Any recent thought as to Linux OpenGL port of DCS ?

[SharpeXB]

26 minutes ago, Berniyh said:

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.

Looks like a whole page of technical gibberish I’m sure 99% of players won’t understand or care about. 

[Berniyh]

Maybe, but that was not the point.

[upyr1]

7 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Looks like a whole page of technical gibberish I’m sure 99% of players won’t understand or care about. 

The 1%  or so  who want to run DCS on steam box and other forms of Linux will care about it

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, upyr1 said:

The 1%  or so  who want to run DCS on steam box and other forms of Linux will care about it

Yeah but it’s likely not worthwhile for ED to spend any resources chasing this 1% There are tons and tons of more important thing for them to be working on. 

Edited February 21, 2023 by SharpeXB

[upyr1]

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Yeah but it’s likely not worthwhile for ED to spend any resources chasing this 1% There are tons and tons of more important thing for them to be working on. 

If you could comprehend the instructions here https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/SteamDeck/ , it would be clear that Eagle isn't spending tons of money on Linux support. In fact I am sure that you have spent more time complaining about it then they actually spent providing Linux support.  As I have said earlier if DCS runs on Wine, then I can't think of any good reason not to say so.

[SharpeXB]

20 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

If you could comprehend the instructions here https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/SteamDeck/ ,

I don’t think many people could understand those instructions. That’s just about the biggest page of technical gibberish I’ve ever seen in gaming. The idea of going through all that in order to play this game on a handheld is laughable. Not sure it has anything to do with this topic either. 

24 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

I am sure that you have spent more time complaining about it then they actually spent providing Linux support.

I certainly hope so. 

[upyr1]

10 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I don’t think many people could understand those instructions. That’s just about the biggest page of technical gibberish I’ve ever seen in gaming. The idea of going through all that in order to play this game on a handheld is laughable. Not sure it has anything to do with this topic either.

The Steam is a Linux platform so the fact it runs on the Steam deck using Protontricks means that it might run on other Linux distrobutions as well. 

 

10 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I certainly hope so. 

If my assement is correct, that you are spending way more energy that it took Eagle to support Steam Deck then then you really need to we think how you spend your time. Why not spend it complaining about the lack of Korean war assets or some other aspect of DCS you want improved  

[SharpeXB]

40 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

The Steam is a Linux platform so the fact it runs on the Steam deck using Protontricks means that it might run on other Linux distrobutions as well.

Might… clearly it doesn’t otherwise we’d know about it. Not much point to Linux support anyways. Hardly anyone uses it. Not sure how we’re on page three of this topic. 

40 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

Why not spend it complaining about the lack of Korean war assets or some other aspect of DCS you want improved 

Sure. Literally anything else ED could do would be more worthwhile. 

Edited February 22, 2023 by SharpeXB

[cfrag]

5 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Not much point to Linux support anyways. Hardly anyone uses it.

Except in the server community. I'm hoping that DCS multi-player takes off more, and having DCS dedicated server support Linux would make hosting dedicated servers so much more affordable. Currently, a 16 player server hosting runs around USD 50 per month (e.g. at the kind and great people over at Fox3); with a Linux-based server solution that could come down to as little as 12. Of course, that would also require making DCS a bit more multi-player accessible than it is right now, but having the infrastructure  in place would be a great first step. Actually playing (sim, not server) on Linux - I don't know. Some people keep forgetting that Linux is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. Just not on the PC (hint: Android)  But serverspace is Linuxspace and I hope that the server part (which does not require any graphics) does come to Linux.

 

Edited February 22, 2023 by cfrag

[SharpeXB]

5 hours ago, cfrag said:

Except in the server community. I'm hoping that DCS multi-player takes off more, and having DCS dedicated server support Linux would make hosting dedicated servers so much more affordable. Currently, a 16 player server hosting runs around USD 50 per month (e.g. at the kind and great people over at Fox3); with a Linux-based server solution that could come down to as little as 12. Of course, that would also require making DCS a bit more multi-player accessible than it is right now, but having the infrastructure  in place would be a great first step. Actually playing (sim, not server) on Linux - I don't know. Some people keep forgetting that Linux is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. Just not on the PC (hint: Android)  But serverspace is Linuxspace and I hope that the server part (which does not require any graphics) does come to Linux.

Well the topic here was the Linux port, not the server. And Linux is the “most popular” OS here, not in the demographic which counts for selling the game. For the server if that is really the cost difference, it seems negligible. I’m not sure what’s in it for ED to create that. Flight sim multiplayer attendance will always be tiny for reasons unrelated to server costs. 

[cfrag]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

I’m not sure what’s in it for ED to create that.

Well, for some games, the multi-player aspect was the next stage. I have no idea how DCS MP will develop, except that I think that MP is more fun than SP, and that I agree that MP has a lot of room to develop into. So what's in it for ED? A potentially great new, largely untapped market. 

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

Flight sim multiplayer attendance will always be tiny for reasons unrelated to server costs. 

