Cryengine 3.8.1 Adds Support for Linux, OpenGL and Oculus Rift

http://cryengine.com/news/update-from-the-team-cryengine-381-is-here-adding-opengl-linux-and-oculus-rift-support

by jrepin • 11 years ago

281 109 11 years ago

dijit• 11 years ago

Slowly removing microsofts AAA game monopoly!

this is a great thing, as a person who only runs linux, I'm super excited at the idea of getting the older games updated to this version and potentially running on Linux. :)

asddubs• 11 years ago

If only. Take e.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity, so they would literally only have to push a button to support linux, and yet, no linux support.

satyanash• 11 years ago

I don't think it's that easy. The amount of effort that goes into testing, supporting and getting a game running for another operating system is not offset by the amount of consumers you have in the linux demographic.

eterm• 11 years ago

That's a technologist's falacy.

Sure, they could enable a linux build with a "push of a button", but to have linux support they require a support department to support that build.

Actually supporting something is a lot more than just the technology required.

tadzik_4• 11 years ago

Maybe they have learned other developers' lesson that a it takes much more than a push of a button to get a Unity game on Linux.

QA takes time. Middleware may or may not be available. Launchers may not be there (especially in the case of Hearthstone). A lost of indie/kickstarted projects are still considered "Linux Scams" because they assumed that it'd be that easy.

golergka2• 11 years ago

they would literally only have to push a button to support linux

What. Why do people think that? Even if you use Unity, the DirectX/OpenGL distinction still matters, not to mention all other platform-specific stuff. Of course, with Unity you _can_ develop a very simple and unoptimised game that would be able to compile on all desktop and mobile platforms with one click — but when you start to dig down and try to do things effectively, you end up with a lot of platform-specific code.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

There's a lot of Unity games that don't release on Linux. Ori and the Blind Forest is another one that comes to mind (http://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/).

CyberDildonics• 11 years ago

But how would they sell it? Their launcher is not on Linux so there is more overhead to it. It has just now come to Android and IOS, which makes sense that they would target those platforms first.

tcfunk• 11 years ago

I imagine it has less to do with Hearthstone and more to do with Battle.net and other DRM-related stuffs. But that's just a guess.

orbifold• 11 years ago

Pretty much all Blizzard Games have been running very well under Wine for years.

needusername• 11 years ago

Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity

Oh, that explains why it's so shitty on Mac OS X.

ekianjo7• 11 years ago

This is super great news too: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jramey/2015/06/18/it...

jebblue7• 11 years ago

I'm in total agreement, Linux really is the future of the desktop (though Microsoft seems to be improving some things so I'll give them that). If I were Canonical I'd be worried they come out with Microsoft Linux and ditch Windows by 2020.

shmerl3• 11 years ago

I'm more excited about new games coming out for Linux from day one.

frik• 11 years ago

Microsoft's E3 presentation put a nail in the coffin. There was a huge XBoxOne sign on the stage and many XBoxOne exclusive and time-exclusive games. There was no "Windows 10" sign. Windows exclusive games, nada. New Microsoft Game Studio games (Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, etc. anyone?), nope. Kinect 2 was absent. And after the HoloLens Minecraft showcase, it turned out the field-of-view is tiny and the device twice as expensive as their console: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/18/8809323/microsoft-hololens...

On the other side, the PC gaming platform is thriving, especially in certain parts of Europe and Asia. The PC was able to render Witcher 3, Watch_Dogs and The Division in all its graphical glory without the need for a Console-downgrade. Also many former PlayStation exclusive titles are released on PS4 and PC. And Steam and GoG are big too. So great, despite the little effort from Microsoft itself.

mrmondo4• 11 years ago

About time. I am so sick of rebooting into Windows just to play the odd game. I find myself spending a lot of the time rebooting for windows updates, removing spyware or finding myself rebooting into OS X / Linux when needing to do work (ssh, git etc...)

tormeh5• 11 years ago

Install steam for Linux. There's enough good games that, unless you are an enthusiast, gaming on Linux only is completely acceptable. I'd recommend Civilization V, dreamfall chapters, spec ops: the line (way smarter than it looks), witcher 2, team fortress 2 and braid. Those are the kinds of games that are officially supported for Steam on Ubuntu these days. Most of the rpg classics (torment, baldur's gate etc) on gog.com also works on linux, if that's more your thing.

mrmondo4• 11 years ago

Thanks for the tip. Last time I tried steam on Linux it only supported Ubuntu and only has 32bit packages with broken i386 compatibility dependencies but that's probably changed now I'm assuming. I've actually really been enjoying Elite: Dangerous recently and they've just come out with an OSX client which is great.

