Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 19:54 UTC (Tue) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

http://www.humblebundle.com

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 20:22 UTC (Tue) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (7 responses)

And (so far) the average price paid by the Linux users is way ahead of both the Mac and Windows camps. Again.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 21:11 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

That's simple economics. Games are scarcer on Linux, thus their value is higher.

(Sure, maybe it's a sign of innately higher moral standing on our part as well -- or perhaps it's just that the money is going to a worthy charity, to the EFF, and to a bunch of indie developers... and a lot of us are developers ourselves. People are always happy to pay other people like themselves.)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 21:47 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (5 responses)

The next step is where vendors realize there's an untapped market and supply increases. Maybe someday.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 15:42 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (4 responses)

Hmm, Grand Theft Auto IV was developed for ~100 million USD - the one million USD is not really a market for this type of software...

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:37 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Keep in mind the amount paid is decided by the purchaser, this significantly skews the numbers. Also the games being sold, indie games, typically have much smaller budgets and development costs. The statements at the time of the original offer were that a couple of the developers made more on the original humble bundle offer than they did selling the game through the normal channels. One million might not be significant for a major console game but for some of these indie games it's like the developer winning the lottery.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:49 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

how much of that money was spent on the artwork and gameplay design and tuning that would be re-used on a linux port vs the amount spent on windows specific code that would have to be replaced?

and of that amount spent on the windows specific code, how much savings would there be by planning for cross-platform portability to begin with vs going in after the fact and re-coding things?

Small correction...

Posted Dec 17, 2010 9:14 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

and of that amount spent on the windows specific code, how much savings would there be by planning for cross-platform portability to begin with vs going in after the fact and re-coding things?

90% of contemporary games are planned for "cross-platform portability". Including GTA4, of course. You should thank surprising non-ally of FOSS: SONY. It's "battered and miserable #3" in current generation of consoles, yet it still sold 41.6 million of PlayStation3 (vs "successful #2 XBox360" with 44.6 million) so game developers can not ignore it.

Yet another case where Microsoft was unable to successfully exercise it's Windows monopoly to gain monopoly in adjacent market. The initial plan was to make sure games are easily portable between XBox and Windows, but not portable to other platforms... but runways success of PlayStation2 made this plan impossibility and neck-to-neck competition between PlayStation3 and XBox360 created window-of-opportunity for cross-platfrom games... too bad Linux was unable to seize said opportunity.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 18:23 UTC (Thu) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]

GTA IV is the most expensive game developed to date. It is hardly a fair standard by which to judge the model in question.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 22:38 UTC (Tue) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm downloading the games as I type.
It makes a great gift, even if you're not a gamer, even if your friends don't use Linux.
As most full price games nowadays are just the same old kill-everything multiplayer gore fests, it's refreshing to see indie developers addressing what makes games great: addictiveness and playability.
Vote with your credit card people! Let's support those that support us.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 17, 2010 8:56 UTC (Fri) by albertoafn (guest, #64225) [Link]

I have bought the 2 bundles, and I have to say Machinarium is a fine piece of art. It is worth alone the 10$ I paid (im poor) and much more.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 1:17 UTC (Wed) by merge (subscriber, #65339) [Link] (12 responses)

The game "Braid" of this bundle won't run on a Intel GMA chip. I can't start it, see http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4825

Intel GMA is below spec on windows. I hoped I could at least try it on Linux somehow.

All in all, it's a great bundle again!

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 2:15 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (8 responses)

Won't work on (even bleeding-edge) Radeon/KMS/DRM drivers either. I've come to expect Linux games to require proprietary drivers.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 15:20 UTC (Wed) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link] (7 responses)

Braid is working fine with the free radeon drivers.

Sure, you might need to enable some workarounds (not sure why somebody knowledgeable like icculus didn't provide a better error message?) and drivers do have bugs (just like their proprietary counterparts) but saying that games for Linux doesn't work with free drivers just isn't true.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 18:54 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

It totally fails for me on my 4870. Without force_s3tc_enable on, it simply won't start: with it turned on, I get a slightly-scrambled-looking startup screen, then a black screen with a flash of garbage at the top (looking oddly like someone had tried to emit tiled data on an untiled display, though I doubt that's what actually happens), then signal is permanently lost and braid becomes nonresponsive to anything but kill -9. This is with Mesa 7.9 and xf86-video-ati 6.13.2, which is hardly old by any standards.

The bug for this is also full of Intel and even nvidia proprietary driver users all complaining that it fails due to lack of s3tc support.

