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Latest Comments by denyasis
Feral Interactive have no plans to update their Linux ports for Steam Deck
21 February 2022 at 8:42 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: fagnerlnI love Feral and I respect a lot their work, they are amazing. But yeah, fragmentation IS a issue, and Linux do a little to support older softwares (which is comprehensive) while Windows has a system bloated to just works™.

As their ports doesn't runs in a container, sooner or later it will stop working.

good point, as an reminder, we CANT blame feral for only supporting one distro, its the fragmentation fault that things wich work on one might not work on others to begin with, not feral fault.

I'd expect the contract to port to be very specific with regards to what they are porting to, probably down to a specific distro/version. Imagine if you were told to port a game to "every Linux distro"; it would be impossible! Maybe some people here who do porting or freelance work have better insight, but it seems sensible to me to be very specific on the deliverables as a protection from client abuse/allegations.

Feral Interactive have no plans to update their Linux ports for Steam Deck
21 February 2022 at 8:35 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: denyasisI guess it's another win for Valve and Open source successes. I guess I feel slightly conflicted about it. While I appreciate Feral's work, I'm also glad that open source tools like Wine/Proton have finally taken over in a meaningful way.

I guess it's both a loss and a gain.

it is a loss.
on one hand, its good that an general purpose solution like wine/proton is better than porting, but that says more about the porting process and quality than about wine.
the ideal solution is linux geting enough marketshare to be threated like an first class citizen and open apis like vulkan becoming the standard.
its almost like if we were living the flash era vs html5 era, flash was multiplatform but had an crap support for linux, where html5 would be the "native" solution, using open standards.
while wine is gpl, directX isnt.

Is it? I'm under the impression most of these porting companies use wrappers, don't they? It's not like they all rewrote the binary and renderer into openGL. Maybe some did, but Valve has toGL, I forget what Aspry's wrapper was, etc. I'd bet some of these older ports looked a lot like a windows game under the hood, and the proprietary porting tech worked a lot like wine in some cases. Heck, there are even projects using DXVK as a wrapper for porting. I believe there are a number of Linux releases on GOG that are essentially wrapped with Wine.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in a sense, we've put the power to "port" into our own hands, at a level simple users like me can leverage. And if a "native" port is just using its own wrappers and layers under the hood, is there really a huge moral difference there?

Feral Interactive have no plans to update their Linux ports for Steam Deck
21 February 2022 at 6:02 pm UTC Likes: 7

I guess it's another win for Valve and Open source successes. I guess I feel slightly conflicted about it. While I appreciate Feral's work, I'm also glad that open source tools like Wine/Proton have finally taken over in a meaningful way.

I guess it's both a loss and a gain.

Caves of Qud gets a big content upgrade, improved gamepad and Steam Deck support
20 February 2022 at 4:34 pm UTC Likes: 1

This game is awesome. Literally saved my sanity during work travel with no signal.

My first play, I think I got infected/turned into a mushroom? And maybe I shot spores at people, I'm not totally sure, because then I died, probably horrifically. I was very confused, lol. Awesome.

Hopefully someone used my mushroom corpse in a fancy meal.

Valve clarifies how they test Native Linux or Proton for Steam Deck
20 February 2022 at 2:49 am UTC

Quoting: pete910
Quoting: denyasis
Quoting: pete910
Quoting: Frawo
Quoting: slaapliedjeHuh, Dying Light ran awesome natively for me. Granted I don't know if running under Proton makes it run better, as I had no reason to test it.
It definitely does run better in Proton, see Liams and Xpanders videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11dZ0iuzH-M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKdT3RuL9jQ

Even if the game runs "good enough" with the native version, I think they still will prefer Proton as it seems to be more efficient and should draw less power from the battery.

It could also be because of the controller support. I don't know about Dying Light, but controller support in the native version of Trine is pretty much broken, while in Proton it works as expected.

IIRC liam has a 2080ti in the first vid ?

Here is a rx5700 non xt running dying light on a AMD R3 3300 CPU compared to windows .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j7LXbD0IN8

As you can see on AMD windows is only slightly better and this was 2 years ago, Mesa has improved a great deal since then!

If that is Liams rig in the first vid it is looking a bit pants compared to a lowly 5700 GPU. How much was a 2080ti, 1200ish?

Coincidentally, I tried Dying Light for the first time tonight. Native. Didn't work, got screen distortion and the splash screen videos would only do audio (codec issue?). Switched to proton and it worked just fine.

I'm sure the solution to make native run was probably something simple that I could research. Or I could spend the 15 min and let it redownload for proton...

I can't speak for all of us, but sometimes I just want to play instead of tinkering.

Whilst most of us just want to game, some things on a particulars computer can mess up at times which is annoying for the individual.

It may well have been a simple fix unfortunately you wont know.
It may have been a missing lib from a package of your distro of choice for example, Easily rectified via a bug report thus helping the rest of users on that distro. This is how Linux works, No?

Not saying that is the issue it's just an example.

Yet on the other hand I bet you've hunted for fixes on other games in the past that had issues in wine, Witcher 3 for example ?

If you did, Why not install windows and just game rather than tinker ?

I'm implying several things in my post, that upon reading, are likely not very clear. I'm commenting on the advantage Proton can offer, especially with aging native games, using Dying Light as a personal example. Obviously it's not a blanket advantage or that it is superior to all native ports, just that it has a very useful place in the Linux game ecosystem.

I'm also implying that we are not always in the mood to debug our system at any given time. Sometimes I may not be in the mood to debug or tinker. I'm also implying this "mood", if you will, may be more common with a typical Deck user that is expecting a more console-like experience. Obviously, that's not universal among all users or any user all the time. But either way, Proton can help.

