Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Steam Play Proton 5.0-4 is up fixing Origin, GTA V, Denuvo and more
13 March 2020 at 6:42 pm UTC

Quoting: Linas
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: LinasYou don't need Steam at all for this. You could try Lutris which has an installer for Dead Space 3.
I just don't want to have to install yet another thing like Lutris, would much prefer to have it all done by Steam. I've got enough tinkering going on by being a full time dev at work :)
I can relate. But still Steam is not the right tool here. Steam manages Proton configurations for the games that it knows. To add a third party non-native application, you would have to create your own Proton prefix manually, just like with regular Wine. You would also do all the tweaking manually, which is not fun. Lutris is exactly the installer you are looking for if you want to avoid messing around with all of that.

Ok, you convinced me. I'm going to try out Lutris.

SDL 2, the hugely important cross-platform development library updated to 2.0.12
12 March 2020 at 8:18 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: MaathI wonder why specific game controller hardware needs to be added to SDL. I wish the hardware could provide a "standard" description to the computer indicating the buttons, axis, etc. that it supports, and the computer can provide the user a way to map that into game inputs. I think this is something like what Steam can do for games.

As it is, I think any proprietary game not compiled with SDL 2.0.12 for example will never allow the player to make use of those new controllers.

A game compiled for any 2.0.x version of SDL should be able to link automatically with the 2.0.12 .so if you have it on your system (unless of course they linked statically or this version of SDL is not ABI backwards compatible).

export SDL_DYNAMIC_API=/path/to/libSDL-2.0.so.0

Ryan Gordon thought about the static linkage issue, and internally SDL2 can actually redirect to a dynamic lib, even if statically compiled into the target program.

Ryan is one clever cookie!

Steam Play Proton 5.0-4 is up fixing Origin, GTA V, Denuvo and more
12 March 2020 at 8:17 pm UTC

Quoting: 14
Quoting: Linas
Quoting: F.UltraAny one having any idea how to go about installing Origin in steam? Are one to install it as an external 3d party game and then just launch it and proton will then run on all games installed via Origin or must the game be one of the steam games that comes with Origin?
You don't need Steam at all for this. You could try Lutris which has an installer for Dead Space 3.

Although to be honest, with all of the games to choose from, I wouldn't bother spending my money on Origin on a game that may or may not work.
In my case, it's a game I already own from long ago, so I might as well give the Lutris method a shot.

Yeah if you already own it I guess that you don't want to purchase them once more :)

Steam Play Proton 5.0-4 is up fixing Origin, GTA V, Denuvo and more
12 March 2020 at 8:16 pm UTC

Quoting: Linas
Quoting: F.UltraAny one having any idea how to go about installing Origin in steam? Are one to install it as an external 3d party game and then just launch it and proton will then run on all games installed via Origin or must the game be one of the steam games that comes with Origin?
You don't need Steam at all for this. You could try Lutris which has an installer for Dead Space 3.

Although to be honest, with all of the games to choose from, I wouldn't bother spending my money on Origin on a game that may or may not work.

I just don't want to have to install yet another thing like Lutris, would much prefer to have it all done by Steam. I've got enough tinkering going on by being a full time dev at work :)

The thing with Origin is that both Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3, both of which are keen game franchises for me, are Origin exclusive.

And I already have an Origin account due to my daughter wanted to play Sims 4 some years ago.

Steam Play Proton 5.0-4 is up fixing Origin, GTA V, Denuvo and more
11 March 2020 at 8:20 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: 14I did not expect the Origin launcher to work via Steam. Wow. The timing is great since I just mentioned to a friend last week how it would be fun to play the Dead Space games somehow. I wonder if I can now.

DS1 and DS2 does not require Origin and have worked fine in Proton since the 3.x days, it's only DS3 that is Origin-exclusive.

Any one having any idea how to go about installing Origin in steam? Are one to install it as an external 3d party game and then just launch it and proton will then run on all games installed via Origin or must the game be one of the steam games that comes with Origin?

SDL 2, the hugely important cross-platform development library updated to 2.0.12
11 March 2020 at 8:16 pm UTC

Quoting: MaathI wonder why specific game controller hardware needs to be added to SDL. I wish the hardware could provide a "standard" description to the computer indicating the buttons, axis, etc. that it supports, and the computer can provide the user a way to map that into game inputs. I think this is something like what Steam can do for games.

