Quoting: BlackBloodRumHappy to see this update landed within a timely manner.

It's not fixed fixed yet, though. There's still no cross-platform multiplayer. They've coincidentally prioritised the part that involves their customers giving them more money.

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Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: drlambHowever unlikely I'd die if Google (Stadia) and Valve formed a partnership.

Horrible idea! :O

Google getting bored of Stadia and Valve taking the infrastructure, and stable of Linux-native games, off their hands at a knock-down price to make available through Steam wouldn't be a terrible outcome, though.

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Quoting: LinuxwarperIt's meaningless to hope for Google to encourage devs to release locally on Linux when they aren't even providing that opportunity to even Windows users.

In the time before Stadia developers would make their games for Windows and take on the costs of supporting them on Windows, and a very small number with the skills to do so would also make their games for Linux and take on the costs of supporting them on Linux.

Stadia won't, by itself, encourage game developers to release a standalone version of any game, for Windows or Linux; quite the opposite, Google will pay developers not to release a standalone version if they think it will help their goal of growing Stadia as a platform.

But what it does do is force developers to learn how to make their games work on Linux with Vulkan - since that's necessary for a game to work on Stadia - and Google will provide resources to help them do that. What the developers do with that knowledge and the product they've created after that is down to the developers. Many are going to shy away from the (real or perceived) costs of supporting actual Linux versions on actual customers' hardware, but they'll all have learned how to make games without Windows and without DirectX, which has been a barrier in the past.

Some developers are going to say, "just use the Stadia version," just like some developers would say, "just use Wine." They want an easy life. Customers that aren't OK with that will miss out, and customers that are OK with that will be able to play games that aren't available natively. Just like if they were using Wine.

Whether a move to streaming is good or bad for gaming as a whole in the long run, it's too early to say. It opens up gaming to people whose Internet is better than their hardware, which might increase the size of the market so that more people can make more games. Geforce Now doesn't tie purchasers to one provider, but it does tie game developers to Windows; Stadia is the other way round, and Google's reputation for dropping services does hurt them. There are things like anti-cheat and enormous worlds that are easier to do "in the cloud" than locally. But there is less (real or perceived) ownership with streaming than local installs. It could shake out as good, bad, or neutral over all.

Personally, I'm more interested in a streaming service from Valve than anything that exists now. They have a better reputation for longevity than Google and they have a long-term investment in desktop Linux as a gaming platform. But it doesn't exist yet, except as speculation.

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Quoting: LinuxwarperEDIT: Wait Stadia doesn't support local play? It's strictly streaming?! I thought it did as a way to break into the market..

A very early test that used Assassin's Creed gave participants a normal copy of Assassin's Creed as a reward for taking part. You might be thinking of that. Stadia itself is strictly streaming.

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Quoting: LinasNot a builder-gamer myself, but I am curious to try it out. Is it any good without the DLC's?

I had the base game and... After Dark and the free bits.

My impression from my playthrough was that it was a glorious city builder and a terrible, terrible simulation. The traffic is a fudge, and the population explosions that you get from actually using the rewards from passing population milestones trigger inescapable death waves. Last time I checked they had no intention of fixing that, so I haven't played since.

There's enjoyment to be had, but they may well punish you for it.

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I am interested in this, but this statement is not promising:

QuoteWhen speaking to the developer E-Line Media about the Linux version they stated, "The production team is working out a plan that will launch Linux as soon as we are able.".

Two weeks from release and they don't yet have a plan for releasing on Linux.

Really they should have had Linux builds going throughout the development process, to more easily find Windows bugs if nothing else. This sounds quite a lot like they're going to wait a while after release (because release time is hectic for everyone) and then discover that it's toooo haaaard and throw their hands up in the air. As we've seen too many developers do in the past.

I hope I'm wrong.

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Quoting: DadSchoorseThat's close to useless for Proton since games don't give the driver HLSL, they have bytecode in form of DXBC or the newer DXIL. Also translating shaders to SPIR-V is quite fast and not the bottleneck in DXVK afaik, the problem is the missing state information so that pipelines can only be compiled at draw time without a state cache hit.

I suspected that was the case, but there's the ability to handle those hopefully coming too. It was the "how do we turn things into SPIR-V?" part that I was commenting on.

While Microsoft has historically used many methods to lock people into their ecosystem, shaders don't seem to be one that they're trying: developers with their existing DirectX knowledge and existing DirectX tooling can relatively easily produce things for Vulkan.

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Quoting: rkfgThis is a very interesting tech! I wonder how they implemented it. The D3D shaders are stored in the game resources which can be in whatever proprietary format the developers choose so they can't be automatically extracted and transpiled to SPIR-V (the Vulkan binary shader format).

Actually, Microsoft open-sourced a compiler to turn HLSL (the DirectX shader language) shaders into SPIR-V, which has been integrated into the Vulkan ecosystem.

QuoteNow, thanks to Microsoft open sourcing their HLSL compiler, the Vulkan community has been able to work cooperatively with Microsoft to make HLSL support in Vulkan a proven choice alongside Khronos’ own GLSL shading language.
...
With feedback from the Vulkan community, Google, LunarG, NVIDIA, and Valve have steered an effort to resolve these and other issues by adding SPIR-V legalization to Vulkan’s HLSL shader compilers.

Edit to add: I have no idea whether Fossilise or DXVK or anything else actually uses DXC, but it's there.

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Quoting: soulsourceThat's also the reason why I am barely reading the Steam forums for our own titles any more...

You might find this article interesting.

QuoteThere were plenty of moments in the last 3 years when our mindset and resolve to be nice in the face of hate were challenged to the core. I have all the respect in the world for everyone in the service industries who tries to do a good job. To serve is a noble profession, and to do it well is not easy at all. I think a key to success is to treat it as a serious job, and divorce it from being personal. Someone who says mean things and has unreasonable demands might just be having a bad day. Our responses had the power to perpetuate the downward spiral, or to lift someone up. The above quote was one of the worst emails we’ve had (and there were quite a few like that). That this player was reported in game multiple times by multiple people was no surprise. We then gave him a warning, which he confused to be a temp ban. He then got incensed and wrote us an email.

Initially, seeing all the text that I highlighted in red was tough to take. I had to walk away for a bit to collect myself. When I returned to the email and calmed down, it became easier to see the text that I highlighted in blue, which was the point he was trying to make. He paid for the game and spent his hard earned money. He liked the game enough to gift 3 copies to his friends. He misunderstood the warning for a ban. Once I understood the issue, it became easy to reply. I also appealed to him to help us maintain and grow this community while reminding him of ours as well as Steam’s terms of use and community standards. The player never expected me to reply, and once I did, he was nice enough to help us and turned his behavior in game completely around. We’ve had quite a few players with a similar encounter, and the majority of these players actually stayed with the game over hundreds of hours of play. With over 60K player reports investigated, we ended up giving out warnings only about 4% of the time. Only 0.3% of the time did we issue bans of varying degrees. We take players’ hard earned money seriously, and we try to appeal to people’s humanity and reason over heavy handed policing, and I think it has worked for us.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumPorting houses usually don't get access to the update code until after the windows team has finished their part, by this time usually the update is announced and has a deadline.

With the broken Borderlands 2 they changed the status from "we fixed Mac and we'll get round to fixing Linux someday if we get round to it" to "we'll fix Mac someday if we get round to it" after it broke for a second time. That was months ago. There's no reason to think that they'll ever fix this one either. They haven't even said they will.

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