I have in various points of my career, toyed with various flavors of Linux. Starting off with Slackware, dabbling with Fedora and giving openSUSE a whirl. I even spread my wings a bit and tried the Unix variant of FreeBSD. I liked them all. I’m not even including several others I’ve tried.
However, the one thing that was missing for me was mainstream games. I’ve become more and more a social gamer. Oh, it’s nice to play a single player game now and then, but after a bit, either you beat the game or you tire of it–at least with me. More and more games are including some sort of social element, whether that be a simple chat interface or fully formed avatars hanging out virtually.
I was excited last year when I heard my favorite game, EVE Online, came out with a Linux client. At last, people thought, this could be an in-road to more people gaming on a Linux box. Only not so much.
Turns out the client was based on something called Cedega, a part of Transgaming. Cedega had gotten the old EVE client to work, the one without the premium graphics content…only not well. In fact, it was quite buggy and at times impossible to play. I know this because I tried to get this to work at one point and gave up on the Cedega client. And I wasn’t alone. Most EVE players decided that the official client wasn’t worth the trouble, considering that there were a number of players who were able to get the premium client working on WINE.
Here’s the dilemma; does a player try to make a buggy and at times an infuriating client running on older graphics to work or do they work with the active community within EVE to get the premium graphics client running with WINE? It’s not really much of a question really and most people went with the WINE solution. This was coupled with the lack of developer help in getting the client to work in the first place. Then came this post from the EVE developers, essentially ending official support for the Linux client. Of the reasons they gave, one was the lack of growth of players using the official client. Their numbers essentially derived from the official client reporting, not the number of players running Linux. It puts the developers, CCP, in a bad position as they can only really address the official client rather than the number of players who might be playing under Linux. However, I find some fault here as they didn’t seem to achieve accurate numbers of Linux players, so the numbers may seem skewed.
However, using the reasoning from the developers, it’s hard to blame them. With both WINE and the EVE client itself being moving targets, it’s difficult to pour more man-hours into something that could be put to use somewhere else, especially since the community seemed to be picking up the slack. Speaking of, the Linux community within EVE has taken it well, rolled with the punch and promised to soldier on, with the exception of a few pointed, and seemingly spot on posts, about the dearth of developer support over the last several months. The problem here is that there is no easy path for people who are not as technically inclined as many Linux users currently are. The ease of install may still elude beginning users and that remains a problem for Linux to break out as an OS for the common person.
It comes down to this question though. What will it take for cross-platform gaming? Microsoft has shown no interest in providing ways that promote actual competition with other systems and seems destined to shoot itself in the foot as more and more people turn to console gaming. However, the largest hurdle to jump over is the available APIs for game development. I’m not a developer, but from what I’ve seen on various sites, it just seems that DirectX is about as robust of an API on the market today and no other API seems to come close. Plus add in the various issues with Linux distros and in particular it’s struggle with audio, it seems an uphill battle.
What seems to be the future though may lie in virtual machines being able to support gaming. It’s not a perfect solution as you can run a Linux machine but have to buy a Windows license to play games. One has to wonder if there will ever be a groundswell of support to get quality gaming on the Linux platform.
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