Latest Comments by F.Ultra
When should i386 support for Ubuntu end? Help Canonical decide
1 July 2016 at 11:43 pm UTC

Just strange that they use a survey for this when they have download stats for their ISOs and their i386 repository. And "solving" multiarch via snap, please no.

Developer breaks silence about 'The Silent Age', a point-and-click adventure for which a Linux port was promised
1 July 2016 at 11:36 pm UTC

Quoting: HyperdriveIt would be really interesting to better understand the issues that gets reported when devs face issues with Linux ports. What does the "texture" issue really mean for instance? Is there a 32/64 bit mess up? Are the APIs incomplete on the Linux side? What is it?

In this context it probably means that they wrote the shaders in DirectX on Unity and the DirectX to OpenGL translation in Unity borked some of them so that some textures looks wrong. Since too few write their shaders in OpenGL to begin with we can only hope that the momentum behind Vulcan will change this.

Game porter Ethan Lee on packaging games for Linux
19 June 2016 at 9:47 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: sarmadtgz archives don't have a way to specify dependencies. If the game doesn't have any extra dependencies then tgz is good enough. If it does then you better have a proper package otherwise the user will need to hunt down dependencies which is a pain.
No, the games must provide the libs they need. That’s even quoted in the article here…

Edit: ok no it’s not explicitly quoted :) … But that’s what’s needed. Only insane developers make distro packages such as .deb for their games. Besides, installers are not "proper packages" as you say and I was comparing tgz to installers, not to packages.

Making a .deb is hardly insane, there is no problem to create exactly the same package with a .deb (or a .rpm for that matter) that you would with that "installer", all a .deb or .rpm does is basically a .tgz plus executable (optional) scripts. I'm guessing here that the installer in question however handles key management to "prevent" piracy and that is of course not built into .deb or .rpm so that might be a reason (which would rule out a .tgz as well).

Here's my own Linux OpenGL vs Vulkan test for Dota 2, not much difference for me
16 June 2016 at 5:17 pm UTC

Now I don't know how much effort Valve is putting into this but it would be interesting if they could create a blackhole driver, i.e a driver that does nothing but yet returns every value that it should so that the game engine thinks that everything is OK. This to sort out if the different between Windows and Linux are really the drivers or not, because wasn't one of the things about Vulkan that the drivers would not be involved as much as they are in OpenGL? (I have no experience with graphics programming I might add).

Starbound developer comments on Linux support and their SteamOS icon
10 June 2016 at 4:15 pm UTC

Quoting: STiATPainless Linux-Support has two sides:
It's probably painless to support stuff if you're using the right libraries to get all the window management, input and stuff done.
What can be a pain, especially for graphically more... challanging products is still the graphics stack. Ye, a lot of is done there, but we're not quite where I'd consider it a good state.

Still, ye, Linux numbers is minimal, and I can understand business decisions on not supporting Linux. Though, it's always nice if we get a game :-).

I think that the pain that some devs feel with Linux is that they try to handle it like just another version of Windows, realizing that there can be a world of difference between the two systems and cry wolf. Now I'm no game developer but I do develop software for a living and I always write the Linux version first and then port to Windows and every time it's a real pain to do, so I image that the reverse must be true for devs that are used to how Windows works as well.

We are now importing sales from Steam to our Sales Page
9 June 2016 at 9:50 am UTC

Quoting: NyamiouMake sure you don't extract data that is not exposed by the public API, because databases are also protected by copyright in the EU.

Looks like Liam is scraping the public Steam Store so there is no way that he could expose non public data.

Minecraft 1.10 released, adds Polar Bears and more
9 June 2016 at 9:45 am UTC

Quoting: AnxiousInfusion
Quoting: PlintslchoThere're people way older than you are that still greatly enjoy Minecraft, believe me. ;-)

Ironically, the only people who are adamant that Minecraft is for kids are those who were recently children/young teens. That said, I am pleased to see Minecraft still works well on Linux even though it is owned by Microsoft. I can only wonder how much longer this version equality will last and so I've been cozying up real close to Minetest lately.

I think that the version equality will be there for a long time since it's the same version due to Minecraft being a Java application. Of course they could always try and force the XBOX version as the only version (guessing here that that version is not written in Java) but there is nothing that indicates that this is on the road map.

According to Deep Silver the new editions of Dead Island are not coming to Linux
26 May 2016 at 3:32 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: wojtek88interprets all the occurences of words starting with '@' character
We are not on Twitter though.

To use @ to refer to users on forums happened many many years before Twitter existed.

Unity3D working on SDL, Wayland and Mir support
11 May 2016 at 7:20 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Guest1. Any special reason why would you support Unity3D?
2. Everyones acting like X11 is the past and is really buggy and slow - but really most don't have real problems with X11 and if there are problems let us fix them or rewrite parts if neccesarry.

But X11 is the past and is really buggy (try for example to create a 100% no-one-can-bypass screen saver lock for X11). More to the point is that the devs behind X11 is the same devs that are creating Wayland.

The only sad thing with these nice changes to Unity3D is that AFAIK Unity3D is statically linked to each game and does not exist as a shared resource in for example Steam so for this new version to be used games have to be updated one by one(?).

Feral Interactive officially confirm F1 2015 is coming to Linux
10 May 2016 at 8:02 pm UTC

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: TheRiddickFeral should port Skyrim then/or Fallout4... just saying.

Is it Feral who choose what to port, or the development/publisher house approaching Feral?

Must be the publisher! How should they get the source code otherwise? Also they wouldn't have any rights for distribution then.

Or it's Feral who reaches out to the publisher to make a deal in which Feral buys the distribution rights for OSX and Linux. Consider that Feral sells their ports on their own shop, people who simply create ports don't do that. And if you go to Sega's webshop and select LINUX as platform you cannot find Alien: Isolation.