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Latest Comments by ShabbyX
A look at Tinertia, a twin-stick rocket-jumping shooter for Linux
10 February 2017 at 11:02 pm UTC

Quoting: M@GOid
Quoting: no_information_hereI still have no idea what the left touchpad on the Steam controller is actually any good for.

I use it very little too. But I heard some people saying they managed to ditch the analog stick and use the two touchpads exclusively.

Me!

I never used a controller before SC, and I find it utterly impossible to use the joysticks. My thumb slides over them, so if I'm going forward for a while, I have to stop and position my thumb on the stick again. With the left touch pad, I didn't even need to apply any force (to move the stick). And that's just for moving! Aiming is even worse with joystick. Also, it's faster to switch between left and right, because you don't need to draw a physical stick from left to right.

If you can't imagine how using the two touchpads work, imagine playing a "twin-stick" game on your smartphone. It's fundamentally the same thing.

An interview with Simon Roth, the developer of space colony simulator 'Maia'
2 February 2017 at 1:23 am UTC Likes: 2

QuoteI’d love to see a more robust IDE matching the power of Visual Studio hit Linux.

I've recently got into the game industry and forced to use Visual Studio. In just a few months, I have seen it crash and burn, get in infinite loops, lose my settings, etc. Also, Intellisense is slow, so they recommend some add-on. Searching is slow, so another add-on. I also use the vim add-on. Essentially, the whole thing is useless and needs to be replaced with add-ons.

On Linux, I personally treat the whole system like an IDE. Desktop workspaces can be used to reduce the clutter of opened files. Ctrl+` greatly simplifies navigation between windows. The extremely fast terminal is great to quickly search for something/open a file. Not to mention that bash will let you do things you can never imagine with an IDE, like transform a set of variables in all your files based on some regex, or search for patterns again with regexes. On top of that, working with git (or most other version control systems) is easiest in the terminal (really, type what you want instead of looking at 100 options in some GUI list).

I know that for someone who's used to IDEs switching to separate editor and build could be odd at first, but if you do learn it, I guarantee you'd cringe at how limited your life is with IDEs.

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Nevertheless, if all fails, try Qt Creator (and use it to create non-Qt applications). Between IDEs, that's the sanest I have seen around.

The next round of our user-powered statistics has completed, take a look
7 January 2017 at 7:22 am UTC

Have you noticed the "GPU Driver (AMD)" trend graph has over 105% as the sum of free and proprietary drivers for Jan 2017? That graph generally looks weird: the free driver is on a smooth rise, but the proprietary goes up and down... shouldn't they be complementary?

What game are you truly thankful to have on Linux & SteamOS?
23 December 2016 at 7:07 pm UTC

Tomb Raider: even though I played it only once, it was what attracted me to join Eidos Montreal!
Borderlands 2, Payday 2 and Rocket League: the games I play with my brother (who's on windows)
Countless indie games: these are the games I actually spend most of my time on!

Our latest user survey is done, Steam Controller seems to be the favourite
4 December 2016 at 11:12 pm UTC

The worst part about "one-click confirm" is that you need a multi-click step to log in first. Many times I am discouraged from doing anything on this website (including writing a comment), because I have to click login, be taken to Steam's login page, put my credentials, get the authenticator code, put it in, wait for the page to be loaded back.

I'm permanently logged in to my Google account on my phone, which is a far riskier thing to do that to be permanently logged in to GOL on my PC. If you allow one to stay logged in for a long time, with the usual "Remember Me" checkbox or something (checkbox disable by default), that would definitely increase my activity here.

What one game would blow your mind if it came to Linux & SteamOS?
2 December 2016 at 12:52 am UTC

Starcraft 2. I stopped using windows before Legacy of the Void, and I really want to buy/play that campaign, but of course not until it's on Linux.

User submission: Vulkan tutorials now up on github
9 October 2016 at 1:54 am UTC

If anyone is still following, I've added a couple more tutorials since I posted this.

Most recently, I added one where I fake a presentation engine (as if done in the driver) that renders to terminal with ncurses. With very minimal changes to the application, I get a Vulkan-rendered triangle on the terminal!

User submission: Vulkan tutorials now up on github
14 July 2016 at 1:57 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: SmalokiImpressive! I actually held off on learning Vulkan because I was told that you'd need a certain amount of experience with graphics programming to comprehend it. And since I just started playing around with OpenGL three months ago, I figured I'd never be able to get into Vulkan.

I'd say you need to know a bit of math, matrix transformations in particular, but then again you would need to know that for any graphics API anyway! To be honest, when I didn't know about something in Vulkan, I would look it up in the context of OpenGL (where there are a lot of info online), and almost everything, conceptually, is the same. I don't see why you wouldn't learn Vulkan directly.

Only thing I can say about that, and I'm sure you know already, is that it's much easier in OpenGL to get something drawn on the screen. But once you can do that in Vulkan, everything else is actually much easier; the API is very clean, there is zero cruft, and no strange behavior because of legacy.

Quoting: Smaloki... no Vulkan binding for Vala atm. Maybe I'll implement one myself someday...

How awesome would that be? :)

User submission: Vulkan tutorials now up on github
14 July 2016 at 1:49 am UTC Likes: 1

Thanks for all the positive responses, guys! I'm happy I managed to inspire a few. :)

Like all free software, do feel free to point out errors, imprecisions, or send pull requests.