Fair enough - and I hope that you are wrong; today it certainly looks like that for DCS. So I guess the next question would be: why? What are the reasons that hold back DCS and prevent it from becoming the next MP sensation? We certainly don't need another WT - we need something else. I don't know what would/could work here -- I'm dreaming of persistent worlds in different time eras, where people can join for a couple of missions, with tiers like casual, normal and strict. A live dynamic campaign with emergent gameplay development, perhaps. But my imagination is limited; except I know one thing for sure: the era of single-player games is coming to a close, and DCS will have to move into MP to stay relevant. 

Well, that's my contention, anyway. And that I want DCS to stay relevant for a long time.

 

Edited February 22, 2023 by cfrag

[SharpeXB]

5 minutes ago, cfrag said:

Well, for some games, the multi-player aspect was the next stage. I have no idea how DCS MP will develop, except that I think that MP is more fun than SP, and that I agree that MP has a lot of room to develop into. So what's in it for ED? A potentially great new, largely untapped market. 

Fair enough - and I hope that you are wrong; today it certainly looks like that for DCS. So I guess the next question would be: why? What are the reasons that hold back DCS and prevent it from becoming the next MP sensation? We certainly don't need another WT - we need something else. I don't know what would/could work here (I'm dreaming of persistent worlds in different time eras, where people can join for a couple of missions, with tiers like casual, normal and strict. A live dynamic campaign with emergent gameplay development, perhaps. But my imagination is limited; except I know one thing for sure: the era of single-player games is coming to a close, and DCS will have to move into MP to stay relevant. 

Well, that's my contention, anyway. And that I want DCS to stay relevant for a long time.

 

DCS isn’t well attended in multiplayer for the same reason that other CFS games aren’t. The popular ones are actually air-shooters, FPS games with planes, not sims, meaning a first person cockpit etc. They might have those features but the popular version is the 3rd person arcade style. This could actually be done in DCS but this audience clearly isn’t interested in that.

The “problems” are pretty obvious. It’s a difficult complex game for starters. It requires a joystick or HOTAS and other hardware as well as head tracking or VR to be competitive. And more importantly requires you to stay connected online for extended times. Most gamers play in sessions of perhaps only 20-30 minutes, constantly respawning, that’s just not compatible with sim style gameplay. And in SP you can pause the game, in MP you can’t. So SP is much more conducive to playing longer sessions which sim style games are mostly about. Lowering the server cost by $34 wouldn’t change any of the above. 

[upyr1]

7 hours ago, cfrag said:

Except in the server community. I'm hoping that DCS multi-player takes off more, and having DCS dedicated server support Linux would make hosting dedicated servers so much more affordable. Currently, a 16 player server hosting runs around USD 50 per month (e.g. at the kind and great people over at Fox3); with a Linux-based server solution that could come down to as little as 12. Of course, that would also require making DCS a bit more multi-player accessible than it is right now, but having the infrastructure  in place would be a great first step. Actually playing (sim, not server) on Linux - I don't know. Some people keep forgetting that Linux is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. Just not on the PC (hint: Android)  But serverspace is Linuxspace and I hope that the server part (which does not require any graphics) does come to Linux.

If a DCS server could run on Linux in Command line, I'd see that as one more argument to building a linux server 

[Berniyh]

On 2/21/2023 at 2:16 PM, SharpeXB said:

I don’t think many people could understand those instructions. That’s just about the biggest page of technical gibberish I’ve ever seen in gaming. The idea of going through all that in order to play this game on a handheld is laughable. Not sure it has anything to do with this topic either.

It's quite funny to read that on a forum of a flight simulator, which requires you to read several pages of technical instructions (or watch a couple of videos), just to take off and fly. xD

On 2/22/2023 at 7:36 AM, cfrag said:

Except in the server community. I'm hoping that DCS multi-player takes off more, and having DCS dedicated server support Linux would make hosting dedicated servers so much more affordable. Currently, a 16 player server hosting runs around USD 50 per month (e.g. at the kind and great people over at Fox3); with a Linux-based server solution that could come down to as little as 12. Of course, that would also require making DCS a bit more multi-player accessible than it is right now, but having the infrastructure  in place would be a great first step. Actually playing (sim, not server) on Linux - I don't know. Some people keep forgetting that Linux is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. Just not on the PC (hint: Android)  But serverspace is Linuxspace and I hope that the server part (which does not require any graphics) does come to Linux.

Can't you just run the server using Wine, too? I know that's what they are doing for other games that don't have a Linux version of the dedicated server.

[cfrag]

26 minutes ago, Berniyh said:

Can't you just run the server using Wine, too?

Yes, but it would introduce another layer of possible incompatibilities. It's not that it would be impossible, it is that when you set up a rack of 100 or more servers, you want your stack to be as simple as possible to keep operating cost down and performance high. Currently, DCS is already high-cost in maintenance: it has no real server admin interface, is nearly completely non-standard with regard to automated setup, and has quirky runtime behavior. Adding Wine to the mix will not help bring complexity down, so putting the server side on Linux would alleviate some of the pain. There's still some ground to cover before DCS server is a full network denizen, but it surely would be a start.  

