Can always just buy and ignore the forums.Im sure plenty do. And FWIW GOG is pretty relaxed about these forums unlike certain other places.

How the heck did people start talking about homophobia at a news article about Trine 2 being sold for cheap?

I also don't get how anyone could have thought that the blue comment made by Judas condones homophobia. Some people are extremely super massively ultra sensitive to anything that trillions-of-light-years remotely resemble it as homophobic which is really not surprising sadly.

It is as if some homophobic person once used the words "I like cake" and from then on, anyone who uses any one or more of the words "I like cake" is now homophobic as well. o_o

I would think GOG is about games that are sold DRM free and people would normally stick with that, but like Youtube, fuzzy kittens rolling around on the ground squeezing fuzzy balls somehow yield political and religious arguments... Here at GOG Trine 2 being sold for $4.99 yielded arguments about homophobic slurs or in my perception, the lack thereof and people are just nitpicking at anything and everything and making a deal out of nothing.

Come on guys. As one super fan once defended Britney Spears with "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" Can't you all just leave GOG alone with the vitriol of hate and over sensitivity about absolutely nothing?

It's Trine 2! I wanted to read the comments to see what everyone thought of the game! I have it installed on my HD already and is jealous of the DRM free standalone installation and cheap price!

Thanks for this ... am a right that you just added a Mac Version ? The moment I saw that and the price I bought the bundle, even though I bought both games in the Mac App Store. Because this Complete Story Version is not available there (and Goblin menace costs more than this complete bundle)

This is the best moment to say "thank you, GOG"

I bought a few games here so far, and some (like Slipstream 5000) that have an enormous emotional/nostalgic value for me ... I am truly grateful ! And I am also grateful that you bring us so much Mac content, cause thats my stuff :D

(A little wish at this point: If it´s possible to release the Settlers2 Gold for Mac, I would be super happy (can´t "wine" it on my own ;) )

(((And for me, personally, no german stuff needed, nothings better than the original spirit of a game)))

Mace? Like the Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter game? That would be awesome here.

Glad to see these two together and on a good discount; I've had the first one on disc for a little while but been waiting to get it on GoG or steam.

Although I must say, the more I work with the way steam games insist you need steam activated or turned on first makes it more and more annoying to want to buy any games from there anymore (not that I was big on them to begin with).

People have opinions bro, whether they work somewhere or not. If you don't want to support people who disagree with you then stop buying anything, anywhere, ever.

changed it ... ya ... this morning at 6 or 7 am I am sure I wrote Mac ... but it took me additional 2 hours to wake up completely ... so ... :P

"No, they should wait until they internally feel that the Linux platform is ready for them" you said? i'm sorry, but i feel like you gettin it somehow wrong. First, as you should know, there is no "official linux distro", there is a lot of them, all different.
Second, there is not such task in distro developers as "make linux GOG compatible". Games not going to get any special treat.
Third, Linux already have all it need to "support" games. It have OpenGL, it have packet managers, main videohardware official drivers. That ELSE gog waiting for?
And to tell truth, as linux user i can say that MOST source of "halfbaked" ports is BAD ports. Peoples starting to developer games with pure windows-only frameworks and technologies like XNA, NET, DirectX, then after they finish they starting to "port" it to linux. In 50% of cases they try to use different dirty hacks like wrapping existing code in some sort of compatibility layers like Monogame or Wine and call it "port". Great if its more or less polished and working fine, but very often its just fails miserably. So, i dont really see why wrapping awkward code in awkward hacks making LINUX bad platform.
Rignt now linux support for gaming stuff is better then it was ever. We even got Unity building native (with mono part) builds for linux which working (unlike MANY ports) out of the box. But if developers will continue to use strange frameworks to make games and after "kinda" port them with no QA - nothing will changes.
As for Valve doing, i would not gettin my hopes so high. OFC by developing their own distro they can eliminate problem of "too much different enviroments to support" and introduce some sort of "standardization" , but where it will lead us? It may turn that developers will build linux games ONLY for Valve distro. Another one "embrace extend and extianguish". And will you bother to have dual boot with you favorite linux distro on Valve's one? Not much difference with dual boot in windows.
Anyway, the only real reason i see GOG dont support Linux is low user base. Its simply economically not interesting for them and i can understand that. But to tell " oh uh, lets wait another decade until Linux matures" - its just being hypocrite.
Thats easy. Trine 2 is great. No less then first one (if yo still not played first i pity you). Enemies became harder and smarter, and characters was rebalanced too (no more superpowerfull thief ). In terms of music in visual art its still top notch. Frozenbyte made it this way to not lose anything they gained in Trine 1, its just as great as first and even better.
P.S. not yet tried DLC, so..no comments.

