Ashes of Creation on Linux/Proton Compatibility Layer support

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!

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Talents

They commented on this during the livestream last Thursday.

https://youtu.be/HB7gWTpeB08?t=2926

RevengeRoman

@Talents Do you remember what they said or about what time they said it? I watched the livestream and I dont recall hearing it but I may have missed it.

Gaul_

Steven said without going into detail that there are not enough Linux users available to justify spending development effort on Linux support (at this time).

Boanergese

They mentioned it at the end of the stream when Margaret was doing a couple of community questions. At this time I think the game is going for just Windows. No Linux, no Mac, no Consoles. They could port it to console after its launched if they decided too, but porting to other operating systems takes additional resources. For desktop computers Windows is 75% of the market, Mac is 16% of the market, Linux is 2% of the market, Chrome is 2%, other is 5%. I realize with smartphones that Apple and Android have a different market share, but we aren't playing this game on our smart phones. It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to do work on the game for Mac or Linux.

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

RevengeRoman

While I agree with the statistics you provide I disagree with the message they convey, just look at all of the work being done to make gaming on Linux more viable.

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.

Vhaeyne

@RevengeRoman

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.

RevengeRoman

@Vhaeyne

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.

Kovrm

I'd love for the game to be on Linux. I am capable of doing most of my activities on it. If there was a game of the caliber that Ashes of Creation is aiming to be (and succeed at), I would migrate away from windows 100% and never look back. The ONLY reason I still use Windows is because it's a PITFA to game on Linux with games not natively supported by the OS.

But I get their reasonings

Boanergese

I have used Ubuntu and I understand why people like Linux from a security standpoint. Unfortunately, the two options would be to duel boot with one partition for Windows and one for Linux. Have Windows installed just for this game. The other option would be to get the game to work in "Wine". I am not familiar with proton. I don't think the developers have any desire to put this on Steam. I don't think they want to lose revenue by having to share revenue with Valve. Intrepid is publishing this game themselves and by doing this the game will not be rushed or delivered in an unfished state.

Atama

Boanergese wrote: »

Unfortunately, the two options would be to duel boot with one partition for Windows and one for Linux.

I know you meant dual boot, but sometimes it does seem like two different installations are fighting each other…

RevengeRoman

@Boanergese Proton is a compatibility layer that can be used in Wine, Intrepid wouldn't need to put Ashes on Steam in order for Proton to be usable.

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.

RevengeRoman

@Kovrm Yes I agree, I would never use Windows again if Ashes would work through Proton or Wine.

Gaul_

RevengeRoman wrote: »

It would just require Intrepid to work with the Linux community on compatibility of Anti-Cheat

I'm ignorant of Linux. Why does it have compatibility problems with anti-cheat software?

RevengeRoman

@Overthrow Until recently no Anti-Cheat developer natively supported Linux. To put it in simple terms, the Anti-Cheat software would look at your system and expect to see the Windows kernel, and when it doesn't see the full kernel it thinks you might be cheating.

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?

ogre

Would love to see linux and/or BSD support. The only thing keeping me on windows is game compatibility. The current level of compatibility for most games on Linux is seriously lacking, albeit understandably due to the (much)lower number of users and the time/cost of testing and development for other operating systems. I realize that the odds of getting a build for BSD systems are infinitesimally low but a man can dream.

RevengeRoman

@ogre I'm not familiar with BSD systems, but I know the Linux community well enough to know that if we were given liberty to get it working and they enabled Proton compatibility with EAC or whatever Anti-Cheat they opt for.

At that point barring unforseen issues Ashes shouldn't have significant issues running on Linux without a completely separate and parallel build.

palabana

RevengeRoman wrote: »

@Overthrow Until recently no Anti-Cheat developer natively supported Linux. To put it in simple terms, the Anti-Cheat software would look at your system and expect to see the Windows kernel, and when it doesn't see the full kernel it thinks you might be cheating.

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?

They're using EAC. It's been used in Apoc as well as the recent Alpha 1 test.

RevengeRoman

@palabana Thank you for the input! I hadn't realized it when I played the Alpha 1, but then again that was a while ago now.

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.

Noaani

RevengeRoman wrote: »

especially with LTT's recent Linux Daily Driver challenge

Citing this in support of Linux right now is just... odd.

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.

---

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.

Sioneva

RevengeRoman wrote: »

@Overthrow Until recently no Anti-Cheat developer natively supported Linux. To put it in simple terms, the Anti-Cheat software would look at your system and expect to see the Windows kernel, and when it doesn't see the full kernel it thinks you might be cheating.

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?

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

Noaani wrote: »

RevengeRoman wrote: »

especially with LTT's recent Linux Daily Driver challenge

Citing this in support of Linux right now is just... odd.

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.

---

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.

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 😂

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