last night I went to EB to get the “World vs. Kite” achievement, and when I got to the jumpung puzzle… Dammit, there were a lot of red players. Yet… There was no killing at all! Actually, people from a server were helping those from the others in certain parts of the dungeon!
Given the other threads where people actually complain about trolls and griefers, I actually want to thank all the players of these two servers (along with mine, Northern Shiverpeaks), who actually made this achievement obtainable for everyone! I’ve never witnessed such friendliness between rival factions on any other MMO, I’m quite moved!

@Leios: hey, it looks like my script as well! Although I linked it in a .desktop file, I don’t like to keep terminal tabs busy… It just bothers me somehow lol

By the way, I’m using a GTX 560M (with Optimus disabled, thank Lyssa)… So yeah, this workaround is pretty hardware dependant. It’s a shame really, but this is the best we got so far, I believe… Unless we start pressing both ANet and the Wine dev team :p

That’d depend on the settings and the hardware I guess… I can say I get about 30-35 fps in open world and dungeons, but I haven’t tried a big zerg yet

Leios.8965:

soulsuke.7913:

Actually, the multiple cpus issue in wine can be fixed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11674
Problem is, it won’t make GW2 run that much better. Looks like this wasn’t the main bottleneck.

Man! That’s so unfortunate! I just made sure the fix was, indeed, in my build of WINE… And then I logged on just to be sure. I’m Still getting abysmal FPS. I’m sad.

On a more positive note, because this game doesn’t work on my system, I have taken to doing productive things in my spare time.

With their new dev system (where they are cranking out living world content every two weeks) I doubt this issue will even be looked at until October when they are repeating the Mad King event. Even then, they probably have so much else on their plate that it won’t be until Wintersday that the devs even recognize that this suggestion thread is/was active.

In other words. This will be a slow and bumpy ride.

Actually… I have good news!
The multiple cpus patch alone doesn’t solve all our issues, but using LD_PRELOAD=“libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1” and __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 along with it, I actually get decent fps in open world and dungeons! It still isn’t as good as on Windows, but it’s a start!

@Jazhara Knightmage.4389: you clearly misunderstood the meaning of that video. Do you even know who Lunduke is or what he thinks? Because that’s more like a constructive critic about linux developement rather than an attack. You probably just googled “linux sucks” and pasted the first link you’ve found… And failed quite badly.

1. No, not really, nope. I’m not even gonna try to explain this to you. I highly doubt you’d even follow me pas the word “driver”, probably. Especially if you believe they shouldn’t be in kernel space.

2. This has already been covered quite in detail in older posts.

3. Nope. You must have missed this discussion in the earlier posts as well.

4. Right. And Apple users will buy for 900$ anything with an Apple logo over it, and Windows users will try to pour cold water on a pc to cool it down. Yes, of course I’m joking. Too bad I’m quite sure you weren’t.

As for everythog else you said… BSD isn’t closer at all, and this comes from a former BSD enthusiast. Just check how the audio works there. Really.
And Linux IS more secure (than Windows) by default. Do yo ueven know where windows’ vulnerabilities come from? No, of course not. Because if you did, you’d know that it’s because of Windows’ core design.
Of course, nothing is unhackable, that’s true. That’s also a reason why OSs evolve. And… Given I’m talking with some kind of amateur (which, of course, will entitle himself as an IT expert with hunders of years of experience, if not the creator of Unics itself), I feel I should point out how a computers’ infrastructure isn’t only composed of the computers liked to it. The security systems include usually a large number of routers, switches, and self-configured (if not even self-built) firewalls. So yeah, nobody expects a Linux pc to be able to whitstand alone a full scale hacker attack. But again, it does add another layer of defense.
Also, just to point this out as well… Linux has a lot of malware. From memory exploits, to rootkits, to any kind of nasty stuff. But to make them work, you do have to execute them with root privileges. They don’t just start themselves up opening a jpeg file or browsing the net, unless you actually type in your root password. Here, we call it a “problem between keyboard and chair” type of error

Oh, I almost forgot.

