Negative Nelly warning: I've bought a couple of these bundles but won't buy another. One big selling point of the bundles is that they are cross-platform compatible, and that's one of the reasons I buy, as I have Ubuntu on my home computer. Unfortunately, at least some of the games which are advertized as working on Linux simply did not work for me, Trine in particular (which is sad because that game was the main reason I bought the Frozenbyte bundle).
I initially had issues on an older machine & updated ubuntu, followed the threads (it was a common issue), followed the debug & fix steps, but to no avail. I chalked it up to the hardware but with a brand new linux box and new (months later) download of Trine it still didn't run. I haven't bothered spending another hour searching down and going thru all the fix steps. It looks like there might be a new, possibly working version by now but it's been months and months and I've basically forgotten about it.
I don't expect everything to work OOTB in linux, but I'm using a popular distro, many of the games work fine, and if I'm paying for a "Linux compatible" game I expect it to be Linux compatible with a reasonable small number of clear steps without spelunking thru a dozen forum threads &c.. This is not "free" software, I paid for it and expect it to work.
I want to support humble bundle but it's too frustrating to buy a game and have it not even load.
It's really hard to port games like these to Linux. Many of them use closed-source or even binary-only libraries that have no freely available replacements. You can blame the game developers for using non-free technology, but in some cases there aren't any good alternatives.
Indie game development has such thin profit margins to begin with that most developers can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port that might not produce enough revenue to pay for itself.
This kind of depends on your configuration too: Sure, you may be on a modern version of Ubuntu, but what kind of GPU do you have? Does it have modern drivers that are well-supported by the manufacturer? Does it support the variety of extensions and features that a game can rely on having on Windows/OSX? 'many of the games work fine' is only meaningful here if the games all have the same system requirements and you meet those requirements. If not, the best course of action is to try and communicate clearly to the developers that there are customers who are being shut out by system requirements, to see if there are cheap ways for them to lower the requirements.
I understand but if a game is only linux compatible if you are using a stock dell w/o GPU running archlinux on a Tuesday when Mercury is in retrograde, there is a simple solution:
Don't advertize it as being Linux compatible. I'm not asking for miracles, just a bit more realistic honesty.
Most of the games are not graphically intensive enough to require a recent nvidia/ati card. Most incompatibilities are due to bugs that may not be discovered due to inadequate testing especially on different distros/hardware. Ideally most of these games work on all normal, recent desktop linux distributions. On many bugs are reported and many are fixed. They could put a "Warning game has received minimum/moderate testing on following distro/hardware combos:"
> Many of them use closed-source or even binary-only libraries that have no freely available replacements.
How do they port it to Linux, then? (They have to re-compile it right?)
I've developed games before and I can tell you, if you're not using propitiatory platform-dependent libraries, porting your game is a piece of cake. What I've noticed is that most of the games on Humble Bundle use a library known as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer.) SDL is a library that handles two main things that aren't platform-independent: creating a window and receiving events (keyboard, mouse, e.t.c.) The rest is taken care of by the cross-platform OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. libraries.
In addition, there's an even better library than SDL called SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library). SFML is much more fully featured than SDL, and is C++-based and OOP. With both SFML and SDL, all you have is _just recompile_. And done!
So really, it's not that hard to port a game. "can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port" sounds a bit stretched. There are plenty of free libraries available for game dev (atleast 2D game dev), like Box2D, CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI), etc. so if from the get-go you plan on supporting multiple platforms use some of those libraries, and porting will be a breeze.
Not all of them use closed-source non multi-platform libraries.
Unity a closed source game framework was recently ported to linux(just the framework, not the development tools).
There is a partial reimplementation/clone of XNA called MonoGame.
If there isn't a version of a library for linux I guess they have to re-write it. If they are re-writing for mac/linux at the same time they are more likely to use(and benefit from) cross-platform libraries for those ports.
> How do they port it to Linux, then? (They have to re-compile it right?)
Many use a WINE wrapper (or a derivative, like Cider); the same goes for OS X versions. Especially for a lot of these indie games, where a small performance hit isn't a big deal as they don't tax the hardware.
I don't think that closed-source non multi platform games are too big of a problem. A lot of these games use sdl. One of the games in the new bundle uses unity which is closed source and was ported to linux recently(expect to see a lot more unity games in the humble bundle as unity is pretty popular especially for smaller/indie games). A number of others use XNA for which there is an unfortunately unfinished open source clone version called MonoGame.
A bigger problem is developer effort/binary testing on linux. One guy ported 9 of the humble bundle games to linux by himself(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon#Humble_Indie_Bun... including Aquaria).
