Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Baldur's Gate 3 for Linux?

+1 for a Linux version

First there not server that run Windows on the market for big scale servers and even "Microsoft Azure" is linux base. The big problem is directX only games. Once is developed on Vulcan or any Open-API, can be compiled to run on anything, no matter the platform, We just ask for a not only directX game. It will help Larian Studios to be able to port it easily to any platform like PS or Nintendo as they did with divinity eventually, it will help them anyways.

We are a very small group, who use only Linux. But we just ask for to be included on the already development Larian will do for Stadia. It will take almost not effort, all the work is done by using the right API.

By the way, is this work (Vulkan support in the engine) done by your regular developers team, or you are contracting someone else to do it? I.e. did the studio gain Vulkan expertise through this work?

GNU+Linux! (Or even just "GNU" now, since there is a GNU project, Linux-Libre.)

Support for GNU would warm the hearts of old system admins. Maybe an appimage ...

Yes.

That's good to hear! I hope you'll provide Vulkan option for Windows users as well, and it will make it easier for you to make proper desktop Linux release in the future too, since your team will already have needed expertise in-house.

Some people seem to be interested in Google Stadia as a platform.

Can people not see how unwise it would be to allow a Big Data company to track your every decision and move on a computer game? Consider just how much logging Google would manage with access like that. Of course, super duper hardware available on a "cloud" (i.e. somebody else's computer) might be a nice service, but I strongly believe it is a terrible direction for gaming to take. It moves people away from ownership and eventually into a system where nobody has anything and has to rent everything they need all the time. There won't be a second-hand market.

I sincerely hope people do as much as they can to retain their Freedom and where possible buy direct from developers and run games on a Free platform, one which isn't filled with anonymity destroying spyware.

On a related note, some big games were found to ship with logging software (Redshell):
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/red-shell-game-tracking-gdpr

Can we rest assured that there will be nothing of that sort in Baldur's Gate III?

Of course.
I assume there will be a prompt to request people opt in to send anonymous gameplay data for Early Access, as was done for D:OS 2.

The main learnings Google might get from me playing on Stadia are:

1. I'm pretty lame at most games I play.
2. The Internet is not reliable enough for Stadia outside the Silicon Valley bubble.

The biggest problem with mass gathering of data in the modern world is not that it is being done, but that it is frequently done without permission, that it drives marketing from companies that do not explain why they think you might be interested ( i.e. they do not reflect on the data they have gathered from you ), and that their analysis of data is frequently wrong, because it can only show corellation, not causation.

I'm not disagreeing that privacy is important, just that most people are prepared to give up privacy for convenience and utility; usually right up to the moment where something really bad happens to them because they are careless with their data.

Personally, I do use Linux most of the time ( your Free platform ), including gaming. But, like almost every Linux user, I do not read all the source code looking for bad behaviour, nor compile it myself, so I have no more certainty about Linux as an OS than any other.

The only real way to move towards better practices in the digital world is through legislation with proper enforcement. As long as companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google et al. are allowed to mis-use their products and services for other purposes, I'm sure they will continue to do so.

Some legislation would definitely help. I sat down with an Member of Parliament discussing an issue closely related to this. I was left with the impression that nothing will happen in this area for a decade or more. If lobbying happened, there might be some progress, I felt, but Big Data will continue to do what they want for years to come.

I think you underestimate the potential for harm from data harvesting. Already, by combining data points from several sources, companies are able to make predictions about your behaviour more accurately than somebody that has lived with you 20 years! (If you have even lived 20 years.)

Gaming starts young, and if it hasn't happened already, it soon will be the case that games are deliberately engineered to intelligence and personality test the (unwitting) "players" and use telemetry to send results back to the Harvesters, who would flog it (and you) to the highest bidder.

The choices made in games and regarding games could all be used against us in the technological dystopia into which we are walking.

I hope that Larian are conscious of this issue and do what can be achieved to be a light in this future nightmare world.

Probably true. The unspoken belief is that globalised business provides a much larger global economy which benefits everyone. While this may be true, it also allows multi-national companies to seek the least onerous legislative environment, and to threaten to move away from nations that restrict their business.

The current wave of populist governments is, in part, a response to the fact that the globalised economy has resulted in very uneven distribution of wealth and power. If this fracturing of the globalised economy continues, it is possible that legislation may be easier to implement.


I have lived with my current partner for rather longer than 20 years, and am probably the oldest person commenting in the forum

But, no, I do not underestimate the ability to find and link data. Thirty years ago I worked for a financial services company investigating the impact of new technoogy for their business. One thing we looked at was then called "data mining" using an emerging class of ( very expensive ) parallel-compute systems. Even then, long before most people had even heard of the Internet, you could gain a great deal of insight into individuals from the data that was manually recorded about them and about recorded real-world interactions.

