My friend (who has a weekly gaming livestream he does) and I bought copies of this and played it together for a little bit last Thursday.

I set up my Steam Controller for driving with no issues, and just used my mouse for building.

A couple things we both noticed:

* The green transparent block view on the building side makes it really hard for you to see exactly what block it is you're about to put down - particularly when you're given a corner piece, or anything else you need to rotate to be driveable. We had to keep glancing at the 'next block' preview in the far upper right to try and judge what it was we were about to put down.

* When you end up having to turn, so you're travelling and building horizontally rather than vertically, it would be nice for blocks to come in already rotated 90 degrees, so it's not a mad rush to rotate every single block you place down until you can turn the driver again into another vertical path.

* Unless we just couldn't see it in our very very quick blind playthrough, we really could use a button or mode to facilitate having the Driver and Builder switch places in the middle of a play session, without having to back out to the main menu and then set up the game again. We figured out that whoever hosts is the driver, of course.

* Some kind of starting countdown or gating when starting a map would be neat, but that's a nice-to-have. I.e. the low speed countdown/timer doesn't start until either a) the driver touches the controls or b) the builder places their first block? We found ourselves fighting our machines' loading times in a mad dash to get started as soon as we heard the sound start up.

Anyway, if you want two people's very first impressions on a blind playthrough (warning: excited cussing!) ->
View video on youtube.com

I think you guys have a great idea and it holds a lot of promise as an awesome party game! I can totally see setting this up and then having everyone trading places in kind of a double-hotseat mode. :)

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Kind of related, they say DRM is a waste of time. If and when this Linux port materializes, I kind of want to throw money at them just because they're finally getting it. :P

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I've got a couple friends interested in this one - we've gone through Space Engineers, Empyrion, ARK, 7 Days to Die, modded Minecraft, Starbound... not going to lie, the whole crafting/survival multiplayer thing sometimes feels like it's an overdone 'me too!' genre (kind of reminds me of the explosion of MMORPGs after WoW showed up EverQuest), but if this does end up getting a Linux build, being Unity and all, I'd be tempted to try it, just to play with them through one more of these.

The other question, though - if it's multiplayer, will it at least get a Linux dedicated server build? (And, will it run in FreeBSD's 'Linuxulator', or will I have to at least fire up my Ubuntu Server VM?) Something to watch, I guess!

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Just put my $5 in. I was wondering where Vulkan in UE4 for Linux was! :D

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That log looks a lot like a video driver issue. I'm going to hazard a guess and say:

nVidia binary driver, they installed a new kernel, and the DKMS build for the glue module failed, meaning no video driver (and it won't smartly fall back to Nouveau - or can't), and Xorg blows up on launch because of it.

Seen this happen when testing kernel 4.7 on my desktop, on a regular Xubuntu install. :S:

I did play around with SteamOS about a year or two ago, and it did work as well as I expected it to. I enabled the regular Gnome login account, played around with what looked like a mostly-standard Debian install, and then realised the biggest shortcoming: The hacks they've done to Xorg to make Steam run under its own VT are great... but they absolutely wreck being able to run things outside of Steam, that may hook into Steam... like, say, recording or streaming with OBS. Or heck, dual monitor support at all.

I tend to have a browser with walkthroughs or chat windows and such up on my secondary monitor while gaming on the first. If I'm streaming, that secondary monitor is where I can keep an eye on OBS and use hotkeys to do scene transitions... or watch stream chat and respond, etc. That all falls apart when SteamOS kills the other monitor and forces you to stay solely 'in the game'.

It's kind of hard to understand the niche that Valve is going for, here. If people want a console experience, they're typically going to just get a console. Most of my friends on consoles are there for one big reason: they're cheap. The secondary reason might be: 'all my friends are on the same network'. Sony and MS subsidize their console hardware to make this happen - that's why it's tough to build a high end AMD APU system with otherwise matching hardware for similar prices. Once you go beyond that, and into the $800+ range for hardware, you're getting into people who want not just a gaming device, but a proper computer - something they can type up their homework or work work on, they can surf the web on (not that Steam's browser isn't functional, but browsing with a controller is an exercise in sadism, even with an actual Steam Controller). Something they can do video editing or music or whatever else you can do with a proper computer.