dreen2• 11 years ago

afaik the witcher 2 port for linux is actually really poor quality to the point of being just barely playable with a solid machine. or so i heard.

ekianjo7• 11 years ago

Here's an up to date list about great games to play on Linux right now: http://boilingsteam.com/recommended-games/

shmerl3• 11 years ago

GOG also has many Linux games, and all of them are DRM-free.

baldfat2• 11 years ago

Love Linux and I even got work to allow me to work on OpenSUSE in a non-technical job, but you can do all you just said on Windows and very easily.

ssh and git: I personally use mobaXterm for git and ssh. Others like putty and other different programs.

Also Windows 7 and 8 do have a monthly update that does require the machine to reboot which is stupid, but I wouldn't say someone couldn't get work done with Windows. That is not the reason why I use Linux. I use Linux because I can set up my computer any way I like and use any kind of work flow that is best for me. It is also much easier to script and program common tasks.

mrmondo4• 11 years ago

While you 'can' do those things on windows - it's truly horrible and you lack all the local tools that allow me to work properly. Windows just isn't a good client for administering servers (unless they're running windows I guess?).

olavgg• 11 years ago

I have a Windows system with Steam Home Streaming that stream video to a Linux system. It works really well! Quality is great on a gigabit network and latency isn't noticable at all(I play a lot of DOTA2 at 4K+ rating). I can even stream third party games like Diablo 3 or applications like Microsoft Word.

This Windows system is like a server, however I need to use TightVNC as remote desktop. Regular remote desktop doesn't work.

BFay• 11 years ago

Do you have any more info on how you set that up? I kinda want a gaming PC but I like my current laptop/monitor setup, maybe I could leave the PC sitting in the corner of the room running headless, and stream the content to my laptop?

tormeh5• 11 years ago

Whenever I see news about opengl these days I only think about how great vulkan is going to be. I know the spec won't be out until late this year, and drivers will probably need a good 6 months, but still everything opengl already feels outdated.

hitlin372• 11 years ago

supporting your game engine for Linux is great for overall PC game ecosystem and not just Linux. Also, for a casual gamer, its a win as they can probably buy a 20$ game and run it on a Linux laptop without needing to buy the PS machine. I mean, most of us run a i5 8gig laptop as a dev machine anyway.

lentil_soup• 11 years ago

There's more in-depth information on the release notes: http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/EaaS+3.8.1

erikb3• 11 years ago

Oh yes, another major step taken! I love how the whole world switches to Linux. Now I hope they start to leverage the GPU driver companies into better Linux support. At least on my computer it's still complicated as hell to get everything running and even then the performance is quite below of what Windows drivers would get done.

microcolonel• 11 years ago

With Vulkan, there will be a lot less to providing quality drivers; Of course Intel has been really good with their drivers for about five years or so(and we know there's already a Vulkan driver for Intel hardware that will be released along with the spec)

Their linux OpenGL drivers often outperform their Windows drivers.

As for AMD, the open source Radeon drivers are pleasant to work with, and on some hardware perform as well as Catalyst.

madez3• 11 years ago

I have to agree that the free and open radeonsi driver is so much more hazzle-free than catalyst on either platform. Still, the driver reliably kills my system in some games, in others texture is missing.

erikb3• 11 years ago

That's quite interesting. The reason I bought my laptop with a secondary NVidia card was because I heard AMD on linux should be aweful. Did that change or did I hear it wrong or something? Getting a secondary NVidia card working is a pain in the butt, at least from my experience.

jebblue7• 11 years ago

Games on nVidia have always been faster for me on Linux as well as far more stable.

erikb3• 11 years ago

But at least for me it takes a long time after every major Ubuntu release before I can get it working, and it's always more magic than real understanding. The most painful is that I have to do that every 6 months. Doing it once would be acceptable. So often I just use the onbaord Intel chip because it just works. But with many games it runs so hot that even my laptop screen gets a black mark on the side where the Intel chip is.

