It's bit shame that video shows some cool stuff in it, but discussion deteriorated quite quickly to situation where people argue if apples are better than oranges. Even Linux game market is big enough to have games for VR early adopters and people who couldn't care less about VR. It doesn't matter if VR will eventually replace displays or not.

But even now, there's some cool stuff coming out because people are working to get VR working properly on Linux. Basically that was something that simplifies sharing displays on multi-seat setup much easier.

If I'm able to explain it correctly, it's way to lease the display to a program that wants exclusive (but still revocable) access for a display, while making sure that client doesn't have access to the clients running on the real X server. X server or kernel can revoke the access at any time and control comes back to the X server without any disastrous issues.

And no, there was no discussion about forking Xorg or Linux kernel, I think most of the changes are already upstream. Last thing that glues everything together was still worked on, so maybe not that yet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I actually also reported the fullscreen issue in the demo announcement with even some details about the Unity bug (which has been mentioned here on GamingOnLinux few times). Luckily commenting on that wasn't restricted at all like the Steam discussions.

Hopefully they have read it as fixing should be as simple as updating Unity or disabling fullscreen for Mac OS X and Linux users.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: WendigoI hope they will add the search filters from the shop page to the games library.
When searching for games that have local / online multiplayer or coop play you are forced to look up each game separately.
I have several hundred games in my library so that might take a while.
This really annoys me about steam.

I have manually made categories for that, but information will never be quite comprehensive...

Cross platform multiplayer is also important information. Though for some playing only with Linux and Mac people could be a feature :)

Search that uses tags from store would be so much better as keeping all the information up to date manually can be quite tedious.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Humble Store has Dungeons 2 for free for next day or so: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/dungeons-2

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: razing32

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: razing32Do you mean something like the classic isometric games ?
Or something like the Bethesda games were you have a FPS/Third person shooter with RPG elements to spice things up ?

If the community would come up with something like Wasteland 2, I'd appreciate (and play!) this, too.
But I was dreaming of the full modern monty, huge open world, "next-gen" graphics, FPS/third-person view.
"Open source triple AAA", if you want.

Well for it to be truly open source , I think you would need an engine built from scratch.
Not sure how much work that would be. I am thinking a pretty huge project.
Then you need all the content creators.
Not saying it would be impossible but I cannot fathom how you would coordinate a team that big. Most people would have to donate their time.

Building from scratch is not necessarily only option as there are several open source engines available. Though I don't think there's anything out there that could be considered next generation. Most of them are several generations behind, with some modern bits (there are people still working on them after all).

As for getting people contributing, problem is that people spend their free time as they like. If they like old game enough that they would want to run it without Wine or DosBox, they will do stuff to make that happen. With open source people that do stuff make the rules.

So if you you really want something, go ahead and start doing it yourself. Maybe other people like your idea and will join in. That's more likely to happen though when there's something tangible.

As for coordinating big projects, I haven't seen anything in open source games that would be same size as AAA games. Battle for Wesnoth has quite many contributors though and it even has good single player campaigns, which is rarity in games with open source assets (as opposed to projects like OpenLara).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Nanobang

Quoting: AnzaI would suppose there's difference if port is done internally or by external porter. If port is done internally, game developer can interpret the numbers as they see fit. They get exactly the same amount of money for each sale anyway. Though there's no absolute guarantee that port will ever leave the beta stage.

For external porters, it sounds like that at least Feral Interactive has contract where they get money only from Linux sales.

Thanks Anza, that answers part of my concern: who gets the money. But the other part of my concern --- who gets the credit? --- remains a mystery. What will the port be tallied as a Linux version on Steam and so add (however incrementally) to Linux's overall reported market share? Or will it add a drop in Window's already oceanic reported market share?

Statistics that game developers see are usually not revealed publicly.

