Every article tag can be clicked to get a list of all articles in that category. Every article tag also has an RSS feed! You can customize an RSS feed too!
Latest Comments by scaine
Steam smashes its peak players online record to over 34 million
4 March 2024 at 5:24 pm UTC Likes: 1

I played a couple of hours of Pacific Drive on Friday, mainly testing out my new Movemaster. But I spent the bulk of the weekend spreading democracy in HellDivers 2, and building up a new character in the awesome Last Epoch.

Funnily enough, HD2 is regularly hitting 300K players, and Last Epoch is well over 200K. Last Epoch definitely surfing a popularity wave, stealing players from Path of Exile, which is down at the 15K mark (although it'll typically rebound to around 150K easily when a new season launches) and Diablo 4 which lucky to see 10K players these days.

Crazy numbers really, considering these two games are barely even top five (Countersrike, DOTA2, Apex Legends, etc, as noted in the article). No wonder Steam is hitting new highs!

Valve reveals schedule of sales events for the rest of 2024
4 March 2024 at 4:19 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: MinuxNo please Liam, don't do this to me again. I have no more money to buy anything. I already sold my gaming computer, now I must survive on a wooden pc.

Don't shoot the messenger!

Steam Survey for February 2024 shows a big bump in Simplified Chinese
4 March 2024 at 3:11 pm UTC Likes: 2

You'd think, after the second, third or possibly tenth time it happened, someone at Valve would look into the why of it and you know, fix it.

Valve reveals schedule of sales events for the rest of 2024
4 March 2024 at 3:00 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: PenglingI've got 42 games on my wishlist, but 11 of them are marked as Coming Soon (some of them have been marked as such for a couple of years, now

Just checked my own wishlist - 79 games on there, and I'm in the same boat. Some of them are ANCIENT, and still Coming Soon. In fact, nearly all of the ones I really, really want are Coming Soon. Pretty frustrating! Still. Nice to have something to look forward to. And I have a heap of backlog to play - Pacific Drive, most recently.

But "Coming Soon" are a bit of a pain when "Soon" turns into literal years. Remember The Last Night?? I only removed that from my wishlist late last year! 6 years! Even the copy-cat game Replaced is still "Coming soon" after 3 years. What a mess.

Farlight 84 players reporting bans on Steam Deck / Linux
3 March 2024 at 10:49 am UTC

Never heard of it, but it's actually getting review-bombed right now for an update to make it more like Apex Legends. They removed a jetpack mechanic that everyone loved and which distinguished it from Apex Legends. Not sure why you'd want to actively compete with Apex like that - Apex still enjoys roughly half a million players, meanwhile the changes appear to have crippled Farlight's player base from 17k daily to under 6k!



Feels like there's something else going on this, some publisher pressure maybe? Or maybe they're playerbase, while high, was static, and this is a move to (successfully) drive them away and attract "new blood"?

Proton Experimental updated with Proton 9 - adds fixes for Helldivers 2 and more
27 February 2024 at 6:13 pm UTC Likes: 1

I think Discord is doing process lookups, because it doesn't just pick up on Steam games - it gets quite a lot, like Spotify, League of Legends and so on. So yeah, firejail all round!

Too much hassle for this penguin though. And doing this stuff will often lead to breakage, something to keep in mind. Like, if you successfully firejail and apparmour everything... does that actually break nGuard from launching Helldivers 2?? I have no idea. But good luck if you're going down that road!

Proton Experimental updated with Proton 9 - adds fixes for Helldivers 2 and more
27 February 2024 at 3:44 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: sudoerHow does the nprotect rootkit fit into this situation, it monitors just WINE's windoze processes or can it read memory as well?

Well, obviously it's only rootkit'ing your PFX folder and the processes are started/stopped by Steam, so that's a comfort. At least you know it won't be running in the background after playing. Good question on memory access - I'd expect it has access, but I don't know enough about the Steam runtime sandbox to answer that. Pretty sure Steam has some pretty extensive rights on your box.

Reddit article here seems to suggest that process lists are available, and if you're paranoid about this stuff, you should firejail and apparmour the whole of steam. Some people have the same concerns about Discord's ability to detect what games you're running, and suggest the same there (or just use the web version, I suppose).

Proton 9.0 now in Beta with improved game compatibility for Steam Deck / Linux
27 February 2024 at 12:00 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: sonic2kkIf anyone is curious: It appears that Proton 9.0 is not built with the Wine Wayland backend enabled. When building Wine I believe you have to use the "--with-wayland" flag - See example in Wine-tkg build system's wine-tkg-git build.sh script and this Arch Wine packaging issue where they didn't enable Wayland support at first for the Wine package

Trying to run a prefix that has the "Graphics" regstry entry at "HKCU\\Software\\Wine\\Drivers" set to "x11,wayland" will work when running with my system Wine (and using "DISPLAY=") with the same prefix, but not with Proton 9.0 Wine.

Example commands using the same prefix but with Proton 9.0 versus System Wine 9.2:
- (Using Proton 9.0 Wine fails with "The graphics driver is missing. Check your build!") DISPLAY= WINEPREFIX="/path/to/steamapps/compatdata/<appid>/pfx" "/path/to/steamapps/common/Proton 9.0 (Beta)/files/bin/wine" regedit
- (Using system Wine 9.2 in place of Proton 9.0 Wine works as expected) DISPLAY= WINEPREFIX="/path/to/steamapps/compatdata/<appid>/pfx" wine regedit

This is not a huge deal for now, but something worth noting.

EDIT: Interestingly, using a build of Proton-tkg based on Wine Master, I can run the Wine Wayland backend with things like Winecfg and regedit, but when passing "DISPLAY= %command%" as a launch option, games cannot launch from Steam. The Proton log errors with "Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded.", "Make sure that your X server is running and that $DISPLAY is set correctly." - So I guess using the Wine Wayland driver with Steam right now is a bust. Fwiw, using Wine-tkg based on Wine Master, games can launch (although it is not a great experience if you have a multi-monitor setup with only one or two scaled displays, but the others unscaled, and the Wayland driver has no fractional scaling support yet so applications look blurry unless you're using 100%/200%/etc scale).

I wish I had your knowledge of wine, ngl. I understood most of those words, but they aren't lining up a message I can take in. I choose a version of Proton in Steam and click play. Very rarely, when I do this, the game doesn't quite run correctly, and I have to try a different version. That's it. That's what I do.

Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters (open source Star Control 2) now available on Steam
20 February 2024 at 8:31 pm UTC Likes: 1

BTW, I tried this on Debian Sid and it doesn't work - you need to add "non-free" into your source. Just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list and add "non-free" to the end.

Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters (open source Star Control 2) now available on Steam
20 February 2024 at 8:17 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: pb
Quoting: slaapliedjeIt always weirds me out a little bit when someone basically takes an open source project and throws it up on Steam and hopes to make some money, or they don't fully support all the operating systems that the opensource project supports.

It was released by the creators of the original game, for free, as a part of building hype for the upcoming sequel.

Yeah, but the Steam version is Windows only, which I think was slaapliedje's point. At least in this case though, as you say, it's not a random person - it's the creators of the original game itself.