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Latest Comments by slaapliedje
Ryan "Icculus" Gordon is looking for new games to port to Linux, pay not required
23 August 2017 at 2:44 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: MintedGamer
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think some people who are talking about Mr. Gordon doing things like contribute to Wine or fixing problems with Unreal engine or whatnot are missing the mark a bit. Coders are not universal tools. Ryan Gordon is very experienced and expert at porting games to Linux; there may well be nobody in the world who is better. That does not make him experienced and expert at any and all computing tasks. He's a smart man and could no doubt learn any of those other things, but spending time on those learning curves, unless he happens to have "caught the bug" on one of them, would not be the best use of his time and expertise.
Other people who know Wine can hack Wine, he can port games.

You are absolutely right, I just thought if he knew some of the pitfalls and challenges of porting with Unreal Engine having worked with Epic and UE before, maybe he could help directly with the Engine and toolsets to make it easier long term for himself and others, just a thought I had, and as you say it may not be his forte and his talents may be better elsewhere, I like others was just speculating on what I thought might be an interesting project :)

Again, I point out that Unreal Engine has Linux support, yes even in the latest version, you can even download the Unreal Tournament 4 test.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-and-linux
https://github.com/UTAwesome/UTLauncher

Speaking of coders not being universal tools, I hit up a co-worker today because I knew he'd done some kernel development if he knew anything about video capture devices (I bought a great one but found out Linux doesn't quite see it). He kind of laughed at me, since he'd done some network device code and some other embedded work, but not much to do with libusb and video capture. I asked him in jest anyhow, but really that's the great thing about Linux, so much knowledge out there that it's quite possible that someone somewhere could just one day pop up with a driver for the Startech USB3HDCAP... *hint hint*

Did you miss Shadow Warrior for free last month? It's free again on Steam this time
23 August 2017 at 2:36 am UTC

Yeah, I thought 'cool, 50% off of... a Windows game.. Nah, I have enough. I mean if it's like 80% off, maybe?

But don't get me wrong, if it were out for Linux, I'd pay full price. I did for Shadow Warrior 1 (at least I'm pretty sure I did).

The Witcher 3 didn't come to Linux likely as a result of the user-backlash from The Witcher 2
22 August 2017 at 3:29 pm UTC

The thing is while I'd like to yell at developers for not supporting AMD upon release, it's really AMD's fault for having such crap drivers for so long. It's the reason I always buy nVidia. I also always buy Intel now because every time I get an AMD CPU/Chipset motherboard I have weird random issues.

Though I will say lately it's been Intel's latest chipset/cpu that has been having weird issues with it's microcode.

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon is looking for new games to port to Linux, pay not required
22 August 2017 at 3:22 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: onibakumanI feel like it would make more sense to go for porting the major game engines as opposed to one off games. Imagine if unreal engine had Linux support. It would be insane and we could recycle a bunch of code.

Uhm... Unreal Engine does have Linux support. In fact it's had Linux support since Unreal Tournament. Doesn't mean all the companies making Unreal Engine games want to support Linux. In fact Unreal Engine 4 now has a 'compile for Linux' option, last I heard, much like Unity.

I got a bunch of unreal engine books off of humble bundle, and maybe in the year 2030 when I have some time, I'll build a game out of it... :P

The HTC Vive just had a price cut, VR just became a little more accessible
22 August 2017 at 7:27 am UTC

Pretty sure I managed to find the firmware for the bluetooth within an AUR for Arch. Haven't tried SteamVR in Linux yet to see if that fixex the issue though.

Interesting note on EXT_memory_object. From my last experimentation, about the only software that worked correctly outside of the Vavle demo stuff (Destinations... and now called SteamVR Home..) was Serious Sam: The First Encounter, which could arguably be said to be the best Game for VR right now. Considering 95% of the other stuff out there is extremely short, or simply lacking polish. Granted the one other that is a full game would be Elite: Dangerous... which we need a Linux port for..

Sociable Soccer, from the designer of Sensible Soccer could see a Linux version with enough support
21 August 2017 at 11:42 pm UTC

Couldn't we create some sort of Kickstarter/Patreon thing like that? Pick a game a lot of us would want, get a sign up of X amount of people, show the amount of possible money from purchases for it then show the developers? Talk is cheap, but putting a value behind the work could... well work.

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon is looking for new games to port to Linux, pay not required
21 August 2017 at 11:39 pm UTC

Elite: Dangerous!
Ryan and David should become drinking buds!

The HTC Vive just had a price cut, VR just became a little more accessible
21 August 2017 at 11:38 pm UTC

If there is any jitter, they probably are trying to run it on a machine just not cut out for it, or quite possibly they tried to up the super sampling too high.