I suggest you lintards watch this

I feel quite offended by this. Your post was quite provocatory, and you obviously didn’t read this topic at all. While you may say it was only a joke, there have already been enough “smart kids” who’d drop by to lay random insults and repeat the same (mostly wrong) things over and over again (probably without understanding them, even), and I’m quite sure you’re one of them as well.

PS. I’m sorry for any typo in this message, it’s quite late here :p

Actually, the multiple cpus issue in wine can be fixed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11674
Problem is, it won’t make GW2 run that much better. Looks like this wasn’t the main bottleneck.

I agree with you Leios, a response from a staff member would most surely be appreciated, even if it’s just a “We’re not going to consider you all all, go kitten off”

That is for Debian Wheezy which is 7.0, I don’t know if it will work on Squeeze (6.0), since it lacks multiarch…
I can say that Ubuntu’s package works flawlessly on Debian Sid without any hack though

eisberg.2379:

There was literally no difference between a new install of Linux Mint, and Windows 7, both worked right out of the box.

You mean besides having to search the internet for the latest nVidia/ATI drivers, a firewall, an antivirus, a ram checker/cleaner and other performance tweaking tools, oh, and rebooting 3-4 times to install the huge mass of updates? So simple and “out of the box without efforts” :p

Sorry, but I just had to point that out.

TheLaughingMan.4320:

So your problem is you cannot be yourself by dual booting windows, hence you won’t play gw2?

I really like homebrew’d console systems, why don’t I ask sony to put out the next FF game for my homebrew console system as well? I use it to program and I like the idea, its really cool, so Sony should publish for it as well!!

We all should start spreading the word, “homebrewed” now means an OS with almost the same market share of Apple, and used by NASA and many nations’ governments worldwide. Also, “homebrewed” is a product that is able to keep a few companies (which are even rivals) worldwide alive and still making money (Red Hat/Canonical anyone?). I wonder why my homebrewed toaster isn’t making me earn any money or followers :\

That said… Please, stop trolling. Once again, judging on what you’ve said so far, you have neither any data nor any knowledge on the subject to back up what you say. While I agree with you that kebaa is being quite extremist deleting his GW2 account, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the right to do such a thing. Maybe this can be hard to understand for you, but for some people GW2 isn’t a faith, but just a common, replaceable game. Many people already stopped playing it because they didn’t like it for many reason, why should “it doesn’t run well on my OS” shouldn’t be a valid one?

So, once again, I’m asking everyone here to stop feeding the trolls. Also, to everyone who did a +1 for a Linux client: we should start using the report button altogether. I mean, yeah, everyone has the right to post what they think, but these kids here are just plain trolling us, trying to look smart without knowing anything on the subject at all…

Reciprocity.8021:

lmao MAC OS X is NOTHING like linux. Its a BSD based kernel. It has a drastically different scheduler. Its a completely different OS. Its as different as Windows NT and OS2 Warp. The graphic libraries are nothing like those in Linux. A port of this game to Linux wouldn’t be any easier already having a prot for OS X.

I’m going to say this as a former FreeBSD and OpenSolaris user. With the exception of applications that need certain kernel-specific calls, It’s really hard to find any application written for Linux that couldn’t be compiled on FreeBSD or Solaris. Sometimes a little patching is required (and even I can do that myself, most of the times), but it’s surely faster and easier than rewriting ex-novo such applications for another OS (chich mostly uses the same libraries, by the way). That said, since OSX actually does use OpenGL (am I wrong here?) and it’s kinda POSIX compliant (I don’t really trust Apple about this, but I kinda hate them, so whatever), I doubt that porting the game to Linux wouldn’t do any good to the Mac port itself. Maybe the client and the engine will need a little patching and tweaking… But heck, the whole DirectX-to-OpenGL issue would be already fixed! And there’s even a tiny itsy bitsy little chance that there won’t be the need of such huge patches to make the Linux port run nicely on Mac!

