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Latest Comments by CatKiller
The Steam Play Proton compatibility layer turns two years old
20 August 2020 at 11:53 pm UTC Likes: 13

QuoteI'm still thoroughly curious on what the end game is here

My impression is that they don't really need one.

The strategic reasons they had for starting out on the path are still the case, so there's no strategic impetus to stop. Compared to their revenue, their total outlay for supporting Linux is small, and the Linux market likely makes a profit for them. The work is interesting, which fits well with their flat structure. The work can progress incrementally, which fits well with their flat structure. If they did stop the help for new Linux games they'd still be on the hook for supporting all the existing Linux customers without new sales to cover those costs, and the appearance of there being no viable alternative to Windows would mean that they'd end up more dependent on Windows than they were before they started.

So unless they get bought by someone else with radically different strategic priorities, which is extremely unlikely given that Valve is privately-owned and makes an awful lot of money just as it is, I don't see their support stopping. If they happen upon some new amazing thing as a result that puts them in a stronger position, then that's good, but if they don't that's fine, too.

Linux being a good place to scratch one's own itch works just as well for Valve as it does for everyone else.

NVIDIA GeForce NOW adds Chromebook support, so you can run it on Linux too
19 August 2020 at 4:28 am UTC

Quoting: Alm888Proton™

This is really obnoxious.

A weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently
15 August 2020 at 11:28 pm UTC

Quoting: brokeassbenI'm having frequent complete system freezes that require a hard reset and nothing I've tried so far is helping. Different drives, entirely different distros, updated the BIOS, tested RAM, and still freezing. Sooo damn frustrating.

Power supply is the next item on your checklist.

Imperator: Rome gets a major free update, new DLC and cross-store multiplayer
13 August 2020 at 2:01 am UTC Likes: 1

QuotePowered by Nakama from Heroic Labs, it's something PDS has been working on for some time now, which enables players to "be able to connect and play with others from any Windows, MacOS, or Linux platform where the game is sold, including the Paradox Store, Steam, GOG.com, and any other digital retailers where Imperator: Rome may appear".

This sounds awesome.

Cross-platform multiplayer is a pain, because devs make assumptions about determinism that don't necessarily hold on different platforms, so you get games where players on different platforms can't play against each other. Plus matchmaking, which tends to heavily use the platform infrastructure (like Steam), so doesn't translate to other platforms that don't have it (like GOG).

If it's easy to integrate and saves devs from having to roll their own, that should be really useful. With it being open source it shouldn't go the way of GameSpy, either.

My experiences of Valve's VR on Linux
12 August 2020 at 10:40 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: scaineOne thing in particular I hated is that both Kate (the text editor) and Dolphin (the file manager) are crippled to disallow running as sudo.

I agree on Dolphin: I think it was short-sighted and daft. You're much more likely to mess things up having to do things as root from an unfamiliar command line than doing so with a file manager that's easy to understand and familiar.

For Kate, I believe it does the standard authorisation thing when you try to save a root-owned file now, but before that you had to use sudoedit.

My experiences of Valve's VR on Linux
12 August 2020 at 5:26 pm UTC Likes: 1

Off Topic:

Quoting: scaineAnd I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.

But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!

I was in a similar position to you. I had Cinnamon on my laptop because, at the time I got it, the high-DPI support was best, and I was getting increasingly annoyed by Gnome 3 on my desktop.

When I built my new desktop I gave KDE a try. Within a week I decided to switch my laptop to KDE as well, since I liked it so much more.

In particular, and the reason I'm mentioning it, the out-of-the-box audio configuration for setting device priorities - and having different priorities for different classes of audio application if you want that - is way better than what you get on the GTK side, since they had all that already for Phonon.

If you do get itchy feet to try something different, that's the direction that I'd suggest you try.

NVIDIA GeForce are teasing something for August 31, likely RTX 3000
10 August 2020 at 7:12 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI repeat: We need a third player in the GPU market.
Intel have been working on Xe for quite a while now. Actual real-world performance, and how much it's directed towards gaming rather than machine learning, are still to be determined, of course.

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoThey should calm down and release new GPUs every three years and not every year.
I'll freely admit that I find AMD's products and release schedule confusing, but on the Nvidia side:
Fermi 2010
Kepler 2012
Maxwell 2014
Pascal 2016
Turing 2018
Consumer Ampere? 2020

You don't have to buy a new card every generation if you don't want to.

The weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently
8 August 2020 at 9:11 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: scaineStill my number #1 game of all time. Although I played mouse/keyboard, so I didn't have the controller issue you're seeing.


It's not an issue issue, it's just that devs are lazy. As I understand it, Windows support for the PS3 controller was really inadequate compared to the Linux support for it, and Microsoft were pushing the Xbox controller as the One True "Standard" for controllers on Windows, so it makes sense that that's what they were lazy about. It's just irritating that they were lazy, and a bit of a pain that the game says that I should press X when it actually wants me to press square.

QuoteAlso, if you like the campaign, I HIGHLY (HUGELY, DEFINITELY) recommend the Witches DLC. The play mechanic is even better in the DLC (time freezes when you blink). It's amazingly good fun, and it's a long campaign. Highly recommended.

The bundle that I got has the DLC as well as the games, so I'll look forward to it.

The weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently
8 August 2020 at 2:26 pm UTC Likes: 5

I've been playing Dishonored. I got most of the way through it on the PS3 back in the day but got distracted by something else and never went back to it.

That one and the sequel had good reports on protondb so I picked up both of them on Steam, although I've only tried the first one so far. It works perfectly in Proton, although the Xbox button prompts when I'm using a PS3 controller are quite irritating.

Racing game 'DRAG' with impressive visuals enters Early Access on August 11
7 August 2020 at 6:40 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Liam DaweHere here.

It's actually, "hear, hear," from the earlier, "hear him! Hear him!" [/pedantry]