As a former systems engineer of a major Linux vendor I'm well aware of the differences between Linux distributions. ;oP

That itself is a major problem for gaming companies and distributors and as long as they perceive this to be a problem, it holds back gaming on the platform. When I speak of "the Linux platform" I speak of it in these generic terms that are all encompassing of the majority of distributions that are relevant for gaming on Linux to be successful and not just for 1 or 2 of the most popular distributions.

I haven't suggested anywhere that there is such a task at hand by any distribution vendors either. In fact, there very much isn't any such kind of concerted effort. The effort is going to come from the outside, such as Valve's Linux efforts which are motivated by their desire to build a profitable business model on top of the Linux platform. In doing so, Valve is doing a first handed look into the problems they perceive that exist within the Linux platform and trying to solve those problems and make contributions back to the Linux ecosystem which ultimately will find their way back into all of the major distributions over time as well. Valve is motivated by their business interest and the flexibility of Linux to accomplish their goals, and the work that needs to be done is only likely to come from a company or group of people who are sufficiently motivated in this nature as it is unlikely that major distributions are going to be motivated to do such a thing as there would be no major payoff for them personally up front. For distributors it would be all risk, no perceived gains. For Valve however it is a different story, the risk is acceptable to them and they believe they have the resources to pull it off to a profitable end and everyone else will benefit from the cascade effect that follows.



If only things were that simple. Unfortunately they're not that simple. The X Window system and video drivers are incomplete and a frequent source of instability and unreliability (both open source and proprietary), which is my area of personal expertise (I am a former XFree86/X.Org X server and video driver developer and can state this with some degree of authority and no other X developer will be likely to disagree with me about either). Support for various input devices is also limited with various hardware as well. Audio support is lacking for a lot of hardware is lacking similarly to video and often has problems with latency and other issues. The pulseaudio system which is widely used is still immature and has a long way to go yet. None of the other audio subsystems are any more mature either currently.

Things continue to improve in all of these areas over time, but new hardware comes out just as quickly leaving support always lagging behind the current best efforts of the open source community and hardware vendor contributions to track it all. This means that people definitely do have and will have problems that are quite varied on different hardware across distributions, and it means that the support for specific hardware can vary greatly from one distribution to another and one installation to another.

OpenGL support in the open source drivers is also lagging behind the current standards. Mesa is currently supporting OpenGL 3.x if memory serves correct while current is 4.x, and this is probably going to continue to be the case for the forseeable future. That does not prevent games from coming to Linux so long as they don't hard code requirements of newer OpenGL features, but it does mean that less features are present where people are using the Mesa stack for OpenGL. The proprietary drivers are probably much more current with OpenGL specs however, but I'd have to look that up as I'm not up to date on where things are with ATI/nVidia for that.

Other areas where problems exist that affect developers are in networking (less of a problem), with desktop interactivity issues (a long standing problem to which I have spent time working on myself). These type of issues vary from distribution to distribution as well depending on what kernel is provided and how it is patched and what the default configuration is. Some are affected more than others.

All of these issues and many more I've not enumerated make Linux actually a collection of very similar platforms rather than one single unified platform. So while we can speak of "the Linux platform" in a singular sense and mean something specific from it, the mechanics vary from actual distribution to distribution a fair bit and that has a concrete affect on what it takes for a 3rd party game or applicationi developer to provide their software on the platform and have it work uniformly from one distribution to another, one system to another. The compatibility issues can vary quite a bit even between different releases of a single distribution, but when you multiply that by the differences between multiple releases of multiple distributions it can become quite a maze quickly.

This does not mean Linux is unsuitable for something like gaming, it means that a company considering bringing a game to Linux is going to have to be prepared to handle all of these differences themselves and have to either provide support for a wide range of distributions and setups, or limit their official support to a subset of all of the available distributions and provide limited or no "official" support for other distributions. It's really up to the developer in the end and some will decide to support it while others will decide not to.

For a lot if not most of games at least, it is the game developer who decides whether to support Linux or not on the code side, and then it is up to the distributor like GOG/Valve etc. to decide if they've got the resources to support it at that level as well.



Yes, sadly that is the case that some developers choose to cut corners in this manner seeing it as a quick and dirty cheap way to bring support to the platform with minimal effort. In practice it does not seem to work out well and never has as far back as I can remember so I'd have to agree with you wholeheartedly there. ;o/ Wine has made great improvements over the years and is a great piece of software, but it is also sorely lacking in the audio/video department and other areas, and is a constantly moving target also.

Now here I have to agree with you 100% as well. Things are indeed getting slowly better over time and this is something us Linux heads should be very happy about indeed. The battle isn't over yet though, there is a long way to go yet. :) I think it will get there though in the coming years, and that Valve's Linux momentum will be a huge booster shot to see that happen. I also think we'll see other big game companies come forward to support Linux as well, and them combined with the multitude of game developers themselves all coming slowly one at a time to Linux are all going to end up making contributions to X, mesa, the kernel, Wayland, freetype, and all sorts of other areas in the OS stack. I think things are at the point currently where we can say that the scales have been tipped for Linux viability for gaming, and now those with the money and motivation need to (and to some degree are) coming forward to try and solve the remaining major issues that are perceived to have held things back in the past. 1 to 2 years from now I think we'll be having a very different conversation about this, and one which I'm personally quite excited about for sure. I've got a lot of man hours invested in hacking on parts of the system in the past and while I am not active on that front for a few years now it is nice to see things proceeding forward towards more commonplace usage and acceptance of Linux to the wider consumer marketplace.

If they're building their game for Linux, then the software in theory should be able to run on any Linux distribution so long as the appropriate OS level dependencies are present which the game needs to run. Whether they provide official technical support for a given distribution will likely depend on the individual game developer and game title of course. Valve's SteamOS has a high chance of becoming the defacto target to aim for first and I don't think that is a bad thing personally. All signs seem to show that Valve does not plan to make this a proprietary exclusive thing. What I read from this is that they are sick of Windows platform and want to cut themselves free from the chains and are looking at Linux as the way to that end. Their own platform built on Linux gives them the control over having a single primary target to aim for, but other Linux distributions will be supported as well. They sell games not operating systems, so it's in their interest for things to work on as many distributions as possible, but it makes sense for them to focus on one definitive OS as their target and making their own OS puts them in control of what goes into it and not having to rely on the whims of a particular distributor so it makes a lot of sense.

I think we'll see SteamOS be the standard target, but that improvements made there by Valve will be contributed to the upstream projects and distributions and eventually make their way into updates for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. and that all gamers will benefit - but Valve and other game companies wont have to wait for every distribution to patch things which trust me - can take months and years for some stuff. I've got direct personal experience there (and some would likely say I'm one who delayed including a patch for as long hehe).


I would agree with that too, but in a "relative" rather than "absolute" sense. You have finite resources to work with and you want to produce more profit, so you look your list of potential projects are to generate more revenue and grow the business and what the monetary and man power costs are for each. Then you choose a project that seems viable, and that you can project a risk/reward and maximize return on investment. It might end up being perceived as more profitable to spend the next year or 2 or 3 allocating developers to making more existing games work on Windows or Mac than trying to kick start support for a new platform like Linux. To be honest, I think GOG would be wise to wait a while and see how things pan out with SteamOS and the improvements that come to the Linux ecosphere from that. Let's also consider that GOG may actually be working on porting dozens of games to Linux behind the scenes right now as we discuss this and just not have anything publicly they're willing to disclose about it yet until they get a better idea of when and whether it will work out for them. I think it would be a bad idea for them to say much publicly about Linux either way unless they're already sold on the idea and working on it and getting really close to launching it.

