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Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
Canonical drop the Unity desktop environment for Ubuntu favour of going back to GNOME
8 April 2017 at 7:33 am UTC

Quoting: GrimfistBecause there is one thing that Unity 7 did absolutly right compared to ALL other Linux DE's out there, in times where 16:9 widescreens are the norm, vertical screen space is very precious compared to horizontal screen space. Having a monstrous launcher bar at the bottom is just bad UX design when you can have it at the left side of the screen, preserving precious vertical screen space and using the available but only 80% or so used horizontal screen space. And delivering such a good out of the box experience is what drives Ubuntu.

Really, ALL? So let's see, here I am using Mate, and I guess that thing on the right hand edge of my screen can't be a taskbar with a bunch of launchers on it because apparently ALL the Linux DEs other than Unity don't do that.

NVIDIA have announced the TITAN Xp and it's a monster
6 April 2017 at 5:43 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: inlinuxdude
Quoting: scaineI don't get who/what these cards are aimed at? This behemoth will likely retail for well over a grand, given that the plain 1080s are still around the £500-600 mark and the TI edition is £800-900. I mean, there's top-end gaming, and then there's just flushing money out the window!

IBM has worked with NVidia to incorporate their GPU's into high performance computing servers. This could well fit into some supercomputer type applications (and could also explain the initial limit of 2 per customer?)..

If your supercomputer connection is true, that suggests they would actually have to do good Linux drivers since most supercomputers run Linux.
Thinking of graphics and drivers in Linux . . . this is not directly gaming-related, but has anyone else noticed that Canonical is apparently dumping the Unity desktop and going back to Gnome? And so the thing is, that suggests to me that maybe they're dumping Mir as well, since Gnome are heavy into Wayland. And that would mean the absurd situation of the Linux desktop using two competing stacks for certain graphics stuff would be going away, and I think that would be good for Linux gaming.

Armor Clash II looks like a cheap RTS that could end up being fun, releasing soon
4 April 2017 at 4:35 pm UTC

I don't mind the look. I like that the vehicles stand out nicely from the background. I still enjoy original Starcraft; the gameplay's the important part.

Mad Max meets Vulkan in a new fully public beta for Linux, benchmarks and OpenGL vs Vulkan comparisons
1 April 2017 at 1:49 am UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: natewardawgI'm really failing to see how this is a naive view, haha :)
by naive i mean this:
'The thing that strikes me is that many of the Vulkan ports are in beta, which as a developer says to me, "We really care about quality and feedback and want to give as good of an official release (first impression) as possible."'
i dont think being beta menas they are commited, it only means its not fully tested/functional, bug free, or it can improve the performance in the future.

as i said, DX12 is older, if an game takes 3 years to be developed, you show what you're doing at the year 1, and say something like: its still in beta that means you're more commited to it than someone that waits until the game is almost finished to show any screenshots/video of it?

also, we cant compare the POV of an indie with the one of an AAA developer.
example 1:
indies may profit more from piracy used as an way to spread the word about their game, than have losses from piracy.
AAA studios, on the other hand, put millions in marketing, they don't need piracy to market their products.

example 2:
when the 5 first indie humble bundle where done, 20% of the income came from linux users, looking at this numbers you may think "20% of the market are linux users!" but the reality is: there were almost no games for linux, so people where willing to pay for anything and pay more for it.
among the linux user, the game was more popular since it where one of a few games avaliable.

that dont means if an AAA studio ported their games to linux, 20% of they profit still would come from linux users, especially, considering that for some AAA games 75% of their income comes from consoles an market where indies werent even allowed a few years ago.
The point about things being in beta does strike me as overoptimistic, perhaps. I'd agree that that isn't really an indication of anything much except perhaps that since Vulkan is so new those games haven't had time to come out of beta.
The general point that Vulkan seems to be acquiring games rather faster than DX12, however, seems pretty solid. It's an early data point, but at the current pace and given what some studios have said it seems quite unlikely that there will be only 20 Vulkan games out by the time Vulkan has been out for 2 years. And when you start thinking mobile--really, there's little chance there won't be a swarm of Android games on Vulkan within a year. And some of them will be ported to other platforms.

I see no indication that Vulkan development either has been or is likely to be restricted to "indies" so your point about indies vs. AAA doesn't apply. You're talking as if it's an issue of Linux games and the "all indies" stereotype vs Windows games--but the point here seems to be precisely that there are indications game developers are finding Vulkan a more attractive target for Windows development.

And I don't think your example 2 is really relevant to anything anyone has said, so it's kind of gratuitous.

Mad Max meets Vulkan in a new fully public beta for Linux, benchmarks and OpenGL vs Vulkan comparisons
30 March 2017 at 5:49 pm UTC Likes: 8

So, lots of people wanting to see this game or that game that were already ported to Linux in turn get ported to Vulkan for performance. For me, this is more a proof of concept; it demonstrates that it will be very good if future ports go to Vulkan rather than OpenGL. Generally I'd rather see Feral's energies go to new ports rather than makeovers for old ports.
Like, say Feral over a period of time can do 10 projects. Rather than have 10 games already on Linux that ran a little slow (on current hardware) run faster, I'd rather see 10 new games that were not already on Linux run fast in the first place, because then instead of 10 fast games we'd have 10 not-so-fast games + 10 (probably newer) fast games. 20 games is better than 10 games.
I also suspect Feral can't stay in business if it spends too much of its energy re-porting old games for little sales benefit.

Mad Max meets Vulkan in a new fully public beta for Linux, benchmarks and OpenGL vs Vulkan comparisons
30 March 2017 at 4:57 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: CitirollerIt would be nice to see how it compares to the Windows version of the game as this doesn't have Vulkan or dx12 I think. So this might finally be a(nother) game which performs better on Linux than on Windows?
I was thinking the same--would like to see a comparison on same hardware between Linux with Vulkan and Windows with (whatever the Windows version uses).

AMD have announced 'Anvil', an MIT-licensed wrapper library for Vulkan
26 March 2017 at 3:33 am UTC

Quoting: BeamboomIt's terminological pedantry, but bear with me: isn't this more a "framework" than a "wrapper"?

Point taken as far as I'm concerned. I mean, my impression of what a "wrapper" is, is that it pretty much obscures what it wraps--you are now working with the "wrapper" at a higher, or translated, level, instead of working with the lower-level wrapped thing. Whereas with this Anvil thingie, it sounds more like it automates certain relatively predictable but onerous tasks one does in Vulkan while allowing you to still do the core Vulkan programming stuff yourself directly with Vulkan--so it's not really an intervening "wrapper" layer for the most part.

AMD have announced 'Anvil', an MIT-licensed wrapper library for Vulkan
24 March 2017 at 5:55 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: tuubiEDIT: I tried to resist fixing that minor typo but I'm weak.

I know how that feels.

Turns out The Swindle has a Linux beta, a short review
23 March 2017 at 10:08 pm UTC Likes: 2

Sounds great, although it's sort of a pity that a game called "The Swindle" apparently does not in fact have any swindling. Presumably "The Heist" and similar are already taken.
I'm not sure just how one would design a game in which you can be a confidence trickster, but it would be a neat idea.

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