Specifically, I worked on those games so I know what they natively support and how things transpired behind the scenes.
Proton has absolutely no hope of working without the changes we made because of stadia, the code we wrote was deeply hooked into Windows and we made more generic variants of many things.
The Division 1 PS4 release was significantly shimmed underneath compared to the win32 and xbox releases: this became much less true over time as porting the renderer to linux (specifically debian) made us genericise issues across the OS’s and when Div2 shipped we had a lot more in common across the releases; we didn’t rely on deep hooks into Microsoft APIs as much
> this became much less true over time as porting the renderer to linux (specifically debian)
Strange how you ported the renderer to Debian, and yet you couldn't even find a link to a game that has a native Linux support.
Was there ever a port?
> Proton has absolutely no hope of working without the changes
You keep saying this as the absolute truth, and yet at the time when Stadia launched Proton already had 5k working games under its belt.
Strange how Stadia is this monumental achievement without which Linux gaming wouldn't happen according to you.... and yet no one ever mentions Stadia ever contributing any code to any of the constituent parts of what makes Proton tick. Apart from the changes that engines supposedly made to work on a yet another game streaming platform.
I don’t know how to say this without being unkind.
There is a functioning version of The Division 1, Division 2, Avatar and Star Wars outlaws that run on Linux internally at Ubisoft.
Nobody will release it because it can’t be reasonably QA’d. (Stadia was also very hard to QA, but possible, as it was a stable target and development was essentially funded).
I’m not sure what your problem is; I said - as clearly as I can - that architectural changes to the engine were neccessary for proton.
I know this, for an absolute fact, because Proton was a topic when I worked on those games and it was not until Stadia (codename Yeti) was on the roadmap, and our rendering architect lost all his hair working on it - that Proton started to even function slightly.
I’m not shilling for Stadia - there’s nothing to shill for, it is dead.
Get over yourself, if you don’t like the truth then don’t start going in on me because my reality does not match your fantasy. Sometimes corporations do things accidentally that push other things forward unintentionally.
I just want to share my thanks to Stadia because I know for a concrete fucking fact that at least some of the AAA games I worked on would not function at all on Linux without Stadias commercial interference.
All I'm saying is that "it’s actually Stadia that made linux gaming the most feasible" statement is at best contentious because in reality gaming on Linux was already made (more) feasible when Stadia had only just launched.
And Stadia used the same tech without ever giving back to Proton at all (atl least nothing I can quickly discover). So the absolute vast majority of work on Proton was done by Valve which you dismissed as "when Proton came around" (it came around before Stadia) and "quite a lot of heavy lifting had gone away" (Valve did most of the heavy lifting).
That's the extent of my "problem".
> at least some of the AAA games I worked on would not function at all on Linux without Stadias commercial interference.
So, not "actually Stadia that made gaming feasible on Linux" but "because Stadia used all the same tech, and there were possible commercial incentives early on until Google completely dropped the ball, bigger studios also invested in compatibility with the tech stack"
Stadia did a lot to help by being a stable target and by being seen as commercially viable. Google also helped a lot to aid developers, not just financially.
That they didn’t contribute code to proton doesn’t factor at all, I just hate to see people not get their dues for their part in the prolification of Linux gaming- because I saw it first hand.
You are labouring under the delusion that I’ve implied Proton did nothing, no, they levied a lot of existing technology and put in a lot of polish. They were helped by Stadia, by Wine, by DXVK and others.
They didn’t do it alone, that doesn’t minimise their contribution, it contextualises them.
Also: Stadia ports of games were native, they did not use proton- it was architecture changes of the games themselves that made proton work better- not Google making proton itself function better.
That proton was running some games is a weird revisionist take, very few AAA games ran at all, those that did were super old and there was always some crazy weird bugs- proton got better but also AAA games coalesced into conforming to linux-y paradigms underneath better- so support got better much quicker than expected. You can even see this if you track the “gold” released games over years, some of the worst supported games for Proton are from 2015-16; before stadia but after game complexity started rocketing up with next game engines of the day.
Hope that helps, because honestly this conversation is like talking to a brick wall.
> They didn’t do it alone, that doesn’t minimise their contribution, it contextualises them.
Oh, you very much minimised their contribution. From "when Proton came" (again, Proton came before Stadia) to "Stadia made gaming feasible on Linux" (when Proton made it feasible before Stadia)
> Also: Stadia ports of games were native, they did not use proton- it was architecture changes of the games themselves that made proton work better- not Google making proton itself function better.
So, Stadie games were Linux ports. But as a result of this there are still literally no Linux ports. None of the tech behind Stadia ever made it back into software behind Proton. And "native stadia ports" are somehow responsible for more games that target Windows and DirectX to run better via Proton
> That proton was running some games is a weird revisionist take
Funny to hear this coming from a revisionist. I literally provided you with links you carefully ignored
--- start quote ---
A look over the ProtonDB reports for June 2019, over 5.5K games reported to work with Steam Play
> You can even see this if you track the “gold” released games over years, some of the worst supported games for Proton are from 2015-16; before stadia but after game complexity started rocketing up with next game engines of the day.
Or because the actual heavy lifting that Valve did with Proton paid off, and not the nebulous "native ports" and code that never saw the light of day.
> because honestly this conversation is like talking to a brick wall.
Unreal can target Linux, sure, but not all of the plugins you might use will, nor any of your own plugins.
Unreal is almost worse because their first party tools (UGS, Horde) will not work on Linux, so you have to treat linux as a console, and honestly the market share isn't there to justify it.
Not sure, Unreal Engine is pretty popular though and Snowdrop is increasingly common for Ubisoft titles.
https://www.protondb.com/app/2842040 https://www.protondb.com/app/2840770/ https://www.protondb.com/app/365590