CCP To Discontinue EVE Online Support For Linux 299
maotx writes "CCP's recent support for EVE Online in Linux is now set to be discontinued this March. Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client. Feedback on the EVE Online forums, which includes the e-mail in which CCP announced this decision, suggest that the client was not preferred for Linux users as it did not support the Premium graphics client and did not run as well as the win32 client under Wine. For those who wish to stop playing EVE Online, CCP is offering a refund towards unused game time. Select quote from the e-mail: 'The feedback and commitment we obtained from players like you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system.'"
Makes you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Did anyone use the Linux client? (Score:3, Interesting)
BBH
uh (Score:2, Interesting)
So...maybe nobody was using the client because it sucked? Well, if they make Wine a supported platform for their Windows client, that wouldn't be too bad. I remember when World of Goo was released, with Linux support promised (still not here), it ran perfectly on Wine.
It's still a shitty alternative to say, OGRE. But if you absolutely must use DirectX, just test on Wine the same way you test on WinXP or Vista.
Bummer for them... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was about to ditch WoW + Crossover for EVE because of their support (and talking my WoW friends into doing the same). Now I don't know...
Is it really so hard to support Linux natively? (Score:3, Interesting)
CCP is yet another Windows shop that would rather throw a lot of money at a crummy DirectX wrapper than look over the fence and embrace native Linux development.
Re:Bummer for them... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure they'll change their mind when they read this. :)
I use Linux heavily (Score:5, Interesting)
and do all of my development work on it... and periodically I reboot into Windows to play Fallout 3.
I like Linux for development, but the fact is that it is not as good of a gaming platform as Windows is.
Windows has better video drivers, and it has a tons of teams at Microsoft working on things like directx that directly support gaming. Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games.
Oh, and sound just works on Windows, did I mention that? That's pretty important for games. I have surround sound working on my Linux install, which took some doing, but as soon as I plug in my USB headset so I can use skype, the Linux sound system explodes. That means that even if left for dead was on Linux, I still wouldn't be able to play it.
Really, I don't see what the big deal with dual booting is and since people like me are just going to dual boot, I can't imagine why any game maker would waste money on a Linux port.
If I can play my game even marginally better on windows I have no reason not to get the windows version.
Re:Surprisingly hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Ohh my God, another "Linux architecture is hard, therefore vendors have problems" apologist.
Listen, CCP was never hiding behind a fact that so called "Linux client" is just a Windows client with Wine wrapper. And frankly, with Wine or Crossover Games you would have more success than Transgaming (which from mine point of view is completely shite). Transgaming based client has hard time with ATI video cards, with exsotic sound card settings, etc. Of course you can tweak it, but what's the point then? They have nice forum where people already exchanging with ideas how to get EVE running on Linux.
There are one space sim (rather funny one), which has real *native* client. NEVER had problems with that, even on open source ati drivers on Radeons. So propably it is not that hard to do that...natively.
Sure thing boss. (Score:5, Interesting)
- GCC Plugin Wiki [gnu.org]
That is the first that comes to mind. I believe Linus himself has been quoted as saying something along the lines of "We don't promise a stable kernel ABI and if that means breaking binary drivers, oh well, in fact we might change the ABI just to break them on purpose!". Can't find the quote though.
And if you still aren't convinced, just browse the comments right here at Slashdot every time there is a story about some driver somewhere. There indeed exists a group of people who want to purposefully mix shit up hoping to scare certain kinds of developers away.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
No kidding.. this is like the record industry releasing shitty music without DRM and pointing to its low sales to show that people don't want to buy DRM-free music.
*sigh*
Aikon-
Re:Is it really so hard to support Linux natively? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against. If you can even get the thing to install and launch, sound definitely won't work.
The original official Quake III and IV Linux binary releases still run fine on my bleeding-edge Linux box (yes, it uses PulseAudio). The same goes for Uplink, Defcon and Darwinia. Your point was what, exactly? That most studios that release game binaries for Linux are too incompetent to statically link them?
Either you're a troll, or you need to practice what you preach.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
A brief look at the Transgaming forums show that actual development of Cedega has stopped. Wine is the better choice these days.
I didn't say they were wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
But the by product of the kernel developers actions does two things:
1) Establishes a tone and attitude that one should randomize your API to fight off proprietary software.
2) Actually works... see also this article.
If you you agree with that attitude, that is fine and I respect that. However, this article is an example of that attitude working. You cannot be for things like binary games like WoW running on Linux and still promote an attitude of actively making their life difficult. If you are doing it under the idea that it will encourage them to open-source, you will have to accept when companies choose to abandon Linux instead--as in this case.
Re:Competing with itself?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh, not really. I don't know but I'm skeptical as to what Wine contributors could do to persuade them.
