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we have our first actual reply from a dev

Good.

on the discord

Annoying. I despise discord, and I really don't understand why a third-party platform gets attention where the official ludeon forum does not.
At least it something though.

"I thought we had fixed that in 1.4, but apparently not".

Seriously? Someone tried to fix this, then didn't even fire up the linux build to see if it worked? It took me less than 30 seconds to check for this bug in 1.4.
I mean, if that's indicative of the level of effort being spent on this...

I don't understand why I'm treated as a second-class customer just because I'm not using a malware as my OS.

Well, since there is still no productive dev communication going on here, I guess we'll just bitch and bikeshed a bit more while we wait...

My 2c on the why:
For whatever reason, developers using unity have a tendency to drink the "deploy to multiple platforms with one click" koolaid, invest next to nothing into support or testing for cross-platform, then react to the inevitable platform-specific bugs with a big fat "not my problem".
I've seen this attitude with many games, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's what is going on here as well - linux (and often MacOS as well) support is just a freebie they got by using unity after all, so they're not willing to spend time on it.

Personally I'd prefer studios just didn't offer multi-platform builds at all if they're not going to commit to supporting them, that way I could make an informed decision to not purchase their products, and this all-to-common bait-and-switch situation could be avoided.


In short: Do, or do not. There is no "try" to sell a linux build as an afterthought that won't result in angry customers.
Unless you explicitly state that the linux build is an unsupported beta, we will, and frankly should, expect the same level of release quality as on any other platform.

As it stands, the simple fact is that some people paid full price and received an inferior experience, through no fault of their own bar believing ludeon's marketing.
The UI is borderline unusable, and something as basic as mouse-dragging is still horribly broken. Fix it.



On the communication bit, I haven't been around long, but from what I can see so far dev communication is pretty much just not-a-thing here. Pity, considering how much of the games success is attributable to players, modders, and word-of-mouth.

Free tip, ludeon: People are more willing to file good, well-documented bug reports and more understanding of bugs and delays in general when they feel that they are being listened to. Locking bug report threads you don't want to deal with is not productive.

1.4 release, new DLC, and multiple patches later...
This regression is still not fixed, sliders in particular are still completely unusable, and developer communication remains a solid "nil".

This is getting beyond a joke, please give us something more concrete than variations of "[somebody] is aware". At this point, given the timeframe and the lack of progress, I am going to have to assume that such statements are nothing more than platitudes and/or lies, and nobody is actually doing anything about it.

If "the devs" have truly been aware of this since shortly after it was reported, then they evidently do not care to fix it, and have no problem shipping a broken product.

As for that condescending "soapbox" comment... There is no soapbox, only people getting progressively more pissed that this extremely annoying bug is still not sorted after all this time, and that related bug reports are summarily locked because "fixed in beta", when said "fix" is quite obviously incomplete and untested.
And "I don't have linux / linux tester"? Really? The game is advertised and sold as supporting linux, yet nobody actually installs said (free and readily available) OS for testing? If that's what counts as "support" these days, the mind boggles.

GNU/Linux is free, dual-boot is easy, and VMs are even easier... Lame excuses for lack of QA testing are just lame.

"It is being looked into" from a year ago is not acceptable towards the players who bought a linux-compatible game, and then got the compatibility removed due to Ludeon refusing to fix bugs that they introduced during updated.

Indeed.
Latest news I can find is is: "Fixed in steam unstable branch" *thread locked* ...And yet it's still not actually fixed, because apparently testing is hard. What a joke.



This is pathetic Ludeon, absolutely pathetic. Wake me up when you fix your regressions, I might even be willing to pay money for your game.
Until then I'm avoiding anything made with Unity, as in my experience it's just shorthand for "Too cheap to use a real game engine, can't be bothered with testing or performance profiling, thinks supporting a new platform means clicking "build" and hoping for the best."

When you got so many problems with Rimworld maybe ask others how its work with them.

The primary problem that is bothering me at the moment has been reported repeatedly, and the relevant threads are now locked.

Asking "others how its work with them" [sic] is kinda pointless when said threads already contain all the "me too" posts one would ever need, as well as gems like "I can't really consider the Linux version playable while this bug is around"... With which I fully agree.

