Gaming on Linux These Days...

Message

Gankfest · Post by **Gankfest** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:36 pm

I've been hearing from friends lately that gaming on Linux has been better these days. Pretty much Winehq is able to produce more stable results for games with less bugs. This makes it possible to play games at release rather than waiting <Insert Days, Weeks, Months here> for a game to become stable. Is it true...? Can I finally delete windows and never look back...?

Anyway I can ask this question anywhere or even Google it, but I trust people here to give me an honest assessment...

I also stream and need to be able to upload to twitch. Preferably with xSplit, but I can use something else...

I would be happy gaming in Linux if I could play online games at release... I wouldn't even care if it broke every patch and I had to spend and hour fixing it...

Anyway, thanx for the assessments.

djdunn · Post by **djdunn** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 12:55 am

directx 8 good
directx 9 ok
directx 11 bad

http://appdb.winehq.org/

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Fri Apr 04, 2014 1:32 am

I use ffmpeg for streaming live things to http/rtmp servers. No idea what twitch uses internally but it's very likely one of the two.

Gankfest · Post by **Gankfest** » Fri Apr 04, 2014 6:51 pm

I figured streaming shouldn't be a problem... How does running mac versions work on Linux these days compared to windows versions...? I figure now that macs are main steam, and game developers are creating mac versions... Porting mac versions over to Linux would be easier, quicker, and less buggy than porting windows versions. Idk though... Did a little Googling on the subject, but didn't find any real info on if that is true or not.

I just want to play games without Windows...

Naib · Post by **Naib** » Fri Apr 04, 2014 7:22 pm

There is Simplescreenrecorder which simplifies using ffmpeg

Gankfest · Post by **Gankfest** » Wed Apr 16, 2014 5:08 am

I just want to say that when I look at this thread with 590 views and 4 posts... With 50% of the posts being mine, I figure people think gaming on Linux is s**t, so stick to windows... Inside there is this burning desire to just want to dump windows roll LVM and just go Linux. It would trade a lot of problems too... windows needs weak updates. Everyone hacks windows, a long with the application issues like Firefox and Youtube not playing videos. How to 'Not go Vista and You', or another awesome book 'Problem Solving with Linux: The Noob in You'! I don't expect perfection, but I want to play games and it works. It isn't about the games that already work on wineHQ, but the ability to adapt to new games comparative than before.

I used winHQ in 2005 and new games were hit or miss. Like I couldn't play FFXI for the longest time, and Guild Wars was hit or miss. WoW worked most of the time, but had its moments of being hit or miss. I quit gaming and just programmed for a few years, and then just went full windows on my new Intel setup. Having time to run a Gentoo setup these days; I would like too, but been out of the loop for awhile. I could ask this question anywhere, but I don't need failure... I ask here, because I expect the best. Gentoo is #1, everything else is second best... -_-

P.S. Super drunk right now... I take no responsibility for these statements. Even though these statements are truth. Gentoo FTW!

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Wed Apr 16, 2014 10:59 am

You are paying Windows, a crappy software (if i get your feelings right), made by a company that is deef to your requests and paying gaming companies that are also deef to your requests and that makes software for Windows only.
Why not stop giving them money, because they don't need to seek money elsewhere if they get it from Windows.

Now that Steam think money could be made with linux, things might change and other gaming companies may jump in too.
Just like the recent announce i saw that a popular 3D engine has add native linux support.

ChrisJumper · Post by **ChrisJumper** » Wed Apr 16, 2014 11:13 pm

Hi Gankfest!

Steam is nice to bring some Gaming on Linux. And i think that this will need more Support from us as Linux Customer. Just the other think is that Steam is somehow a DRM Plattform that i will not support. So i'll just buy a different Hardware like a SteamOS driven Steam-Box in the near Feature. Yes this is the Way how Support have to work.

Actually i could Play many Games on my Gentoo OS. Most of them are Wine Games. Many are Humble Bundle Games or Linux Boxed Games. Since there are no Security Upates to Unreal Tournament or ETQW i have bad feelings about these Games online with my System. :/

My PS4 works fine here. That Way i play Multiplayer Online and have Amazing Games like The Last of Us, GTA5, the last Bioshock or Assasians Creed. But yes.. all are Coming with damn DRM Online-System. That's Gaming work these Days its sad enough. Just i am Lucky that the PS3 is still Offline and all the Games i can buy or sell as second hand.

The Wine-Games work fine, but you have to push an hour or more to install and configure it right. Sometimes the configuration is like a puzzle and you love the game for running fine later. Mostly its just annoying.