Reciprocity.8021:

Personally Linux doesn’t get much support because everyone that runs linux also runs windows. Also the ATI and NVidia linux drivers have always been just an after thought and perform very poorly under heavy 3D-type loads. Even if they ported this game to Linux you wouldn’t be happy with the performance.

Actually… Valve’s been working with both ATI and nVidia to improve their drivers, using Left 4 Dead 2 (and probably other games) as a test run. They’ve been doing that for a while actually, they actually already added a few nice functions to nVidia drivers that you can already see in the latest releases.

Reciprocity.8021:

I use Linux 100% at work as a developer. I use it 100% of the time at home except for gaming. So I run Windows 7 and with VMWare I run my linux VM’s for work. One I use for writing/compiling code, the other runs an Oracle database and some other components.I can run both Linux VM’s, including having the database up and running, and play this game at the same time with no problems… This on a rig that is now 4 years old.

Well, that’s such a great feat. Mind explaining how to setup a working VMWare enviroment, and help every single Linux user who want to play Guild Wars 2 without dual booting how to do that step by step?
Really, that’s not viable for newbies, they tend to screw up easy things, there’s no chance they could handle virtualization well! They’d give up after 20 mins and go back to dual booting… Without somebody guiding them step by step, at least.

@degovernator

There’s a way to fix this: make the whole process automatic! How so? Create a script for it! Here’s what to do:

1. Locate where Guild Wars 2 is installed on your system (usually is in /home/yourusename/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Guild Wars 2)
2. Open a text editor and write this into it (be sure to put in the right game path, and don’t forget the "):
#! /usr/bin/env bash

cd “/home/yourusename/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Guild Wars 2”
while true; do
WINEDEBUG=-all wine Gw2.exe -dx9single -image &
sleep 600
wineserver -k
sync
done
3. save it on your desktop as “GW2_update”
4. open a terminal, and run “chmod a+x ~/Desktop/GW2_update” (without ")
5. still from the terminal, type “./Desktop/GW2_update” (without ")

This script will run Guild Wars 2, then will shut it down after 10 minutes (regardless if it crashed or not), and then will start it again. It won’t know when GW2 will have completed the download, so you’ll have to stop it manually. To do so, simply press ctrl+c in the terminal you’ve launched it from.
I hope this helps :p

@Elusive
Please, let’s not start all this again. You failed yout purpose of being objective pretty fast, and I’d rather not to point out the reasons to avoid another 5 pages of Linux vs Windows debate. To put it shortly, you belive that we like Linux better because we “don’t know how to use Windows”, and we probably think the same about your reasons for not liking Linux. Big deal, let’s not start it over again, PLEASE.

You wanna be objective? Please, fetch me a list of originally win32 native programs which can run on other OS without any layers (of course, I mean that they can be compiled and run on other OSs, not that they have some “universal binaries”, just pointing this out.), then do the same about linux-native and osx-native programs. For bonus credits, find a list of programs that run only on a specific linux distro, and that can’t run on the others. Then, we can objectively talk about standardization.

I guess I missed something… They did an OpenGL port??

Leios.8965:

soulsuke.7913:

Just for the record: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM0MzU

alright, I’m drawing a blank. Why did you link this thread to Phoronix? I frequent the site a lot for benchmarking and news, but I guess I missed the big picture.

If you copy and paste the link in your browser, you get to an article called “NVIDIA, Valve Share Lessons In Porting To Linux”, which has some advices about porting game to Linux from Valve and nVidia. clicking on the link doesn’t work though, and you get redirected to Phoronix’s main page…

Just for the record: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM0MzU

Just wondering, but do Guild Wars 2’s servers run on Windows or Unix/Linux? Anybody knows that?

First off I’d like to say this: I’m one of those people who, on various MMOs, sometime stopped the endless hack-n-slash to simply put on some casual clothes and enjoy the scenery. Be it for roleplaying with friends, or just not to see the same old armor on my character when walking around in peaceful areas, sometimes it’s nice to change look.

