Gamedev and linux - eviltoast
  • BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social
    1511·
    1 year ago

    I remember a gamedev complaining about this on Twitter but the outcome he came to was that he hated that Linux users submitted bug reports, stating the OS itself was broken and he refused to help any of them.

    • 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net
      70·
      1 year ago

      I remember threads like this from back when Valve was pushing Steam Machines. Won’t name names, but there were very successful developers throwing tantrums once the bug reports started to flood in. Many weren’t prepared to actually provide support and spent years regretting it (according to postmortems.) I managed to get a refund on one game after the developer’s Twitter rant went completely off the rails re: Linux being unfit for desktop. Weird that they were 100% fine with Linux when it meant getting my $15, $20, or $30. Makes you think!

      • conorab@lemmy.conorab.com
        3·
        1 year ago

        Garry from Facepunch was pretty down on Linux from Rust (the game) because of the high bug to purchase ratio and because some stuff just didn’t work on the Linux version of Unity but worked fine on Windows. I mean, fair enough.

          • FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml
            1·
            1 year ago

            I remember this. I refunded the game ASAP. For the longest time they’ve neglected the Linux client to the point where it was just broken and crashed often and you couldn’t even play with Windows players because the Linux client was so far behind. And of course the Windows version ran just fine on Linux via Proton. Yet they seemed surprised and annoyed whenever Linux players pointed this out. That’s where I lost all my respect for them as a developer. I would refund Gary’s Mod too if I could.

    • leo85811nardo@lemmy.world
      36·
      1 year ago

      Good devs are good regardless of context, they may have their personal preferences but in the end welcome bug reports and feature requests, especially the helpful ones because it helps the project. Bad devs are dicks regardless of context as well, all they care about is review rate and other numbers appear in the scoreboard

    • buzziebee@lemmy.world
      71·
      1 year ago

      Yeah this article is a nice juxtaposition to that deranged rant. Hopefully if more game devs see it they’ll appreciate the Linux gaming community a bit more.

  • WatTyler@lemmy.sdf.org
    1191·
    1 year ago

    Reflecting on my first year running solely Linux (as opposed to dual-booting), I think that this culture comes from the fact that, on Linux, problems can more often than not be solved. If not solved, then at least understood. When you want to change something on Windows, or something breaks, you have far less room to maneuver.

    When I was a Windows user, I’d barely ever submitted a bug report for anything, in spite of being very tech-literate. It felt hopeless, as my entire experience with the OS was that if a fix would come, it’d have to be done by someone else.

    Linux treating its users like adults, produces users who are more confident and more willing to contribute.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      23·
      1 year ago

      This is true. I also dont even know how to report actual Android bugs. On Windows its true, its simply a big “f you”

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        Android bugs go to the maintainers of that specific device or of the custom ROM installed on it.

        Using the unaltered version that was installed on the device when you bought it? Reports go to the manufacturer usually.

        Unless it’s a carrier branded version, like a Verizon or Tracfone provided phone, in which case bug reports go to them. But frankly, don’t bother, and for the love of all things holy spend a little more money and stop buying carrier branded phones.

        For custom ROMs, bug reports go to wherever the maintainers of that ROM ask bug reports be submitted. Usually Git, XDA forums, their website, or their Discord/Telegram channel. And fuck that last one, because hiding bug reports and other information in non-indexed places like Discord is making this more difficult for everyone.

        • Pantherina@feddit.de
          3·
          1 year ago

          GrapheneOS, basically AOSP for the bugs of concern. So no, the reports would go upstream to Google I guess.

          Btw not everyone lives in the US ;D

    • 0xD@infosec.pub
      104·
      1 year ago

      You can do the exact same thing in Windows, just think of the SysInternals Suite and its power. It’s just that people on Linux expect problems, while the overwhelming majority of people on Windows/MacOS is using their device expecting it to work and if it doesn’t they go do something else or buy another device.

      Also this completely untrue notion that you cannot fix Windows or play around with its internals is very prevalent, to the point that it’s a meme, so people don’t even try.

      • Chais@sh.itjust.works
        111·
        1 year ago

        But I have to fight the stupid OS to give me useful information. I have to install 3^(rd) party stuff. By default you only get this useless error reporting tool. Even if you report an error your likely to never hear from anyone and the chance of the error being fixed is virtually nonexistent.

