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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
The Paradox Launcher is now available on Linux
17 July 2018 at 6:44 pm UTC

Quoting: EikeWhat I wondered lately...

Quoting: F.UltraWhich is why I included the fact that all agreements you have to sign with Valve in order to publish on Steam is public in my previous post.

What's the share Valve takes off the Steam price?

Paradox claims that it's 30% in their Annual Reports which match what others have said the cut is. Seams to be a magic number since that is what Google/Apple et al also seams to take in their stores.

The updated release of 'Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive' that has Linux support is now on GOG
12 July 2018 at 10:54 am UTC

Quoting: mylkadoes anyone know how much it cost to make a linux version of this game?
im sure they wanna sell some copies, but how much can they make, when its now just 1€

or are they planning a 3rd title and use this as commercial

Probably more or less came included when they updated the game, i.e whoever made the update made the game cross platform as part of the update so there where no additional cost (or atleast it cannot be broken away from the cost of the update).

Open source game engine 'Godot Engine' to get an impressive third-person shooter demo
3 July 2018 at 1:22 pm UTC Likes: 3

Now this is impressive for such a small and open game engine! This FPS demo gave me flashbacks to Mass Effect 3 for some reason.

Mesa now supports OpenGL 4.4 Compatibility Profile for radeonsi
3 July 2018 at 12:33 am UTC

Quoting: pete910
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: pete910
Quoting: ShmerlYep, it shows up in the OpenGL string now:

OpenGL renderer string: Radeon RX Vega (VEGA10, DRM 3.25.0, 4.17.0-trunk-amd64, LLVM 6.0.0)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 18.2.0-devel (git-2854c0f795)
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL version string: 4.4 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 18.2.0-devel (git-2854c0f795)
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.40


Killing compat profile could have made sense if Khronos would have done it. But they didn't, and now it's proliferated in Nvidia blob, so some clueless developers use it despite many warnings not to, and you get results like Dying Light. There is no option for Mesa but to implement it.

Does Dying Light work for you ?

You can already make Dying Light run on stable mesa if you set the Launch Options in Steam to "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%" the great thing with the new patches is that such workarounds will no longer be necessary.

edit: however reading the mesa-dev post it seams that this perhaps does fix some stability for Dying Light that the override did not. In that case this change is even better :)

As mentioned numerous times, that fix does not work for arch users or even non *buntu based distros. :(

Yeah I know but that should indicate that the problem on Arch is something else. I do hope that this is where I'm totally wrong so that things will start to work for you Arch-guys as well.

Mesa now supports OpenGL 4.4 Compatibility Profile for radeonsi
2 July 2018 at 10:43 pm UTC

Quoting: pete910
Quoting: ShmerlYep, it shows up in the OpenGL string now:

OpenGL renderer string: Radeon RX Vega (VEGA10, DRM 3.25.0, 4.17.0-trunk-amd64, LLVM 6.0.0)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 18.2.0-devel (git-2854c0f795)
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL version string: 4.4 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 18.2.0-devel (git-2854c0f795)
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.40


Killing compat profile could have made sense if Khronos would have done it. But they didn't, and now it's proliferated in Nvidia blob, so some clueless developers use it despite many warnings not to, and you get results like Dying Light. There is no option for Mesa but to implement it.

Does Dying Light work for you ?

You can already make Dying Light run on stable mesa if you set the Launch Options in Steam to "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%" the great thing with the new patches is that such workarounds will no longer be necessary.

edit: however reading the mesa-dev post it seams that this perhaps does fix some stability for Dying Light that the override did not. In that case this change is even better :)

The Paradox Launcher is now available on Linux
29 June 2018 at 4:16 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: F.UltraIn my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.

I disagree. It takes more for a conspiracy theory than speculation. You're missing boxes, boxes which wouldn't tick.
But I don't think we need to discuss this further.
Your arguments about the real question are good; my speculation was most probably wrong.

Ok I'll soon drop this :) but just wanted to point out that:

#1 A conspiracy is: "a secret agreement by people to commit something wrong or illegal. Depending on the circumstances, a conspiracy may be a crime, or a civil wrong."
#2 A conspiracy theory is: "an explanation of an event or situation that invokes an unwarranted conspiracy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy

Which is why I included the fact that all agreements you have to sign with Valve in order to publish on Steam is public in my previous post. I would say that both boxes are ticked ;)

However with this I did not intend to paint people in a bad light so I can stretch it to call everything posted before this very post as speculation and everything after as conspiracy theories (unless people bring up credible evidence of course).

The Paradox Launcher is now available on Linux
29 June 2018 at 2:41 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: F.UltraI don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam

I'm happy with calling it pure speculation, but unhappy with having it called "conspiracy theories". (The possibility of Valve forcing companies to do something is lacking enough parties for a conspiracy to begin with.)

