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EVE Online News - Linux Support to End
Posted by Jon Wood on Feb 12, 2009 | 14 comments in our forums
We may be a couple of days late reporting it, but we wanted to pass on the fact that CCP has announced that they will not be continuing to support Linux users for their space-based MMO, EVE Online.
As some of you may know, I am the producer in charge of the project bringing EVE Online to the Mac and Linux operating systems. In order to achieve this aim, we are working in partnership with Transgaming Technologies, utilizing their Cider engine to allow EVE Online to run on the Mac OS and their Cedega engine to enable operation under Linux. This project went live in late 2007, and in that time we have seen the same slow, steady growth in the numbers of users of the Mac client that has characterized the growth of EVE Online throughout its history. However we have not seen any similar growth in the numbers using our Linux client.
It is for this reason that I am sorry to have to announce that from the 10th of March onwards CCP will no longer be officially supporting the Linux operating system. The low amount of users of the Linux client did not justify the degree of additional complexity that maintaining three operating systems imposed on our development and release schedules. There is the matter of maintaining the hardware infrastructure to facilitate the development work, spending man-hours on testing and diagnosing faults in the client as well as regression testing. While we did embark on this project with the aim of being one of the few MMOG’s on the market offering a game client for all of the major operating system architectures, we feel that the time and resources that were being spent on the Linux client would be better utilized in areas where more players would benefit from them.
I would like to thank those users who supported our efforts to bring EVE to the Linux OS. The feedback and commitment we obtained from many of you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. I am sure this announcement will cause a rather emotional response, and all I can offer as a counter is that this was not an easy decision to make. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system. We did our best to identify all of our current subscribers who were using the Linux client and contacted each of them prior to this blog to make them aware of the change and to offer them some options on how to continue playing EVE through other emulators. We apologize if there were some who did not receive that notice and invite them to read this knowledgebase article.
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Eve not wanting to support linux anymore is kind of sad :(
Well it might be sad, but it was to be expected.
Beside this means Devs can move thouse ppl to other parts of the game.
I think support for windows and Mac is more than enough this days.
They didn't support GNU/Linux in the first place. The Cedga client was pathetic and all the GNU/Linuxs users used the windows client under wine. The support transgaming got from CCP was non existant anyway, and if there is no support who would bother sticking with the cedega client?
I cancelled my account anyway. Not really because of their lack of support for GNU/Linux, but the disengenious way they insinuate that they had supported the client.
Smaller companies like the guys behind vendetta online have no problems supporting 3 clients. The real reason is EVE is a M$ house software company.
I'm glad wine users are able to get those clients to work in spite of these companies efforts to exclude GNU/Linux. A huge source of ingenuity and pride from an indestructable community.
Windows free for over 2 and a half years and never looking back.
Blah blah blah /martyr. Serously, you can be more pretentious than Mac users sometimes. Yes, the linux client support might have sucked, yeah, they're backing out. But you know what, they at least tried for you guys, and for how many years? It makes perfect sense to drop official support if there is barely a demand for the client considering the extra effort involved. Seriously, why would they add support and then just drop it for no reason if there wasn't any overhead? Did they have a board meeting and go "hey, lets go and piss off our users and garner some bad PR by doing something completely unessisary!"? Besides, you're supposed to be the "resourceful" ones right? One would think you could deal with this. Also, comparing the technological wonder that is Eve to Vendetta online is ignorant and you know it. But no, lets all turn a blind eye to this. CLEARLY its them bowing out to pressure from M$ (lol see what I did there, it's because microsoft likes money 8D) and their hatred for linux users, not the perfectly rational reason that tacking on extra manhours and development time for a whopping 100 users or so isn't worth holding development back for the 40k other members of the community. But by all means, keep your penguin shaped tin foil hat firmly affixed to your head.
Thanks for reminding me of why I don't like Linux/Mac. Elitist jerks like you.
i think its sad that they are ending their linux support but honestly my brother use gentoo linux and they are so proud about it being open source and all their coding knowlage. if you insist on using linux use it to your advantage and make eve work on our system. if you cant do that why do you even bother using linux for gaming. thats just stupid.