And now, back to the topic: town clothes. I believe there’s a lot of potential wasted here, and I’m not talking about the lack of craftable/various models. What if there was some use for them? What if they provided some, let’s say, “town skills”? There could be a set of skills avaible only when wearing town clothes, with a common pool plus other skills specific to certain costumes.
For example, the common skills could include a signet that gives a passive 25% speed boost (I know that many classes have that, but I still feel like a sloth when running in town with my guardian), a signet that makes you unable to aggro mobs (for those who like to roleplay in open areas, maybe with the malus of not being usable in dungeons and to not being able to unlock waypoints/POIs/vistas and such, or just usable in 100% mapped areas).
Special skills unique to some town clothes, on the other hand, could be something like signets that have the passive effects of making your character walk in a certain way, or normal skills that allow you to use some contestual emote-like unique actions.

Of course, this’d need some testing to avoid all the possibile exploits that everyone probably thought about while reading what I wrote above, but I think it’d make town clothes more like an enjoyable part of the game rather than an useless “cosmetic feature”. And just to make this clear, I’m one of those players who farmed for days to get the skin I wanted on Guild Wars, and I still do the same for armor pieces and weapons on GW2… Yet I still find town clothes, as they are now, entirely useless. I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels this way, but I hardly see anyone wearing town clothes around.

Leios.8965:

Tyler.7168:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows

Seems like a pretty good article on DirectX vs OpenGL and why we aren’t using all OpenGL games these days.

I have been looking into it a bit. It seems most indie developers and those who are learning to code games nowadays go for opengl. The AAA developers seem to prefer directX, and that kinda makes sense.

Indies need everyone they can to buy their game, so the 5% of players using linux and 15% using mac will be helpful—especially because those platforms are more indie-oriented.

AAA developers are typically mre old-school and need something that is stable and works. They have been using DirectX for a good while. They know they can sell games off of it and they know how it works. No reason to switch saddles if you know the horse you’ve got.

Everyone keep making the same mistake over and over. Opengl is a competitor to Direct3D, not to DirectX. Why most developers use DirectX? Because it has been made so that it’ll handle both input and output for you. On Windows, that’s it. If you don’t use DX you pretty much have to reinvent the wheel, and that is a big turn down.
Why indie developers use Opengl more than big SH? An Indie developer has the time to learn how to handle input/output without DX and on other OSs, and still make some money. Big SH have time tables and budgets to respect, and to make such a thing it’d take them a lot of money and time to retrain their programmers. Just look how much it took them to make Mac ports…
It’s not really about stability (heck, why even make games for Windows then), it’s more like a big “I don’t want to spend money on that and I don’t really care about what you think, so if you want to play my game do as I please” from SHs. At least, that’s how I see it. After all, why should they change while they can still milk the same old cow?

evolverzilla.2359:

So Loki went bankrupt for piracy, there aren´t enough buying customers to pay the development costs. And even most linux users will never buy a proprietary software (even without piracy).

I’m quite offended by that. To be quite fair, that’s a form of racism. I know there are some “free software extremists” that will never buy software, but first off they are mostly old school developers who probably aren’t interested in games anyways, and secondly they are probably not even as many as those “I won’t buy any games because I can torrent them, I’m so cool suckers” windows kiddies. And now don’t start saying that those aren’t the majority of Windows users, it’s the same kind of generalization.
Linux users don’t just use free or open software. As other people said before me, just check the data from Humble Bundle’s sales. Or just talk with some everyday Linux users.

danbuter.2314:

You can’t make a good linux client. Which distro? Which download format? What about every 6 months or so when everything is updated for all the major distros, which will probably break this game?

And worst of all: GPL v3. No commercial company in its right mind will allow their product anywhere near this mess.