Not sure if the Jump an Run: Rayman Legends running as nice as Rayman Origins. But take a look on the Winehq Page. If you like Jump an Runs that Game is with a Controller in HD really nice on Gentoo, too!

Gaming on Linux still need more Hardwarepower sometimes then the Windows Games. 2014 and with a Steam Account or the Humble Bundle Games.. or Winehq gog.com Games will serve your Dreams of Gaming on Linux.

All the Mobil-Games that use Android, i suppose they will run on Linux too. Not sure but i suppose so.

If you like Adventure Games, and here in Germany are some Studios that create some one. You could Play with Wine:

Deponia 1 to 3
Broken Sword 5 - the Serpents Curse
Black Mirror 1 - 3
Limbo
Botanicula
Resonace, Gemini rue
The Cat Lady
Papers Please
Face Noir
the dark eye - the chains of satinav
memoria - the chains of satinav 2.
Machinarium
The inner World.
The Moment of Silence
The Last Crown
Memento Mori, Memento Mori 2
A New Beginning, The Whispered World
Syberia 1 and 2
Edna and Harvey: The Breakout + Harvey's New Eyes
Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or the older ones.
The Night of the Rabbit
Gray Matter and Scratches ... and many more Adventure Games that run fine with wine on Linux too!

Or other 3D Games that use Steam like:
Dead Island (wine patching?)
System Shock 2
Mass Effect 1 to 3 (wine patching?)
Ea's Crysis 1-3
Tropico 3
Deus Ex - Human Revolution

And some more. More games work fine with wine on Linux than native on Mac Os. Too much have ugly Glitches or issues due the Multiplayer Part. Steam Os will do a good Job and bring more Games in the Future.

saellaven · Post by **saellaven** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 12:00 am

Gankfest wrote:I just want to say that when I look at this thread with 590 views and 4 posts... With 50% of the posts being mine, I figure people think gaming on Linux is s**t, so stick to windows...

I've been gaming on Linux since 1998 or so... Loki Games was the straw that got me to abandon OS/2 as my "other" OS, since I could now play AAA titles under Linux natively (games that still work if you install the compatibility libs from that era). I've got dozens of commercial native games, including games I've bought since Steam created a Linux version and started selling native games, and I've played a lot of games under wine.

It's rare that any of the native games give me a problem, but you're simply not going to find all of the major games supporting Linux natively right now.

Games under wine are hit and miss... most older games are fine, some newer games, particularly ones that only use more recent versions of DirectX, don't run that well. If you want to play bleeding edge games the day they are released, wine probably won't be sufficient for you. Some publishers have traditionally been pretty good with either direct or wine support, others go out of their way to cripple their games to make sure they aren't played (and often cause problems natively in Windows too). It really comes down to what games/publishers you prefer to play.

Post by **Chiitoo** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 3:27 am

Teegrins, Gankfest!

Lots have been said already... I, myself, moved to Gentoo in 2010, and still somewhat to my surprise, I haven't had the need to boot up Windows ever since, save for testing purposes (though even that often happens in a virtual machine).

Due to gaming, Wine was probably the major deal-maker here, for I doubt I could have switched if the games I mainly play wouldn't work (FINAL FANTASY XI being the main culprit there). I never was too much into the most latest games, but anything I've tried, has more or less worked just fine, or I managed to make them work.

It's definitely great to see Linux getting some love from something like Valve, and the Linux game-library growing ever longer. Regardless, I'm still very interested in getting myself more and more into the Wine-project for some reason. I still have ways to go before I can put in patches as real fixes, though I've already had some small success in finding causes/workarounds.

Just as I was writing this, I went to store.steampowered to perhaps do a bit of a look-see of the current situation over there, and what do I find: “System Shock 2 is now available on Linux”...

They claim SHODAN has got access to my root account... oh dear. This wont do. This wont do at all! That's one of my favourite games to date, and it's a bit unfortunate that I had previously bought it already (even though I have it on disc somewhere), for I would have liked to buy it now, to show my support, but oh well!

I think I got the chills off of seeing that one there. Of course, it's just a Wine bottle, but it was a fun moment... heh.

Anyblue. What was I talking about...

Oh yeah, games. The search lists 390 at this time, when filtering to games only. It's certainly a smaller number than for Mac or... “PC” (why oh why don't they already list them by the OS or something), but I guess this can only be going up.

