News - Desura

For our Linux users out there who have helped us with our beta over the past 2 months, thanks. We have recieved thousand of emails of support, many willing to goto great lengths to help us harden Desura on Linux. Whilst we have a long way to go, today we take a big step by officially ending the beta and unlocking the client for all Linux gamers. For those new to Desura what we are releasing today is an application which makes it easy to install, patch and play games on all Linux and Windows distributions.

Here are a few comments from our press release:

"Our company has actively supported Linux for 6 years now. When developing UNIGINE 3D engine, we have often pushed hardware vendors to bring the newest 3D graphics features to this platform." said Denis Shergin CEO of Unigine Corp, maker of Oil Rush.

"... this is the best proof of our strong faith in the successful future of the platform. Being a game developer, we see Desura as the most viable game delivery system that covers the full range of Linux distributions right now. What's even more important, it features comfortable updates for end users. I'm excited to see this long-awaited public release since I believe it is the major step forward for Linux gaming" said Shergin.

"Linux users were continually reaching out to us offering their support and encouragement as we developed the Linux client. I believe we have created a robust tool to help promote and grow gaming on Linux. After an extensive 2 month beta, we are proud to unlock Desura for all Linux users and shift our attention towards adding to the more than 65 Linux games already offered." said Scott Reismanis the Founder of Desura.

Now we look forward to refining the client (currently in discussions to GPL the code in a manner similar to Google Chrome / Chrominium) and expanding our catalog of Linux games which presently includes 65 titles. We also have a few Linux games on sale, to celebrate the launch including the Hacker series from Exosyphen, A Typical RPG from Pyrodactyl and Steel Storm from Kot in Action. Thanks for your ongoing support Linux gamers!

Four great games, one crazy low price, all available on Steam, Desura and direct download. Indie Royale is a new indie games deal site inspired by the awesome HiB (run by us! in partnership with indiegames.com). In this bundle we have Fate of the World, a tough and extremely addictive strategy game from Red Redemption that asks you to save the entire world from crisis. We have NightSky, a fantastic arcade puzzler from Nicalis and a past IGF Seamus McNally Grand Prize finalist.

Next up is Scoregasm from Charlie's Games, a brilliant space shooter that will get you a little hot under the collar with its hordes of bullets, enemies and explosions. Finally, we have the Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! adventure game combo, both from Size Five Games. That's right - this bundle has 5 games in it, rather than 4!

That's over $40 worth of games we've got for you right there, and we recently added all DLC for Fate of the World and two bonus games from Charlie. To grab it, Indie Royale is the place to do so.

So the *first* major change affecting the Linux client is here, and it concerns how we handle a games dependencies. The old method had each library included with the content, which as you can imagine is problematic when a library is missing. It also causes conflicts when the same library is already on the system. 

The new method allows easy selection of libraries from the administration panel and the client handles these in a much smarter manner. It first scans your system to make sure that you don't already have the library and if its missing it downloads and sets the library up for the game. 

This new method also allows better handling of dependences like Java, Mono and Air which comes with a improved prompt that offers help if they are missing.

Another feature that was requested was the ability to set a different binary to launch games via and this has now been added to settings along with an option to add global launch arguments.

The issue with forms not being tall enough to press the buttons should be fixed along with Desura not saving relative paths so you are free to move Desura around where ever you please.

Due to the massive changes in the way games work some games might not work correctly as we are still in the process of testing them all and as always please report bugs on the forums. This change will also mean you are prompted to restart the client after the next auto-update.

Opps we done goofed!

Last night we pushed a new update to the start script and bootloader, this is one of the most frightful things you can do since it is easy to break leaving the users stranded with a broken build... Which we did, linking the wrong libs on 64 bit platforms which a lot of users have reported this morning and the worst part is that Desura cannot update itself to fix the issue.

We solved the issue however...

A build has just been pushed that should fix the bug and get Desura working again but you will have to manually update Desura by using the force update shortcut in the menu or by running Desura with the -f argument.

Over the next couple of days we are also updating games to use a different method of including the libraries that they need to avoid conflicts with system libraries and allow quicker fixes for missing libraries on some platforms. This might cause some issues with games not working but like always please report bugs and issues on the forums.