That “which download format” actually made me laugh, and I’ll take you don’t have the slightest experience with Linux, probably you don’t even know what you’re talking about. Anyways…
1. Which distro?
You don’t have to rewrite the client for each distro. Just to repackage it. Actually, you don’t even have to do that, just look what happened with Steam’s package: Valve created a .deb package for Ubuntu and nothing more, but right after it appeared in Arch’s AUR. Users repackaged it, with not so many problems. Some rpm packages came along as well, and so did Debian-compatible .deb.
2. What about every 6 months or so when everything is updated for all the major distros, which will probably break this game?
Most (sadly not all) libraries are backwards compatible. Meaning you can probably still run the same client even after 6 months or so. But let’s say that the client will have to be compiled again… You are aware that the client itself gets updated every so often under Windows too, right? It’s not that they won’t update it at all (especially since GW2 is still at an early stage)… By the way, do you know how much it takes to compile a program?
3. GPL
Why should ANet use GPL for their client? They could make an open source client under GPL3 (in which case, they wouldn’t even have to package or compile it themselves, many other people would do so for them, thus invalidating the 2 issues above), but why? They can use any license they want for it, and they don’t have to make it open source or anything. Believing that everything on Linux must be licensed under GPL (or that its source code must be avaible) is a really stupid preconcept dictated by plain ignorance on the subject.

Spongeroberto.7182:

DarkHorse.1059:

Game plays fine in Ubuntu with wine. No problems… doesn’t need a special client.

I’d love to know your secret. To me GW2 in wine suffers from horrible fps as soon as I move the camera

That’s mostly because of raw support… Before they “fixed” it this issue was absent (although you had to use the raw3 patch).

That said… Once I’ve tried to recompile wine (from the wine-multimedia repository, with pulseaudio support) and actually got WAY better FPS, no freezes, no crashes, no big performance problems at all with maxed settings (although I do have some nice hardware)! Too bad, a week later, some unknown commit must have screwed things up, for the new version again caused a huge performance loss.
However, I’m still in possession of the version of wine which can actually run GW2 with no big performance loss (although that could be hardware dependant), if somebody wants I can upload a tarball on rapidshare. It’s been built on Debian Sid with libc 2.15 (i think) and nvidia support (although I don’t think it has AMD graphics support)…
Else, people can try to get an older version of wine (prior to 1.5.9, i think) and patch it with the raw3.patch that can be found on WineHQ

Todd.8162:

Twysted.9824:

I’ve been an active user of Linux the last years and I think it’s sad that gaming companies and developers doesn’t seem to care about the constantly growing Linux market. There are more and more users of Linux based computers which I think game developers should start to take seriously.

You might consider looking at Crossover from Codeweavers.

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=7951

That’s still a syscall interpreter though, so it doesn’t count :\
We want native games!

Heh, I remember what Alan Cox said about that, to be quite fair I can’t understand his motivations… It’s the same reasons why I can’t use a stable (Opensolaris-like stable, at least) ZFS root on Debian. Sigh. It sucks that most of the skilled programmers are such license-extremists.
Again, I may be wrong about nVidia dropping Optimus on Windows, I just remember somebody saying they were taking into account the possibility to drop it with the coming of Ivy Bridges, but again it was a lot of time ago, and I may be remembering just some rant on the forums :p Wish I could find the post, but the old nVidia forum is a mess

About the Optimus stuff: I’m the prowd owner of an Alienware M17x r3 laptop, and I’m not really having issues with optimus. It CAN be a problem at the start, but bumblebee solved it for me. As a proof, I can say I play GW2 with accettable fps, and native games ( Legend of Grimrock, Team Fortress 2, etc ) with at max settings with no slowdowns at all…
Also, IIRC… Didn’t nVidia announce that they’re actually gonna drop Optimus on Windows as well, to move on another project that they plan to support on both Windows and Linux? I may be wrong about this one, it’s just something I recall I’ve read somewhere on the old nvidia forums, Linux section

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

No I’m not your average Joe, I did not send a ticket to my manufacturer. I actually used both the forums and official websites.

I don’t believe this, and I won’t start believing until I see links.

