|
United States47024 Posts
On January 08 2010 10:43 MamiyaOtaru wrote: Luckily WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's far from perfect though D: If you meant "emulation" to mean compatibility layer like WINE, well I'm not sure how a Linux distro would be supposed to run games for Windows without one. I'm aware of that. However, in its current state, WINE really isn't a better platform for running games than a virtual machine, and I guess what I'm trying to say is that it needs to be better than a virtual machine if we're going to get anywhere with it.
|
Not so many people use Linux compared to those who use Windows.
|
On January 08 2010 05:39 Puosu wrote: Blizzard could take a huge leap forward if they were the first big company to do this, although I am not informed on how difficult it is to make a game compatible with both platforms it seems like a hugely profitable investment.
I'm all for spreading StarCraft to even more players.
All linux users partition from windows... nobody is going to buy a linux-only version, so making SC2 compatible with linux (which would still be awesome) is definitely not profitable.
|
Wait, so there is more than one person on the planet that thinks the development time of SC2 should be INCREASED?!? No comment...
|
I guess they'll just do it the same way they handled WoW. There won't be a native client but by creating a OSX version it'll probably run just fine in wine. If that works out, why should they put up with the mess that is deploying anything to Linux. A native client would be really great, though.
|
i would love it because blizzard's awesome rating would go up +1 in my book (like s2 providing a linux HoN) but really, be reasonable. how many people use linux? Little. How many of those would want to play sc2? Significantly less. And how many of those wouldn't want to get a windows partition to play sc2? A really really tiny fraction...of an already tiny number. We're approaching 0 here.
but hey, sometimes you do things not for the money but just because you're an awesome company, like patching starcraft a decade after it's been out. who knows
|
It'll work fine in WINE eventually. It'll take a long time, most likely (though WINE has improved a lot in the last year), but it will happen.
|
On January 08 2010 14:45 JeeJee wrote: i would love it because blizzard's awesome rating would go up +1 in my book (like s2 providing a linux HoN) but really, be reasonable. how many people use linux? Little. How many of those would want to play sc2? Significantly less. And how many of those wouldn't want to get a windows partition to play sc2? A really really tiny fraction...of an already tiny number. We're approaching 0 here.
but hey, sometimes you do things not for the money but just because you're an awesome company, like patching starcraft a decade after it's been out. who knows
Actually, S2 has released a native client for Linux/OSX/Windows for each of their games. Surprisingly enough, HoN works 2x better/faster/smoother on Linux than on Windows.
And to people saying that Linux has shitty graphic driver support: Please explain? I'm using the latest drivers from nVidia and have absolutely no problems with them. You might be referring to ATI drivers though, which usually suck on Linux and aren't updated often enough.
|
United States3824 Posts
So...some tidbits:
1) While Starcraft runs on OS X and the OS X kernel is built off of Unix SC for Mac was written to run on OS 9 and use the OS 9 libraries (called Carbon, thus the reason it says Starcraft(Carbon) in the folder. Nothing to do with a carbon copy as it turns out.)
2) The reason that programs that run on Linux platforms run on OS X is because OS X is POSIX compliant and has the X11 emulator that let's you run Unix programs that have a GUI. So all Linux programs run on OS X but not all (in fact none really) OS X programs run on Linux boxes.
So, if the SCII code that was written for the Mac machines only made use of POSIX stuff then it would run on Linux boxes. Problem is is that all that Mac framework stuff is just too sexy not to use.
|
^ Listen to this man.
I run Linux as my main desktop but I keep an older PC just for playing SC lol?
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Linux users have no interest in games. It wouldn't make any sense to develop a commercial version for this platform,
The best thing is probably for Blizzard to release it to a third party company like LGP then resell the game later than the track. Not likely though.
Then there are the issues of open source nutjobs that reject anything that's not free. Sigh.
|
i think they will make it work for linux, i use ubuntu atm and i just hate it lol.
|
|
|
Careful, OP. Microsoft might try to eat your soul for making such sacriligeous suggestions.
|
On January 08 2010 17:49 haduken wrote: Unfortunately, the vast majority of Linux users have no interest in games. It wouldn't make any sense to develop a commercial version for this platform, That's not what I've seen. I know many people that dual boot their systems or have two computers, one for Linux and one for Windows and gaming. Sure there will always be those who only use Linux or don't game or both but most of the people I know aren't like that.
|
On January 09 2010 00:11 Chuiu wrote: That's not what I've seen. I know many people that dual boot their systems or have two computers, one for Linux and one for Windows and gaming. Sure there will always be those who only use Linux or don't game or both but most of the people I know aren't like that.
And pretty much all those people who actually care about PC gaming don't need a Linux port anyway since they already have a Windows partition or system for gaming anyway...
I think the major reason most game developers haven't put too much thought into Linux is really the fact that the market is so small. Sure, there are lots of Linux users, but how many really care about gaming and of those that do, how many don't already have a Windows partition or machine that they already use for gaming? Everyone that I know that uses Linux either doesn't play PC games or is already set up to play games on Windows so there probably would be little point from a developer's standpoint. It would just cost more money and it really wouldn't bring it much more profit (if any at all). It just doesn't make any business sense.
That being said, of course it would always be nice to have more options so I would completely support Blizzard if they were indeed willing to port SC2 or any other game to Linux, but truth be told, I doubt a failure to do so would have any measurable impact on their sales.
|
that signable petition is the stupidest thing ever. Even if it got 1 000 000 names, Blizzard wouldn't do it. Why? Because at most 1-2% of those who sign it use linux. Amazing right? They wouldn't do it because it would NEVER pay off. I don't think it would pay off either.
Of course I think it would be cool to have SC2 on linux, ubuntu and whatnot as well, but let's be realistic... It would never be worth it.
|
True home desktop Linux users as sad as it seems are a minority.
The great majority are:
programmers, intermediate users, folks who try it then ditch it but still say they are linux user blah blah.
I don't have a real figure for this but just by reading the forum, you will eventually come to the point where you realize that the people who can actually do something about the sorry state of gaming are either too open source religious or just don't give a shit about gaming.
If people dual boot to play games then what is the point? just sell them the windows version, is Blizzard really going to spend money just so that you save 5 mins?
|
On January 08 2010 16:16 Manit0u wrote:
Actually, S2 has released a native client for Linux/OSX/Windows for each of their games. Surprisingly enough, HoN works 2x better/faster/smoother on Linux than on Windows.
Cool, so when I run HoN on Linux I get twice the fps?
|
Just dual-boot people, not the ideal solution but come on. It's not like there aren't other good pc games to play every now and then. Oh, and I'm one of those people that have tried BW in wine and haven't been happy with the results. I tried every fix I came across, and got the game working rather well, but that wasn't good enough. Something felt off about the mouse response.
|
About the difference between DirectX and OpenGL: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
And about the UNIX roots of OS X: Just the low level parts of OS X are based on UNIX. Everything that involves graphics or audio is done in a totally different way than on other UNIX or Linux systems.
So if a game has a Mac port doesn't mean that it's easy to port to Linux.
A lot of games that are ported to Mac OS also don't have OpenGL support. They use 3rd party libraries which emulate the DirectX API with OpenGL and other libraries.
|
|
|
|
|
|