You are correct that my example was a simple fix and I know what it is: Use Proton. There's more than one way to fix things. That's how Linux works.

You are also correct, I have tested, tinkered, even filled bug reports while trying to get games to work in Wine (and native). I don't recall if Witcher 3 was one having only played it for the first time several months ago and I don't recall having any issues at all, but I can definitely say so for others.

I'm simply trying to point out there is difference between sitting down at your PC and saying "I wonder if can get this game to run?" and sitting down at your PC and trying to play a game that you believe should run fine, both in terms of expectations and level of frustration when things don't work I'm also trying to point out that Proton can help in both cases (but especially the second in terms of easing frustration).

If you want to know why I use Linux instead of Windows, I recall there being a thread or two on this site about that. If you are keen on some simple research, I'm sure my response would be easy
to find. If you can't, feel free to post, but I fear that might be veering a little off topic. (Or at least more than we already are).

Valve clarifies how they test Native Linux or Proton for Steam Deck
19 February 2022 at 6:14 am UTC

Quoting: pete910
Quoting: Frawo
Quoting: slaapliedjeHuh, Dying Light ran awesome natively for me. Granted I don't know if running under Proton makes it run better, as I had no reason to test it.
It definitely does run better in Proton, see Liams and Xpanders videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11dZ0iuzH-M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKdT3RuL9jQ

Even if the game runs "good enough" with the native version, I think they still will prefer Proton as it seems to be more efficient and should draw less power from the battery.

It could also be because of the controller support. I don't know about Dying Light, but controller support in the native version of Trine is pretty much broken, while in Proton it works as expected.

IIRC liam has a 2080ti in the first vid ?

Here is a rx5700 non xt running dying light on a AMD R3 3300 CPU compared to windows .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j7LXbD0IN8

As you can see on AMD windows is only slightly better and this was 2 years ago, Mesa has improved a great deal since then!

If that is Liams rig in the first vid it is looking a bit pants compared to a lowly 5700 GPU. How much was a 2080ti, 1200ish?

Coincidentally, I tried Dying Light for the first time tonight. Native. Didn't work, got screen distortion and the splash screen videos would only do audio (codec issue?). Switched to proton and it worked just fine.

I'm sure the solution to make native run was probably something simple that I could research. Or I could spend the 15 min and let it redownload for proton...

I can't speak for all of us, but sometimes I just want to play instead of tinkering.

Proton Experimental heats up with fixes coming, plus a disk space saving measure
19 February 2022 at 6:05 am UTC

Just tried Dying Light on experimental (both for the first time). Oddly the native port wasn't working for me, so I'm glad it was easy to switch (not sure why Steam needed to redownload the while game, but I'll live).

Buttery smooth and kinda fun to boot.

Valve clarifies how they test Native Linux or Proton for Steam Deck
18 February 2022 at 5:40 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: denyasisFeral's stuff should run fine on Nvidia. Thats the only card they've always supported, IIRC. Older ports didn't always release with "AMD support" , do to the driver situation, as mentioned by someone above.

While I'm personally still pretty skeptical about the Deck, both in commercial success terms and Valve's long term support, I am genuinely excited that this endeavor seems to be a bit of a pusg to improve Linux gaming on the Steam Ecosystem, which benefits all of us, regardless of the Deck's success.

So the nice thing about a static hardware platform like Steam is they won't need to be chasing constant kernel / mesa updates to get all the features of the GPU enabled. As long as the current kernel / Mesa versions support everything in SteamOS 3.0, then it should be shiny.

The problem, in my mind, is usually when a new AMD card comes out, and then you have to use kernels outside what your distribution normally supports (hence can cause random issues that are more difficult to poke around) and bleeding edge mesa libraries. This is the reason I use nvidia. Get a new card, update the nvidia driver (or wait for the distro to update their packages) and boom, you have support.

That's a very good point. Also historically, the same reason I've used Nvidia in my Linux build as well.

I was actually meaning something different in my mind when I said support. I was not clear with that, my apologies.

I was thinking more along the lines of commercial/institutional support (I hope that's the right word), as opposed to more kernel/driver support.

Basically how quickly will they discontinue the product/stop supporting it, fixing issues specific to it, etc.

Sorry for being confiusing

1 week from release, Steam Deck hits well over 640 Playable games
18 February 2022 at 5:18 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: thelimeydragonI do wonder if they really are going to go through everything. There is a ton of just complete junk/trash on Steam that even if it did "work" it's still pure rubbish that no one except for gag-gifts would buy.


things like this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1595780/Inno_World/

and this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1551910/Race_On_Ice_2021_Pro/

I think the article from yesterday about that testing and retesting policy seemed to indicate some form of developer submission into a "que". I'm sure that's not the only way something gets tested, but if imagine that might explain it. Developers are submitting it. Makes sense if your putting up junk to grab a few bucks, why not grab a few bucks on another platform too right?

I mean in one sense, they got more exposure for thier game by doing it then they would normally. How else would they end up on, for example, this site?

No offence to this site here, it just happens to be a very good example/use case.

Valve clarifies how they test Native Linux or Proton for Steam Deck
18 February 2022 at 5:05 pm UTC Likes: 1

Feral's stuff should run fine on Nvidia. Thats the only card they've always supported, IIRC. Older ports didn't always release with "AMD support" , do to the driver situation, as mentioned by someone above.

While I'm personally still pretty skeptical about the Deck, both in commercial success terms and Valve's long term support, I am genuinely excited that this endeavor seems to be a bit of a pusg to improve Linux gaming on the Steam Ecosystem, which benefits all of us, regardless of the Deck's success.

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