All in all, I think one needs to try it out for themselves to see if things work as well as they can live with. And if they can't, well, there's always dual-booting for those times, if it's not making things too complicated. And as I think they say: patches are welcome. ^^;

I, for one, am glad that I somehow (no recollection of how and/or why) stumbled upon Gentoo, which was, aside from a very quick Ubuntu-test (didn't really do anything with it, just a peek it was), my first steps into Linux in general.

Meh! Getting distracted by System Shock 2 bonus content now...

See ya!

Aonoa · Post by **Aonoa** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 9:58 pm

Hello!

Gaming with Linux is definitely improving a lot these days. With major players such as Unreal Engine and CryEngine supporting Linux, which in turn let's people like Chris Roberts announce that there will be a Linux version of Star Citizen.

Everyone into Linux and gaming should keep up with www.gamingonlinux.com if you're not already visiting that site.

However, I can not really comment on the state of Wine, since I am not really using it. I did try it with the latest alpha2 build of Stonehearth, which worked without any tinkering, that was rather nice. Stonehearth will be getting it's own Linux version eventually, but just not this early in development.

Most of the games in development now that I want to play, will be getting their own Linux build, which is awesome. Among which are: Planetary Annihilation, Shroud of the Avatar, The Mandate, Satellite Reign, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and Frontiers. The exception here is Dark Souls II, hopefully it will work with Wine.

These are good times for Linux gaming.

Clad in Sky · Post by **Clad in Sky** » Mon Apr 21, 2014 7:19 am

As always in these matters - it depends.
Many games run really well in Linux, either because there is a native version or using wine.
Then again, there are some that just don't or require a whole lot of tinkering.
So, all in all I'd say: Gaming on Linux is possible, but don't expect to be able to play every game you could play on Windows.

I've not used Win in 7 years now and I never had any problems playing games. Diablo I, II, III, Civilization IV, V, Path of Exile. But it might just be that I was lucky to like games that actually run on Linux.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 12:54 am

I run a highly modded skyrim on wine, flawlessly (through skse).

I run native steam on linux and play games like Natural Selection 2, left4dead 2, serious sam 3, Metro: Last Light or StarBound.

I install native proprietary DRM-free games like hotline-miami, trine2, brutal legend or larry reloaded via portage.

I install native opensource games like urbanterror, warsow, megaglest, battle for wesnoth, minetest or stone-soup and so on via portage.

I play a crapload of silly boy-hunts-girl visual manga novels via renpy, although I don't mind lesbian stories as well.

OldTango · Post by **OldTango** » Sat May 31, 2014 10:57 pm

Tough I prefer FPS style games, when I first started using Gentoo in 2004, gaming on my Linux machine was mind numbing difficult but I still managed to get almost all of my previously owned game titles to work to some degree.

Today I find it difficult to find a game I like, that I can't install or get running in Linux in some fashion. Either using Steam through Wine, Wine itself, portage ebuilds, an overlay or sometimes just using a bigger hammer. I am sure there are games that won't run on Linux but none I have considered purchasing. Years ago I kept a windows install around just for certain games. Today I use windows only for software that won't run well in Linux like Quick Books and I run windows XP in Linux using VirtualBox for that purpose.

I play RAGE on-line with some of my friends using a Wine Install of Steam and I works great. Been waiting for the Native Linux Steam client to mature a bit more before tackling it.

I installed windows-7 about a year ago on a second (its own HD) disk and have booted into it maybe three times just to make sure it was still there I guess. Thats as far as I go. I will never purchase a copy of windows-8 but I suppose I will always have some version of windows left running someplace on my systems.

Its your choice if you decide to delete windows or not, just like Gentoo, its all about choice.

666threesixes666 · Post by **666threesixes666** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 5:08 pm

steam on linux has been consuming 90% of my spare time lately, i can hardly bang out a hostapd wiki now! i fixed s3tc issues under nouveau and i can even play my left4dead2 & portal.

Removed 969 , because we all know what happens when little yellow pills are used in excess. -- desultory

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Wed Jun 25, 2014 7:14 pm

Gankfest wrote:I just want to say that when I look at this thread with 590 views and 4 posts... With 50% of the posts being mine, I figure people think gaming on Linux is s**t, so stick to windows...

Oh boo effing hoo.

Crying about commercial Windows games not running on Linux is akin to crying about PS4 games not running on Linux. You don't want them to make games for that platform? Don't buy into it then. Vote with your actions as a consumer. Reward the few companies that do make games for Linux (and there's plenty on Steam) or get involved in the plethora of good open source game projects - and there's hundreds of very active ones which are good games.