[SharpeXB]

8 hours ago, Berniyh said:

It's quite funny to read that on a forum of a flight simulator, which requires you to read several pages of technical instructions (or watch a couple of videos), just to take off and fly. xD

Those things represent two different realms of aptitude and motivation. Sure I suppose most anyone can force themselves to understand something and apply it but in this case all that’s accomplished is installing the game. It’s worth noting that the average customer is not a computer programmer or IT worker. To the general public Wine is a drink and Linux is a cartoon character. 

[Berniyh]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

Those things represent two different realms of aptitude and motivation. Sure I suppose most anyone can force themselves to understand something and apply it but in this case all that’s accomplished is installing the game. It’s worth noting that the average customer is not a computer programmer or IT worker. To the general public Wine is a drink and Linux is a cartoon character. 

It's not that complicated really. All of those things can be achieved by running a GUI and all of it could be easily explained in a 5min Youtube video step-by-step. It's much harder to setup something like TrackIR on Windows, really.

Ultimately, all of that can and hopefully will be automated anyway. It's already done for other games, where steam automatically installs .Net and other stuff as it does on Windows, so all you have to do is to hit the "Play" button and it'll work. I don't know why this isn't the case yet, maybe it has to be setup by Valve (and they have quite the backlog, I suspect), don't know the exact steam-internal process going on here. We'll see …

Edited February 25, 2023 by Berniyh

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, Berniyh said:

It's much harder to setup something like TrackIR on Windows, really.

Really? Veering off topic but TrackIR is plug and play. Other than changing its default setting from 1:1 to smooth. I’ve never needed to make any adjustments for it.

The point being in someone can be flummoxed by TrackIR they’re not going to be up to this whole page of install instructions. And the target market for handhelds is kids riding in shopping carts

Edited February 25, 2023 by SharpeXB

[cfrag]

2 hours ago, Berniyh said:

It's not that complicated really.

and

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

Really? Veering off topic but TrackIR is plug and play. [...] And the target market for handhelds is kids riding in shopping carts 

Well, Sharpe's got a point. My Godson was 9 when he started flying the Eagle in DCS, and it took him another 3 years (to become 12) before he could install Debian on his Pi. So yeah, playing DCS isn't as difficult as installing Linux. Neither breaks the brain trust, though, so I submit that most people who claim that installing Linux is too difficult for them usually say so simply because they don't want to, or don't want to be bothered. On top of that Sharpe is also a leading member of a select group of DCS fans known for their penchant to sharply deny anything they don't like, and this is straight up their alley, so it is small wonder that some of the arguments are a bit, uh, left-field  

ED may bring the server to Linux if/when there is a business case to be made, and we'll simply have to wait.  

Edited February 25, 2023 by cfrag

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, cfrag said:

On top of that Sharpe is also a leading member of a select group of DCS fans known for their penchant to sharply deny anything they don't like

It has nothing to do with like or dislike. It’s the simple fact that 1.38% of this customer base runs Linux. 
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

1 hour ago, cfrag said:

I submit that most people who claim that installing Linux is too difficult for them usually say so simply because they don't want to, or don't want to be bothered.

The majority of customers likely don’t install Windows either. They’re going to just buy a machine with it preloaded. Installing the OS isn’t the question here, it’s the market share above. 

Edited February 25, 2023 by SharpeXB

[M-Flux]

Hi everyone, it's great to see here that other Linux users are interested in DCS World on Linux, too!

A few more statistics I found last weekend and found quite interesting:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/

* Windows desktop users declined from 90.96% to 74.14% in the last 10 years

* At the same time MacOS grew from 7.95% to 15.33%. And peaked in April 2020 at 18.99%.

* From April 2020 (so when MacOS lost some shares again) to today Linux desktop users grew from 1.61% to 2.91%.

And this statistic for how many people use which OS for software development:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-software-development-operating-system/

* Windows: 61%, MacOS: 46%, Linux: 45%

Which might be an explanation for why the amount of Linux users potentially interested in DCS World might be higher than the 1.27% Linux users on Steam. At least Linux users and especially developers are used to reading manual pages and maybe like the challenge to dive into technicalities of a system. (hi @okopanja, I'm a software developer working on/from Linux, too :D). And from a marketing perspective, software developers could be an interesting target as they get payed very well and can and might still be open to pay the extra price for DCS World compared to other games.

---

Anyway, back to topic: I would love to see an OpenGL / Vulkan port of DCS World, too, with native Linux support. However it seems that this actually not needed anymore to play DCS on Linux, there seems to have been great progress with Wine and Proton:

* https://github.com/TheZoq2/dcs_on_linux

* https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1722

15 years ago I had played LockOn and this year I checked back and I was very pleasantly surprised on how easy it was to install and use DCS World via Lutris. Looks like I came back right on time. And I get very decent frame rates with medium settings on this new laptop with its integrated GPU (a Thinkpad T14s with an AMD/ATI 680M). In fact, we can already play with Vulkan thanks to the crazy DXVK project (which gives me about ~10% more frames, from 21-25% -> 24-27% on the Caucasus map and with the new multithreading in Open Beta I even get about 26%-32%).

Only remaining issues seem to be radar texture issue with the F-16 (for which there is a workaround), texture issues with the Marianas map and maybe VR support.

Edited March 13, 2023 by M-Flux