Quoting: sarmadWell, we have to admit. Valve tried to make Linux a viable gaming platform but they failed miserably at execution and it seems none of the major players in the industry is taking SteamOS seriously. Very sad. Though they did give Linux gaming a great push.

All in all, looking at responses, I'd say it's clear we don't have to admit any such thing.
And really, although I have a critique of Valve's execution and marketing of the Steam Machines myself, this seems an exaggeration painted with a too-broad brush and not that relevant as a response to this particular event.

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Got it, thanks.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT

Quoting: pete910Just need some games now! {looks toward feral/aspry)

Please not only Windows ports - I'd like to see some well optimized native-cross-platform developed and optimized games as well. Of course a well optimized vulkan port will run better than OpenGL 4 - still it will take them a lot of time to get used to Vulkan. The first ports won't offer us such a great performance gain as many people expect - at least it's very unlikely.

Have to agree that something natively developed from the start is what we should be pushing for. Almost all the people who have so far touted the performance gains from Vulkan have had engines designed with DX11 in mind and tried previously to kludge OpenGL into it.
The only game I can think of that might be more representative of moving to Vulkan is Doom, which of course isn't available for GNU/Linux, but does come from a codebase more friendly towards OpenGL. Even then, they had access to special extensions made just for them, so it's not really something that can be considered a true comparison.

By this point, developers really should be using libraries that do away with 99.99% of platform specifics, and be cross-platform developing from the start. It makes sense even as a basic sanity check. Not that I think sanity prevails as much as it should, of course.

It's been mentioned hereabouts before, but the prospects would be better if Apple had gone with Vulkan instead of turning their noses up and rolling their own (Metal) as usual. At least Android is using Vulkan, which is huge although I'm not sure how much mobile development overlaps with the PC space.

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Looks like a pretty nice feature.

It is a bit hard for me to get just how it works though. I guess there's this one crucial moment that makes things unclear for me--when you're inputting the "gesture". So from the looks of it, you don't input a gesture by, like, recording it or something, you type in arrow keys to represent directional movement? So that brief moment when you appeared to type in an up arrow and maybe a down arrow into a dialog box, that was inputting the gesture? 'Cause I think that's really the key moment and it goes by in a flash so I was left scratching my head thinking "Did he do what I thought he did?" And that uncertainty distracts me so it's harder to twig to the next bit where you're specifying which input method the gesture applies to.
(Watching again I realize most of that stuff I said is totally wrong, so I definitely was confused)

Basically I think it's easier/quicker to do something yourself than to assimilate seeing someone else do it, at least if it's new to the viewer, so if you're showing computer stuff in a video it's probably useful to slow it down significantly relative to what feels comfortable in terms of just performing the action.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: kit89Doesn't SC stand for Steam Controller?

Well, the application itself controls the Steam Controller, so technically it really is a Steam Controller...Controller :D

So if you wrote an app that did things like apply packaged-up gesture schemes to SC, would that be a Steam Controller Controller Controller?

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Quoting: ajgp

Quoting: Purple Library Guy. (Shrug) Language is weird.

The English language is especially weird as alot of words can have several interpretations depending on context(some as in this case conflicting), often this is at odds with other languages that do not have so many words open to interpretation and this means what you think is a clear translation means something radically different in actuality.

However on topic its good to hear this is resolved I need a space fix since elite isnt available to me anymore.

English is particularly weird because it comes from two main languages and a couple of secondary ones, with different grammars, all mooshed together (Old English, French, a bit of Old Norse, some Latin, miscellaneous stuff). We ended up with tons of extra words and smashed grammar.

Um, right, on topic--yeah, I think I was looking forward to this one although I might be getting it mixed with Shallow Space.

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Quoting: EikeI'm not a native speaker either, but to my understaning, their wording was not wrong (just missinterpretable)?

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/could :
"past of can"
‘We could hear the clear belling from inside the patch of forest in the valley.’

No, the wording was wrong, or at best a usage so rare that nobody would ever expect that meaning from that phrasing. Yes, could is sometimes the past tense of can, but there are problems.
One is simply the meaning of "can". It means there is an ability for something to happen, not necessarily that it does. Set in the past, that ability would be gone by the time we reach the present. So for instance, in your quotation, it is likely that we can't hear the clear belling any more. We could in the past, but not now. Similarly if I were to say that I could have fixed that kind of problem in the past (back when I still had the right tools, say) it doesn't imply that I actually fixed any problems and suggests that I can't any more.