Thanks for summing it up, good sir

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

Here is a good read to see why OpenGL keeps falling behind http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

I can agree with much of that, but OpenGL is catching up quickly now, and it has its advantages (e.g. portability). OpenGL will never advertise things like ‘tesselation’ as a feature, because it works on a lower level than DirectX, so those features are actually up to the engine developer to implement. This brings me to another advantage. My old GeForce 8600 runs DirectX 9 and OpenGL 4.2. DX10+ is a no go, but a lot of OpenGL extensions were added in software.

I’d just like to point this out this article: http://timothylottes.blogspot.gr/2012/11/why-gl-now.html
OpenGL vs D3D has been a really hot topic for quite some time, it’s possible to find articles about how either of them is better than the other. Truth is, it’s hard to say which is better of the two, unless you’re quite skilled in the use of both of them. In most cases it’s just a personal choice, linking a random article usually won’t do much good…

meinie.5037:

i don’t see why people are so against getting a Linux port of the game it doesn’t effect any windows users game play or a mac user

To be quite fair, a Linux port would be benefical to Mac users, since it’d lead to a native Mac build as well… So yeah, Mac users shouldn’t really be against this :p

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

No I’m not your average Joe, I did not send a ticket to my manufacturer. I actually used both the forums and official websites.

I don’t believe this, and I won’t start believing until I see links.

Thanks for summing it up, good sir

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

Here is a good read to see why OpenGL keeps falling behind http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

I can agree with much of that, but OpenGL is catching up quickly now, and it has its advantages (e.g. portability). OpenGL will never advertise things like ‘tesselation’ as a feature, because it works on a lower level than DirectX, so those features are actually up to the engine developer to implement. This brings me to another advantage. My old GeForce 8600 runs DirectX 9 and OpenGL 4.2. DX10+ is a no go, but a lot of OpenGL extensions were added in software.

I’d just like to point this out this article: http://timothylottes.blogspot.gr/2012/11/why-gl-now.html
OpenGL vs D3D has been a really hot topic for quite some time, it’s possible to find articles about how either of them is better than the other. Truth is, it’s hard to say which is better of the two, unless you’re quite skilled in the use of both of them. In most cases it’s just a personal choice, linking a random article usually won’t do much good…

meinie.5037:

i don’t see why people are so against getting a Linux port of the game it doesn’t effect any windows users game play or a mac user

To be quite fair, a Linux port would be benefical to Mac users, since it’d lead to a native Mac build as well… So yeah, Mac users shouldn’t really be against this :p

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

No I’m not your average Joe, I did not send a ticket to my manufacturer. I actually used both the forums and official websites.

I don’t believe this, and I won’t start believing until I see links.

Thanks for summing it up, good sir

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

Here is a good read to see why OpenGL keeps falling behind http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

I can agree with much of that, but OpenGL is catching up quickly now, and it has its advantages (e.g. portability). OpenGL will never advertise things like ‘tesselation’ as a feature, because it works on a lower level than DirectX, so those features are actually up to the engine developer to implement. This brings me to another advantage. My old GeForce 8600 runs DirectX 9 and OpenGL 4.2. DX10+ is a no go, but a lot of OpenGL extensions were added in software.

I’d just like to point this out this article: http://timothylottes.blogspot.gr/2012/11/why-gl-now.html
OpenGL vs D3D has been a really hot topic for quite some time, it’s possible to find articles about how either of them is better than the other. Truth is, it’s hard to say which is better of the two, unless you’re quite skilled in the use of both of them. In most cases it’s just a personal choice, linking a random article usually won’t do much good…

meinie.5037:

i don’t see why people are so against getting a Linux port of the game it doesn’t effect any windows users game play or a mac user

To be quite fair, a Linux port would be benefical to Mac users, since it’d lead to a native Mac build as well… So yeah, Mac users shouldn’t really be against this :p

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

No I’m not your average Joe, I did not send a ticket to my manufacturer. I actually used both the forums and official websites.

I don’t believe this, and I won’t start believing until I see links.

