14 DAY TRIAL // The makers of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition from CD Project Red have made the game available on Steam for Linux, but they used a Wine-like wrapper to do the job. A native port is now in the works and that means more people will be able to play it.
Linux users were very upset when they found out that the The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition port was not a native one. The studio commissioned the guys from Virtual Programming to take care of the port, but the players were not satisfied with their work.
The main problem is that the game is not actually ported and it's actually the Windows version forced to work in a Linux environment. This is how Wine works and this is how the wrapper from Virtual Programming did the job with the game. One issue stands above all.
The performance of the games that run with a wrapper is always affected and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is a very demanding title. It runs on high-end PCs on the Windows platform, so it's understandable that very few people with Linux machines were actually able to play it, not to mention the fact that it “hated” AMD GPUs.
CD Project Red couldn't let things deteriorate any further with the community, so now, the guys from Virtual Programming are working on a native port. It's still in the beta stages and there is still a lot of work to do, but some progress is being made.
“Added a new sound backend - using openal-soft instead of SDL's audio. We've had better performance out of this with FMOD, so we added it here to see if it improves the sound situation. Note that this now means the 'Audio' option in the configuration options no longer functions, and openal-soft will use an .alsoftrc if you have one. If you have any audio problems, and have a custom .alsoftrc, please attach it to any bug reports. We're still finding out what's going on with the game and AMD cards being a lot slower than it should be.. please bear with us!” reads the announcement.
According to the changelog, the shader compilation has been optimized to link OpenGL programs in waves instead of one by one, some memory barrier commands from the OpenGL command queue have been optimized, and better reporting of missing extensions in game log has been implemented.
More details about this release can be found on GitHub.