I believe Ryan/icculus did most of the porting work as well as fixing any bugs filled on his bugzilla(https://bugzilla.icculus.org/query.cgi If you see any unreported, please report) by himself. While he is a good developer that is a lot to take on for one person.
Even more importantly many games are rushed and released/ready just before (or even a bit after humble bundle release). Even "just" recompiling for a new os with the same cross platform code requires binary testing to help find unexpected problems. A number of these bugs are eventually fixed but not all of them.
With the integration of the Ubuntu Software Center both Humble and Canonical work really hard to make sure that does not happen anymore. Right now we have two games ready and the others should be live tomorrow, I can't promise zero problems but they are well tested and if you let us know we will get to the bottom of any problems, high profile Ubuntu debuts are great.
As a counter point, I run Arch. The one time I had a problem I couldn't solve, I fired off an email to the Humble Bundle support team. They had a fix for me in <5 minutes.
If you're worried about this, you can get the bundle for free, and then increase your contribution later (for as long as the bundle is still going on) once you're sure all of the games work on your computer.
Fair warning. I only tried to run Braid on Ubuntu a while ago, and it didn't work because of some complicated driver issue (perhaps solvable for an expert, but not for me). However, I think it might work by now - at least those games are rather timeless, so you can still try again at a later time :-/
How do updates work for hundle bundles? I purchased Bastion in a previous bundle, which was version 1.3. I recently got a rMBP and it flickers a lot during some screens. I noticed patch 1.4 fixes these issues, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get a patch. Anyone know how generally we can get patches?
It's not a lot of money, so I'm not disappointed if 1 or 2 of the games doesn't work OOTB. I usually don't bother looking for reasons why they don't work and just play the games that do.
Comments
Negative Nelly warning: I've bought a couple of these bundles but won't buy another. One big selling point of the bundles is that they are cross-platform compatible, and that's one of the reasons I buy, as I have Ubuntu on my home computer. Unfortunately, at least some of the games which are advertized as working on Linux simply did not work for me, Trine in particular (which is sad because that game was the main reason I bought the Frozenbyte bundle).
I initially had issues on an older machine & updated ubuntu, followed the threads (it was a common issue), followed the debug & fix steps, but to no avail. I chalked it up to the hardware but with a brand new linux box and new (months later) download of Trine it still didn't run. I haven't bothered spending another hour searching down and going thru all the fix steps. It looks like there might be a new, possibly working version by now but it's been months and months and I've basically forgotten about it.
I don't expect everything to work OOTB in linux, but I'm using a popular distro, many of the games work fine, and if I'm paying for a "Linux compatible" game I expect it to be Linux compatible with a reasonable small number of clear steps without spelunking thru a dozen forum threads &c.. This is not "free" software, I paid for it and expect it to work.
I want to support humble bundle but it's too frustrating to buy a game and have it not even load.
It's really hard to port games like these to Linux. Many of them use closed-source or even binary-only libraries that have no freely available replacements. You can blame the game developers for using non-free technology, but in some cases there aren't any good alternatives.
Indie game development has such thin profit margins to begin with that most developers can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port that might not produce enough revenue to pay for itself.
This kind of depends on your configuration too: Sure, you may be on a modern version of Ubuntu, but what kind of GPU do you have? Does it have modern drivers that are well-supported by the manufacturer? Does it support the variety of extensions and features that a game can rely on having on Windows/OSX? 'many of the games work fine' is only meaningful here if the games all have the same system requirements and you meet those requirements. If not, the best course of action is to try and communicate clearly to the developers that there are customers who are being shut out by system requirements, to see if there are cheap ways for them to lower the requirements.
I understand but if a game is only linux compatible if you are using a stock dell w/o GPU running archlinux on a Tuesday when Mercury is in retrograde, there is a simple solution:
Don't advertize it as being Linux compatible. I'm not asking for miracles, just a bit more realistic honesty.
Most of the games are not graphically intensive enough to require a recent nvidia/ati card. Most incompatibilities are due to bugs that may not be discovered due to inadequate testing especially on different distros/hardware. Ideally most of these games work on all normal, recent desktop linux distributions. On many bugs are reported and many are fixed. They could put a "Warning game has received minimum/moderate testing on following distro/hardware combos:"
> Many of them use closed-source or even binary-only libraries that have no freely available replacements.
How do they port it to Linux, then? (They have to re-compile it right?)
