Any recent thought as to Linux OpenGL port of DCS ?

[okopanja]

3 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Hell would indeed freeze over before Linux becomes the dominant OS

Well we got your sentiment about Linux...

[SharpeXB]

3 minutes ago, okopanja said:

Well we got your sentiment about Linux...

That’s not just my sentiment… 99% of this market agrees with me. 

Edited September 5, 2022 by SharpeXB

[okopanja]

4 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

That’s not just my sentiment… 99% of this market agrees with me. 

I think you need to decide once on the actual percentage... What would be your standard deviation?

[SharpeXB]

32 minutes ago, okopanja said:

I think you need to decide once on the actual percentage... What would be your standard deviation?

Well at the moment those numbers are:

Windows 96.23%

OSX 2.5%

Linux 1.27%

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Draw your own conclusions…

 

[SkateZilla]

On 9/4/2022 at 8:46 AM, 5ephir0th said:

Well, exactly AMD developed with DiCE (the guys from Battlefield series) the Mantle API but Vulkan, while based at first on Vulkan, was (and are) developed by Khronos Group

AMD's Mantle API was sold donated to Khronos Group to be developed into Vulkan, not the other way around.

AMD Developed Mantle, but unlike 3DFx, did not want to limit it to specific AMD Hardware, the Mantle API was given to Kronos, which was developed into Vulkan.
Prior to 2015, kronos was developing OpenGL Next, and promised it would be backwards compatible with Prev. OpenGL Generations,

Kronos realized that the OpenGL Core was never going to be a low overhead to compete with DX12 on Windows or Metal on Mac, AMD Donated the Mantle API and Vulkan was developed from that, eliminating the OpenGL Line and Name.

[upyr1]

I would love to see Linux support via wine if possible 

[Berniyh]

On 9/3/2022 at 3:19 PM, DmitriKozlowsky said:

Any recent thought as to Linux OpenGL port of DCS ?

Linux has grown up somewhat. Still no MS DirectX, but there is OpenGL, Nvidia Vulkan, AMD Radeon API. In my day job I use Maya, Houdini, NUke, other OpenGL. Looking at their installations, there is just Linux version, without disto-specific versions m that used to be norm.

Wow, you mixed up a lot of things here. To answer your question: An OpenGL port doesn't make sense, if they are implementing Vulkan, since Vulkan is very well supported on Linux.

Even DirectX isn't that big of a deal anymore, since there are low overhead layers that translate DirectX calls into Vulkan (i.e. dxvk). The rendering works just fine on most games on Linux, if a game is problematic, then it's most likely due to other stuff, like anti cheat software, .net stuff etc. You can even use this path for semi-native Linux ports, like Valve has done with a couple of their games.

But anyway, having a Vulkan rendering port for DCS would surely improve things and might(!) make a Linux port more realistic. Really depends on how much other platform-specific stuff they have incorporated into their code base. It's not fair to limit the question just to the rendering path. That might have been the main question 10 years ago, but today, it isn't.

On 9/4/2022 at 5:26 PM, SharpeXB said:

It doesn’t matter what changes there might be to this number as long as it’s always around 1-2%. I don’t think this has ever changed. It’s not a matter of programming science that makes Linux infeasible for DCS it’s a simple question of the market share. And it’s worth remembering that this is a tiny niche game. Spending $50million to reach an extra 1% of its potential customers is clearly not worthwhile.

Actually, it really matters what changes happen. Not only to that number (that at least is now constantly above 1%, which is progress), but also in the ecosystem. And the change in the ecosystem is significant. Using Proton, you can run many games on Linux that were never designed to run there. Even DCS. So that actually enables games to make the step to Linux at all, without leaving most of their games behind. I'm a regular Linux user since almost 20 years, but I – while I tried a couple of times – never really thought dropping Windows on the 2nd computer, simply due to the games. Well, until now, because I am now in the situation that almost everything works on Linux and most games I only play on Linux. My Windows installation currently only holds 5 games, of which one is just a backup installation of DCS World 2.5 (since it's still Windows 7 on that machine) and the other 4 I know work on Linux, but they have rather complicated profiles and I haven't migrated them yet. So ditching Windows really becomes realistic now.

In addition to that, there is also something else that has changed and that is the release of the Steam Deck. I know, Valve has, unsuccessfully, tried something in that direction before, with the Steam machines, but the Steam Deck seems to spark more interest. Especially I know one particular developer who always said he doesn't want to support Linux. Not, because he doesn't like it or something like that, but simply because nobody on the team was using it and that obviously makes development harder. Now however, he said that he is interested in making his new game work on SteamOS on the Steam Deck. So now he's interested in Linux support, simply due to the existence of this device.

