Latest 30 Comments

Age verification should be illegal. This world has gone crazy. The ruling cast is infested by predators.

The world has gone crazy, but with those statements, you fit right in!

Maybe step outside a little, take a walk, take a few breaths.
Less tinfoil, more nature.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Purple Library Guy ... huh, I didn't think of the font stuff. And he does a lot of document work currently in office365. Thankfully, the company he freelances for the most has already told everyone they're ending their subscriptions to o365 at the end of the year and they expect everyone to use LibreOffice from then on out and whatever file syncing/sharing service they want. So he was already planning on moving off of office, BUT that is a really good point on fonts. Damn. Thank you though for mentioning it because now I can get in front of that problem!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The problem is not specifically Linux users cheating, it’s Linux being a platform repeatedly abused by cheat makers to run them. So it makes Linux an easy target to just block. Low hanging fruit in the fight against cheaters.

Also implementing kernel-level anti-cheat on linux would...

• require skilled linux kernel devs


• require extra maintenance


• not increase sales much


• likely be easier to circumvent due to the kernel being open source

In short it would be a terrible return on investment.

I still have some hope for valve or a government to label kernel level anti-cheats as the terrible security liability they are and ban them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Linux Mint aka a working version of Ubuntu. It fixes most of what is wrong with Ubuntu and is actually quite a nice distro. Glad that they have a backup with the Debian edition... But Debian is already a great distro, so I don't see much of a reason to use this over plain Debian. Always nice to have options though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I played few demos tonight, but most had issues

Best one first:
[Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2643390/Star_Trek_Voyager__Across_the_Unknown/)

I'm not sure if this is actually part of the fest, but as demo is available right now, it doesn't matter that much.

While not perfect, having possibility to diverge a bit from what happens in TV series is fun. And resource management and base building is fun enough too. Space battles seem to be bit too simplistic though in practice. Though it still could be even more fun with voice acting from original cast and with original music.

There was article a while back if you want to find more discussion about it.

[Stellar Archipelago](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3295680/Stellar_Archipelago/)
Steam though I like openworld survival craft games. And Stellar Archipelago does have little bit of charm with practically building stuff on a small asteroid. But problem is that there the fun ends. It's way too basic, even when the premise is kind of cool.

[XenoHaven](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4004010/XenoHaven_Demo/)
My Japanese is not good enough to play this. Store page claims having English as option, but couldn't understand the menus enough to find where to enable it. Maybe they could just modify the store page a bit to advertise it as Japanese learning game.

But if actually understand Japanese, you get to enslave monsters and run cafes. Or something.

[debris](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3734350/debris_Demo/)
This should be drone building and asteroid mining simulator. It's just bit convoluted with barely any tutorial. If you actually try to play it, the top left corner thing can gather resources if you browse through the options. That actually should make it possible to launch a drone. What happened me though was the the freeplay dialog refused to close. So I gave up.

[Trade Anchor](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3878170/Trade_Anchor/)
Space trading game, what's not to like. Though intro wasn't very promising as it was very laggy. Problem is though that there doesn't seem to be easy way to scroll the screen. There might be ways to work around it, but they're bit too inconsistent.

But basically you fly between star systems and buy resources. Then you try to find systems that wants the resource and is willing to pay higher price. I didn't saw any indications how much profit or loss you are making with the sale, so you need to rely on your memory. Or make notes.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Work use-cases can be tricky. Sometimes there's that one particular thing you have to do for work, like you actually need to do surgery on .pdfs that you can't really do without Acrobat Pro, or you actually need some of the weird advanced features in Excel to do with charts and such, or you need exact visual fidelity on the roundtrips between Word and LibreOffice Writer.

That last I believe can be made a lot better if you arrange to get your hands on the Windows fonts and put them in where LibreOffice can see them. Or I guess put some of the fonts you find in Linux into Windows? Anyway, a lot of the trouble with Word on Windows and LibreOffice on Linux documents not looking quite the same is if they don't have the right font and just grab some other one that's available to use instead. That can affect not just how the letters look, but how much space they end up taking up, which will mess up layout. Have the right font and everything will be a lot closer to identical.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Community made wrappers have been around for a while. The ThirteenAG fixes are released under an MIT license so I'm guessing they just used that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Kernel-level anti-cheat is a big no-no but... they never said they would support Linux desktop (to the contrary) so... *shrug* (of course I would not support them).

