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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Ashes of Creation on Linux/Proton Compatibility Layer support
RevengeRoman
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Hello Glorious Ashes Dev Team and Ashes Community,
I recognize that Linux support as been spoken on a few times in the past, but if I and other's like me don't push for it, I fear it may be lost to time and the black hole of statistics I don't believe accurately reflect the number of individuals that would utilize it.
With the adoption of Unreal Engine 5 I wonder if now is the time to ask for a definitive answer from Steven on the topic of Linux support. Either directly via Native Support (Please for the Love of God Steven I can't keep playing Ancient MMO's like WURM.) or via the use of Proton Compatibility Layer. Now I know there are some out there who will say "But Roman, don't you need to install Steam in order to use Proton?"
Well, as for Proton, you do not need Steam to utilize it, it is open source and stand-alone.
With all of that said, I wonder if those more knowledgeable than I could elaborate if due to the transition to UE5 it may actually be the time to look heavily into supporting Linux Natively.
If any Devs read this, could the challenges of developing for Linux as well be elaborated on?
And for those in the community reading, if you are a Linux user that needs a new MMO to play and doesn't want to go back to Windows to play one, or a Windows user trying desperately to escape Windows and MAC hegemony, respond to this post to show support!
I recognize that Linux support as been spoken on a few times in the past, but if I and other's like me don't push for it, I fear it may be lost to time and the black hole of statistics I don't believe accurately reflect the number of individuals that would utilize it.
With the adoption of Unreal Engine 5 I wonder if now is the time to ask for a definitive answer from Steven on the topic of Linux support. Either directly via Native Support (Please for the Love of God Steven I can't keep playing Ancient MMO's like WURM.) or via the use of Proton Compatibility Layer. Now I know there are some out there who will say "But Roman, don't you need to install Steam in order to use Proton?"
Well, as for Proton, you do not need Steam to utilize it, it is open source and stand-alone.
With all of that said, I wonder if those more knowledgeable than I could elaborate if due to the transition to UE5 it may actually be the time to look heavily into supporting Linux Natively.
If any Devs read this, could the challenges of developing for Linux as well be elaborated on?
And for those in the community reading, if you are a Linux user that needs a new MMO to play and doesn't want to go back to Windows to play one, or a Windows user trying desperately to escape Windows and MAC hegemony, respond to this post to show support!
6
Comments
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/
Reference the below articles.
https://hothardware.com/news/linux-a-viable-pc-gaming-platform-steam-stats-prove-it
https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-gaming-on-linux-how-hard-can-it-be
https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-sees-more-growth-with-linux-gamers-and-windows-11-popularity-surges
I apologize ahead of time if you see a lot of Valve statistics here, they are the most ubiquitous and most frequent compiler of this sort of data. That said, 7 straight months of albeit small gains is significant, and will only continue with the release of the Deck. Once Proton becomes more consistent you will start seeing more people like me, fed up with Windows as a company and looking for a better alternative.
Outside of the obvious lack of supported software in general, you could select any one of the Top 5 Linux Distros, and they are objectively better than Windows in terms of Security and in a lot of cases are becoming more and more user friendly especially with LTT's recent Linux Daily Driver challenge there are some Linux Distros I would say are objectively better operating systems than Windows, especially in the JunkWare department.
My Pop OS install takes up almost no space on my PC and demands comparatively little overhead cost to my CPU/GPU. All of the Driver's come preinstalled and work out of the box just as well as Windows IMO and I never have to worry about whether they are up to date because they are pushed out with OS updates.
The only complaint I have ever had is little of my games worked on Linux and that is quickly changing.
As it stands right now, I have 28 games in my Steam Library that work like-native through proton or are Native Linux games.
This also includes a game that could be considered an MMO, War Thunder.
With only 41,000 players playing the game at its Peak in the last 24hrs according to Steam.
https://steamcharts.com/app/236390
It would seem somewhat moot for them to develop it for Linux if only ~400 people played on Linux.
That or those ~400 people bring in enough money to offset the development costs of Native Linux support.
For example if we assume all of the Youtube Channel subscribers for the AOC Youtube are interested in playing, or have already preordered Ashes, then you could see 1%-2% increase in players(or approximately 1200-2500 additional players), I would say thats a low percentage due to the generally larger overall player base for MMO's like Ashes vs WW2 games.
Salvete amici!
I am also hoping Linux support, but I don't expect Intrepid to do anything about it until the market share picks up. I am very hopeful and optimistic that the Steamdeck will fix this. Personally, I would like to be free of Windows by 2025 when Win10 support stops.