I think you'll also agree that one thing is for certain. We are on the eve of Linux making a big splash in the coming years in the gaming market, and ourselves and many others are a vocal and enthusiastic community of enlightened gamers whom are very passionate about both Linux and gaming and eager to see our favourite platform march forward to the forefront as the platform of choice for gaming. I think we'll have that victory celebration one day in the not distant future, but it's a little early to crack the champagne just yet. Hehehe.

Take care!

Bloody hell, I finally broke down months back and got Trine 2 from Steam cuz I figured it would never come to GOG.

(sorry, had to cut out too much of quotation)

Ok, yes, i agree on that technical situation on linux technologies maybe not best one. OpenGL had long dormant period while DirectX evolved, so they really need to catch up. But right now is tami of BIG changes in linux userland - Pulse Audio, Wayland\Mir, and some less interesting to common user things. But, on other side, progress over past years is giant! Who would imagine that Nvidia and Ati will provide official drivers for "non-existant" platform? OpenDrivers is ofc not that great, but that mostly due same vendors not willing provide specification. Developers just have to work with that they have in hands.
And i agree on that Linux is shattered into lot similar platforms instead being one solid. But from that i know Linux was never supportive for ideas of making one-to-rule-over-all distro.

About Wine - yes, Wine brings a lot of possibilities for linux users, but as we all know its fixes one bugs and introduce new one into each new release. Folks doing great, and many application is working just fine in Wine, but its still not proper solution. Many games works buggy in wine, some (especially Xna based) - hard to get running.

Now, back to Steam OS. Yes, i know, that by common rules they HAVE TO share all changes they make. but on other side they can mix open software with their own proprietary solutions.
Like Android for example, they have generic (with patches) kernel, but absolutely uncommon all other. I dont think Valve will go that far, but they can implement something own, which will simply make Steam Os in one big Steam client, incompatible with anything else. And while they maybe will be able to provide superior gaming experience, i doubt they will bother to build all favorite packages for everyday life lie Debian or Ubuntu. Thats why i dont soo happy with seeing in near future things like "Linux build for Steam OS". Maybe thats not going to happen, i dont know. Time will show.
Anyway, thanks for your opinion.

I think Trine 2 on GOG was expectable once they appeared in Humble Bundle. Its sure taken a lot time for them to decide to liberate Trine 2 from hard Steam dependency, but since they already dropped that bomb in bundle - why not GOG too? And dont forget they have all their portfolio here too.

Yep, for many years a lot of video vendors would either not provide any documentation at all, or would provide only minimal incomplete documentation. Over time it got better with some vendors and worse with others. Intel never used to provide docs and then they started doing so and also working directly on the drivers with some encouragement from the right people. ATI was always rather Linux/OSS friendly from the start and I had more documentation and hardware from them than any other vendor. Sure made it easier to fix bugs etc. But... then they stopped providing documentation and sample code after the Radeon 8500 series for a couple of years and went silent only to return again in another year or two and start providing both docs and sources once again and this time to the community at large rather than under NDA as it was previously. Another win. nVidia was always the bigger problem by not providing any documentation at all for any of their hardware, and only contributing via a single developer to the 2D-only nv driver completely obfuscated source code that was next to useless to study and fix bugs etc. Now that is allegedly changing slowly as well from announcements I've read in recent times.

As you say, a *lot* of things have been happening in the last year or so that could be quite exciting if it all comes to fruition over the next year or two etc.


Yeah, it was always intended to be an open platform rather than a specific well defined standard platform and many would argue that's one of its biggest strengths that got it this far to date also. But, it also holds it back from a lot of opportunities too without some level of standardization agreed upon for certain usage. The LSB, FHS, POSIX, SUSv3 all attempt to standardize things to some degree or another successfully but there are a lot of parts of the system which aren't yet standardized, plus implementation differences/glitches from one distribution to another that cause incompatibilities or differences between systems. That will always be there to some extent due to the very nature of the beast, but there's always room where more things can be blessed with some form of standardization or another also and distributions that choose to follow the given standards can benefit from what that offers their userbase also.

