This was an interesting discussion, but it went off-topic in the other thread about CDPR technical promises. So I open a new discussion here.

Note to moderators - this is not about promoting piracy or justifying any illegal copying. Illegal practices are not acceptable, let's say this explicitly. This is about an important discussion regarding public interests which are affected by intense copyright lobbies around the world, which exploit the logic of "piracy = lost sales" in order to push all kind of copyright extensions, laws like DMCA, SOPA and etc. as well as international trade agreements like ACTA, TPP, TAFTA and etc. which serve the interest of stronger copyright enforcement, at the price of reducing the freedom of speech and dumping the fair use.

This is an argument about essential theoretical basis of these lobbyists. I.e. they claim that piracy = lost sales, however this is not correct, since those who pirate wouldn't necessarily be inclined to buy the same thing if not for pirating. So for the sake of intellectual honesty, one can't use this argument when talking about piracy, especially for pushing copyright maximalism agendas.

Feel free to express your thoughts about it, but I assume we all agree that piracy is bad and that's not about promoting it.

https://developer.nv...0to%20Linux.pdf

Quite a few interesting details for game developers.

Why aren't some threads appear in the "recent topics" list? I.e. when you open http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/ you see recent posts in "Recent Topics Added", but some threads (like this one for example) don't show up there. It's really puzzling - is it a bug or some kind of "feature"?

May be this would be useful to someone who is new to Linux. I usually do this for DosBox games from GOG, but new Linux users might be unfamiliar with the procedure.

I just got a Strike Commander from GOG (http://gog.com/gamec...trike_commander), which is an old DOS game, so in order to play it one would use DosBox. GOG packages DosBox with such DOS games, but targets Windows users. So Linux users would need to perform some manual steps to play it using the native distro's DosBox (there surely is no point in running Windows DosBox through Wine).

1. First, get the package (in my case it was setup_strike_commander_2.0.0.5.exe). You can use the handy Linux GOG downloader for that (https://github.com/lhw/gogdownloader).

2. Unpack it with innoextract (no need to install it with Wine). innoextract 1.4 worked for me (but I had to compile it from source, since current Debian testing still ships 1.2 which produces errors for current GOG packages):

Let's say you saved the package in $HOME/Games/install/gog/strike_commander

cd $HOME/Games/install/gog/strike_commander
innoextract setup_strike_commander_2.0.0.5.exe

3. You'll see app and tmp directories created. You don't need the tmp one, but you can read tmp/GOG_EULA.txt first.

rm -rfv tmp

4. Create the destination directory for the game (let's say $HOME/Games/strike_commander or whatever you choose - change appropriately).

dest_dir=$HOME/Games/strike_commander
mkdir -p $dest_dir

5. Move needed files to the destination directory, and then remove empty source one:

mv -v app/* $dest_dir
rm -rfv app

6. Clear unnecessary stuff from the destination (like the Windows build of DosBox and some dll files which have no use on Linux):

cd $dest_dir
rm -rfv DOSBOX *.dll

7. Now take a look at provided DosBox configuration files. In this case you'll see: dosboxSC.conf and dosboxSC_single.conf. Look inside them - it's worth getting familiar with basic DosBox configuration in general. The first file appears to be general DosBox settings, while the second one is actually for launching the game.

Note that the second file mounts an iso image for the game (SC.dat) as a virtual disk "D", and mounts the game directory as a virtual disk "C". We'll have to modify that to use Linux filesystem syntax (instead of Windows one). So we change mount C ".." to use correct absolute path as well as imgmount d -t iso -fs iso "..\SC.dat". To avoid confusion - it's not about changing C and D, that's internal DosBox (DOS) syntax and it's right. What's changing are native paths that are mounted. Windows uses backslashes: \ while Linux uses slashes: /. Plus adding absolute paths here is helpful for launching the game from some other directory, like with the launcher. You can do this change using some editor, or purely in terminal as follows (useful for some script automation):

sed_subs=`pwd`
sed_subs=${sed_subs//\//\\\/}
sed_subs='s/"\.\./"'$sed_subs'/g'
sed -i $sed_subs dosboxSC_single.conf
sed -i 's/\\SC\.dat/\/SC\.dat/g' dosboxSC_single.conf

8. Now you are basically ready to run the game. If you are in the game directory:

dosbox -conf dosboxSC.conf -conf dosboxSC_single.conf

For convenience, you can create a launcher for your desktop using that command, just use the full path for each config file in that case (I'm leaving this excercise to you). The icon for the game is gfw_high.ico located in the $dest_dir (you can assign it to the launcher to make it nicer). Enjoy!

Since you (CDPR) didn't [yet] express active interest in porting / developing your RedEngine for Linux and subsequently releasing TW3 and Cyberpunk 2077 there (I guess the usual reason is limited resources), what do you think about using crowdfunding to support such development? Linux users will be probably cut off from playing your new titles, because Wine project won't catch up with DirectX 11 support that soon. Making some Kickstarter campaign to get the necessary funds can work quite well since I think a lot of Linux users will be more than interested. Is it realistic, or you think it's not going to work? It would be great to hear your thoughts about it. Community members are free to comment on this idea as well of course.