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Latest Comments by Samsai
Stellaris 2.0 'Cherryh' patch & Stellaris: Apocalypse expansion released, over 1.5 million copies sold
22 February 2018 at 6:25 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Praxach
Quoting: FredOIt's worth noting that your old save games will not be compatible with this new version 2. There's plenty of warnings about it when you start the game after updating. My save from 1.9 still loads, but with some strange statuses due to layout changes.

Do you have to start a new game to get all the features of 2.0 or can you update your old saves to the new version?
It's been new games for a good while when they release new feature versions. If you want to finish up your old save just switch back to that version and then move to 2.0 when you're done.

Unique puzzle experience 'We Were Here Too' will make you shout at your friends
21 February 2018 at 7:55 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: SadL
QuoteIn the end, I wanted to try something which resulted in a gate opening for Samsai, naturally he took it to freedom leaving me to rot alone—that's friendship for you!
really Samsai? really?
You say "betrayal". I say "survival". :P

Rise of the Tomb Raider announced for Linux, port from Feral Interactive
15 February 2018 at 5:04 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: pete910
Quoting: z1lt0id
Quoting: Geppeto35Nice, let's work on Shadow of War now Feral :-P ^^

Oh yeah because all those micro transactions and loot boxes will work well for Linux gamers. Ugh this game can die in a fire.

So because you don't want it or agree with it , *** anyone else ?

Nice attitude to your fellow users ...
Well, he does have the same right to not want a certain game as another has to want it.

Rise of the Tomb Raider announced for Linux, port from Feral Interactive
13 February 2018 at 12:08 pm UTC Likes: 7

Quoting: Geppeto35Nice, let's work on Shadow of War now Feral :-P ^^
I really hope they don't. Shadow of War is loot box trash and I really don't want Feral's image tarnished by that crap.

Windows 10 S might alarm Valve into boosting SteamOS again
11 February 2018 at 6:18 pm UTC

Quoting: appetrosyan
Quoting: Samsai
Quoting: appetrosyan
Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: appetrosyanRight now the biggest one I face, is the fact that in a complex scene, the rendering speed drops. this all due to the way in which frames are buffered in X.org, and is one of the main reasons why the switch is being made.
OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux make use of direct rendering, communicating directly with the hardware. Frames are not presented through an X.org buffer. What you said is mostly true, but it doesn't affect gaming that much.

Last I checked Vulkan was supported by Croteam (who are doing a great job an away) and Bethesda, (who make great games, and don't support Linux). When we get native support that circumvents the issues of X.org and the common ways of porting games (e.g. SDL) start making use of Vulkan, we're in business.
SDL doesn't really "make use of Vulkan" (unless you use just SDL's built-in graphics routines and even then I think it might just use OpenGL). What you do with SDL is make a window, load up Vulkan and create a Vulkan context/surface/whatever onto that window and start pushing data and commands to the GPU to do things with that surface. The support for doing this was released in last September.

Vulkan and Wayland are quite probably not going to be some kind of silver bullets that will solve the performance issues. Vulkan will allow devs to possibly tweak their games more and parallelize their rendering more than OpenGL allows but that'll largely depend on the devs' ability to make efficient code. As for Wayland, it's not really much of a performance boost. I've used it for a couple of months now and the only real difference between X.org and Wayland is that window movement is a bit smoother, 3D performance is more or less equal between the two.
Secondly, Wayland's improved performance stems from a few factors. Most of the applications and games still use X.org, which means that you couldn't detect a performance increase, mostly because you were running it through the same graphical pipeline. If you don't have Wayland running in the background, you will see the difference. Also, Wayland decouples some of the hardware from the software, which (if the developers listen to reason) will allow us to do Windows level customisation to Gaming peripherals. Right now, the only way of creating keyboard macros is bound to x.org. Once we have enough people running wayland full time, we will be able to convince them to let us do some of those things: pass keypresses to specific applications (in gamer world terms 'tis a must).
3D applications that use system SDL already have access to native Wayland and I've also built some games from source so that they utilize system SDL and thus shouldn't be running through XWayland. In both cases I have seen no noticeable performance benefits. X.org just isn't the bottleneck with game performance, sub-optimal OpenGL is.