I think a spade is a spade. It's quite easy to begin publishing games on Steam. All you have to do is sign the agreements from https://partner.steamgames.com/newpartner/?signup_type=1 and pay the fees. I just tried with my Steam credentials and exactly nowhere in any of the agreements and NDA:s that they wanted signed was any reference to prohibiting you sale of your products on any other platform nor of any text regarding how you decide to set the price of your products either on Steam nor anywhere else.

So yes that is a conspiracy theory because all the open facts dispute it, it's easy to see since the agreements are public, both big and small publishers operates their own stores besides Steam, but still people "speculate" that this is the case. In my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.

Techland haven't decided if Dying Light 2 will be on Linux
29 June 2018 at 1:26 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: GuestI bought Dying Light one year ago. Actual play time 0 minutes, it never worked on my machine, neither with Mesa or Mesa-git. So if they release it for Linux, they hopefully make it work as well. Otherwise I can't see what's the difference to a Windows only release. I paid the full price for this game, but so far I got 0 fun and 0 service. Technology wise I hope they go Vulkan only for Dying Light 2 to reduce bugs.

Did you change the Launch Options in Steam to "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%"? This is needed for it to start on Mesa since it tries to open v4.5 of the compat profile instead of the proper core profile.

Yes, I did. But it doesn't help, there is just a black loading screen. And in some days in mesa-git this workaround will be obsolete :-)

Strange, I had that exactly that black loading screen until I changed the launch options... Don't remember if I did anything else, since you are on mesa-get I believe that you are on 18.x since they also did some workaround in 17.x to get Dying Light to work.

It's a really buggy game though, currently I'm stuck near the end of The Following since the game crashes as soon as I reach a certain point (the granary) which apparently also happens for people on Windows and PS4 so not even with a better port it would be completely stable.

edit: btw do you have this section in /etc/drirc:
        <application name="Dying Light" executable="DyingLightGame">
            <option name="allow_glsl_builtin_variable_redeclaration" value="true" />
        </application>


edit2: seams like others on Arch also have problems with this game: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/2766/post_id=15355

The Paradox Launcher is now available on Linux
29 June 2018 at 1:21 pm UTC

Quoting: mylka
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: mylkamaybe they get more money with each sale, but now they have higher costes. own servers and linux programmer for the launcher
maybe gog follows

I think that it's simply that they have now grown big enough to where those costs are less than having to give away 30% of each sale to companies such as Valve.

Now I don't have longer data than back to 2013 in the database (they listed their share in 2016) but they seam to have made some nice increase in both sales and profit (ptp in the table below is the pre-tax-profit) and while not close to a behemoth like EA they are probably as I wrote before closing in on the kind of sales numbers where 30% suddenly are quite a lot of actual money (aprox 35M EUR in 2017 if we assume that all sales are from places like Steam).

does steam really take 30%. assassins creed costs the same on steam and uplay. actually its now cheaper in the steam sale, than the uplay sale
why wouldnt ubisoft make their games like 10-20% cheaper in their own store? the customers would pay less, so they would get more costumers and they would make more money with each sale

why is EA selling their games only on origin, but ubisoft isnt, if they would save so much money?

Yes they take 30% (Paradox writes so in their Annual Report which I have in Swedish only but they might have it in English on their IR site) however there exists no details if large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are tied to the generic deal or if they are large enough to get a discount here.

That Ubisoft does not lower their own prices by the Steam tax is quite simple, that would #1 make them loose 30% there as well and #2 it would lower the value of their games. Say the price is 100 USD om Steam and 70 USD on Ubisoft Store then Steam users will complain en masse that the price on Steam is lowered to 70 USD as well which now means that Ubisoft gets 49 USD from each Steam sale instead of 70 USD.

And to move a substantial amount of your customers from Steam to your own store you probably have to do way more than just decrease the price of your wares by 30%. I wouldn't categorise Steam as vendor-lock-in but their store is convenient enough so that it's close to customer-lock-in.

Also for large AAA games it's not certain that a lower price yields more sales (or enough more sales to cover for the lower price).

I don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam since #1 no one in the industry have ever claimed that this is happening, #2 lots of both large and small publishers (e.g EA and Feral) have their own stores, and #3 that they simply do not need to force a specific price due to the mechanics that I explained earlier (i.e that if they lower the price in their own store then they ultimately lower the prices on Steam as well).

Techland haven't decided if Dying Light 2 will be on Linux
29 June 2018 at 1:02 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: GuestI bought Dying Light one year ago. Actual play time 0 minutes, it never worked on my machine, neither with Mesa or Mesa-git. So if they release it for Linux, they hopefully make it work as well. Otherwise I can't see what's the difference to a Windows only release. I paid the full price for this game, but so far I got 0 fun and 0 service. Technology wise I hope they go Vulkan only for Dying Light 2 to reduce bugs.

Did you change the Launch Options in Steam to "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%"? This is needed for it to start on Mesa since it tries to open v4.5 of the compat profile instead of the proper core profile.

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