Of course, the Steam Deck might not be the best target for DCS, since clickable cockpits on such a small screen might be painful to use. Still, it has been tried successfully and DCS World does run on the Steam Deck using Proton: https://www.protondb.com/app/223750

And who knows, maybe for some of the less complicated cockpits and flight models, using DCS on this device might a lot of fun?

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, Berniyh said:

that at least is now constantly above 1%, which is progress

This is not “progress”

[Berniyh]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

This is not “progress”

I'd say that depends on the perspective. If you're just looking at it from a "everyone is using Windows" perspective, then yes, there isn't much progress. It's still "everyone is using Windows".

If however you look at it from my perspective, seeing Steam on Linux sit around 0.6-0.8% for years, then yes having almost twice within a year or so, that is progress. It won't change the gaming world as a whole (see above, everybody is still using Windows …), but it's progress. Still, as I outlined above, the bigger progress is in the ecosystem than in the actual numbers, because that work is paving the way for more users to try it and have a good experience. Right now, the road is still quite rough sometimes, but this is always the case if you're one of the first people on a new path.

[SharpeXB]

2 minutes ago, Berniyh said:

If however you look at it from my perspective, seeing Steam on Linux sit around 0.6-0.8% for years, then yes having almost twice within a year or so, that is progress.

Not enough “progress” to matter to anyone… really. 

[Berniyh]

4 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Not enough “progress” to matter to anyone… really. 

Well, I'm someone …

And looking at this topic coming up several times already, so do apparently others as well.

In the end, you're bashing people in a niche. Kind of odd coming from someone interested in a topic that is very niche itself, don't you think? If you compare the numbers, way more people use Steam on Linux than are playing DCS on Steam (below 0.1%). Obviously, that's not taking into account the number of players that use the standalone version, but even with those included, I doubt the numbers would be much higher. Sure, you can make the argument, that of these relatively few people not too many will use Linux (so that'd be less than 0.1%*1.3%, so maybe around 40 or 50 people) and that's fine. Keep in mind though, that similar statistics applied to VR in the beginning. Or FFB, since next to nobody actually had one of these devices. So you'd also say "Screw FFB, nobody cares"?

Anyway, I never claimed that they should start supporting Linux. Just said that the ecosystem on Linux is changing and that there is some progress. If you don't care about it, that's fine. Just stop neglecting that others do care.

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, Berniyh said:

In the end, you're bashing people in a niche.

I’m just pointing out the obvious. That ED spending any resources to chase <2% of the market doesn’t make any sense. 

1 hour ago, Berniyh said:

Keep in mind though, that similar statistics applied to VR in the beginning.

Yes they call this the “chicken or the egg” syndrome… the market would have to be there in the first place to justify the cost of trying to get it. And VR is still suffering from this so not a great example, it’s got a user base similar to Linux. 

Edited December 19, 2022 by SharpeXB

[upyr1]

I know ED has said they have no plans to do so. However I would love it if they wrote for wine so that they could write once and run on both windows and Linux 

[SharpeXB]

I would rather ED focus their work on Vulkan and multi-core.

[Berniyh]

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I’m just pointing out the obvious. That ED spending any resources to chase <2% of the market doesn’t make any sense.

I didn't say that they should.

7 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I would rather ED focus their work on Vulkan and multi-core.

Yes, for sure. As a side-effect, this might also help with DCS running on Linux via proton.

(Which is already working, but then it might work out of the box, without requiring to install DX libraries.)

[upyr1]

9 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I would rather ED focus their work on Vulkan and multi-core.

Vulkan is a cross platform graphic api. So these aren't exactly counterproductive wishes. However my desire to see a Linux or Mac version is inversely proportional to the amount of extra work it would take Eagle to support them. 

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, Berniyh said:

Yes, for sure. As a side-effect, this might also help with DCS running on Linux via proton.

Such a workaround has nothing to do with ED though, so that’s rather off topic. 

1 hour ago, upyr1 said:

However my desire to see a Linux or Mac version is inversely proportional to the amount of extra work it would take Eagle to support them. 

1.44% of this market currently uses Linux. In all likelihood it will never be feasible to support this.  

[Berniyh]

21 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Such a workaround has nothing to do with ED though, so that’s rather off topic.