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@dpanter: dgvoodoo? Last I checked that still didn't reproduce everything, but, admittedly, I haven't looked at it for a while.

Edit: ah, the Enhanced mod. Yeah, I skipped that one once I saw PS3 textures in there.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

That looks entertaining! (it reminds me a bit of SimTower )

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I would have bought this in a heartbeat, even though I’ve had a portable, modded version of this from my old physical copy for years, which I can run at any time and that has all the problems fixed. But requiring Ubisoft Connect makes it a no-go for me. If they ever drop the requirement, I’ll buy it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Well, most games run through Proton aren’t officially supported by the devs. I don’t see how this would be that much different.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I replayed through Splinter Cell 1 a few years ago on modern hardware with correct shadows, you need to get some fixes done but it's not locked to the ancient Geforce tech anymore. Once again modders fixed it since Ubishit doesn't care.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

From what I remember, it does dedicated hardware checks for the Steam Deck CPU and SteamOS.
While both are probably possible to fake, you run into the risk of getting banned whenever the anti-cheat gets updated.
Unless it's officially supported by the devs, it's better to just treat it as inaccessible under Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

yeah super weird - I mostly play rpg's. Probably like 90%+ of the time. There were 0 references or recommendations for rpgs in my next fest home page. LOL steam what happened, have one too many last night and just phoned it in?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

LOL that's true!

So this'll be an interesting experiment. Here are the people I'm moving to Mint from win10:

1 - 44 yr old close friend - very tech savvy - mostly used for work - should be easy I think.
2 - his ~75 yr old mother - least tech savvy human being on earth - but only uses computer for solitaire and email, nothing else. I think I can make it work.
3 - 60 yr old close friend - medium tech savvy - laptop is older but works totally fine - I think this is the one I'm most worried about.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

How is it still running on Steam Deck? Does that kernel have some of this implemented? If not, can’t we just simulate a Steam Deck environment on the desktop? We’re already simulating a Windows env

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Do you play Janeway? Or are you the captain in the timeline where Janeway never existed/died/didn't join Starfleet?

Think I saw Chakotee and Janeway in one of the shots near the end of that trailer, so presumably you're playing her, as captain.

I didn't play the demo all the way through yet, but practically you're playing as Janeway as captain. Don't know if they're going to do some kind of switcheroo in the full game, but probably not.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The problem is not specifically Linux users cheating, it’s Linux being a platform repeatedly abused by cheat makers to run them. So it makes Linux an easy target to just block. Low hanging fruit in the fight against cheaters.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Age verification should be illegal. This world has gone crazy. The ruling cast is infested by predators.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Yeah, that's promising, but apparently moving shadows are a separate issue - those needed the right Nvidia GPU (within 2 generations, I think) and correct drivers to render properly.

Early Splinter Cells are a massive PITA in this regard, and even assuming Pandora is now fixed SC1 is still locked to GF3-GF4 (none of which is that great at running this game at a decent framerate, funnily enough. Hello, 800x600). One of the reasons I keep old parts around.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Do you think problem is in WSL2 and cheaters on Windows, or Linux users are cheating?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

side note: something is super wrong with the steam desktop app for the next fest home page. At least for me. The top recommendations for me are "parkour time attack anime third person" games. I have absolutely zero interest in that whatsoever, and have exactly 0 games in my library with those tags.

Then moving down, the next recommended category is "minigames games" (terrible recommendation) and the next recommended category after that is "soundtrack games" (terrible recommendation) and then it goes to "all titles".

It's like they swapped my recommendation profile for a total stranger?

That's odd. I have space sim and openworld survival craft games, which would make sense from No Mans Sky perspective.

Though for me, finding unsuitable game categories is somewhat hard. I probably have at least one game for large number of genres.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The screenshot was taken on an AMD GPU.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This has been on my wishlist since your first article a year ago. No need to try the demo.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Hm. Gives me Grim Fandango vibes.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The old demo had be sold already. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

And boom! On my ignore list. A game should work on al my devices. If the game is intentionally made to break then it's not worth my time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I wish I could play this one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Seems the most user friendly coming from... Arch

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment