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0 pointsvbezhenar1mo ago0 comments

> Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output.

They should be trivial to port then, no?

0 comments

Yeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native Linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.

greiskul1mo ago

As someone once said it best, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

tosti1mo ago

Because free software doesn't need such a thing as a stable ABI.

There does exist flatpak, everything that would benefit from a stable ABI could use that.

Rohansi1mo ago

Yes, they are easy to port a lot of the time. Especially now because you can use DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan, so you don't need to write a Vulkan renderer. Input is sometimes a trickier one to deal with but a lot of the time games are using cross-platform libraries for that already!

Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.

MindSpunk1mo ago

The hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%.

Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.

simonask1mo ago

It’s not really about OS differences - as the GP said, games don’t typically use a lot of OS features.

What they do tend to really put a strain on is GPU drivers. Many games and engines have workarounds and optimizations for specific vendors, and even driver versions.

If the GPU driver on Linux differs in behavior from the Windows version (and it is very, very difficult to port a driver in a way that doesn’t), those workarounds can become sources of bugs.

codebje1mo ago

The killer for games tends to be the anti-cheat or anti-piracy layers.

I have a Windows game I can't run under CrossOver (aka Wine 11) or a VM, only because its anti-piracy layer doesn't accept those circumstances.

alpaca1281mo ago

Meanwhile I had to pirate Dark Souls 1 because Microsoft's own DRM prevented the legitimately purchased game from saving on Windows, and download official no-cd patches for two other games because their DRM stopped working.

The problem with DRM is the DRM.

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