Linux is perfectly capable for most of those things, of course, but that's where the sell gets harder for people used to Windows (and may have a library of software already from their old computers), and Valve has made it abundantly clear that 'another desktop Linux distro' is not the ideal they're chasing. They want a highly tuned, customized distro that boots straight into Big Picture Mode and has little need for anything else - at that point it kind of makes more sense to think of it a bit like, say, Android. Yes, it's technically Linux, but no one outside of tech circles actually cares, and even heavy Android users would have no clue how to manage or install software on a typical Linux desktop; they're just that disparate from each other.

That means Valve's job would then be to bundle all the things that people want to do into Steam itself. Granted, they've already got stuff like non-gaming software in there (which I've never tried to purchase or use straight from Steam), but as mentioned - Netflix (ugh, with that EME DRM crap), streaming... in my case I'd love to see some kind of integration with Kodi, actually. That would make the most sense as it's already 'done', has its own plugin system for many of those things, and doubles as being able to manage music and movies on local or NAS.

I don't get the feeling that Valve is ready or willing to dump those kinds of resources into SteamOS just yet, and I don't think the people who would be interested in the end-result from a user perspective line up with community members with the technical knowledge to implement it; technical Linux users by and large just don't really care about SteamOS, but we care about the Runtime and the games themselves that we can launch from our own distros. Community fixes and improvements on a 'locked down' experience are going to be hard to come by, leaving the burden almost entirely on Valve. :(

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And just like that, he's implemented vid_vsync cvar support on the Vulkan side:
Implement vsync off

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That still leaves the code from the old launcher or other modpack ones to be adapted, plus, right from the FTB homepage:

"Finally, work has started to test the viability of a Linux based client. The Curse dev team has a few Linux enthusiasts among them, so they're really excited about bringing the app to Linux."

I'm sure something will be sorted out. This is not any reason to panic. :)

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Quoting: FUltraThe launcher is not only used to launch the game, it also handles i.e upgrades and authentication with the Mojang servers.

Of course - and both of those are also currently handled with the FTB Launcher, ATLauncher, Technic, etc. etc., which are all Java based. The main travesty would be if they decide to mess with the 'legacy' authentication system further and break compatibility with those launchers. At which point a very large, vocal chunk of the community would have their heads (i.e. every modded Minecraft player).

Absolute worst case, Mojang/MS decides to crap all over everything? The existing code is out there, and in Java. It may be obfuscated, but that hasn't stopped e.g. Forge from being able to abstract out standardized hooks. They pretty much are the de facto modding API now. I'd expect a bunch of pirate auth servers to pop up instead, or server ops to just set 'online-mode=false' in server.properties (bypass/skip Mojang's auth servers) and find some other sort of plugin to protect op accounts. Heck, that probably already exists. 'Install this mod on server + client, then ops have to auth with some kind of encryption key directly with the server when in offline mode'.

This isn't a great direction to be going in, but in no way shape or form will this kill the existing PC (and yes, I mean Win/Mac/Linux, not that Win10 garbage) Minecraft ecosystem. :)

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I'm completely useless at coding, but I did open an issue (really an enhancement request) regarding Vsync:

Vsync Modes

No amount of trying to mess with the vid_vsync cvar will work, because it looks like it's being totally ignored anyway, and the Vulkan 'presentation mode' is hardcoded to one with Vsync. Changing that one line in one source file and recompiling, though? Then you can disable Vsync for some good old fashioned timedemo action. :p

Obviously, this is absolutely silly on any machine modern enough to have Vulkan support, especially if the vkQuake renderer isn't feature-complete compared to Quakespasm's stock OpenGL one, but it is faster.

OpenGL: ~720fps
Vulkan: ~780fps

(i7-4790K + GTX 980)

It's a little hard to get a good CPU usage measurement when all of demo1 finishes in like 9 seconds, however. :P

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Wait, people still use the vanilla launcher instead of a modpack one like FTB, ATLauncher, etc.?

... wait, people still play vanilla? :P

Yeah, I don't think this is going to be as big of a deal as it's made out to be. There's ways to launch Minecraft right off the command line - it's just a Java app. If for whatever reason the official Mojang one stops working, there'll be alternatives abound.

It depends what the new launcher is written in - if it's Java as well, then I can't see it being difficult to support Linux with it. They probably just don't test it that well.

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