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!

Find more posts tagged with

Staff

Comments

Noaani

AOCHype wrote: »

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 😂

0.1% of customers generated 10% of the tickets. Since not all tickets take the same amount of time to resolve, and since Linux is far, far more time consuming to sort out, that 10% of tickets took 90% of tech supports time.

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!

Sioneva

Noaani wrote: »

AOCHype wrote: »

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 😂

0.1% of customers generated 10% of the tickets. Since not all tickets take the same amount of time to resolve, and since Linux is far, far more time consuming to sort out, that 10% of tickets took 90% of tech supports time.

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.

Atama

To support what @Noaani is saying, I once supported a mixed environment company early in my career. (I do IT support for a living.) My first “real” IT job (full time support in a professional setting) was at an environmental consulting firm which was about 90% Mac, 10% Windows. (Maybe even closer to 95/5.) The only staff with Windows computers were a few accounting staff folks, because the software they ran would only run on Windows.

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.

RevengeRoman

@Noaani @Atama

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.

roanwa

@RevengeRoman

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.

RevengeRoman

@roanwa

I am aware this feature exists. I want Ashes to take advantage of this feature to open the game to Linux users.

Atama

I wonder if it's feasible for them to put in a Linux compatibility feature, as a "wink wink, nudge nudge" unofficial way to support it for people. But officially to have zero support for Linux, so that if someone puts in a support request and at any point they find that Linux is involved, the ticket is closed with no further action.

Vaknar

Others have done a good job of answering this, but I'll also just make a statement here for you as well!

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 ^_^

zerofill

I saw someone mentioned the LTT daily driver challenge. To be frank... Linus is not even remotely close to knowing what Linux users know. I like the guy, but his testing of Linux for that series was laughable. Some of the things he found complicated were mind boggling.

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.

Noaani

zerofill wrote: »

I saw someone mentioned the LTT daily driver challenge. To be frank... Linus is not even remotely close to knowing what Linux users know. I like the guy, but his testing of Linux for that series was laughable. Some of the things he found complicated were mind boggling.

The point wasn't that he knew what he was doing and had a hard time, the point was that he is probably a fairly good analogy of the average person that would want to use Linux but currently isn't.

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.

Botagar

I've asked for in the past, and will ask again....
Intrepid, you don't have to support linux like you do your windows releases, but please don't actively block us by using deeply intrusive anticheats which we cant use proton to overcome. We can fend for ourselves a bit.
I'm seeing some stats being thrown about above and I wonder how true those are.
1) the talk about 0.1% of players generating 10% of tickets i think is disingenuous. Without knowing the nature of the tickets, its hard to say "its the fault of linux". Remember who the type of people are that main run linux... mostly technical people who would be more likely to pro-actively submit a bug report to see a product they support get better. Probably submit higher quality bug reports too.
2) I saw another stat about how linux is a tiny sliver of the desktop market which could be true, but is that restricting the scope to the type of people who would play online video games?

FYI, I can play EVE online on proton fine. It's just a shame at how the devs are behaving over the last few years...
Proof you can not block linux and still run an MMO.

Noaani

Botagar wrote: »

Intrepid, you don't have to support linux like you do your windows releases, but please don't actively block us by using deeply intrusive anticheats which we cant use proton to overcome.

This is a reasonable and appropriate request that - for what it's worth - I fully support.

Velkin

The only reason I use Windows is for better performance in gaming. That's it. My 'main' nvme drive is Linux which I use everything else for. I am fine with the Dev's focusing their energies on getting AoC out the door (initially) for Windows only. However, after release, I would be happier than a pig in mud if it would run natively on GNU Linux at a later date. For what it's worth, I prefer an Arch-based distro for tinkering/learning and a Debian-based distro for stability (I do prefer the APT package manager over Pacman though). I tend to shy away from Fedora/Red Hat -- just my personal preference.

PenguinPaladin

With the market numbers in the thread, i would almost say you need to be asking more players to switch to Linux instead of asking them to develop for it. Once the people are their they would obviously take their product there as well

RevengeRoman

I'm not asking them to develop for it. Just to make their Anti-Cheat software not ban Linux users.

If they use either of the largest most used Anti Cheats then it's as simple as a phone call as far as I have found.

ariatras

Vaknar wrote: »

Others have done a good job of answering this, but I'll also just make a statement here for you as well!

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 ^_^

You don't have to support Linux in order to support Linux. You just have to enable it for EAC. There is no development time needed.

Uural

I will be very sad if I can't get it to work on my beautiful Manjaro with proton atleast.

Uural

Uural wrote: »

I will be very sad if I can't get it to work on my beautiful Manjaro with proton atleast.

So far all my games run, even eso, guild wars and fallout 76. Am not going back to windows for a game. I can play not supported games for fine, at least the ones that don't ban you xD. I hope aoc will work too

Taleof2Cities

Uural wrote: »

Uural wrote: »

I will be very sad if I can't get it to work on my beautiful Manjaro with proton atleast.

So far all my games run, even eso, guild wars and fallout 76. Am not going back to windows for a game. I can play not supported games for fine, at least the ones that don't ban you xD. I hope aoc will work too

Maybe after Ashes releases, @Uural.

There just isn’t enough playerbase on Linux to justify it right now … hopefully you understand that.

SongRune

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Uural wrote: »

Uural wrote: »

I will be very sad if I can't get it to work on my beautiful Manjaro with proton atleast.

So far all my games run, even eso, guild wars and fallout 76. Am not going back to windows for a game. I can play not supported games for fine, at least the ones that don't ban you xD. I hope aoc will work too

Maybe after Ashes releases, @Uural.

There just isn’t enough playerbase on Linux to justify it right now … hopefully you understand that.

It's important to understand that for many of us Linux users, this is a matter of Intrepid clicking one box when configuring EAC. We can normally handle the rest.

If you look at these forums, and the frequency of this question, and the broad support it tends to receive from Linux users present and interested, there are absolutely enough Linux players to justify that 10 minute investment.

The biggest thing Linux users need is simply to not be BANNED when we run the Windows build on our Linux PCs. A Linux-native build would be spectacular, but there probably isn't enough demand to warrant that. But simply not automatically banning Linux users? There absolutely is. And that's all we usually need.

Child Item