You may have to miss out on a few AAA titles, but so what? Y'know, it won't actually kill you.

janga8 · Post by **janga8** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 10:35 am

On steam I am seeing very few newly released games being only being released on windows, and considering that most game developer's will not go out of their way to make gaming on Linux bad and most will give similar levels of dedication in terms of performance.

comarfi · Post by **comarfi** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 9:36 am

On linux I mostly play indie games. Unfortunately, as improved, the situation is not the best for what concerns the AAA games

i92guboj · Post by **i92guboj** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 3:00 pm

I can't bother to read the thread, so, please, forgive me if this all has been pointed out, but, for the sake of briefness and conciseness:

wine is not reliable, it never was, and probably never will. No pun intended. It's simply impossible to keep up with the pace of a world-wide industry, no matter how good you are at it.
steam has come a good way, lots of games (both indie and pro) are available for linux nowadays in this platform. But not all of them. You can probably get a clearer idea by visiting their site or installing the client and looking around.
GOG.com has also a very good assortment, I haven't a clear idea about how fresh or dated is the stuff in there (well, I have no idea about that when it comes to gaming in general, so check yourself).
humblebundle/humblestore has also a good selection of games which will work on linux. Note that a lot of the stuff that you see in steam can also be bought here, sometimes for a much lower price. So, double check both stores before purchasing anything.

These are the places where you can get games with are almost guaranteed to work on any reasonably up to date system. But, that doesn't guarantee the experience is gonna be smooth. The other part of the story is getting the most of your box (mainly your GPU), but I guess you already know that.

Yamakuzure · Post by **Yamakuzure** » Fri Aug 15, 2014 8:06 am

Steam has shown what it's worth. As my main (and almost only) games I play are the Mass Effect trilogy games, I do hope that EA eventually brings origin to linux and have the ME games ported.

(I know... Hell will freeze before *that* happens...)

Roman_Gruber · Post by **Roman_Gruber** » Fri Aug 15, 2014 1:29 pm

Well gaming depends.

I used to play tremulous for years. Than freeciv, freedroidrpg, pysol or pysol-fc or what it is called now, smc and some other stuff.

Mame and those gameboy related games or lets called it the hardware whcih followed after also worked flawless on my box here.

These days I play urbanterror.

It is more a choice but when you consider that you have to pay for games and run it on a crappy OS like windows I just dont use such games / software anymore.

I also checked steam website but I hardly saw anything for free and if so the hardware ressources are too demanding.
My 4 year old T9500 / 4gib ram / 9800m gts is decent hardware but for steam it is a bit underpowered and therefore steam is out of the question.

I also agree with the poster above that wine will never be able to run anything smooth which is newer software out of the box.

I also found my love for MSDOS games again. Dosbox works quite well and you find a lot of games in those abondware websites. Those games are from years ago and quite fun. These days its mostly eyecandy.

I am not sure but I havent seen a decent pinball games for years like EPIC Pinball for MSDOS which runs quite well in dosbox.
For a shooter you can play enemy territory, tremulous, unvanquised and urbanterror.

I also saw there are emulators for those playstation games already but I never tried those.

Roman_Gruber · Post by **Roman_Gruber** » Fri Aug 15, 2014 1:33 pm

charlieg wrote:
Gankfest wrote:I just want to say that when I look at this thread with 590 views and 4 posts... With 50% of the posts being mine, I figure people think gaming on Linux is s**t, so stick to windows...
Oh boo effing hoo.

Crying about commercial Windows games not running on Linux is akin to crying about PS4 games not running on Linux. You don't want them to make games for that platform? Don't buy into it then. Vote with your actions as a consumer. Reward the few companies that do make games for Linux (and there's plenty on Steam) or get involved in the plethora of good open source game projects - and there's hundreds of very active ones which are good games.

You may have to miss out on a few AAA titles, but so what? Y'know, it won't actually kill you.

I have also read on another website, these are from overclockers and gamers, that some gamers are only made for PS4 and such consoles anymore. Even ordinary computer games are dying out slowly because the play console market is much bigger these days.

So I would not say it does not run on linux, in general it does not run on a personal computer soon.

And i totally agree on that, I stopped buying software ages ago. I mostly used gnu software in the past and therefore if it runs on this or that operating system it does not matter at all. Therefore windows left my computer ages ago.

Gaming on Linux These Days...

Gaming on Linux These Days...

><)))°€