Pretty much only publicly available Steam statistics are the ones gathered in the Steam survey. For that you can't do much more than to keep using Steam only on Linux and hope you'll get selected for the survey. AFAIK SteamOS doesn't count as Linux, so to be on the safe side, stay away from that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NanobangThat looks ... nice! Very, very nice. Third "person" underwater action with strategic cutaway noodling. I'm intrigued.

My one hesitation with this beta, as indeed with all Linux betas on Steam, is I simply don't want the purchase to count as anything but a Linux purchase --- but to be honest, I don't know if it would or not. I've been following the Brotherhood lads as they work to bring STASIS to Linux, but I've not bought that either, for the same reason. Now I'm wondering if (and frankly, hoping that) I'm all wrong and buying these games but only playing the Linux beta will count as a Linux purchase. Could someone please enlighten benighted old me about this?

I would suppose there's difference if port is done internally or by external porter. If port is done internally, game developer can interpret the numbers as they see fit. They get exactly the same amount of money for each sale anyway. Though there's no absolute guarantee that port will ever leave the beta stage.

For external porters, it sounds like that at least Feral Interactive has contract where they get money only from Linux sales.

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: F.UltraLooks like most negative reviews comes from fiddly controls. Hopefully that is something that they can and/or will improve.

Fiddly controls, camera issues, bad interface, unpolished, multiple bugs... To quote Destructoid:
"I can't remember the last time I had to go to a game's forum to get a bug resolved just so I could advance. It's a lesson in wonderful concept and poor execution."

https://www.destructoid.com/review-diluvion-422788.phtml

I ignored the comments about bugs due to the "to get a bug resolved", too me that sounds like the devs are active and are fixing the bugs as soon as they are found.

Sounds like developer just didn't do enough testing. Pretty good game for somebody who actually enjoys finding bugs :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

While programming is hard, also estimating is hard if you're doing something that you haven't been already done several times. And on top of that working on foreign code makes things even harder.

With you own code you should understand what it does...

Not announcing deadlines publicly seems to be pretty good strategy. In very ideal case everything is actually ready when deadline comes, but in real world that's not usually the case. So in order to keep the deadline, something has to give. Cutting features works, but doing that in the last minute is risky. Though if only Linux port is missing the features, Linux users will not be happy...

Another casualty of with keeping the deadline no matter what is quality. Some bugs found in internal testing might not be fixed before the release. Also if testing is lagging behind, plenty of bugs might have not been found yet.

So keep that in mind when you demand immediate release...

Based on the interviews though, there's plenty of experienced developers in Linux porter community. Pretty interesting stuff in every interview.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

As said ports are varying quality. Saints Row 2 has pretty bad performance, which is bit of shame as that one was best open world game of the available ports. What I have read is that having game on SSD or even in RAM helps somewhat. Also Gentlemans Row mod should fix some issues. I haven't tested any of that myself.

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell has audio issue: https://github.com/virtual-programming/saintsrowgat-linux/issues/1

Workaround is to restart the game.

As for continuity, now it's at least possible to play them in correct order. Saints Row IV was one of the first ported games and that makes lot of references to older games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

[quote=Skiski]

Quoting: Anza

Quoting: SkiskiI've just updated to kernel 4.10 (4.10.8-100.fc24.x86_64) and I have way less stuttering. I don't know if it's thanks to the new kernel or the latest patch of the game.
I haven't tried today, but I've been able to play the game without stuttering just by using the offline mode of steam. I don't why this solve the kernel problem or even if it is related. But in offline mode, I was able to max every setting and I'm never under 40 FPS and usually between 50 and 60.

And I'm really enjoying the game so far.

Too bad Steam crashes when I try to enable offline mode. I would have been nice to test if offline mode workaround would work too.

I disconnected from Internet (and that was horrible, but I guess in the name of science sacrifices have to be made). Performance problem was gone though.

Strangely when I plugged back in, threads started switching cores again, but that didn't cause as severe performance problem as before. I checked again with Steam in online mode just in case and problem was back.

That's pretty odd. It would be interesting to know what's the actual root cause.

View this comment - View article - View full comments