        On Linux the necessary information is usually readily available. The worst offender in my experience is Steam itself. You can get logs from games fairy easily. But if Steam misbehaves things can get more complicated.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I found bugs in Windows server products all the time, and there was no way of reporting them. If you opened a ticket (by paying, of course), they would never admit it was a bug. Half the time I got the impression I was the only person in the world that every encountered said issue, and that what I was doing was complete edge-case. Which was bullshit, I would investigate and find dozens of references (which never got resolved) because it was pretty much the only way to use X product feature.

      Microsoft QA and support is utter trash. You can get better support in Linux on damn near anything by some rando on IRC or the specific product forum, or, gods forbid, Reddit. There is an almost 100% chance you can fix anything on Linux if you look hard enough, even if you have to go dig through the code. Nothing like that happens in the Windows ecosystem.

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        Also, the types of information you find are very different. On windows, you’ll find various forum posts about your problem, and some proposed solutions. Usually, nobody seems to know exactly what’s causing the problem, and that’s why the solutions are a bit random. Same goes for iOS related problems too.

        On Linux, you might not need forum posts, because sometimes the error messages tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it. If that’s not the case, you’ll find posts about your problem, and usually there’s someone who explains what’s broken and what are the commands to fix it.

        There’s none of that guesswork about trying 7 unrelated things to see if any of them magically solve your problem. It’s straight to the point. Your problem is caused by that setting over there, and here’s how to change it.

    • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
      3·
      1 year ago

      Is it even possible to report bugs to Microsoft without paid support? I always come across that Windows community forum where every solution to a problem is to update drivers, run sfc /scannow, etc. I doubt anybody on that forum can relay problems to Microsoft staff.

      • icedterminal@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        The Feedback Hub was introduced to fix this gap in user reports for Windows. Microsoft does actively monitor this. They respond when necessary, merge topics, deny or approve bugs/suggestions, etc. For their software, such as Terminal or VS Code, you can use GitHub issues.

        Keep in mind, like most companies, Microsoft has guidelines on what employees can say when responding to any user feedback. This is why we typically see a lot of copy and paste. When it is more than that, wording is selective and you may not get more than one or two responses in total.

        I know of at least one employee on Reddit who participates every so often. https://www.reddit.com/user/jenmsft/

    • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      When it comes to closed-source software developed opaquely by for-profit corporations, particularly the huge, monolithic ones like Microsoft, I generally have the attitude that, if I do discover a problem:

      1. They won’t take my detailed report
      2. If they do take my report, it goes straight into a shredder bin (or a massive queue where low priority problems go to die, which may as well be the same thing)
      3. If they do read my report, then it’s likely something they already are aware of
      4. If they don’t know about it somehow, the issue is probably so low-priority and niche that it wouldn’t escape the backlog anyway

      Probably not nearly as bleak as I make it out. But when you can’t see the process, how can you tell?

      With open source projects, these things can all still happen, but at least the process is more transparent. You can see exactly where your issue is, and what’s been done to it so far, if anything. Other users can discover and vouch for your problem. And if the dev team takes pull requests, and you are willing, able, and permitted to contribute, you can make the fix yourself.

  • AzureDiamond@sh.itjust.works
    64·
    1 year ago

    Interesting take. I wonder if the amount of platform dependent bugs is generally that low for games. I’m a developer, but not a game developer. I would assume that platform dependent stuff comes into play a lot more, when using shiny new tech like direct storage, which is probably used more by AAA titles and less by indie games?

    • uis@lemmy.worldOP
      431·
      1 year ago

      You don’t get many platform-specific bugs if you use cross-platform libraries like SDL2 for OpenGL/Vulkan context creation and human interface.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
        8·
        1 year ago

        The difference is money. Vulkan is an incredibly terse spec compared to dx12. You’d think that would make it much more consistent to work with, but really, it’s all it can do to keep up with msft and IHVs who pour money into coaxing AAA devs to use dx12. Then, even when the app gets something wrong and causes issues for end users, the IHV just makes a special case in the driver to correct it, because having a big important dx12 title run correctly on their hw is important to sell units.

        Meanwhile, the same IHVs barely bother to support anything beyond the basic vulkan requirements, because it doesn’t gain them anything to do more. If a vulkan game experiences issues, IHVs don’t care because it won’t sell well anyway.

          • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
            6·
            1 year ago

            Yes, and the primary reason any of gaming on Linux is viable (steam deck, proton, etc) is due to Valve dumping money into it. AMD probably didn’t care about the miniscule number of chips they sold to Valve for the deck, valve just wanted a vendor who had the performance, and had decent Linux support.

            But Valve is the one eating all the vulkan costs that msft normally eats on the dx side. To be clear, it’s never out of the kindness of their hearts, it’s purely because a msft dominated gaming ecosystem on PC is steam’s biggest weakness. They don’t want steam on windows to reach the point of EGS on the apple store.

    • Elderos@lemmings.world
      18·
      1 year ago

      I made games primarily for Windows which we also compiled for Linux. It is mostly input/output stuff, aka hardware issues. That is, audio issues, input issues, storage issues, dependency issues. Modern game engine mostly handle the rest. It wasn’t such a big deal to fix, but most gamedev lacked experience with Linux, and most projects are already over budget and late, so fixing Linux for an extra 2-5% of sales didn’t make much sense at small scale. Proton kind off fixed all of this tho.

    • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world
      141·
      1 year ago

      If you’re an engine developer, it’s a reasonably common problem.

      If you’re a game developer using a cross platform engine, it’s pretty uncommon, as the engine developer has already accounted for most of it.

      If you’re somewhere in the middle, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

      It surprises me how many indie devs avoid some of the higher level / more popular engines for this reason alone. But I assume they just must enjoy that sort of stuff much more than I.

      • moon_matter@kbin.social
        7·
        1 year ago

        It surprises me how many indie devs avoid some of the higher level / more popular engines for this reason alone. But I assume they just must enjoy that sort of stuff much more than I.

        The problem with indie devs is purely a lack of knowledge and resources. They don’t feel comfortable testing and packaging binaries for distribution on Linux. A decent number of them are also self-taught and actually have almost no exposure to desktop Linux at all. So it’s actually a much higher hurdle than you think.

      • nixigaj@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        All you have to do to help visually impaired people with screen readers is to search for the title on Google (or your privacy friendly engine), click the first result, and add the link to the post.

  • Mandy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    34·
    1 year ago

    remember the other several occasions where developers hated actually getting feedback from these linux users cause they actually would have to fix their shit? but not many actually did

    cause i remember, they only care as far as money goes

  • Adalast@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 year ago

    A. If you haven’t played ΔV, do it. One of the most amazing games out there imho. So good in fact that I just went to find a Δ on the internet so I could use it and not disrespect the dev and the game. B. He is such an amazing dude. I don’t know him personally, but I do know that when Ukraine was invaded he made the game free for months on Steam so people in Ukraine could get it and have something too distract themselves from the conflict. A+ move in my book right there. I had already bought the game at that point, but I wish I could buy it again just to support him further. C. Reading this almost makes me think it would be a good tactical move to offer early access games at a steep discount on Linux if it has this great of an effect. Pay back the “free” QA kindness of the community.

  • hiddenSin@lemmy.world
    27·
    1 year ago

    Could we do crossposts? This one is in two of my communities. If it was a crosspost then it would be only one post. Less spam.

  • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    Image translation. Pasted from source, Reddit Post

    Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from the Linux community

    Article

    38% of my bug reports come from the Linux community My game - ΔV: Rings of Saturn (shameless plug) - is out in Early Access for two years now, and as you can expect, there are bugs. But I did find that a disproportionally big amount of these bugs was reported by players using Linux to play. I started to investigate, and my findings did surprise me.

    Let’s talk numbers. Percentages are easy to talk about, but when I read just them, I always wonder - what is the sample size? Is it small enough for the percentage to be just noise? As of today, I sold a little over 12,000 units of ΔV in total. 700 of these units were bought by Linux players. That’s 5.8%. I got 1040 bug reports in total, out of which roughly 400 are made by Linux players. That’s one report per 11.5 users on average, and one report per 1.75 Linux players. That’s right, an average Linux player will get you 650% more bug reports.

    A lot of extra work for just 5.8% of extra units, right?

    Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not. Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

    But that’s not all. The report quality is stellar. I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed.

    And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.

    Worth it? Oh, yes - at least for me. Not for the extra sales - although it’s nice. It’s worth it to get the massive feedback boost and free, hundred-people strong QA team on your side. An invaluable asset for an independent game studio.

    • Sentau@feddit.de
      5·
      1 year ago

      I am guessing all of them is it was game running through proton

      Edit : the game seems to have a linux native version