As it is, I think any proprietary game not compiled with SDL 2.0.12 for example will never allow the player to make use of those new controllers.

A game compiled for any 2.0.x version of SDL should be able to link automatically with the 2.0.12 .so if you have it on your system (unless of course they linked statically or this version of SDL is not ABI backwards compatible).

Intel chipsets have another security issue, this time it's 'unfixable'
9 March 2020 at 7:40 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: Mountain ManLocal and physical access tends to decrease the effectiveness of and defeat many security measures. For that matter, if someone has physical access to your machine, they could simply walk off with it and crack it at their leisure.

If you got decent encryption, not within billion years with the whole energy of the sun.
Yesyes, encryption works. And if what someone is trying to do is access your data, that's fine. Won't stop ransomware though, they can just encrypt your encrypted data. Or hijacking your machine to help a botnet or whatever. If someone's got physical access, they can do pretty much anything except access encrypted data, and I still don't see how a chip having security features is gonna stop them.

(For that matter, cracking encrypted data they might not be able to do in a few days or even in a practical length of time, but it won't take any billion years; they just wait 10-20 years for quantum computing to mature a bit)

quantum computing will just scale down the timeframe from many many billions of years to (many many billions of years) / 2.

Where quantum computing will wreck absolute havoc is in asymmetric encryption which is not used to encrypt data (for 99.99999% of it's application) but to exchange encryption keys or used to sign data by encrypting cryptographic hashes.

edit: just wanted to point out that I wrote the wrong timeframe change above, it's not the time component that is halved, it's the number of bits. So a 256 bit symmetric algorithm today will in a fully quantum world be equivalent to a 128 bit symmetric algorithm.

We are still talking about billions and billions of years, and in fact the "not with the whole energy of the sun" that Eike first wrote is actually a quote taken from Bruce Schneier's first book where he talks about the energy requirements to brute force a 128 bit symmetric key so what Eike wrote still holds true even in a quantum world (the energy requirement to brute force a 256 bit symmetric key today would be equivalent of 2^128 suns).

It's also worth noting that this energy requirement is also based on a implausible future where the energy requirement to fully decrypt one step of an algorithm would be just the movement of a single electron one energy level. Today (and still tomorrow with quantum) such an operation will take billions of such movements.

Intel chipsets have another security issue, this time it's 'unfixable'
6 March 2020 at 11:21 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI don't really like Intel, but this doesn't really worry me. I mean,
Quotethey would need some sort of physical and local access
Why are we even expecting any kind of compute-y thing to be secure when someone has physical and local access? That was never a thing when I was young, and I'm fairly convinced that if we think it's a thing now it's mainly wishful thinking.

Think servers, when you use a resource remotely on a server (e.g a HTTP request to a web server, or a SMTP request to a mail server and so forth) you have a form of local access to that server (and if the software have some form of vulnerability as well then you definitely have local access, even if that application is securely sandboxed).

And if you are in a big server room then you have physical access to those servers without necessarily have the kind of physical access that you would have if you stole a laptop from someone.

So these recent vulnerabilities are not so much of a desktop problem as they are a server problem, just like many of the other recent Spectre variants.

Speculation: porting studio Feral Interactive could be in some trouble (updated: they're fine)
27 February 2020 at 10:22 am UTC

Quoting: ShabbyXYou would think Feral can now get many games that are ported to Stadia and release them on desktop fairly quickly. I wonder what's stopping them from doing that.

The original game publisher is what is stopping them from doing that. Either by outright refusing to let Feral buy the Linux/macOS rights or by having such a high price that it's not worth it.

Steam Play Proton is correctly tracking Linux sales, a statement from Valve
20 February 2020 at 9:55 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: rustybroomhandle
Quoting: dpanterAll I want is that buying a game from a Linux platform counts as a Linux purchase.
Is that really so bloody difficult? :><:

On which platform are you not getting this, though?

Well, Android for one - I think that was mentioned earlier. I can't buy games at work either, because that's either Android or Windows, so I have to wishlist, then hope I remember when I get home.

We really should be able to demonstrate support for our platform in easier/better ways that this...!

There is always the "send a mail to yourself" option otherwise :)

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