Well I use Linux a lot, but I use it for business not games. When I want to play games I boot windows.
Whining because you hate windows just pegs you as an elitist. If you are going to lock yourself away from the game market expecting it to come to you, you are in for a very long wait. Things don't happen that way.
Very few Eve players use linux, and almost all have access to windows. It is a good business decision by CCP.
Hmm, I thought Eve was written in Python not .NET ?
Hey! We're not all elitists! I bet you could find some pretty elitist windows users too without looking too hard...
It's surprising it had support in the first place.
I have to agree its not often you see games with linux support.
Blah blah blah /martyr. Serously, you can be more pretentious than Mac users sometimes. Yes, the linux client support might have sucked, yeah, they're backing out. But you know what, they at least tried for you guys, and for how many years? It makes perfect sense to drop official support if there is barely a demand for the client considering the extra effort involved. Seriously, why would they add support and then just drop it for no reason if there wasn't any overhead? Did they have a board meeting and go "hey, lets go and piss off our users and garner some bad PR by doing something completely unessisary!"? Besides, you're supposed to be the "resourceful" ones right? One would think you could deal with this. Also, comparing the technological wonder that is Eve to Vendetta online is ignorant and you know it. But no, lets all turn a blind eye to this. CLEARLY its them bowing out to pressure from M$ (lol see what I did there, it's because microsoft likes money 8D) and their hatred for linux users, not the perfectly rational reason that tacking on extra manhours and development time for a whopping 100 users or so isn't worth holding development back for the 40k other members of the community. But by all means, keep your penguin shaped tin foil hat firmly affixed to your head.
I'm not going to pick on all the other crap you slung at linux cause there's really no dealing with ppl like you who have the wrong idea in your heads about it but hitting on VO like that is over the line, I've played both on both windows and linux and honestly I can say the Cedega client for EvE sucked, when you don't even have a cursor it's not a usable client. VO on the other hand has native support for not only linux, mac, and windows but BSD and many other systems and architectures and they started this from the start, with only 4 developers I might add. I also have to say the gameplay in VO is vastly superior, instead of issueing commands and sitting back and waiting you actually control your ship, you make the smallest mistake in combat and you die almost immedeatly, it takes skill not time to get ahead, IMO much etter a design.
Cedega is a fork of Wine. Porting the EVE Online client to GNU/Linux via Cedega would be little different than running the Windows client through Wine.
I'm not surprised that there's limited interest in commercial MMORPGs in the GNU/Linux world. One of the few things that held me back from switching from Windows to GNU/Linux was that there are fewer games available for GNU/Linux, and they're generally not as flashy. But then I realized that my favorite science fiction, fantasy, and roleplaying settings were those created by multiple authors, my favorite computer games had always been those that had extensive support for user extensions and modifications, and that what I'd liked best in MMORPGs were communities of roleplayers who generated their own content. All these things, in the long run, would find a better environment in the free software world than they would in the proprietary software world.
In my experiences with MMORPGs, in particular, I'd been most frustrated by the way that developers would steamroll right over player communities who were trying to actually roleplay, when some of the content the players was producing was better AND more consistent with the setting then what the developers would impose. I found this to be the case with EVE Online, in which it became clear that the developers preferred to encourage the exploits (in both senses) of player organizations that made no roleplaying sense at all, while overriding or ignoring the efforts of roleplayers to perpetuate and extend the official storyline.
1. The person you quoted has a chip on their shoulder, no doubt.
2. BUT ... as previously stated, we're not all elitist jerks! Yes, many linux users have a very ... in depth understanding of say, the command line, and yeah some of them act like that makes them special, but jerks are everywhere, not just linux. I use linux and I have no flippin' idea how to run a command line. I could barely use Windows ... macs are an absolute mystery. It all depends on what works for you as a user. : ) I will say that when switching to linux, any hardcore gamer should know to keep a windows computer handy. To do otherwise and then wine about it is just silliness.