The Ubuntu Summit 2024 has been and gone, and with it we had a lot of good talks but with our focus on here with gaming there's two that stand out that you may wish to have a look at. Currently the talks haven't been split up so they're across three big livestreams.
On Day 2 there was a presentation from Paweł Lidwin of the Heroic Games Launcher project, a cross-platform free and open source launcher for Epic Games, GOG and Amazon Prime Games. The talk gives a brief overview on what they've been working on like UWP/WinRT in Wine, Comet for GOG multiplayer features and more. But Lidwin also does a quick little sneak peek intro on a new project called Maxima Launcher, an open source replacement for EA Desktop / Origin that will eventually get Heroic integration too.
Skip to 8:43:32 for the Heroic talk:
Direct Link
Then on Day 3 we had a presentation from Thomas Crider, also known as GloriousEggroll, who made GE-Proton (originally called Proton-GE) on the creation of UMU the unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It's a nice overview for people confused on how UMU works and what it's actually for. The talk goes over how Steam actually runs games on Linux, and how UMU deals with running Proton outside of Steam along with the UMU Database that has a bunch of game-specific tweaks to run them properly.
For this one skip to 1:03:34:
Direct Link
All the details can be found on the summit page.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Well, as interesting as getting EA games running on Linux can be. They are working hard on making them unavailable for us with their EA Anti Cheat solution. Currently I can still enjoy Star Wars: Squadrons and Titanfall (1+2 Servers for MP are working again) on Linux, even on Deck. I used to play the Plants vs Zombies games with my little one, no more since their Anti Cheat. I guess Valve is in talks with them already and I hope they can find a solution to make it available in general, like EAC and BattlEye and then the devs also cooperate to enable it, if not working ootb for Linux/Proton.
I felt good the other day when I sent a few emails and got the yard work done. lol.
Shorter videos coming soon.
First time I hear of Maxima. Interesting!
Well, as interesting as getting EA games running on Linux can be. They are working hard on making them unavailable for us with their EA Anti Cheat solution. Currently I can still enjoy Star Wars: Squadrons and Titanfall (1+2 Servers for MP are working again) on Linux, even on Deck. I used to play the Plants vs Zombies games with my little one, no more since their Anti Cheat. I guess Valve is in talks with them already and I hope they can find a solution to make it available in general, like EAC and BattlEye and then the devs also cooperate to enable it, if not working ootb for Linux/Proton.
I'm cautiously optimistic on that front. Unless Valve specifically come up with a drastically different approach to anti-cheat on Linux, we will only have userspace solutions. While this will turn off developers of "highly competitive games", most EA games don't really apply to this label.
So, I'm somewhat hopeful that they might do this at some point if market share keeps rising. Fingers crossed.
This AntiCheat business is annoying but the work still makes a nice and fast launcher possible for Windows users as a side-effect.
Hopefully we will see Maxima in action soon as the same developers work on a private server launcher for Starwars Battlefront 2 and that release has been postponed a few times :)
Man I don't know how on earth Crider does it. Not only is he innovating in a space that's seeing crazy fast development, but he's also maintaining an ENTIRE distro (basically himself?), doing new releases for GE constantly all the time, and now forming new coops and launching totally new tech. All while doing his day job at red hat. Damn.
I felt good the other day when I sent a few emails and got the yard work done. lol.
You absolutely deserve to feel good about that! We easily talk about lacking resources like time or money to do something, but we are sorely lacking in language habits related to talking about the equally or more critical mental resources we might not possess (temporarily or permanently) - among others:
- motivation,
- energy,
- capacity to focus,
- stress buffer,
- severe lack of stimulation,
- severe lack of joy,
- severe lack of social connectedness
And why Crider can manage what we don't? I believe he is lucky in the categories that matter in software development and activism. Which might or might not come at the expense of some other categories. In my country, we have an old related saying (to someone who lost a game): "One who is not lucky in games is lucky in love"
Last edited by chr on 29 October 2024 at 11:21 pm UTC
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