Ha, unless you're gaming on a 50" plus screen you wouldn't be able to see a pixel on even a 2k monitor. It's like people who beg for 4k on their phones... By the way the distance thing is on purpose. I noticed on my Gear VR that you can actually adjust the focus so it's closer to what you could see with 20/20. But the Vive and Oculus apparently try an auto distance as if you're in real life (ended up getting lasik partly for the reason of being able to see correctly in VR without needing glasses, but of course it's great for other reasons)

Considering people with even 4k TVs (let alone monitors) are a very small amount of people, 1200p resolution is quite amazing.

Now you say you watch other people play around on VR and complain. Have you ever played any VR personally? or even watched a video in VR?

The HTC Vive just had a price cut, VR just became a little more accessible
21 August 2017 at 11:22 pm UTC

Quoting: TheRiddickVR will make its comeback someday, maybe when a couple of issues get resolved...
-atm its bulky,
-hand controllers feel rather experimental,
-resolution is quite low causing screen door and pixelation,
-tracking requirements need multiple cameras or sensors for a 'glitchy' experience
-needs allot of software smoothing to compensate for hardware limits,
-still priced quite high despite it being quite cheap hardware wise,
-cheap small screen lcd technology is still limited in color/light/response levels

I'll take your points one at a time:
-It's not TERRIBLY bulky, maybe a tad. Though honestly once my face goes in, I don't really notice anything except that I'm not in a new universe...
-The Knuckles look quite awesome, but otherwise the motion controllers feel like.. well controllers. I wouldn't really call them experimental, just not a lot you can do with how they're currently designed, though playing gun time games is great.
-Resolution.. quite frankly I only first noticed the screen door effect when I tried watching movies in it. I don't see it at all in most games unless I look really hard, and of course when you watch movies you're staring forward at movement, vs moving your head around and paying attention to the game.
-Tracking works great actually, I think the only time I've had tracking issues at all is when my controller somehow ends up under my table, so of course the tracking goes a little screwy.
-I can agree with software smoothing. But much like resolution, it's still early days, text can be hard to read in it, but most other things look fantastic.
-(only speaking for the Vive here) it's fairly decently made, it's not like some smartphones that cost just as much but will completely shatter on impact with anything because they're made of glass...but for price, it is kind of expensive, especially if you're starting with a laptop and not a gaming rig. Though to be fair I did see a 599 eGPU that you could connect up to a cheaper laptop (assuming it has thunderbolt 3), so you could probably get one for about 800+600+600 for laptop+eGPU+vive, but that's still quite a chunk of change!
-I personally haven't had any issues with the color/light/response on my Vive. Though I do occasionally get the 'god-ray' effect if I'm looking around and see something bright.

Either way, VR isn't making any 'comeback' It's here to stay and is only going to get better. There are a few companies claiming 4k per eye.

The HTC Vive just had a price cut, VR just became a little more accessible
21 August 2017 at 9:45 pm UTC

Quoting: haagch
Quoting: mike44Once X-Plane supports it, I'll have a look again. But I might wait for the next gen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/6oalkh/xplane_11_vr_vive_rift_native_support_coming_this/

But there's a good chance it won't support OpenVR on Linux and you won't have to spend money.

There are already a couple of games with VR support that never bothered with linux.

Alien Isolation had short lived experimental Oculus Rift DK2 support, but never in the linux version. There is now an independent mod, but only for the windows version.
Dirt Rally has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
X Rebirth VR is only for Windows.
Serious Sam: The Last Hope is still only for Windows.

There are some open source engines that are in desperate need for some porting
KozGit's doom 3 bfg fork: https://github.com/KozGit/DOOM-3-BFG-VR (there's a fork with fewer features that does compile and work on linux: https://github.com/Codes4Fun/RBDOOM-3-BFG/)
Penumbra VR doesn't compile because the original engine doesn't compile on modern gcc on linux: http://rly.sexy/penumbra-vr-release/

I'm sure there are lots more but those I remember right now.

For what it's worth they have to actually use Vulkan. It's required for it to broadcast through the Headset.

Serious Sam: The Last Hope is kind of lame. It's a wave shooter. Serious Sam: The First Encounter VR on the otherhand works great on Linux and is a blast (even though I'm stuck on it because it's freaking hard!)
Alice VR is one that I think still needs Vulkan tot work (it loads, just not in the headset).
some of the demos work, like Destinations.

What I think the main issue at this point with it, is that the nvidia driver needs to be certain version so it'll work, and I don't think that many distributions have it packaged yet.

But so far, the Vive seems to work like it should in Arch Linux. Except I haven't tested the bluetooth shutdown of the Lighthouses yet (though I found out the firmware file was missing for the bluetooth that the Vive uses, now it's installed I should test that function.)

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