BonoboBoner• 11 years ago

Does it run Crysis? Apparently now Linux can.

fsloth• 11 years ago

Microsoft has pretty strict conformance tests for all DirectX drivers. Is there anything comparable qualitywise for Opengl drivers on Linux?

jebblue7• 11 years ago

I use OpenGL on nVidia proprietary on a GTX 660. I run many Steam games and some of them are Unity: 7 Days To Die, Beasts Of Prey, Dying Light, Metro Last Light, they all run great. In past years back when I ran Windows XP for games and dual booted into Ubuntu I ran Unreal 2004. One day it crashed (as it did sometimes ending in the BSOD) then I booted into Ubuntu and ran the Linux version and it ran faster and smoother and never crashed. That was the moment I decided it was time to go full time Ubuntu Linux.

dogma11383• 11 years ago

Not ATM, there's also a fuss about using closed source drivers/components.

Wine is major performance and feature hit since it attempts to translate DX API calls into OpenGL, many of the commercial GameOnLinux solutions are technically wine with slightly better profiles.

Engines with dedicated Linux support are still well kinda messy, graphically wise they might still have to make sacrifice mostly because OpenGL was in a political limbo for a decade and didn't kept up with DX graphical API.

But the biggest issue in many games for me was actually the controls, audio, and network code. DX is much more than just graphics and OpenGL doesn't cover audio, controls and network code. So unless your engine has discrete code to deal with that e.g. uses Steam Workshop or what ever Unity calls their set of API's you'll get quite a shitty experience.

SwellJoe2• 11 years ago

I buy and play an order of magnitude more games these days now that there is a reasonably large library of games on Steam with Linux support. I don't know if it moves the revenue needle for them enough to notice it, but I spent about $10/year on games (sometimes I'd go more than a year between buying a game) before Linux support became a common thing. It's a heck of a lot more than that now, and would be higher still if more games I wanted to play were available for Linux.

I have Windows 7 on my laptop, but my desktop machine (which has a huge video card) only runs Linux. So, gaming happens on Linux or not at all (almost; I play Civ V on my laptop sometimes).

Lord_Zero• 11 years ago

A lot of people say that gaming is really the only thing keeping them from making a permanent jump over to their favorite distro. Were slowly moving in the direction of not only multi-platform gaming, but a lot of regular desktop apps too as development becomes easier and easier to deploy out to multiple OSes.

INTPenis• 11 years ago

There are even games outside of steam, private distributors like Rimworld or steam-alternatives like GOG.

People have grown sick of the phrase "this is the year of the linux desktop" but I can't help remember when all the games I could play were nethack and tuxracer.

knodi123• 11 years ago

oh yeah, tuxracer! haha, wasted way more time on that than I'd be proud to admit.

archagon• 11 years ago

Isn't Crytek not in good financial shape? Seems a bit risky to rely on them right now.

supercoder• 11 years ago

No doubt Steam / Value are offering enough incentive to make it worthwhile.

dogma11383• 11 years ago

Somehow doubt this is the case, Crytek said they are following CDPR's footsteps and they are reforging their core business strategy to become an online publisher.

GOG at this point seems to be an actual threat to Valve's Steam, they got the right business model at this point to pull it off. If they'll still would've been as Good if they were in Valve's shoes i don't know.

But no DRM on any game, and an offset for regional pricing which means It's finally makes sense to me to buy games in GBP with a very good customer support policy makes me wish i could transfer my giant Steam library to GOG.

redtuesday• 11 years ago

It seems Crytek sold a Cryengine license (maybe more) for 50-70 million USD to Amazon.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/04/06/amazon-dropped-big-bu...

mladenkovacevic• 11 years ago

Things are looking good for October when the pre-order Steam Controller and Steam Links should ship out :)

I don't play games on my desktop computer anymore because I prefer to do work there. After giving my old Xbox 360 to my nephew I've been hesitant to get another console, choosing instead to wait out Steam's living room experience (Steam's where most of my games are anyways). It'll be fun to fill some of my work breaks with a little bit of light gaming on the couch.

shmerl3• 11 years ago

Not surprising. Demand is coming from developers, so all major engines are supporting Linux now. Those who don't will be less competitive.

Some middleware solutions however still lag behind. For instance Umbra 3D still has no Linux support: http://umbra3d.com/

I wonder how Witcher 3 developers plan to port it to Linux without Umbra.

outworlder• 11 years ago

While you will still need Windows to use the Sandbox Editor

Bummer.

I suppose it's a good step forwards though.

anon42• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, Oculus removed Linux&OSX support. Or at least put it on indefinite life-unsupport. https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/

malkia• 11 years ago

Next step must be making the tools run on Linux/OSX.

I've been using Linux as a desktop at work, and it just works.

(Good HW configuration seems to be the key though, and Windows still is the leader of running almost on anything x86 out there)

Cryengine 3.8.1 Adds Support for Linux, OpenGL and Oculus Rift

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