Here's a bit of interesting industry news for you on this fine Monday afternoon. Alen Ladavac, who helped to co-found the Serious Sam and Talos Principle developer Croteam has moved onto game streaming.
Announcing their change on Twitter, which links to a post on LinkedIn, Ladavac wrote about how they were making games since the age of the Floppy disk but they're moving on:
[…] With a heavy heart, I've parted ways with my dear friends and colleagues at Croteam. I love you all, guys and girls, and I will never forget all the beautiful years I spent with you and fantastic things we've created. I'm super excited to announce that I'm starting at Google München, joining the awesome Stadia team to work on finally bringing gaming into the cloud. What was once deemed impossible, now is the reality - and I'm grateful for a chance to contribute to this landmark undertaking.
Considering their experience shipping games, along with helping to get games updated with Vulkan it's not a hugely surprising move. Probably a bit of a blow to Croteam though, as they're working on Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass which has no current release date set.
In other related Stadia news, Red Dead Redemption 2 has been confirmed at launch now as well. This is a huge bit of news, as it was previously only speculated that it was coming to PC but it's now confirmed for Stadia (as well as Steam for Windows).
Stadia is set to launch in November 2019, for those who put some cash up front to get the Stadia Founder's Edition. However, this edition is sold out in certain regions, with it being replaced with a Premier Edition which includes a plain White gamepad instead of the special Night Blue version.
It will be interesting to see how Stadia can capture the market. Especially since the software stack is using Debian Linux, the Vulkan API and it will work on any computer that can access a Chrome browser. Compared to other solutions which require another dedicated application, the barrier for entry at least when talking software is low. This will open up a lot more AAA gaming to be played on Linux, which is why we're keeping a close eye on it.
A hot topic though, considering how it's basically the ultimate form of gaming DRM. You don't technically own anything, the game never really touches your PC and you need to be online to play anything. Input latency and bandwidth use are big issues for some too. We've secured a copy of the Stadia Founder's Edition to cover sometime around the release for GamingOnLinux, let's wait and see if it can win us over.
Will you be trying it out? We've also opened a new dedicated forum for all game streaming topics including Stadia, Steam Remote Play and anything else.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: mphuZQuoting: ShmerlAnother detail was clarified, Stadia is using amdvlk.
Source?
The fact that AMD GPU profiler only works with amdvlk and not radv, and they advertised it as one of the major tools to use with Stadia.
See: https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2019-03-19-amd-radeon-gpus-and-developer-tools-tapped-for-google-stadia-game
The only thing stadia might help Linux games is forcing developers to get familiarized with Vulkan and to not use Microsoft media foundation (Presuming that stadia won't fail either).
About the topic: I think Croteam are the best company for developing linux "AAA games" because I didn't see another company with so much tecnichal knoledge with Linux native games development, so I think Google did a good choice hiring him.
Too bad I don't like Croteam games because they're too repetitive in my opinion.
Quoting: ShmerlI.e. as the first outcome, we might see more developers using Vulkan on Windows due to them already using it for Stadia.
That is why it is so important that developers use AMDVLK instead of RADV.
Quoting: ShabbyXIronically, the disadvantage of Linux with Stadia is that chrome doesn't support hardware acceleration in video decoding, so Linux will have a (slightly) higher latency than windows...What's the latest on this, I'm a bit out of touch since I use Firefox.
So this makes me skeptical of pay-per-month streaming beyond the technical issues... Especially as my decreasing amount of free time shifts the financial advantage in favour of buying over flat rates.
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: ShabbyXIronically, the disadvantage of Linux with Stadia is that chrome doesn't support hardware acceleration in video decoding, so Linux will have a (slightly) higher latency than windows...What's the latest on this, I'm a bit out of touch since I use Firefox.
The latest is what I just said? Firefox doesn't support it either FYI. They will both use software decoding which will add another few milliseconds of delay.
If anyone is interested in adding this support to chrome, I can try to maintain it going forward. Add me as reviewer (syoussefi, chromium, org) and I'll try to push for it.
Kimyrielle Oct 7, 2019
Quoting: mphuZQuoting: ShmerlI.e. as the first outcome, we might see more developers using Vulkan on Windows due to them already using it for Stadia.
That is why it is so important that developers use AMDVLK instead of RADV.
Why is it important? Games shouldn't rely on something so specific most of the time.
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