Thanks for summing it up, good sir

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

Here is a good read to see why OpenGL keeps falling behind http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

I can agree with much of that, but OpenGL is catching up quickly now, and it has its advantages (e.g. portability). OpenGL will never advertise things like ‘tesselation’ as a feature, because it works on a lower level than DirectX, so those features are actually up to the engine developer to implement. This brings me to another advantage. My old GeForce 8600 runs DirectX 9 and OpenGL 4.2. DX10+ is a no go, but a lot of OpenGL extensions were added in software.

I’d just like to point this out this article: http://timothylottes.blogspot.gr/2012/11/why-gl-now.html
OpenGL vs D3D has been a really hot topic for quite some time, it’s possible to find articles about how either of them is better than the other. Truth is, it’s hard to say which is better of the two, unless you’re quite skilled in the use of both of them. In most cases it’s just a personal choice, linking a random article usually won’t do much good…

meinie.5037:

i don’t see why people are so against getting a Linux port of the game it doesn’t effect any windows users game play or a mac user

To be quite fair, a Linux port would be benefical to Mac users, since it’d lead to a native Mac build as well… So yeah, Mac users shouldn’t really be against this :p

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

No I’m not your average Joe, I did not send a ticket to my manufacturer. I actually used both the forums and official websites.

I don’t believe this, and I won’t start believing until I see links.

Thanks for summing it up, good sir

MehWhatever.1248:

Ravenmoon.5318:

Here is a good read to see why OpenGL keeps falling behind http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

I can agree with much of that, but OpenGL is catching up quickly now, and it has its advantages (e.g. portability). OpenGL will never advertise things like ‘tesselation’ as a feature, because it works on a lower level than DirectX, so those features are actually up to the engine developer to implement. This brings me to another advantage. My old GeForce 8600 runs DirectX 9 and OpenGL 4.2. DX10+ is a no go, but a lot of OpenGL extensions were added in software.

I’d just like to point this out this article: http://timothylottes.blogspot.gr/2012/11/why-gl-now.html
OpenGL vs D3D has been a really hot topic for quite some time, it’s possible to find articles about how either of them is better than the other. Truth is, it’s hard to say which is better of the two, unless you’re quite skilled in the use of both of them. In most cases it’s just a personal choice, linking a random article usually won’t do much good…

meinie.5037:

i don’t see why people are so against getting a Linux port of the game it doesn’t effect any windows users game play or a mac user

To be quite fair, a Linux port would be benefical to Mac users, since it’d lead to a native Mac build as well… So yeah, Mac users shouldn’t really be against this :p

Ravenmoon.5318:

And how about most of the laptops currently available having wireless issues? Yes I actually have linux installed on my laptop. It’s the latest openSuSE. Do you know how’s my wireless working? It doesnt. So I sent them a support ticket, do you know what the answer was ? The laptop is built for windows, doh, like most of them

I usually ignore trolls, but this deserves to be brought to general attenction. I haven’t seen such issues for some years, and I find it quite hard to believe. But even so… Let me understand, you sent a ticket to who? I doubt the OpenSUSE community would ever say something like that, which leaves… You sent a ticket to the laptop’s vendor, didn’t you? I wonder if you even checked if there was a driver for your wireless card in the repositories… Do you even know what a repository is?

I’m saying this because it looks like that most people who posted here and are against a Linux port identified themselves as “developers”, yet shewn to be quite ignorant about how Linux or OSs do work. A few people actually brought up interesting points about why a Linux port isn’t viable now ( such as Linux being just starting to look like an interesting option for developers, but such things need time ), but the others mostly spoke out of their plain ignorance or prejudices on the subject. This shouldn’t be a Windows vs Linux topic, if you want such a thread create a new one and start jumping at each other’s throat there, surely I won’t bother reading what you’ll say there. But as for this thread, I’d really like to see people discussing about a Linux client politely, using arguments that aren’t dictated by plain ignorance or prejudice.

Illiander.8049:

mitcho.7926:

They’ll probably work on and finish the Mac version first then decide if they’ll port GW2 on Linux. Personally, I don’t see why they shouldn’t. A friend of mine had Linux and I thought it was OK, but liked Windows a bit better. That was a while ago though.

The thing that bothers me most about the Mac client, other than their PR statements that ignore the existance of any OS other than MSWindows and OSX, is that they could have supported everything, simply by using the free MSWindows translation layer (WINE), rather than the Mac-specific one that they probably paid quite a lot of money for.

The problem is that, even if they’ll finish it, the Mac version will be flawed. How? Because they’e using a layer that “translates” Windows’ syscalls so that OSX can understand them.
By the way, ANet is using a layer that, between other things, probably asked for quite a sum to “support” GW2, and that is takes many of its features from the Wine project. So, by the time the Mac version of GW2 will work well, Wine will probably support it in the same way on other OSs ( Mac too by the way ). Cooperating directly with Wine or Codeweavers would’ve been a better choice, it’d have probably costed less and would have made GW2 playable on nearly any OS ( we should note that there aren’t just Windows, Mac and Linux, but even Solaris, Haiku, *BSD, etc. Ok, not much of a player base there, but again being a “mmo that can run on any OS because ANet worked on it!” would probably get GW2 a lot of good advertisement, both from the users of those OSs or because of many sites that’d probably report such a news, which are more than most people believe ). But still, it’d be just a WIN32 game running on a layer, there’d be still some performances drops on non-win32 OSs.
A better solution would’ve been to actually use OpenGL instead of Direct3D. Now, before anyone starts flaming about this… GW2 currently uses DirectX 9, doesn’t it? So there wouldn’t be any loss in switching to OpenGL at the moment. Of course it’d take some time to port the whole engine, but… Seriously, even WoW does it. It has a -opengl switch that makes it run using OpenGL. They even have ( had? ) a Linux client ready, but renounced to publish it because it was “hard to target a distro” ( I’ll avoid to comment on that ), meaning that building the client isn’t that hard itself. Anyways, this way there could’ve been a working and native GW2 on both Windows, Mac and Linux, with no performances loss in the process. Again, these are just my 2 cents.

+1 for a Linux client! Valve is proving that Linux can be a GREAT OS to run games, having better performances than Windows ( there are a lot of benchmarks out there ), and things don’t look too bright on Windows’ side, with 8 coming out… But we’ll see I guess! I most surely hope to be able to play GW2 without having to worry about keeping a lonely self-hacked version of wine on my system, but porting GW2 to OpenGL ( it’s the only way to make it run on both Linx and Mac with good performances, unless ANet wants to rewrite DX for unix-like systems ) would surely take a lot of time. It’d bring some benefits ( as in being able to run on every OS, possibly on consoles too ), but it’d surely take a lot of time and effort. As much as I want a Linux client, I’d really rather see GW2’s world getting a little bigger first. Please don’t hate me

I’d also like to say something to the Windows fanboys who “know better” that’ve been talking in the last few pages.
First thing: why are you even here? If you want to make us “see the light” ( through a broken window ) or if you think of as an annoyance that could slow down GW2’s developement, this is the wrong topic, isn’t it?
Second, ever heard of distro-independend packages? Yes, some ( most ) programs are compiled and packaged for a specific distro, often are even patched by them, so that it runs better for a specific task. That’s one of Linux’s many benefits, isn’t it? But you know, many games ( see: the ones in the Humble Bundles, for instance ) out there for Linux are distro-independent. What does that mean? You download an archive. You extract it. You open the README file to see which packages you need. You run the binary file. Profit! And, pretty often, people will actually ask the developers to package and maintain them for their favourite distro. For free, I mean. Meaning a random person can, with the permission of the developers, rearrange the files and create a package for certain distro, it’s pretty easy. Then it doesn’t take much to update it for that distro’s new release ( as in: edit a text file, or not even that, often ).
Another thing that I should mention, is the misconcept that a program that runs on Linux can’t support Windows too. You can develop on Linux and still have a WIN32-compatible program. Ever heard of G.I.M.P.? Just saying, I mean. I understand it can be harder than hard-coding paths into a program… No, not even, no.