I am hoping that the Proton and the Steamdeck are a force that can get Direct X out of our lives. Direct X is good, but it's holding us back from having true control over our PCs. I am hoping that this time next year, the Steamdeck is a wild success and more and more developers are looking to abandon Direct X.
Until then, I don't think it's reasonable to expect Ashes to have native support for Linux. Still, there is always the possibility that we get Ashes running on Linux unsupported anyway.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Salve!
To some extent while I would love Native support I understand why they would be hesitant considering the current Linux user share. I just believe there are a good number of people who use Windows right now because they have no choice, and supporting Ashes through Proton Compatibility Layer may be easier in general but does provide some challenges in Anti-Cheat compatibility.
I mostly just want to keep posting about it and showing support for it in the community. The problem we have with getting to Linux is the cycle of, "I don't want to go to Linux because software doesn't work on Linux, otherwise I would already be using it" but game developers won't develop for Linux because "Not enough users in the community use Linux to justify the extra time and expense."
In the interim if they came out friendly towards Linux users and simply said they wouldn't stand in our way like some games do (ie Allow a Proton supported version of their Anti-Cheat software of choice, don't ban players who run the game on Linux unless they are actually breaking the game in some way, etc) I think the small Linux community would generally be happy.
But I get their reasonings
I know you meant dual boot, but sometimes it does seem like two different installations are fighting each other…
It would just require Intrepid to work with the Linux community on compatibility of Anti-Cheat. As long as the chosen Anti-Cheat system doesn't ban Linux players, there is very little Intrepid would need to do outside of just allow the Linux community to figure it out.
Recently Battle-Eye and Easy Anti-Cheat devs have been convinced by Valve to allow this interaction to go through.
Really the big question is what kind of Anti-Cheat software will Intrepid use. And will they follow suite?
At that point barring unforseen issues Ashes shouldn't have significant issues running on Linux without a completely separate and parallel build.
They're using EAC. It's been used in Apoc as well as the recent Alpha 1 test.
Essentially speaking all we would need then is for a small amount of support to make it work. Similar to games like DayZ or Mount and Blade Bannerlord.
The theme of the whole series was that Linux is great if you wanted to tinker with a computer, it is perfectly serviceable if you want a computer for basic word processing or spreadsheets, but if you wanted to game, it straight up is not ready for the masses yet.
There was a recent quote from a game developer in relation to a game released a few years ago. They added in native Linux support to the game due to player requests during development.
When the game released, less than 0.1% of users used Linux (the lowest metric they had), yet 10% of all support tickets came from Linux. As the game officially supported Linux, they had to work those tickets. Since each install of Linux is essentially unique, supporting Linux takes far more resources than supporting Windows, per ticket. This meant that 90% of tech support for that game was spent on Linux, for that less than 0.1% in sales.
The end result, according to the developer, was hundreds of thousands of dollars in tech support, for a few hundred dollars in sales.
While it could be argued that Linux is a little better than it was a few years ago, trying to deal with tech support issues on a Linux computer you have no access to is - if anything - even more of a challenge today than it was back then.
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People want Linux. This is obvious. I want to use Linux.
However, Linux doesn't seem to want the bulk of people to use Linux.
Linux developers are the ones that need to step up right now, not game developers. Linux need to streamline the whole OS, top to bottom, so that - among other things - tech support is financially viable.
Asking a game developer to support Linux while Linux refuses to support game developers doesn't seem overly productive.
My main interest here is “allow this interaction to go through”. I imagine anti cheat uses the windows registry extensively to find exploits and things of that nature. If they’re just allowing Linux, wouldn’t that mean the anticheat is ineffective? Or have they developed a similar solution in the Linux side of the house
An easy solution to this is only to advertise official support of their tested Linux distribution. Any tickets outside of that distribution, closed with a copy paste “use our official versioning”. That’s how we work at my job, in the ticketing system have them put in versioning information. The system automatically sends out the message/instructions if it’s not supported.
Also, 10% doesn’t become 90% because it’s generated by a small subset. Your point stands and is valid, but I got confused with the numbers in there. I missed the delineation between tech support and normal tickets 😂
While stating you only support one specific distribution is a possibility, it shouldn't be something developers need to do. That is something the Linux community needs to sort out.
If all developers decided to just support one distribution of Linux, things would get real messy real quick, because different developers would pick different distributions. The worst case end result here would be leaving Linux users needing specific installs for each game they want to play.
It isn't in the wider Linux communities best interest to let this happen. As such, it is probably not something people wanting Linux support should be asking for.
