Just tried to activate dynamic ligthning on an ATI GPU and I now know that there's a very good reason it isn't on by default.

First, don't set CompositeDynamicLights to true. Really. Don't. Not sure if it is active on nVidia hardware but with my ATI I get a GPU lockup as soon as the game has to render 3D : black screen (no signal to the monitor), has to force a hard reboot.

As for DynamicLights, you can see the problem on the menu screen (where you see your character): some textures displayed as black and flickering. Didn't even try to enter the game in that shape.

Note that I'm using a RadeonHD 7770 with Mesa devel (1.4 from Oibaf PPA). Results might differ on a different GPU or with Catalyst.

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Had to restrain myself from simply writing "the Catalyst driver is an utter pile of shit".

(Oh, GOL has a filter for "naughty words".)

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Quoting: commodore256Oh and on an unrelated note, who's excited for Gnome 3.14? It just came out and it has a lot to offer to the table like a Vector based UI for high DPI, a proper form designer and good documentation for GTK, Wayland integration and Multitouch support. I know Gnome hasn't been the same since four years ago when they went to gnome3, but they've gone a long way and you just have to get used to it and find out how to tweak it if you haven't used Gnome since 2.x.

Well, unless they've fixed the behaviour of their compositor with the AMD/ATI Catalyst driver, GNOME 3 is unusable for me, especially for gaming.

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Quoting: pbSo are Linux versions of the Blackwell games coming to Steam as well?

As their other Linux games (Gemini Rue and The Shivah) are on Steam Linux, I guess we can expect the Blackwell games to be available there too sooner or later. ;)

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There are two things that I find a bit surprising in the interview:

QuoteHumble Bundle worked with us to port the AGS engine to Mac and Linux

There was already a functional port of the AGS engine for Linux that was released about one year ago. I had tested the AGS games I own at that time (including the Blackwell series) and most of them worked flawlessly. The only one that couldn't work was Time Gentlemen Please (not from Wadjet) because of a missing lib.
Any idea why they needed the Humble team to port the engine to Mac & Linux? Is it a different port?

QuotePlus, having a native version allows us to sell it on Steam. Sadly, they don't accept Wine wrapped versions of Windows games.

Well, there's System Shock 2 on Steam that uses a Wine wrapper and I think there are other games that do (not sure, but I seem to remember that it was pointed out in other cases). While I agree that a native port is far better, it's a bit odd that they say Steam doesn't allow Wine ports.

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Quoting: sigzAs they said at debconf, these patches will not be upstreamed

Why did they decide to do that? Is it because their patches are pretty specific and could not be implemented for a general purpose OS (i.e. they would break things) or is it because of proprietary code that they won't share?

Quoting: TincheYeah, it probably makes more marketing sense or something. "It will not have general support of Linux", now what does that mean? Will there be a switch to only allow pure SteamOS machines?

Well, I guess that support-wise, they won't handle anything else. Like the fact that Ubuntu is currently targeted as Linux games on Steam for specs, that leads to developer not wanting to handle other distros or specific cases. Or a bit like GOG officially supporting Ubuntu and Mint with installation packages.
In other words, there won't be a switch that would forbid Gauntlet to run on other distros but if people have troubles with the game, the publisher can say "switch to SteamOS, we don't support other distros", even if the issue is trivial or not distro-dependant at all.

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You can add Shadowrun: Dragonfall (standalone edition) that comes out on september 18th (free for people that already own it as a DLC for Shadowrun Returns).

Any info on Legend of Grimrock 2? The game will be out on october 15 but for Windows only, it seems. I don't know if it's been confirmed for Linux.

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(Note that it is in the current Humble Indie Bundle.)

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Quoting: drmothGreat work on all fronts. I never played this but I loved Flashback, another title by the same French developer with similar rotoscoped animation.

Well, not the same developer, as Another World was made by Éric Chahi while Flashback was made by Paul Cuisset. They were working for the same publisher, though (Delphine Software). I'm not sure Flashback was made with the same engine or if it was "strongly inspired" by it but I seem to remember that there was a bit of tension between the two developers at the time, like using the engine without authorization or copying it.

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I knew icculus was trying to get in touch with Éric Chahi a while ago for a Linux port, that's great it happened!

Now I'm hoping it will come on GOG soon, as I bought it there a few years ago (already played the original version on Amiga in 1991, was glad to see the release of the anniversary edition).

I'm wondering if it would be added to the current Humble Indie Bundle today; the timing looks adequate...

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