I've developed games before and I can tell you, if you're not using propitiatory platform-dependent libraries, porting your game is a piece of cake. What I've noticed is that most of the games on Humble Bundle use a library known as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer.) SDL is a library that handles two main things that aren't platform-independent: creating a window and receiving events (keyboard, mouse, e.t.c.) The rest is taken care of by the cross-platform OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. libraries.
In addition, there's an even better library than SDL called SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library). SFML is much more fully featured than SDL, and is C++-based and OOP. With both SFML and SDL, all you have is _just recompile_. And done!
So really, it's not that hard to port a game. "can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port" sounds a bit stretched. There are plenty of free libraries available for game dev (atleast 2D game dev), like Box2D, CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI), etc. so if from the get-go you plan on supporting multiple platforms use some of those libraries, and porting will be a breeze.
Not all of them use closed-source non multi-platform libraries.
Unity a closed source game framework was recently ported to linux(just the framework, not the development tools).
There is a partial reimplementation/clone of XNA called MonoGame.
If there isn't a version of a library for linux I guess they have to re-write it. If they are re-writing for mac/linux at the same time they are more likely to use(and benefit from) cross-platform libraries for those ports.
> How do they port it to Linux, then? (They have to re-compile it right?)
Many use a WINE wrapper (or a derivative, like Cider); the same goes for OS X versions. Especially for a lot of these indie games, where a small performance hit isn't a big deal as they don't tax the hardware.
According to wikipedia LIMBO is the only port to bundle wine(CrossOver).
I don't think that closed-source non multi platform games are too big of a problem. A lot of these games use sdl. One of the games in the new bundle uses unity which is closed source and was ported to linux recently(expect to see a lot more unity games in the humble bundle as unity is pretty popular especially for smaller/indie games). A number of others use XNA for which there is an unfortunately unfinished open source clone version called MonoGame.
A bigger problem is developer effort/binary testing on linux. One guy ported 9 of the humble bundle games to linux by himself(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon#Humble_Indie_Bun... including Aquaria). I believe Ryan/icculus did most of the porting work as well as fixing any bugs filled on his bugzilla(https://bugzilla.icculus.org/query.cgi If you see any unreported, please report) by himself. While he is a good developer that is a lot to take on for one person.
Even more importantly many games are rushed and released/ready just before (or even a bit after humble bundle release). Even "just" recompiling for a new os with the same cross platform code requires binary testing to help find unexpected problems. A number of these bugs are eventually fixed but not all of them.
With the integration of the Ubuntu Software Center both Humble and Canonical work really hard to make sure that does not happen anymore. Right now we have two games ready and the others should be live tomorrow, I can't promise zero problems but they are well tested and if you let us know we will get to the bottom of any problems, high profile Ubuntu debuts are great.
As a counter point, I run Arch. The one time I had a problem I couldn't solve, I fired off an email to the Humble Bundle support team. They had a fix for me in <5 minutes.
If you're worried about this, you can get the bundle for free, and then increase your contribution later (for as long as the bundle is still going on) once you're sure all of the games work on your computer.
Yep, just tried to install Torchlight & SPAZ.
Torchlight doesn't seem to work at all, SPAZ doesn't do fullscreen properly.
Not sure if these are proper ports or running under WINE.
Shame because I've had success with previous bundles.
Why do you assume wine works worse then a native port?
The windows version of Psychonauts works better under wine then the native linux port(at least for me).
I liked how easy Torchlight was to install, had a nice Linux-native installer with xdg-open links and everything.
It ran, but I couldn't play it for more than 10 minutes before it crashed :(
You can download a new build of Torchlight now that fixes a few crashes.
Fair warning. I only tried to run Braid on Ubuntu a while ago, and it didn't work because of some complicated driver issue (perhaps solvable for an expert, but not for me). However, I think it might work by now - at least those games are rather timeless, so you can still try again at a later time :-/
How do updates work for hundle bundles? I purchased Bastion in a previous bundle, which was version 1.3. I recently got a rMBP and it flickers a lot during some screens. I noticed patch 1.4 fixes these issues, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get a patch. Anyone know how generally we can get patches?
Log in to the Humble Bundle site and you can download new versions.
I mostly just grab the Steam keys so I don't have to worry about keeping up with new versions.
Ahh I totally didn't realize that.
It's not a lot of money, so I'm not disappointed if 1 or 2 of the games doesn't work OOTB. I usually don't bother looking for reasons why they don't work and just play the games that do.
you should buy a non-free operating system to go with you non-free game, I'm pretty sure it'll works.
please also forward this post to the manufacturer of your non-free video card, which is the most likely culprit.