It is, however, a fairly typical Linux resolution to the problem. When there is an issue of the community being fractured, rather than resolve it by trying to tie things together better, lets just fracture it even more!
You're never going to get a convergence where gaming will work on all flavors of Linux. Redhat, Kali, Centos... The list is probably endless. The power of linux is the wide applicability provided for some times very niche use cases.
Games should want to target the "Desktop replacement" options like Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora. It's absolutely on the onus of the developer to say we support XYZ, anything else is not going to take up our time.
Do I think Intrepid is going to pick up that mantle? Probably not... nor is it fair to expect as much from an indie developer. But if they were that's the necessary strategy.
I mainly mention this because tickets were brought up as the major time-sink for Linux support and I disagree with that as that can be easily handled with proper automatic ticket management. I think the real kicker would be having to smoke-test for their supported Linux distros.
But about half of my desktop support was for those few Windows machines. This was back in the Windows 98 days. The Mac OS just worked, for the most part. The Windows computers had so many errors in comparison.
So I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon in-person. It happens. In our case, we didn’t have a choice because we had to have those Windows PCs. If it was at all possible to have all workstations running the Mac OS, it would have made our lives so much easier.
In principle I agree with everything that's said so far. And I understand that the LTT Daily Linux Challenge came to the conclusion that Linux gaming isn't there yet.
There are ways to mitigate some of these issues though. Or spare the Dev team having to diagnose the fragmented space of Linux distros.
The best thing I could think of for developers is to choose specific distros (at most two) to support officially and let the rest of the Linux community do what's necessary to make the game compatible.
That in and of itself would reduce significantly the total number of service requests significantly.
With all of that said I won't ask that the Ashes team support Linux natively as I recognize it's a lot to ask this early in development. But I don't believe that asking for some very basic support on the Compatibility Layer side is unreasonable. I'm not asking for official support. Just EAC compatibility enabled for their version of EAC, and that Linux users not be banned outright unless they are intentionally breaking the game at a detriment to other users, ie using scripting/hacking.
If those two things happened I'd be willing to bet that the Linux community will have a work around for it operational within a week at most of launch if we don't find one before launch.
And since there is no official support, there wouldn't be as much of the cost associated with it. Just the cost of building out EAC with Linux users in mind which I can't imagine is much in the grand scheme.
Linux user here. Would definitely like to see Intrepid Studios enabling Proton support on EAC. It's actually a lot easier than people think.
https://boilingsteam.com/enabling-eac-support-on-linux-now-easier/
It is literally clicking a couple check boxes and downloading the new SDK. Steam, in preparation to Steam Deck, worked with Epic Games to get this feature.
I am aware this feature exists. I want Ashes to take advantage of this feature to open the game to Linux users.
We are always looking at the latest technology to see what would make sense for our team to implement! That's how we ended up converting to UE5, after all!
However, our plan is to support just Windows at this moment. That is unlikely to change from now to release.
Steven and Margaret talked about this during the December Development Livestream which you can find timestamped here
I hope this helps ^_^
EAC works on Linux. It is actually very simple to do.
So for someone like me, who only uses Linux. Because I work in A.I. development... I would like to see this be available for Linux.
Although, if I am going to recommend a distro for gaming, I will recommend Arch Linux. Because it is a rolling release with up to date kernel drivers, applications, etc...
You can make Ubuntu, and other distros sort of rolling, but you are dependent on people maintaining a lot of repos, etc... that never remain maintained lol.
As far as gaming goes... if the games are actually optimized and not a steaming pile of _____ like ArcheAge for example... They run great on Linux.
Sure, you work in AI. That means Linux is a tool you use for work - obviously you would know how to use it.
The problem is, the market of people that know how to use Linux is too small to put any development time in to - let alone the SC time involved (note my earlier post of a game developer that stated Linux users made up 0.1% of the player base, generated 10% of all CS ticket, and the added complexity of Linux meant that those 10% of tickets from 0.1% of the population took up 90% of the CS time).
This right here is the issue - Linux is too expensive to support properly.
Sure, the people that know Linux well may solve their own issues, but if you are saying your game runs on Linux, you need to provide support for the Linus' out there as well as the AI developers that use it.
As such, at the very least, a small company like Intrepid really shouldn't support Linux until the Linux community comes to some sort of agreement on a single distro that they ask game developers to support. This is something that has to come from the Linux community, it can't come from outside and be forced on to them.
It is not in Intrepids best interest to state that they support Linux. The game may well run on it - in which case a Linus user like you will likely not have any issues. However, the game running on Linux and Intrepid saying the game is supported on Linux are very different things.