As more and more games are built on 3rd party engines like unreal, unity and godot, it gets easier to have them run natively without proton or wine. Obviously there are compatibility issues that arise beyond the engine, but it helps a lot. Godot is particularly cool because it is FOSS, even if it is less developed than unreal or unity.
As cool as these developments are for Linux gaming, I am a bit worried about engine development becoming a lost art for studios/devs. Some kinds of game need specialized engines to work properly. Eugen’s proprietary engine, iriszoom, is kind of amazing in how well it handles the huge detailed maps and hundreds of units in Steel Division, Warno and Wargame. I was able to get their latest game, Warno, running just fine on integrated graphics, albeit at minimum settings and through proton. On the other hand, Cities Skylines 2, a game with similar scale to Warno, is built in unity, and it runs like a pig even on high end machines.
I really hope we can get more stuff running natively on Linux without having to go all in on these 3rd party engines, more stuff built in Godot would also be cool.
Cities Skylines 2 issues has nothing to do with Unity. The game has been rushed out the door and is unoptimized. Like for example the game was rendering full set of teeth on the NPCs even when the camera was far away. Unity can be really fast nowadays if you use it properly. Like with the Jobs system and Burst you can write very fast parallelized code that gets converted to native C++ code.
One thing I noticed about cross platform sim games is that, frankly, they run horrible on native Linux. I measure like a 40% TPS drop, and even worse frame time spikes, in Rimworld and Stellaris.
The former is Unity, the later an in-house engine (Clausewitz). And they run fine in Proton.
Point being that you still have to be careful with popular engines, as the actual game dev still has to optimize it for Linux. If they can’t… honestly, targeting Proton is a fine alternative.
As more and more games are built on 3rd party engines like unreal, unity and godot, it gets easier to have them run natively without proton or wine. Obviously there are compatibility issues that arise beyond the engine, but it helps a lot. Godot is particularly cool because it is FOSS, even if it is less developed than unreal or unity.
As cool as these developments are for Linux gaming, I am a bit worried about engine development becoming a lost art for studios/devs. Some kinds of game need specialized engines to work properly. Eugen’s proprietary engine, iriszoom, is kind of amazing in how well it handles the huge detailed maps and hundreds of units in Steel Division, Warno and Wargame. I was able to get their latest game, Warno, running just fine on integrated graphics, albeit at minimum settings and through proton. On the other hand, Cities Skylines 2, a game with similar scale to Warno, is built in unity, and it runs like a pig even on high end machines.
I really hope we can get more stuff running natively on Linux without having to go all in on these 3rd party engines, more stuff built in Godot would also be cool.
Cities Skylines 2 issues has nothing to do with Unity. The game has been rushed out the door and is unoptimized. Like for example the game was rendering full set of teeth on the NPCs even when the camera was far away. Unity can be really fast nowadays if you use it properly. Like with the Jobs system and Burst you can write very fast parallelized code that gets converted to native C++ code.
One thing I noticed about cross platform sim games is that, frankly, they run horrible on native Linux. I measure like a 40% TPS drop, and even worse frame time spikes, in Rimworld and Stellaris.
The former is Unity, the later an in-house engine (Clausewitz). And they run fine in Proton.
Point being that you still have to be careful with popular engines, as the actual game dev still has to optimize it for Linux. If they can’t… honestly, targeting Proton is a fine alternative.