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Latest Comments by whizse
Forza Horizon 5 multiplayer should work on Linux with Proton Experimental
16 November 2021 at 5:29 pm UTC

Quoting: CyborgZetaRight now, I'm just hoping Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water becomes playable with Proton at some point. Right now, it's a no-go on Linux, I'm afraid.
Filing a bug is a good start.

Sadly, it looks like another title with Media Foundations / video issues. Not really sure what's going on with that stuff. I guess there was no new info on the recent talks and QA sessions?

This new mod puts Jazz Jackrabbit in the Doom engine
15 November 2021 at 4:59 pm UTC Likes: 8

People used to port Doom to every inconceivable piece of hardware.

I guess people ran out of hardware and now try to implement every inconceivable game genre in Doom?

Here's some of what we've learned about the Steam Deck
15 November 2021 at 2:31 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: EikeI wonder how much a basic test could be automated. Like, starting each Steam game, letting the computer find that a window has been created (or something opened fullscreen), colors have changed, a minute later on pressing a key and/or clicking around with mouse and/or controller buttons, colours change again...

Ok, it wouldn't say much about playability, but it would at least sort out games that don't start or don't show anything or crash early and the like.
I've been curious about that myself. Valve pretty much sits on the biggest collection of Win32 applications in the world, so running regression tests - en masse - on those for new Wine releases would be something.

Running tests like it works with the old release but crashes in release +1 and do an automatic bisect until the breakage is found. Or filing automatic bug reports for each failing title and look for patterns: 300+ games crashes with a similar backtrace - that's a bug worth investigating. Or for games that works with GE but not in normal Proton, automatically do a reverse bisect until you find the patch that fixes it and propose that for inclusion in Proton.

I'm not sure why this isn't done. Maybe the amount of "Game crashes on start" issues (which are the easiest to test for) aren't that many?

Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now
13 November 2021 at 9:11 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapulthat is a good metric because i see the numbers a lot of times to see if they changed.
the number of bugs being closed isnt changing too fast, unlike the number of new bugs being reported.
sure, people can open a bug report to report that something is working fine, but even if we filter out those (white list request) there are still too many bugs.

and if there are many duplicate reports, then the tag duplicate would be full of entries, unless no one is looking at this.
No, it's not even a good metric for this, since Valve uses one bug report for each game. One game can have zero issues, or a hundred.

Time to update your Raspberry Pi with the new OS based on Debian 'bullseye'
13 November 2021 at 1:41 pm UTC

Quoting: Linas
Quoting: GuestReading the notes it seems to have improved mostly in visuals. Should i upgrade my headless pi-hole then, based on security concerns?
Debian 10 (Buster) is still supported, and is very stable and secure at this point. But I am not sure how closely Raspberry Pi follows security updates from Debian.
Given the excellent LTS program for Debian releases I was curious about this too, but it turns out that for Raspberry OS, the devil is in the details:

"In general, we only fully support Raspberry Pi OS releases based on the current stable Debian (Buster, for now). Older releases will still get packages coming through from Debian, but that doesn't include our kernel, firmware and patched packages. In some cases, Debian's packages will override our packages, so you'll lose our patches. In other cases, our packages may override Debian's updates and you may be missing out on security fixes from Debian. "

From https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=297441

Upgrading really sounds like the best plan.

Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now
13 November 2021 at 1:11 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapulvalve said they aim to make every game run on steam deck, but there are still 3000 open issues on proton github, some of then are 2 years old (the same age as proton, so they might be even older issues that existed on wine)
That's not a very good metric. Bug reports are per game, and people are encouraged to report games that work without issues too, so that list will grow and grow.

Most of the closed bugs are duplicate reports.

Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now
12 November 2021 at 10:40 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoAnd the technical purpose of the banana is....????
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/banana-for-scale

Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now
12 November 2021 at 9:13 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: rustybroomhandleI have 9 cats to support
I'm using that line the next time I ask for a raise!

(Also, wtf? I had one (1) cat, with her own room and own queen size bed, and she was impossible to control. Nine!?)

Forza Horizon 5 on Linux? Yeah okay fine, Proton Experimental was updated
12 November 2021 at 8:53 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: BeamboomIt's a program that takes user input, writes a shitload of data to the screen and often utilise the network interface. What goes on from one game to another should in principle be pretty much the same, as far as the system libraries goes? Architecturally the programs should share far more than they diverge from each other. As far as I can understand...!

So what on earth could it be that this game used from a system library that all the other games don't?
So, from a skim of the changes in git, one of the things Forza 5 needed was Performance Counters. These we're technically not required, but the stubs for the functions was changed to return true instead of false to make the game happy.

I have no idea if the game uses those for error diagnostics, or to adjust performance settings during runtime so the game is actually missing some feature?
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/ed0d3339339b397b305ef218c6dcec46f789101e

Another thing was speech synthesizer support. Again, not fully implemented but stubbed in Wine, and again, no idea if that's something the game actually uses. GPS directions maybe?
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/822c137a52117c03f205ad6b0af71d765983f724

🎵🎵 The APIs themselves keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions they can whizz
As fast as it can be implemented, at the speed of light, I read
Twelve million lines a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is 🎵🎵
(Sorry MP

Forza Horizon 5 on Linux? Yeah okay fine, Proton Experimental was updated
12 November 2021 at 2:30 pm UTC Likes: 13

I'm guessing most of you already knows this, but here's a simplified turn of events for Proton/Wine development that's hopefully not altogether incorrect:

The story of Game.exe

Game.exe is released but crashes on start in Wine. It requires Foo() and Bar() library.dll. Foo and Bar are implemented by someone reading the API documentation from Microsoft. Bar isn't really used by the game so a minimal version is added to fulfil the dependency for the game. The game works.

The sequel Game2.exe is released but crashes on start because it needs the full implementation of Bar. Bar is implemented in Wine, the game works.

An update to Game2.exe is released and crashes on start in Wine. Turns out that Game2.exe now calls Bar with NULL instead of the expected integer value. This is undocumented behaviour but works on Windows, so the behaviour in Wine is changed to match Windows. The game works again.

Game3.exe for Windows 11 is released. It crashes on start in Wine. It requires library2.dll to run. Someone figures out that if the game runs on Windows 10 the older library.dll is used instead, a game specific hack that reports version 10 for Game3.exe is added and the game works.

Now multiply this for all the dlls and functions a game need to run and things get complex fast.

(The movie rights to this original short story have already been acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment™)