I don't know what on earth they tested it on, but it can't be a common card.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 20:52 UTC (Wed) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link] (3 responses)

The 4870 is an r700 card, that driver is still very much a work in progress.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:15 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

For a work in progress it's bloody effective. This is the first rendering bug I have *ever* had with it. Everything else I have ever tried has worked, modulo a few suspend/resume problems. 3D works, shaders work, you name it.

(Also: most development effort nowadays is going into evergreen-and-up, isn't it? I hardly see any r6xx/r7xx-specific commits anymore which don't relate to connector hookups for specific strange configurations.)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:55 UTC (Wed) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm still using an r300 card, it's (as far as I know) the most complete and worked upon of the radeon drivers.

There's quite a lot of work done on r600g - the Gallium 3D driver for r600 and up (including Evergreen I think?).

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 23:23 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ah, yes, Gallium. I keep forgetting about it, uh, because I don't use it. The non-Gallium driver isn't seeing much work, but then I suppose that is only to be expected. My bad (as is my grammar there).

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:24 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

As expected, Ryan is being very helpful in this area, considering workarounds and so on. The icculus crew are known Smart Nice Guys, so I expect good results here even for those of us without s3tc support.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 11:12 UTC (Thu) by makomk (guest, #51493) [Link]

The only workaround that worked for me on my Radeon 4650 with the free drivers was abandoning the Linux release of Braid and just running the Windows version under Wine. (I also had to disable post-processing shaders and force the frame rate to 30fps because the r600 driver isn't fast enough to run at the 60fps the game was trying for, but at least it didn't lock up my GPU at any point.)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 6:09 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

Just noting here that some clever users with ltrace figured out how to work around that problem; the missing extension can be enabled with driconf.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 11:34 UTC (Wed) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link] (1 responses)

Can you provide a link to something that explains the process?

Ta!

Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 12:11 UTC (Wed) by khautio (guest, #15225) [Link]

Install and run driconf

In "Image Quality" enable "S3TC Texture".

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:21 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

As for Cortex Command, the 64-bit version doesn't work and crashes on startup due to a lethal typo. Nice testing!

<http://forums.datarealms.com/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=20590>

This Bundle is looking less and less impressive to me by the minute. Two down as unplayable, one I already owned (Osmos) and would be awesome but uses a font which is broken by a recent FreeType security update without a font fix (which has not been provided despite the passage of two months, so I'm LD_LIBRARY_PATHing in the old FreeType), two to go...

(Cortex Command's half-written work-in-progress status was also not made clear at purchase time. Sigh.)

(One would wonder why games haven't taken off in the Linux world, but with a >50% failure rate, I'm not at all surprised anymore.)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:02 UTC (Wed) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link] (2 responses)

There was a problem with 64-bit (but only on Intel system) discovered during the beta of CC. I'm not sure if it's the same problem you're having, but if so it's more subtle than a mere typo.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 9:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Hang on. It works on AMD x86-64 but fails on Intel x86-64?!

That takes talent :)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 11:14 UTC (Thu) by makomk (guest, #51493) [Link]

Nope, it just takes incorrectly using memcpy when you should've used memmove under the correct circumstances. Well, that's what the rumour mill says anyway.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 22:05 UTC (Thu) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link] (1 responses)

Wouldn't it be easier to just replace the font instead? At least that's what I did, works like a charm.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 22:43 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yeah, but the font's quite nice, and the game looks so beautiful I didn't want to change the look of it. :)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (15 responses)

Machinarium needs a 32-bit version of Mozilla!!! (And, of course, Mozilla drags in the entire known universe as dependencies.)

Dear holy crap, were these people *trying* to make these games unplayable by anyone on a 64-bit box?

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:30 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I tried installing a 32-bit Mozilla. Instant crash, probably because it's the wrong version of Mozilla and their shared libraries aren't versioned.

I can't tell what versions are needed, because Machinarium's website appears to be totally Flash-based, and there isn't a working Flash for 64-bit Linux yet as far as I can tell.

One out of three and counting, and that one by forcing the use of a version of freetype with known security holes.

This is bloody awful.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 22:07 UTC (Thu) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link]

There is a beta version of Flash 10.2 which works on 64-bit, though some websites claim that my Flash version is too old when using it.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:32 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (12 responses)

False alarm, sorry. It needs 32-bit versions of NSS and NSPR, which of course are not installed on all distros by default (though I suppose Fedora has them by default so it probably works for most people).

But of course this is not documented anywhere non-Flash-capable people can see.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:59 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (11 responses)

Not that that helps. Install everything, and it dumps core with no stack trace (why bother shipping debugging info with a not-yet-fully-working program? That would never be useful!)