Yep, I used to produce custom rpm package builds of wine for some years in my personal repository but ended up moving on to more interesting things after a while and my wine usage waned. WIne is pretty cool for what it does though, and it's always cool to get some game or app running in it and working properly when it actually does work properly. ;)


Sure, of course Valve can always provide proprietary applications/tools etc. on top of the underlying OS, but that doesn't mean it is exclusive to their OS. Realistically it is in Valve's own best interests to make Steam and all games available on Steam as accessible as possible to the widest Linux audience. They wont achieve that if they make the system "our SteamOS only, and screw Ubuntu/Fedora/otherdistro users muahahahahaha, give us your money!". Valve has stated that they are not going to be providing SteamOS specific games or other things that make the platform exclusive because that only limits who will or can use it. I totally think it makes sense for Valve to make their own SteamOS rather than choose one of the many distributions out there as their official recommendation. The latter would only stand to divide the community, and they can't possibly give every possible distribution out there 100% equal level of support and QA testing. They really do need to have one thing to target and SteamOS is the best way to do that, but that doesn't mean that it would be best to not support any other distros, just that other distros will be potentially supported as a second-tier, while SteamOS is their baseline. I don't think it would work out well any other way to be honest.

But Valve will make more money from selling games to people running SteamOS and any other Linux distribution out there, than they will by only selling games to people running SteamOS. It would not only be a bad decision financially by limiting their available number of customers that don't or wont use SteamOS but do use Linux, but it would be seen as a major evil move by the entire Linux community at large and that type of negative press would murder the entire SteamOS project completely. So I think people worrying about Steam and Steam games being SteamOS-only really don't understand how the entire Linux ecosphere works. They wont win customers or friends by doing something like that, and in fact they would make enemies and have the entire community they wish to embrace - bad mouthing them and working against them.

No, Valve is smarter than that and I believe they are embracing Linux in a friendly way to the community and that they will work together with other distributions to have bug fixes and other support elements integrated to maximize the number of customers out there interested in what they've got to offer.

It's definitely good to see. GOG has exploded in growth over the last year, going from about 490 games this time last year to almost 670 or so right now, that's about a 50% growth in titles year to year. I think it's fair to assume that we'll see equal growth next year, which means that by this time next year GOG will have over 1000 games, and probably 1500-2000 the year after that. We're going to see a lot of indie titles I imagine but I think we'll start to see more and more bigger name titles both from the past and from current start to show up too. If GOG does end up providing an /optional/ client that integrates more features than just basic downloading, such as some popular features of the Steam client (which some people balk at, but it is very popular nonetheless), I think a lot more people would be drawn to GOG also.

Should be an exciting year on GOG in 2014 no matter how ya slice it. :) I'm going to go out on a total whim here and say that I think that after SteamOS launches in 2014, it will see some good popularity and that within 12-18 months after that we will start to see GOG offering games for Linux as well. Pure rampant speculation on my part, but I'm throwin' it out there nonetheless. ;)

I'm not even concerned with GOG porting anything to Linux. All I really want to see is if a game has a Linux version already made, then GOG just distributes it along with the Windows and Mac versions. Many current indie games are made with all three platforms, which Steam and Humble Bundle distribute. I'd even be happy with unofficial support. If a game has a Linux version, just throw it in the extras as it comes from the developers. GOG could leave support up to the developers.

I wouldn't really consider that. That's a lot of expense, not to mention that they would need the source code to port the games. I can't really think of any scenario where doing this would be beneficial to GOG, short of Linux grabbing a 90% market share overnight and GOG suddenly finding themselves without a customer base that uses Windows. If that hypothetical scenario were to happen, they would probably be forced to close their doors anyway.

I would expect to see a Linux version of TWIII or Cerberpunk 2077 released from CD Projekt, or porting the previous 2 Witcher games to Linux as a more likely scenario.

You've got a better chance of finding a 3 legged ballerina than seeing GOG porting "dozens" of games to Linux. :P

Edit: Since this is the Trine 2 thread, shouldn't we be discussing this over in the "Linux support on GOG" thread?
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/linux_support_on_gog