The more relevant problem is that that's not what that construction normally means. You can say "could" in ways that mean past, but that isn't how you do it. If I say something "could be fixed" it isn't normally a past tense. It's more of a conditional. The difference between saying a problem "can be fixed" and that it "could be fixed" is that, while both say the capacity to fix exists, "can" suggests at least a strong likelihood of the fix taking place, quite likely here and now. "Could be fixed" does not. It implies that while the capability exists, it either won't actually happen or will only happen if some other condition is met. As in, "I could help you, but I won't" or "I could help you, but you'd have to do something for me in return".

Oddly, the negation can be a past tense. If I say "The engine damage couldn't be fixed" that generally means we tried and gave it up as impossible. (Shrug) Language is weird.

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Hmmm . . . No elves, huh?
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's fashionable these days to look down one's nose at elves. Don't care, still like 'em.

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Quoting: SgtRomeo9

Quoting: FredOI didn't think we'd see the day that a Total War game comes to Linux before the MAC. This blog post from Aspyr seems to sum up the situation well though: https://blog.aspyr.com/2016/11/01/state-mac-gaming/

Anyway I'm getting this for sure - I've been drooling over it long enough.

Haha what are the odds I was reading the exact same post just now and even thought of adding it to my comment :)

I have to say recently I've been more upset with Apple and Mac than what I am with Microsoft and Windows. Vulkan had a real shot of being the hands down graphics API of choice for all games fullstop. With DX12 being Win10 only and Vulkan being cross-platform across all systems including Windows up to XP, Vulkan could have been the one reason we saw a lot more PC game releases (Linux, Win, Mac).

However with Apple choosing to block Vulkan and have this Metal crap on their systems, they have effectively created this wonderful divide, again leaving us all back at square one. So devs are going to do the following: Vulkan or DX12 for Windows? Lets go with DX12 besides we don't really wanna support Android and Linux isn't really a deciding factor. Besides if we decide to go with a Mac version aswell we have to use Metal so there really isn't any need for Vulkan. And thanks to Apple that is where it ends. No Linux version once again.

Agreed.
There's a difference, I think, between the mindset of the Linux community on this stuff and the mindset of the honchos at Apple. We have our differences, serious differences, with Apple--walled garden and all that--but still we see it as "us smaller platforms vs. the leviathan monopolist" in the end. The Apple honchos don't, I think, see it that way. They see Microsoft as something they can co-exist with, and they hate open source. They see "open" and "free" enthusiasts as a dirty rabble at the gates threatening to mess up their beautiful curated garden. When you layer this on top of Apple's massive raging case of Not Invented Here syndrome and the impression I get that they don't care about the desktop much any more so all their moves are really to benefit mobile stuff, you get things like this.

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Well, as I said,

QuoteI have yet to see a smidgen of evidence that Steam Machines in specific helped foster game development on Linux.

So yeah, I think your talk about all the games and so on, implying that they are there because of the Steam Machine, is simply wrong. No doubt many of the other moves Valve did, such as SteamOS, were done as part of a push to make the Steam Machine work out. But, just because something didn't do what you intended it to do, doesn't mean it's useless. Those moves did not drive the Steam Machine to success, and the Steam Machine did not in turn drive further success for desktop Linux because it created negligible sales of either hardware or software and so the size of Linux overall as a game market was not appreciably increased. If that positive feedback loop had taken hold (Steam Machine market share significant --> Makes Linux platform a bigger game target --> More games for Linux & Steam Machine --> Desktop Linux & Steam Machine more viable --> Steam Machines, and maybe desktop Linux computers, sell more --> Steam Machine market share even more significant --> and so on) we would be looking at a very different situation for Linux gaming right now, one where Linux as a gaming platform was growing rapidly rather than coasting at the "new normal".

But the moves still in themselves helped Linux gaming massively. They did create that somewhat fragile "new normal" we are inhabiting. It's just the Steam Machine itself didn't end up contributing.

As to a hedge--one might argue that a platform which has failed to sell once makes a less effective hedge/threat than a platform which is as yet unreleased and so an unknown quantity. The Steam Machine might actually be more effective at the role you point to there if it had never been released yet and Valve were still just talking about the possibility. It's hard to call that success.

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