There was a really nice talk at DevConf.cz about direct hardware acceleration in virtio as well, though in that case focused more on the hardware developers themselves directly implementing virtualization support into their devices.

I've been hoping that the virgil project will grab onto Vulkan and all the extra features from there though, with DXVK and all it should be possible to even run it as a Windows driver and just convert all Direct3D stuff into Vulkan calls to the Linux host.

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Quoting: liamdaweUnity have responded: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

I think I can see what Unity is trying to get at here;

QuoteAs an example, if you have made a Windows or Linux player build of your game to be an authoritative game server and run that on a server in-house, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual. If you rent a server or pay for a cloud instance to run the game, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual.

However, if a third party service wants to run the Unity Runtime in the cloud with their additional SDK, we consider this a platform.

So basically they want their ToS to basically say that you're not allowed to do Game as a Service - or Game-Server as a Service - systems. You're only allowed to run instances of your game on systems that you implicitly own by paying for them, so systems that are owned by other providers aren't allowed to run your game for you unless you - as the games developer - pay them to do so.

Going to be interesting to see how they're planning on writing this in legalese without making it really easy to abuse, as you could easily misconstrue this to mean that players aren't allowed to host their own servers for your games, meaning you have to provide all server hosting if you want to do Unity games.

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It's great to hear that they're getting closer to a native Linux release. With the latest Proton betas I've actually been able to play the game with the original DX11 renderer, which was great fun, though Proton can't do multiplayer as of yet so a large part is still lacking.

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That artstyle gets an instant wishlist add from me, loving every part of it - though the interior modules seem to look a little bit ugly with how un-integrated they get with the rest of the interior. Though considering how early it is in development that's probably going to change, they seem to be quite passionate about working on it after all.

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I just realized that if they collaborate with Valve a bit, this could make a great Steam Link device as well - seeing as they seem to be sunsetting that hardware, just write up a Steam Link app version for the Atari OS and add support for the native Steam Controller communication. (should be possible with a regular bluetooth chip and custom firmware as that's what the controller itself uses)
Or heck, just connect the controller over bluetooth, since the Steam Link already means network streamed games a tiny bit more latency (4-5ms) for the bluetooth stack won't be noticeable.

Of course, you should just be able to run the regular steam client in the other OS, but never hurts to support such things natively.

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Personally I can see why they'd set up the design in the manner that they've chosen, and I must say it sounds much more sane than other ways to do it.

To start off, they require a hypervisor, this is not up for debate. Console developers are very good at writing games that can utilize every little mote of performance in the hardware, they're generally much worse at writing things that are secure while doing so.
I mean, just look at the number of games that can be used to completely take over a console or even do much worse things.
The hypervisor is not there to make running open source software hard, it's to protect the console from the console games, and also vice-versa protect the console games from the console.
Additionally, being able to tell the game developers that their other OS feature can't be used to facilitate cheating means said developers will be happier about bringing multiplayer games to the console.

And considering what's said in those entries about the boot, they're planning a bootloader that will automatically boot from any bootable USB drive. Which means the VCS will act basically like a Raspberry Pi with the usb_boot_mode flag set. This is a massive thing, and while I'd love to be able to switch OS without having to insert/remove a USB key, it sounds like a really nice and both simple as well as safe way to do the OS switching.
(Notice how they explicitly talk about not wanting to run the other OS under their hypervisor, simply to keep said hypervisor simple and safe)

From how they're talking, you'll likely also be able to access part of the internal storage from said booted system as well, though it's basically guaranteed that they'll put in some kind of read/write protect over their system in that case - if only to make sure that someone doesn't accidentally brick the console.
Of course, even if they decide to completely wall of the internal storage it won't be impossible to hook up a larger USB drive - or simply boot the device / mount root off of iSCSI or some other network based storage. While IO speed might suffer, with USB 3.1 you can't really complain all that much, 5-10gbit is a lot of bandwidth after all.

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I just learned that Dirt: Rally 2 is coming, so even if the chance for a same-day is small I'm hoping that they're already on-board with getting a Linux version of that out as well.

Best damn rally game I've ever played - and still play, period.

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Quoting: YoRHa-2B

QuoteNo Linux port, no console versions because you need a "clean slate" version of it.

Interesting statement. Very interesting statement indeed. I'd love to know what exactly they mean by that.

If you've written a game against Windows, using the Windows API's directly, then you need to build a "clean slate" version where you strip away all direct calls to the Windows (or POSIX/Linux if that's where you started) API. Instead replacing all of it with either cross-platform APIs (like SDL) or a platform abstraction layer of your own making.

Porting a game between platforms while there's still direct calls into platform-specific APIs is going to be a mess and not sustainable for future development.

Most software development tends to start with talking to the development platform APIs directly, to keep the dependency list light and avoid potentially blocking away customers in the future due to the dependency choices. This also means that unless the development started on a platform-agnostic base then it'll just continue to dig itself firmer and firmer into the starting platform the further development goes.
This is also just as true for development of things on Mac or Linux, where if you start developing directly against the platform-specific APIs then you'll have a harder time making it cross-platform in the future.

Admittedly, Linux is a much lesser example as many of the APIs you get there can be used in lesser extents on both Windows and Mac, though it would still require actual work to port your software between them as the Windows and Mac implementations of POSIX APIs are not 100% identical to the Linux ones.

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Been playing through Dungeons 3 with a friend, it's been having us both laughing constantly due to the heavy meta humor and regular-like-clockwork fourth-wall breaks.
The game plays like a mix of Dungeon Keeper and Warcraft 3 in the overworld/underworld split, and the co-op is quite masterfully done as well, so it's been a real treat.

Also been playing some Deep Rock Galactic with Steam Play, apart from some audio issues - a constant low crackling in the background, and with audio sliders that have no effect - it's been quite the nice experience as well.

And I've been helping work on improving the experience of playing Warframe, sadly stil quite the mess to get that game running, and requiring a complete replacement of the launcher just to get off of the ground in the first place. But it runs amazingly well with DXVK - and with the PoE stutter fix.

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Well, that entire premise has me giggling.

Not much for dating games or dungeon crawlers, but something about the combination makes me want to buy it anyway.

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