Consequently, I do not have a strong online profile. I comment on some technology and gaming sites ( like this one ), and I fully expect that my use of these sites can be linked. But I do not put out information on Facebook or similar social media where most of the abuse occurs, and avoid "engagement" with companies/organisations, regardless of the inducements they offer.

Unfortunately, many people have accepted the trade-off of "free" online services in exchange for personal data, often without understanding that if you can't see what a company in the digital world is selling, then it is probably selling you.

I don't care much that platforms like Facebook target adverts for selling products, since the more something is pushed in my face, the less likely I am to buy from that company. What really concerns me is the "echo chamber" effect of personalisation based on algorithms trying to understand humans. If a company like Facebook only ever shows you news/links that you like/agree with, then you will entrench your beliefs, and assume that everyone else shares them; and you will never learn anything new.

Personalised advertising is being exploited to influence people politically, both by domestic political entities trying to gain power, and by foreign governments/criminals to destabilise public opinion. I really do not want to go back to the geo-political tension of the 1970s; it was NOT a good place to be.



I'm sure that this is already happening, although I am skeptical of the value of information that can be gained from games playing, for two reasons:-

1. Games are not real life. I do things in games that I would never do in real life ( like gratuitously murder someone because I don't like their voice ), and I am also contradictory in my behaviour. The value of data relies on its accuracy, and with games, only metadata is likely to be accurate.

2. Most current attempts to extract useful information from the huge quantity of data being processed are astonishingly crude. For the most part they may be described as "statistics on steroids" at best, and simple keyword matching at worst. Still, it has some value for us as the data processing industry is actually what drives the GPU market forward, more than the games industry

More than data gathering, what harms Linux gaming is platform politics. Big developers ignore desktop Linux, because they don't see anyone owning the platform. And don't make the mistake - it's not a market size problem. Google Stadia has less users than desktop Linux. Yet we see developers release for Stadia while they still ignore desktop Linux gamers. It's because they see Google as owners of Stadia. Linux is an open platform, no one owns it. That doesn't fit into the mindset of developers who are used to dealing with platforms controlled by a single entity.

And I hope Google at least don't have some hidden requirement like "if you release for Stadia, don't release for Linux or don't use Vulkan on Windows" and such.

Yes, I think developer reluctance to engage with desktop Linux is because they want to have a single responsible party to work with, and that is not really possible. I suspect that in many cases, market size only plays a role in evaluating support costs.

Whatever one thinks of Valve and Google, they are both, in their way, helping to make Linux gaming a more viable proposition, which is a good thing that I hope will continue. It will also be interesting to see how big developers approach Apple support once they move to ARM.

It's also possible that developers wait to be paid if they release for an extra platform. I don't mean sales money, but just extra money. Google made Stadia? They pay developers to release there. Desktop Linux has more users, but no one is paying them to release there, so they are ignoring it. If Valve acted more like a steward of Linux gaming, it could get better. They kind of tried in the early days of SteamOS, but then they stopped this marketing push. And despite the size of the Linux gaming market and user base growing, we are still ignored by many developers because of the above.

Exactly, Stadia gave Larian a pile of cash to make sure BG3 was ported to Stadia, with the condition that certain BG3 Stadia features would be ready by certain deadline, that is it, no other requirements. It's why they've been able to make BG3 an AAA game without draining their bank accounts and while staying independent. Larian did a lot of it on Google's dime in exchange for porting it to Stadia with no other demands at all. Plus Google has already spent alot on advertizing Baldur's Gate 3 on Stadia, so that is free advertizing for Larian Studios.

[quote=Omegaphallic]
Exactly, Stadia gave Larian a pile of cash to make sure BG3 was ported to Stadia,
Do game even need to be ported over to Stadia? I assume whatever machines they run their games on can run the game without much, if any tweaking.

Their engine never had Vulkan renderer and previously had issued working on Linux. Porting it to Staida means making a proper Vulkan based Linux release.

I have no experience in this myself, but I guess that at least the in-game achievement system requires a special SDK depending on what platform/vendor is used.

The good thing is, that porting to Stadia is already doing all the heavy lifting of Linux+Vulkan path in then engine. So after that making a release for actual existing user base (desktop Linux) rather than marketed one (Stadia) shouldn't be hard for Larian. I hope they realize that and can make it once Stadia one will be ready.

Most games are coded with "abstract functions" for what a platform might be expected to offer. If you port to a platform where an expected feature doesn't exist, the abstract function simply does nothing, or is replaced by some custom code.

Achievements are generally not important for a game, so a Linux abstraction might do nothing, or maybe display a temporary achievement banner.

I would expect the majority of the game code to be platform-neutral, and simply need to be reviewed for the compiler to be used when porting to a new platform.