Actually running a game via Proton is a valid target. Valve even has some documentation for developers on this topic, including information how to debug etc.:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/proton

Note that this page is for the steam deck, but since that is basically just a PC with SteamOS (and therefore Arch Linux), all of that would work on a regular Linux system as well.

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, Berniyh said:

Actually running a game via Proton is a valid target.

No it’s really not. Only about 1% of this market uses Linux. You keep missing this obvious fact. 
If you read the beginning of this thread you can see that ED answered this question already, not sure why you feel the need to keep it going  

.

Edited December 21, 2022 by SharpeXB

[Berniyh]

55 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

No it’s really not. Only about 1% of this market uses Linux. You keep missing this obvious fact. 
If you read the beginning of this thread you can see that ED answered this question already, not sure why you feel the need to keep it going 

No, you keep reading my posts in the wrong way over and over again, …

[SharpeXB]

26 minutes ago, Berniyh said:

No, you keep reading my posts in the wrong way over and over again, …

Really? Because it sounds like you keep advocating for some sort of Linux support. On a dead topic that’s run it’s course. 

Edited December 21, 2022 by SharpeXB

[Berniyh]

I am, but I have also stated numerous times that I don't see ED doing anything in that direction at all. At least not at this time. All I have done is explaining what is happening on Linux right now, which just indicates the direction things are moving. And correcting some statements.

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, Berniyh said:

At least not at this time.

Or ever… There’s no advantage to the consumer to have multiple competing formats like VHS and Betamax. PC Operating Systems face the same reality. There’s only room for one in the marketplace because to the average consumer they’re all nearly identical. Support, compatibility and learning curve are more important to them and they’ll just gravitate to whichever is most widely used. In the case of Mac OSX the differentiator is really the hardware and appealing form factor, Apple isn't selling the OS alone. And OSX is even too small to justify much support in this demographic at only 2.45% 

It would take some unimaginable reversal of fortune for Linux to be more than a tiny rounding error level % of this market. 

Edited December 21, 2022 by SharpeXB

[upyr1]

6 hours ago, Berniyh said:

Actually running a game via Proton is a valid target. Valve even has some documentation for developers on this topic, including information how to debug etc.:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/proton

Note that this page is for the steam deck, but since that is basically just a PC with SteamOS (and therefore Arch Linux), all of that would work on a regular Linux system as well.

I brought up WINE as well. As I have stated my desire to see a Linux version is inversely proportional to the amount of work it would take to support it. If DCS works just fine on WINE then Linux support would simply be a matter of mentioning that DCS runs on WINE. If not then I can see why they aren't doing it. I'd rather see ED focus on improving DCS core. 

On 12/20/2022 at 7:11 AM, SharpeXB said:

1.44% of this market currently uses Linux. In all likelihood it will never be feasible to support this.  

I said Linux support would be nice to have but it isn't a high priority for me. As pointed out earlier there are ways to write middleware which can run on multiple platforms so as I said earlier if DCS basically is middleware after the introduction of vulcan and Linux support is simply a matter of menitioning it runs on WINE it would be one thing, but if it actually takes rewriting a large chunk of DCS then I'd hate to see Linux support 

[Berniyh]

On 12/21/2022 at 4:35 PM, SharpeXB said:

Or ever… There’s no advantage to the consumer to have multiple competing formats like VHS and Betamax. PC Operating Systems face the same reality. There’s only room for one in the marketplace because to the average consumer they’re all nearly identical. Support, compatibility and learning curve are more important to them and they’ll just gravitate to whichever is most widely used. In the case of Mac OSX the differentiator is really the hardware and appealing form factor, Apple isn't selling the OS alone. And OSX is even too small to justify much support in this demographic at only 2.45% 

It would take some unimaginable reversal of fortune for Linux to be more than a tiny rounding error level % of this market.

I don't mean to rub this in your face. Ok, maybe a little bit.

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/SteamDeck/

So indeed, they are now also targeting Steam Deck, which means targeting Proton/Wine. For those running Linux, this is big news. While they are still not officially supporting Linux (and possibly won't in the future as well, because Linux has so much more variety than the Steam Deck and most likely not natively), this should mean that at least they might pay attention that they are not breaking it either with new code. Something that was a bit problematic in the past, even though the game basically ran through Proton/Wine for the last 3 to 4 years.

Anyway, not really want to start the discussion again, since I think we have all said everything on the topic, just wanted to leave this as an information here.