The Talos Principle going Fusion, Croteam dropping OpenGL & Serious Sam 4 still coming

Does it mean that The Talos Principle will stop working on some hardware?

I have a RadeonHD 7770 and use Mesa (17.3.1). I know that AMDGPU-PRO doesn't handle my GPU and I'm not sure if Mesa handles Vulkan (at all or depending of the GPU model). Any info about this?

While more Serious Sam is always a good thing, what I'm really waiting for is Talos Principle 2. It was my personal GOTY 2014.

I agree with you on that!

There is probably more in the Talos world they could build on, but I also wouldn't mind a different setting if they keep up the good writing and excellent puzzle design.

I didn't think that anything could come close to Portal 2 in that kind of game, but Talos did for me. Not everyone's style though, I understand.

I have touched bases with them many times requesting 16 Player Serious Sam LAN.

I wonder if they will be baking that up? I would die to party playing Serious Sam 4 on 4 TV's with 16 friends in my house. That would be seri0usly killer.

I think that's a supported GPU by radv. So you can Vulkan with "Mesa" (specifically radv, which has been rolled into Mesa).

That would be great but I was wondering if radv really handled more GPUs than AMDGPU-PRO. Is there a list somewhere? Also, are both drivers (radeonsi and radv) loaded concurrently and then switched on the fly depending on the game?

As others have mentioned, Croteam can provide older builds in some form, so Talos should continue to work regardless (though a hoop or two may need jumping through, depending on how it's rolled out).

Sure, they can, but it doesn't mean they will, especially as they're doing this move to stremaline their engine, so they might not want to support an older version alongside the new one.

Ahhh Croteam... Happy Days ahead. Serious Sam 4 will do a great job of filling the Linux "DOOM" void.

Who needs DOOM when we have Serious Sam?

To be honest, I don't think the two are comparable - at all. Not unless everything with a gun and a first person view is interchangeable - and they are not. Serious Sam is rather comparable with Duke Nukem. We don't need Duke with Sam. That I agree with. But Doom? Oh man, how I'd love to see that flagship on our shores.

Serious Sam is even less like Duke Nukem than it is Doom. However Doom 2016 is a hell of a lot like Serious Sam.

Probably best to think of radeonsi as the mesa driver component (userspace) for OpenGL, and radv as the equivalent for Vulkan. It's not a matter of switching on the fly - they're accessed depending if the application wants OpenGL or Vulkan. So radeonsi and radv coexist quite nicely.

Basically, stick with radv, you'll be fine. I don't know of a nicely laid out support matrix, but radv runs on SI parts. Not sure if it's officially conformant for SI, but apparently runs.

Ok, but I am wondering if I have to install anything, setup anything (currently, I have a tailored xorg.conf which loads the "radeon" driver) and so on, or if I just have to launch a Vulkan game and it'll work straight away.

I'm not exactly in a hurry as I don't think I have games that use Vulkan (Dota 2 maybe?) but I may as well start gathering information on this now. :)

I love the Vulkan support, but I'm not too sure about dropping OpenGL and DX11 support for a 3 year old game. What about all the people on older hardware who have already bought a copy?

This is another one of those times when Steam's nature as a DRM platform rears its ugly head.

They can stick older versions into opt-in betas, it's what a lot of Steam developers do.

This is imo bad choice. I still use GPU without Vulkan support and for playing my games I don't want buying anything new -because this GPU can handle all games from my steam library, and playing in outdated game version without new stuff - this feels like abandoning users.

So if they release new games in future I'll think about it several times before I decide buy it. Because I think I can not trust them anymore. So if they release new game maybe after half year they abandon also Linux support? Nobody know...

So In my opinion this is like:

I am buying a new car. Pay the full amount. They promise me technical support and repair for free for 5 years.
After 2 years, they inform me that they are dropping the support of diesel cars (like mine), and they only support new hybrids. So the end of support for me. So this is a nasty situation for the user like now with TTP...

So as I say, they lost my trust.

I _think_ it will just work for you. You could try it right now, but it depends if your chosen distro provides mesa with radv included (and up to date). Others can help more there to make sure - I'm not familiar working with Mate.

Ubuntu MATE 17.10 with Padoka's PPA for Mesa stable. All I know is that Mesa is up to date (well, stable version, not GIT, though there are other PPAs for the dev version but I'd rather stick with this one), I have no idea if it includes Radv; if someone knows...

If you have Talos, that has an option to start with Vulkan right now. Dota2 supposedly (I don't play it). Some Feral games as well.

Yeah, I'll try to reinstall Talos and Dota 2 to check that. Thanks.

Its interesting how Dx12 is already running faster than Vulkan on this game.

Also, their opengl implementation was old and not properly maintained, no reason to have it around.


Last edited by edo on 6 January 2018 at 12:10 am UTC

I can't even play Serious Sam Fusion. Had problems with it freezing up my whole computer, and now I tried it again and it froze up for a bit but then I could alt+tab out and it was just a black screen.

Try to disable Steam overlay.

Serious Sam is even less like Duke Nukem than it is Doom. However Doom 2016 is a hell of a lot like Serious Sam.

Really? The silly/stupid/funny (depending on perspective) enemies, over-the-top "story", the attitude of your character, the sunny locations, the trashy style... You don't see this as similar to Nukem at all?

I've not played the latest Doom, but if they've turned it into something similar then they've really, really fallen from grace with that entry. That would be like GTA turning into Saints Row.

(I love Saints Row btw - but man, GTA is a league of its own).


Last edited by Beamboom on 6 January 2018 at 8:56 pm UTC

While I do not care a lot for shooters lately, it's cool Sam4 is coming (and I'll be buying anyway).

I hope they decide to make another puzzle game though :-)

Correct, besides the fact that is has one liners the gameplay is pretty much completely dissimilar to Duke Nukem 3D.

I finally started replaying BFE with Vulkan enabled today and the performance gains for me are spectacular on my old hardware. I guess that's the true power of Vulkan when it's given proper attention rather than treated as a secondary API.
Can't wait for SS4

I've been having The Talos Principal setting in my wishlist forever. I'm gonna try to grab it on the next Steam sale.

It's -80% on Steam until the 15th of January.

I've been having The Talos Principal setting in my wishlist forever. I'm gonna try to grab it on the next Steam sale.

It's -80% on Steam until the 15th of January.

I know. But I'm broke for the rest of this month thanks to the plumbers when we had frozen pipes. I'm sadly gonna have to wait on it.

I know the feeling. My wishlist is endless for a reason.

The game definitely deserves to be played though. If you enjoy puzzles and/or philosophy, you will most likely get a lot out of the game.

I heard Microsoft forces developers to use mandatory DX12 for XOne.

I heard Microsoft forces developers to use mandatory DX12 for XOne.

Same as Sony forces to use their lock-in for PS. Add Apple to the same garbage behavior.

I heard Microsoft forces developers to use mandatory DX12 for XOne.

you can use dx11 on xbox 11 but croteam are low-level apis lovers so they went the dx12 way expecting to deprecate dx11 on their engine soon (and opengl)