Windows 10 S might alarm Valve into boosting SteamOS again
11 February 2018 at 12:39 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: appetrosyan
Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: appetrosyanRight now the biggest one I face, is the fact that in a complex scene, the rendering speed drops. this all due to the way in which frames are buffered in X.org, and is one of the main reasons why the switch is being made.
OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux make use of direct rendering, communicating directly with the hardware. Frames are not presented through an X.org buffer. What you said is mostly true, but it doesn't affect gaming that much.

Last I checked Vulkan was supported by Croteam (who are doing a great job an away) and Bethesda, (who make great games, and don't support Linux). When we get native support that circumvents the issues of X.org and the common ways of porting games (e.g. SDL) start making use of Vulkan, we're in business.
SDL doesn't really "make use of Vulkan" (unless you use just SDL's built-in graphics routines and even then I think it might just use OpenGL). What you do with SDL is make a window, load up Vulkan and create a Vulkan context/surface/whatever onto that window and start pushing data and commands to the GPU to do things with that surface. The support for doing this was released in last September.

Vulkan and Wayland are quite probably not going to be some kind of silver bullets that will solve the performance issues. Vulkan will allow devs to possibly tweak their games more and parallelize their rendering more than OpenGL allows but that'll largely depend on the devs' ability to make efficient code. As for Wayland, it's not really much of a performance boost. I've used it for a couple of months now and the only real difference between X.org and Wayland is that window movement is a bit smoother, 3D performance is more or less equal between the two.

Valve has boosted their Linux ranks by hiring another developer to work on open source graphics
9 February 2018 at 10:26 pm UTC Likes: 2

Seriously, take the Wine talk to the forum. If this mess of a comment section keeps spiralling out of control further I'll have to close it.

Valve has boosted their Linux ranks by hiring another developer to work on open source graphics
9 February 2018 at 5:15 pm UTC Likes: 1

The Wine talk has quite severely derailed the conversation so if anyone else has some hot takes I would please ask them to voice themselves over on the forum.

Valve has boosted their Linux ranks by hiring another developer to work on open source graphics
9 February 2018 at 4:30 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: SamsaiI feel like you don't know what Feral's wrapper even does

I know what it does. It's source level wrapper. That doesn't make it a native approach, it's still a wrapper.

Quoting: SamsaiSo if you want to say that Feral's ports don't support Linux any more than Wine.

Not for me, if I can't even play them. You are comfortable with Feral's exclusivity approach, that's why you don't get it.
Even you are benefiting from them because they are pushing our graphics stack forward. You just refuse to acknowledge this because you are mad that their games are not on GOG.

Valve has boosted their Linux ranks by hiring another developer to work on open source graphics
9 February 2018 at 4:19 pm UTC Likes: 7

Quoting: Shmerllots of blah blah about Feral wrappers
I feel like you don't know what Feral's wrapper even does, which doesn't surprise me since you have been known as a hardline GOG fanatic for as long as I can recall. To our knowledge, Feral wraps the game's renderer and then translates those calls to OpenGL and Vulkan plus they tune the wrapper on a per-game basis (unlike Wine) to boost the performance of the game. Compare that to Wine where the wrapper wraps the entire binary, providing a clone of a Windows API and wraps the libraries too. Meanwhile, to our knowledge, Feral replaces the libraries and middleware with Linux-compatible counterparts. This means they act as a customer for Linux versions of middleware which means those middleware developers have a reason to keep supporting Linux which means that middleware is also available to people who do "native ports" (whatever that means today). This in addition to tuning the performance of Mesa when new games come out supporting newer OpenGL/Vulkan features (when was the last time you heard Wine do that? Those guys are barely using GL 4.0 now.).

So if you want to say that Feral's ports don't support Linux any more than Wine, I am going to have to say your GOG fanaticism has blinded you and you are just lashing out because they don't ship stuff through GOG, which they probably even can't because they only have limited ownership of the stuff they sell and the original publishers don't want to go to GOG.

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