As this problem has apparently existed since before the 1.3 release and nobody has so far mentioned any kind of workaround beyond "run the windows build", perhaps you would be so helpful as to do that instead of linking irrelevant things I am already well aware of?

Aside, this is almost certainly not a Unity bug (insofar as none of the many other unity games I own exhibit it), and it's not a distro specific problem either. So again, what relevance has that "What Linux distributions will run Rimworld" thread?

1. What Linux distributions will run Rimworld? I've read most of the requirements are Unity-engine-based and that requires a particular window manager (GNOME, IIRC) and I do like to keep to some kind of major distribution. Currently using Puppy Linux so yes I claim to know how to use Linux.

Pretty much any, so long as it isn't too exotic. You'd probably have drama if you tried to run it on something that doesn't use glibc, for example, but that's well outside the realms of "mainstream" distros.
Window manager (or DE) shouldn't really make any difference at all. I've run unity games fine with Kwin, XFCE, TWM, and even bare X11 with no window manager at all. The only time it might make a difference is if your WM uses OpenGL compositing and it impacts performance, but AFAIK that problem is pretty much a thing of the past.

I can personally attest that Unity games run fine on Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu & Debian. I expect any other relatively well-established distro would be the same. Push comes to shove, library version problems (e.g. really old distro releases) can usually be worked around using steam-runtime (no, you don't actually need steam to steal bits of it ) anyway.
You may run into issues with certain older unity versions if your distro doesn't include pulseaudio, but that's a unity bug, and one that Rimworld doesn't (currently) suffer from.
FWIW, I'm currently running Rimworld (GOG release) on Gentoo/X11/Kwin/ALSA. Apart from the known mouse-jank, it runs pretty much like any other unity game.

I just bought this game and both expansions (a steepish price for an indie it was too), and while the concept looks great, the first impression and general presentation quality so far is not. Specifically, and encountered immediately in a cursory playtest:

a) Sliders (and other UI elements) are almost unusable, presumably due to this unfixed and now multiple-update old bug. It has been reported several times, with no action beyond "forwarded to the devs".
Where is the dev commentary? What's the timeline here, and what release is the fix tagged for?

b) Performance generally blows, and the game is full of the infamous Unity GC stutter - particularly when panning the map.
Having played (aka suffered through) several other unity titles, I am no stranger to this problem... I'm also not going to accept "unity problem, wontfix", as there are by now well understood means to mitigate the issue.
Fixing this may entail rewriting various methods to reduce garbage production, but that's just the price of a game that doesn't run like crap and feel like an unoptimised pre-release.

So, here's my dilemma: Are either of these going to be fixed in a reasonable timeframe (particularly the cursor tracking), or am I just going to use my refund window and play something that's not built on Unity3D?
The clock is ticking, and I'm not so invested in this game that I couldn't just walk away now. Walk away is exactly what I'm going to do though, if there's going to be no real support for the GNU/Linux build and bugs as infuriating as the one I linked above are to be ignored for multiple updates.

I await, with bated breath, your assurance that this is a game where bugs and performance problems actually get fixed (again, experience concerning unity-based titles), and your encouragement to stick with it, as surely I'll only have to deal with broken mouse input a little longer... Surely.

Sounds like it's a Unity bug. To my knowledge, that means Tynan won't be able to fix it within RimWorld.

I'm pretty sure it is a Unity bug, and one that has already been fixed. The solution is to upgrade to >=5.4.
I would love to actually buy this game (rather than the unofficial "trial" found on the interwebs), as it looks pretty cool. Since no sound without pulseaudio, guess I'll just delete it instead.

Is this the first time you're trying RimWorld, or has sound worked in the past?

First run.

Have you tested any other Unity games?

Yes, at least two other games I have tested exhibit similar problems. Common factor is Unity version 5.0<<5.4.

What version of RimWorld are you running? Also, Steam or DRM-free?

A15, no steam.

Probably related to this bug.

Hiding libpulse-simple.so from the game at runtime (prevents crashes in bug linked, Unity should fall back to ALSA) does not appear to work here, no crash, but still no sound. This method worked perfectly (with sound) for Kerbal Space Program when it was running 5.3.

I will not run pulseaudio just for Unity, unless you can suggest a method where it will not interfere with my desktop (KDE) or other applications seeing raw ALSA devices, as I have a complex audio route defined there.

No audio whatsoever in game. Log attached.

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