Over the past 4 months I’ve been addicted to Eve Online. My recent foray into the game has been far more exciting due to the fact that I’m out in 0.0 space, and not hanging around Empire with the rest of the pubbies.

Today CCP in conjunction with Transgaming (creators of cedega and cider) released both a Linux and a Mac client for Eve. I was running Eve under cedega, and eventually wine for quite awhile so I was eager to give out the new “native” (not really native) Linux client a try.

Basically what they did is wrap the windows client up in Cider for the Mac, and cedega for Linux. This may sound horrible at first, but Transgaming has been working with CCP for quite awhile, and the performance between windows and Linux seems to differ very little. I was impressed when I loaded into the game and was getting my standard 55fps. about the same FPS I was getting in windows.

I haven’t tried any major fleet battles, but I’m going to go ahead and assume it definitely won’t be any better than windows in that aspect.

There were a few issues that I ran into, however. The primary problem was that I was forced to run the game in full screen mode. Now, I primarily switch back and forth between Eve and whatever work I’m doing throughout the day. Being unable to run in windowed mode makes this task impossible. Fortunately the Eve community has quite a few Linux geeks, and they seem to have found a workaround for it. You can set up windowed mode in the “Eve Online Configuration” program.

For those of us using Gentoo, the icons don’t get installed automagically for us, therefore it’s done quite simply by typing:

/path/to/eve -config

The second problem I had was with the audio. It would cut out from time to time. This may indicate an issue with my audio drivers in Gentoo however, and may not be game related at all.

All in all, I was quite impressed with the Linux Client. Both CCP and Transgaming seem to have done a good job thus far.

Edit: Eve Online can be downloaded here