Gamedev and linux
Gamedev and linux
102 comments
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Thats pretty much my argument when people say "There are more bugs on Linux than Windows! Linux bad!".
No, there are not more, there are more found. There are just as many (or more) on Windows, but never found or properly reported. Which is a bad thing.
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There are more bugs reported. That makes all the difference.
People used to closed source everything are trained to eat shit and find a workaround.
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Hi, Micro$oft Community Advisor Alicia here!
I'm sorry to hear that your software occasionally crashes. Trying some of these steps may help you:
- Go to Windows Update and search for the latest drivers
- Run 'sfc /scannow' in command prompt
- Reinstall Windows
Please mark my post as "Answer" if this helped you solve your problem! Thank you!
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This is a good point and one I think explains this phenomenon well.
Linux users are more willing to report bugs because they actually get fixed. Especially when the bug report is extremely detailed.
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Some time ago all the tech "news" headlines where "Linux is less secure than Windows, look at all the CVEs open !", well yes Linux has tones more CVE reported because anyone can audit the code, bugs are discovered and reported, people are informed and can put mitigations in place, unlike with Windows...
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Exactly. It goes the same way in development too. People who say XYZ lang is better than Rust because "you get so many compile errors" suffer from the same misconception: Just because the errors aren't immediately obvious doesn't mean they aren't there.
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I always always write strong feedback and extensive bug reporting for games. Doesn’t matter the platform. However, my daily is Linux and my daytime job is director for cloud eng and ops which is all linux distros. We write and manage massive nix fleets. Shit my career started writing and doing linux kernel work. It really made me appreciate good feedback and extensive reports on bugs.
BTW I use templeOS
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That doesn't surprise me.
Linux users are biased towards higher technical expertise, and they have a different mindset - most of the software that we use is the result of collaborative projects, and we're often encouraged to help the devs out. And while the collaborative situation might not be true for game development, the mindset leaks out.
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And this is one of the reasons why we should continue buying indie games and supporting indie devs!
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I've never once touched the logs button until I used linux. Over my time asking for help with anything wrong on my machine I've been asked to provide logs, replication steps, what went wrong and what's supposed to happen. This has trained me to be a good reporter and sometimes these issues help me fix them myself. Thank you Linux community for providing these skills. This isn't gaming industry specific but even with things like protonvpn, vmware, virtualbox, and stuff on Arch I use.
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Part of it too is that logging on Windows is just dogshit. No one uses event viewer so it's not like the end user even knows where to look for logs, and most of the shit in there is like"lol computer crashed and idk why go fuck yourself"
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TIL
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Some games have such community, that it treats life as this game. For example community of certain factory optimization simulator was so enlightened, that optimized it and made 30% faster.
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But if too many Linux users now have a lot of games to play the development of all softwares will grind to a halt.
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My only problem with reporting bugs in a game, despite knowing how to report a bug and playing a lotta games, is that I don't always have the knowledge a thing happening is a bug and not the intended design. It's not like I, as a regular every day player, have insight into what was supposed to happen that would indicate a bug.
Obviously a bug like my guy doesn't jump despite pressing the jump button is pretty easy to recognize. But how am I to know the damage calculation is fucked up when I'm not told what the formula is supposed to be?
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That is still extremely valuable feedback.
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
If it looks like a duck, swims like a dog and barks like a dog but I am still telling you it is a plain old duck, there is a miscommunication between me as a game developer and you as the player.
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Is something surprisingly different than elsewhere in the game? If so, it's probably a bug.
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I remember when Elite Dangerous was still in beta, there was a bug where System Authority Vessels would label you a criminal upon attacking verified out-of-system bounties on the victim and attack you. So many players thought that was intended, like there was a "corrupt cop" system in the game until it was actually fixed. 🤦♂️
I really liked the idea that could be a possibility; unfortunately the fact that firing back at the "corrupt" cops just increased your bounty, which is what showed me that it wasn't intended.
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What a provocative anecdote!
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... Or not provocative
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Despite being just 5% of the population...
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linux desktop users are up to 6 or more percent i believe.
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I think part of this that I'm not seeing talked about, and perhaps confused for "more tech savvy users", is just the user hostility of Windows.
9 times out of 10 when a Linux app or game crashes I get a verbose error and more often than not one that I can simply copy and paste.
9 times out of 10 when Windows, or much of windows software, crashes it gives some random number or code and in a window I can't even copy and paste out of.
My skill level doesn't change. Linux just isn't user hostile in nature making it easy to search for fixes and report issues. Where as on windows I can't summon the care or effort to manually transcribe the error so I can then do something with it.
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I would report so many more bugs if there was a way to do so easily, in app, without having to create an account somewhere or signup to some website or specific forum. Give me a one-click “report bug” box and I’ll do it. BG3 did this well.
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BG3 did everything well, no surprises there
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Bc linux users are not only more tech literate on average, but also have more of a sense of community and shared responsibility. Yeah, if we get annoyed by something, we know we're not the only ones, and if we can't fix it ourselves, we tell the ppl who can. You don't just assume it will always be broken, or assume a future update will magically fix it.
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Real nice unique looking game too. Gameplay is good but the look and feel you can tell was a lot of effort and thought and love. Definitely glad I made the purchase especially after seeing this post. Cool dev
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Probably those 3 downvotes are from people who did not read past headline
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No it's the 3 guys who reported a platform specific bugs on unsupported platform :D
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actual BSoD on my win11 yesterday. a... bar?
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You don't need logs because in Windows 95 they made a tool that always 100% diagnoses and fixes the issue and it runs every time dispite never actually returning a fix or error code.But wait there's more here's a hex code to some memory allocation rather than creating a reference library in human so you can search forums where the only advice is reformat or don't worry guys I fixed it.
But you are not allowed to look at the actual run time logs as we're a polished environment.
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Windows 95;
bought my first Gateway PC when Windows 95 came out. Lockups every day drove me to Slackware install from a dozen floppy set I d/l'd. Mac OS 8.*/9 was no better. OS-10 brought apple back from the dead. wanted to buy stock, was/am poor
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One issue with developing for linux is that userspace isn't consistent between repos. Steam has solved this by vendoring all of the most commonly used libraries like zlib or whatever.
Assuming the bug is in-game then this information would definitely be useful for developers.
Edit: meant distros instead of repos
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Umm... Zlib is everywhere. It just works. Even without steam. Even 20-years old games can run on moderns distros while using system libraries. Like UT2004 does.
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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.
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Well that's certainly a way to look at it. I'm sure some of the issues reported were Linux specific, but most were probably applicable to Windows, and Windows users probably just bailed on the game.
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contributed a comma in some obscure Gentoo pkg to fix a compile error I had. think it was a 1 line dif. yw
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That's not just any comma. That's YOUR comma. You should be selling it for $13.99 a month!
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I don't daily drive Linux anymore but it taught me to write up better bug reports
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That's surprising to me. I get the vast majority of bug reports from Windows users. But I use auto generated crash reports that the user clicks OK to send and it's a music app, not a game, which might be different.
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Yeah how I'm guessing their reports work is it's like a forum or form you can fill out with the bug report. Not something that happens automatically like that.
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It all depends on whether the developer cares about fixing those bugs. For big studio games, the answer is obvious. For AAA games, even more so. The shriveled, starving optimist in me wants to think that those developers have become jaded and don't believe that players can make valuable bug reports.
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PoliticalCompassMemes ruined me, just the word Despite felt like a reference
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Why post periodically disappear from active?
102 comments