Republic of Folk

As you might or might not have heard, (or might even have noticed in your library!), Arma 3 has been partially ported to Linux. Now Bohemia hinted at this a few months ago, and I was quite excited since then. Actually, I expected this to happen sometime this winter so what a surprise...

So, this thread is where our brave party scientists will meet to discuss how great it is to be able to use ArmA without the capitalists that own Microsoft monitoring our battle tactics in preparation for the final battle.

As we speak ARMA is installing for me. I'll have to see what kind of performance I get out of it, but here's what we know from bohemia:
- They claim a 5-10% performance hit. Not bad.
- No battleye, if my understanding is correct there never will be because battleye uses the windows kernel to verify your game
- No rotorlib (which is odd since a reddit user pointed out rotorlib supports Linux)
- No launcher
- Some workshop content may require an extra step from creators to make it work on best OS

Not a bad deal!

I use Linux as my primary OS, and have been quite excited about this as Arma is the only reason I have been booting back into windows as of late. Unfortunately the linux version is the slightly older version, 1.42, so I think this makes it incompatible with current servers.

Anyway, I downloaded and tried to run it, but it claimed my drivers do not have support for OpenGL 4.1 and failed to launch. I'm using the closed source Nvidia drivers, and haven't had issues with any other games on linux. I'll have to research this some more and find out what is going on...

Update, I have the same problem. When I get time I need to set up the proprietary AMD drivers (I've always used the open ones because they were good enough.) hoping it goes away once I get around to that though.

I got it working! Well actually I just rebooted and it worked. Probably just a new video driver that had to be loaded.

Everything worked out of the box pretty much. It doesn't like dual monitors when in fullscreen mode or running in a window(didn't capture the mouse), so I had to temporarily disable one monitor. Performance was excellent, being very similar to what I get on windows. 40+ fps in single player, with Very High settings at 2560x1440 on a GTX 780. There may be a tiny bit of stuttering, although Arma's engine is clunky anyway so it was hard to tell. (More testing required!)

Of course it is the older 1.42 version, so I was unable to join any real servers for proper testing. I did join an empty server with 20-30 AI running around and was getting 30-40 fps.

So yeah, this is really cool. While I will still have to boot back into windows for any proper gameplay, I can test out weapons or practice flying right here in linux. Maybe one day the linux version will be the same as the windows version, although Bohemia has not made any promises there.