I'm sick of this. What a waste of money.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 20:04 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (10 responses)

This may not be Machinarium's fault. Gtk and Pango are... not very biarch-friendly: they read text files in /etc with an arch-independent name to determine the location of various arch-dependent plugins, and then coredump if these plugings are not found. So you can't install 32- and 64-bit versions of Gtk or Pango at the same time without patching around this (perhaps by introducing an arch-dependent filename), and my distro didn't. Sigh.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:13 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (9 responses)

That didn't help, but an strace reveals that Machinarium dlopen()s a 32-bit libcurl.so.4 and coredumps if it's not found. Installing that lets the game start... but the first thing it does is kick up Flash Player 10, which is not PulseAudio-ready, so blocks solid at once. Killing everything else accessing the sound card 'fixes' that, but still all I get is a black screen.

I've done enough wrestling with insurmountable closed-source obstacles for tonight. I just wanted to waste a few hours playing some silly game, not waste a few hours cursing software :(

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:44 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

> I've done enough wrestling with insurmountable closed-source obstacles for tonight. I just wanted to waste a few hours playing some silly game, not waste a few hours cursing software :(

<Troll>Guess you should've just run the game under windows then</Troll> :)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 14:55 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Say what you like, on Windows the infrastructure for installing inscrutable binary lumps is more robust (mostly because there's a monoculture so everyone can be depended upon to have a limited number of things and they *all* must be shipped everything else).

That's not the reason

Posted Dec 17, 2010 10:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The real reason it works on Windows so well and on Linux so bad is for simple fact that Linux developers are hostile to binary-only releases.

The surprising exceptions are GNU-related projects (GLibC, GTK), but even they are not perfect. Most other projects fell the answer "just recompile with latest headers" is acceptable. It may be acceptable for FOSS (even even there it's painful), but it's totally unacceptable for proprietary software like games.

Backward-compatibility is awful on Linux. The fact that it took literally years to provide decent support for OSS after ALSA introduction speak volumes. In Windows world it's just unthinkable to drop support for old API without providing some kind of emulation!

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:51 UTC (Wed) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link] (5 responses)

It's working fine here, with Flash and PA.

But if you're on 64-bit, I guess you're SOL. The game is basically shipped as a stand-alone (32-bit of course) Flash players.

Supposedly you can play the full game using the .swf from the games website (or extract the swf from the binary) which might mean it could someday work with 64-bit Flash from Adobe, or maybe Gnash, whichever comes first.

(Why otherwise sane game developers would willingly chain themselves to Adobe I don't understand...)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 23:25 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Oh, gods, is it just a giant Flash-based game? A 300Mb+ Flash game?

I guess we are out of luck hoping for it to work on 64-bit then. But, equally, I guess speed and 3D support is hardly of the essence for it either, so it'll probably run under virtualization. I'll try that. (What a kludge!)

64bit flash is tolerable-to-decent now

Posted Dec 16, 2010 2:32 UTC (Thu) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link] (1 responses)

Preview 3 of square, native 64bit, works real nice, fullscreen HD (except under compiz), the kid's games, the works. Booting into XP for comparison you can tell it's still slower but it's getting subtle.

64bit flash is tolerable-to-decent now

Posted Dec 16, 2010 9:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Interesting! Still non-free so rather icky, but we couldn't expect miracles. I'll try it out (though again I don't see how it could get Machinarium working, as that appears to contain its own nonfunctional Flash player).

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 17, 2010 15:59 UTC (Fri) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]

Works just fine for me...

...in a 32-bit chroot on my Debian system.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 23:29 UTC (Wed) by remur_030 (guest, #70979) [Link]

I got it running on openSUSE 11.3 and 64bit system, though some strace was needed to find out which 32-bit libraries are required and I don't use pulse audio.

I don't really know if I want to blame the developers here, they are obviously more into the art of designing a game then writing a solid portable application so they fell for adobe flash =/ Still a great game in the spirit of old times adventures and beautiful paintings!

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 23:34 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

It has been forcibly borne in upon me by everyone who has ever lived that I have been too critical in this thread.

So, plus points: the 32-bit version of Cortex Command is quirky and charming, if still (unsurprisingly) rough around the edges. Osmos is flawlessly beautiful, worthy of an art prize, simple to get used to, very tricky to get good at, yet also very relaxing, the best Linux game since World of Goo, possibly even beating that. IMHO the Bundle is worth it just for those. (When and if I get the others working too, that'll be gravy!)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 14:25 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

Yes, well, the Bundle is very Humble. And with reason.