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Learn how locks really work in Sophie's Safecracking Simulator now on Steam
18 June 2021 at 2:32 pm UTC Likes: 10
Hmm. My little one loves machines and loves puzzles. Showing a five year old how to pick locks couldn't possibly have negative future consequences, right?
Steam Next Fest is live again with new demos, livestreams and more
17 June 2021 at 9:33 pm UTC Likes: 1
Quoting: whizseStill not too fond of the colour arrangement. Too much brown. Like Quake 2 mixed with early Ubuntu.

You're thinking of the first Quake: that was the brown one. Quake 2 is grey with whoa! coloured lights slapped everywhere. The early Ubuntu versions were also very brown, though.
OpenGL over Vulkan driver Zink gets a huge performance boost
17 June 2021 at 12:35 pm UTC Likes: 2
Quoting: Eike"One problem is that OpenGL is a big API with a lot of legacy stuff that has accumulated since its initial release in 1992."
Yeah, OpenGL was driven by the needs of CAD software when programs were single-threaded and hardware was a fixed-function rendering pipeline. Modern software and hardware aren't really like that at all.

There's an interesting set of articles from one of the PowerVR people that describes how Vulkan does things differently to OpenGL.
OpenGL over Vulkan driver Zink gets a huge performance boost
17 June 2021 at 11:25 am UTC Likes: 3
Quoting: ajgpQuestion I always assumed that Zink was a similar project to DXVK in that it was simply a translation abstraction between OpenGL and Vulkan. But the wording of the above makes it seem that it is a MESA specific. I.e if Im using Nvidia drivers then I cant use Zink to translate to Vulkan like I would DXVK. Or am I missing something.
You can use Zink on Nvidia. But native OpenGL from Nvidia's driver will be faster.

The motivations for Zink were laid out quite well in its initial announcement.
Steam Next Fest is live again with new demos, livestreams and more
17 June 2021 at 11:12 am UTC Likes: 2
Steam Next Fest is live again with new demos, livestreams and more
16 June 2021 at 9:46 pm UTC Likes: 2
Quoting: whizseOverall, I'm glad Valve is bringing demos back. But please, keep them in place after the festival is over. There's no way I have time to try out even half the titles that catch my fancy!
This came up with another recent article. A lot of game devs believe that if a potential customer is able to satisfy their curiosity with a demo, the dev won't be able to pick their pocket for the full game price. I think that's an abhorrent attitude. But by enforcing the demos being unavailable on launch day to placate the devs, Valve can get them to actually make a demo in the first place.
What we want to see from the possible SteamPal handheld from Valve
15 June 2021 at 5:06 pm UTC
Quoting: slaapliedjeI'm hoping the 'SteamPal' has some sort of modularity to the controller though, being able to hot swap buttons and control sticks around like the Thrustmaster eSwap controller would be amazing!
Yeah, that could be awesome. Having button blocks, D-pad blocks, touchpad blocks, and stick blocks that you can swap out, to suit your taste (not having to choose between GameCube-style and PlayStation-style) or for easy replacement when they get sticky or whatever. They might find that it adds too much cost to the build, or are too fiddly at the size they need to be, though, so that's in my nice-to-have list rather than something that I'm particularly expecting.
Collabora give an overview on the status of Zink, the OpenGL over Vulkan driver
15 June 2021 at 4:06 pm UTC Likes: 4
Quoting: EikeWould this mean specialized OpenGL drivers could be abandoned in favor of Vulkan (only) drivers?
I think that existing OpenGL drivers will still be a thing, but I can see new hardware, like new embedded things, and stuff that only has an unmaintained or problematic OpenGL implementation blowing that out to rely on a Vulkan implementation and Zink.
The tiny multiplayer online RPG 'Book of Travels' enters Early Access on August 9
15 June 2021 at 3:15 pm UTC Likes: 3
QuoteThey emailed to say "Linux won't be available for EA I'm afraid, but we will be working on getting it to you as soon as possible!".


That suggests that they're doing it wrong. Multiplatform from the start makes the whole dev process easier. Trying to shoehorn it in later makes everything harder, and you'll likely have to redo a bunch of stuff that you did wrong the first time, and assumptions you've made or third-party tools that you rely on might mean that you can't do it at all.
What we want to see from the possible SteamPal handheld from Valve
15 June 2021 at 1:16 pm UTC Likes: 2
Quoting: HoriObviously you wouldn't see your strategy games there since they don't (IMO: can't) work with a controller

The right touchpad on the Steam Controller worked pretty well as a mouse substitute. I expect the handheld will have that. The left one didn't work that well as a D-pad substitute, so I don't know if it will have one of those. Maybe if they go with the swappable modules they have a patent on. The display is also expected to have a touchscreen. I think that the touchpad/touchscreen combination should work well for a lot of strategy games. Particularly fiddly or particularly information-dense ones won't likely be great, but I can see something like Civ or something like Northgard being fine.
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