CCP is a company that does some truly groundbreaking programming, but mostly on the server-side and not so much on the client side. They do things a little slower client-side.
I suggested such on the forums over there, but CCP is in the business to make money...I'm not sure if they see the "long enough down the road" concept of making money via supporting Linux as a business case or not.
Re:Is it really so hard to support Linux natively? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against.
Just for giggles, I fired up the 'ole Castle Wolfenstein version of Enemy Territory. Popped up, full sound. No biggie. Most other old stuff is archived or OSS that's been updated - I'll have to dig around for the older stuff and see what it does.
I wonder how well Doom would work on a WinXP box? Not that I'm trying to obscure Linux's faults by pointing at Windows. However, Windows is the PC gaming platform of choice at this point so it represents what the industry and players are used to.
Having said all that - I'm probably just lucky. I know Linux's sound environment has been horribly lacking for so very long. There's great support on various forums to make things work. But one shouldn't have to jump through hoops to do so. Now days, I rarely have to jump through a hoop. Unless, of course, I'm dealing with an app that's from the Bad Old Days of OSS-is-the-only-choice.
Re:I use Linux heavily (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, I don't see what the big deal with dual booting is and since people like me are just going to dual boot, I can't imagine why any game maker would waste money on a Linux port.
I used to dual boot. Then I got a few games working on the Linux side. I didn't have to reboot to play. I could just flip over to a new virtual desktop, goof off for awhile, then go back to what I was doing. I didn't have to interupt anything on my Linux system. I didn't have to waste drive space for a "game" partition. And eventually, the Windows partition went away and never came back.
Those times that I do need Windows for work involves a VM. I don't play games in Windows. But then, the days of being a "heavy gamer" are behind me. Now I burn spare cycles in WoW. :P
Re:I use Linux heavily (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't wonder. (Score:5, Interesting)
They use D3D because OpenGL is not particularly good to program with. OpenGL 3.0 is not the much-heralded "fix" to the crap specification that it was supposed to be.
I work better in OpenGL than D3D, but that's my own familiarity with the API rather than the quality. OpenGL has huge gaping problems. A few basic issues...
-everything's a fucking GLuint, so you have to wrap and cast everything to make it halfway tolerable (at which point it looks so close to D3D that, for the important platforms, you might as well have already done it in D3D)
-GLSL sucks, with weird and arbitrary rules
-GLSL shaders can't be compiled (there are ways to do this but they are best described as "skiffy" and less charitably described as "broken")
-no way to query for GLSL functionality (for example, the noise() function always returns 0 on most cards because almost nobody actually implements it)
-no coherent SDK-type documentation; crap organization of what documentation exists
-VBO trashes pointer setup. WHY?
-developing GLSL on nVidia cards is crap, because it's translated into Cg and doesn't correctly report errors on bad code
-developing anything generally is crap, because there's no analogue to the D3D caps structures that tell you what work on a given machine.
-using binding to do everything means you can't make what should be really, really simple assertions about the state of your render pipeline between two draw calls (this is just plain fucking unacceptable!)
Microsoft may be rah-evil or whatever your nearest GNU zealot wants you to believe, but D3D is a vastly superior API. It's pretty hard to fault developers if they choose to use the better API for targeting their primary platform, if they decide that being cross-platform isn't of interest to them.
You want more developers, have an API that doesn't suck. It is perhaps a very sad statement that WINE's implementation of D3D is a better gaming API than anything native that's currently available on Linux (yes, it uses OpenGL under the hood, that's fine--OpenGL is a decent binding to the hardware but absolute shit for actually developing stuff).
Dual boot is annoying. (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially when one has to shutdown, reboot, etc. Annoying. If we want to go back to Linux, then we have to do it again! Yes, we can get another computer but still... I hate rebooting. :)
The game is broken anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently cancelled my two accounts for EVE because I was getting disillusioned with the game in general and CCP's motives in particular. Things that struck me as odd in the game:
1. The enormous amounts of time need to train skills in the game to be anywhere near able to play on a level playing field with experienced players. This has nothing to do with true skill at the game. Although CCP claims that this is to make it easier for new players to compete with olde rplayers, I suspected pretty early on that the real motivation behind this was that CCP uses this as a mechanism to get people playing longer, i.e. to make more "guaranteed" money from players as they try to compete with more experienced players.
There is no real rationale in the game for the so-called Tech 2 (and soon Tech 3) skills. They just make things longer to complete.
There is already a term in the EVE universe about this "timesink", an activity designed to make the player spend enormous amounts of time waiting to be able to do something during which CCP makes extra money out of the players.
2. Lack of content. The player versus computer missions are so similar to one another, and so lacking in anything interesting that doing missions is referred to as "grinding", i.e. something unpleasant that takes time, like doing homework, filling out taxes etc. Mining in the game is so boring that many players actually get an extra account simply to do this because it is so boring.
3. Terrible UI. The game's UI is so spectacularly bad that it is a wonder that anyone can achieve anything with it. In effect it usually means having so many windows open that you're left with a tiny portion of the screen in which you can actually play.
4. Player versus player. The one area of the game which really is interesting is almost totally off bounds to new players, who don't have the trained skills to be able to compete. There is also an increasing tendency in Eve for players to congregate in huge gangs, called "blobs" which makes casual play for a solo player extremely difficult, and this trend is only increasing.
5. Technical issues, referred to partially in the parent post, and somewhat alluded to in the topic title. Network disconnects are frequent, overburdened laggy servers are a frequent problem and UI glitches are very common. What often makes things worse is CCP's attitude towards its own failings. CCP trumpeted its development of a unique technology to fix the server lag issues, but they have simply worked around the problem by assigning more resources to areas of the game that are usually more frequented, leaving other areas sometimes even more starved of resources than they previously were.
I can't get over the feeling that CCP are a bunch of technically gifted con artists, given to the same PR misleading statements and untruths that other companies are. I think the main reason they stay in business is because they appeal to the geekiest of gamer who appreciate the game's complexity and are willing to turn a blind eye towards all the inconsistencies in it.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because their official client was actually the Windows client running under Cedega from Transgaming which is built off of wine.
As a linux user who does play games I can tell you the reason I don't play EVE Online is because they announced a linux client and before buying the game I read up on it and discovered they actually didn't release a linux client and instead were working with Transgaming to get the Windows client working on linux. Its called bait and switch, no thanks, I purchased ID Software's Quake Wars instead as it actually does have a native linux client. Its no where near the same genre and it would have been interesting to play EVE Online, but oh well.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Try Vendetta Online [vendetta-online.com]. It's got a native Linux client and it doesn't take six weeks to learn to control the ship.
Re:Sure thing boss. (Score:5, Interesting)
What a find! Wow... just wow:
A gcc-based scripting interpreter could by default check for a mandatory license statement (header) in every source file, so that "stock gcc" could deny running plugins (scripts) with a non-matching license header/marker telling the user that stock gcc only runs plugin scripts covered by the GPL.
In addition, SDK users could -by design- be required to explicitly set up each individual plugin to be covered by the GPL, e.g. by making the proper "init" calls at startup, along the lines of setLicense(GPLv2);
In order to make it harder for non-GPL'ed plugin SDKs to be used with gcc, stock gcc could by default also require each plugin to provide a certain set of hooks that provide licensing information to the host, so that stock gcc may refuse to run such binaries that do not provide the required information.
Furthermore, it would be possible to require all plugins to be statically linked with the corresponding plugin SDK (making the plugin itself GPL'ed thereby), thus whenever the checksum/hashes of linked in files doesn't match (the ones of the SDK), gcc could refuse to run any such plugins.
This whole license/checksum/hash verification stuff sounds conspicuously DRM-like to me. But of course it's okay if it's used to force more code under the GPL, right? right?..
Re:The game is broken anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
4. Player versus player. The one area of the game which really is interesting is almost totally off bounds to new players, who don't have the trained skills to be able to compete. There is also an increasing tendency in Eve for players to congregate in huge gangs, called "blobs" which makes casual play for a solo player extremely difficult, and this trend is only increasing.
As the CEO of a 6 man corp that regularly finds itself at war with other corps/alliances that range in membercount from anywhere between 10 and 200, I can't even begin to express just how incredibly wrong this statement is, except to say that you probably didn't even try and are just parroting what other people told you.
As for being a solo player...it's an MMORPG. There's no point in just sitting around on your own running missions or mining, you might as well just play X-Beyond in that case.
And yes, I've got plenty of room left for a couple of new players flying rifters with a tech1 warp disruptor fitted, thank you. And that's a ship you can get into...pretty much the moment you start playing.
I can't get over the feeling that CCP are a bunch of technically gifted con artists, given to the same PR misleading statements and untruths that other companies are. I think the main reason they stay in business is because they appeal to the geekiest of gamer who appreciate the game's complexity and are willing to turn a blind eye towards all the inconsistencies in it.
They've definitely gone more corporate the past year and have been more careful about what kind of statements they put out. Then again, every time a dev so much as takes a breath there's 15 pages of people on the forums screaming bloody murder. On the other hand, after watching the epic matches in the alliance tournament this past weekend, I can't help but feel that there's a lot of people at CCP who put their heart and soul into this game.