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Valve have once again gathered all the new features and fixes from a bunch of recent Beta builds and pushed it out to everyone, this includes a bunch of nice fixes for Linux.

Steam Remote Play is one of the biggest changes (previously in-home streaming), now it's "experimentally" available outside the home too with the renaming. You should now be able to stream games from one Steam client to another, wherever they are.

On the Linux side the fixes include: a random Steam client crash when launching games, a bug where copying/moving files bigger than 2GB would fail with an I/O error, improved responsiveness to network changes, support for rumble pass-through for virtual controllers (rumble for the Steam Controller), prefer Steam Runtime's libcurl over yours which fixes "Risk of Rain" and other GameMaker titles, support for removing old Proton versions by aliasing them to more recent ones and support for developers and Valve testing specifying default Proton configuration options for games even if they're not yet white-listed.

Their Shader Pre-Caching was re-worked, to enable downloading and pre-compiling of the whole collection of Vulkan pipelines for a given game. You will likely now see them show up in the Steam client downloads area with an OpenGL/Vulkan logo below them. Valve said "Pre-compiling" will be enabled in a future Steam update. This is the feature that should, eventually, help stop stuttering in games when you first play them. They also fixed an issue with them being downloaded, even if the feature was disabled by you.

There's plenty more fixes in this update, like issues with the in-game overlay becoming "abnormally pixelated" for games using Vulkan, plenty of Steam Input updates and so on.

Full news here.

As a reminder, the Steam Library overhaul is also getting a public beta soon.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam, Update
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Eike Jun 14, 2019
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Quoting: Guesttweaking an entire engine to hide stutter only seen on first launch might simply not be considered worth the effort.

Hmm... On the other hand, you never get a second chance to make a first impression...
Mohandevir Jun 14, 2019
Quoting: Dunc...There's the odd naysayer, as always...

Nessus is pretty hilarious to read... Feels like he tried to run Linux from Scratch.

I can't remember a single time I had to manually install a single dependency when using the software center on any Ubuntu based distro. Feels like the problem is between the keyboard and chair, to me. :D
TheSyldat Jun 14, 2019
Quoting: liamdaweprefer Steam Runtime's libcurl over yours which fixes "Risk of Rain" and other GameMaker titles

I wonder if it also fixed Devil Daggers on 18.04 because if I remember correctly it's because the libcurl version was different that it didn't work anymore .
Liam Dawe Jun 14, 2019
Quoting: TheSyldat
Quoting: liamdaweprefer Steam Runtime's libcurl over yours which fixes "Risk of Rain" and other GameMaker titles

I wonder if it also fixed Devil Daggers on 18.04 because if I remember correctly it's because the libcurl version was different that it didn't work anymore .
Didn't work for me on Ubuntu 19.04.
Purple Library Guy Jun 14, 2019
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: Guesttweaking an entire engine to hide stutter only seen on first launch might simply not be considered worth the effort.

Hmm... On the other hand, you never get a second chance to make a first impression...
Indeed, if you do the first impression badly, you may never get a first chance to make a second impression . . .
massatt212 Jun 14, 2019
Is their a Steam launch option i can use to swap between graphics Driver
AMDVLK & MESA
Some games work better with AMDVLK and some with MESA
F.Ultra Jun 15, 2019
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Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: jens
Quoting: Mohandevir
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: gradyvuckovicFor Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.

The Valve servers would have to run on Windows, though and I highly doubt Valve would want to pay for those licenses.
No they wouldn't, not with Steam Play once it's mature enough.

I suspect SteamStreaming, or SteamCloud (who knows how they will call that), might happen the day SteamPlay/Proton leaves beta and become official. Simultaneous announcements is my guess.

Edit: It can't be too far away, because Valve risks long term damages, if they let users get accustomed to the competitions' solutions (Xcloud or Stadia).

I wonder if Valve is legally allowed to offer everything in your library as a streaming service just like this. I could imagine that existing contracts would need at least some review. This might also be the reason that official Steam Play whitelisting isn't happen that often, even for games that work perfectly well (e.g. TW3). I'm just speculating here though.

They sure can. Services like Geforce Now and Shadow already do that. You just rent a remote computer with those and access your Steam library from there.

The list of supported games on Geforce Now is very very small: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/supported-games/ or am I missing something obvious here? Looking over the Geforece Now site tells me that it works just how Jens wondered, aka they must license each game from the publisher before they can add support for it on their platform.

Shadow I have no idea how they work since they don't offer their service in my country and consequently don't want to shed much information either.
F.Ultra Jun 15, 2019
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Quoting: gradyvuckovicAll Valve has to do now is offer some kind of option to run your own remote instance of a gaming PC on a Valve server, and connect direct to it, and they'll have an alternative to Stadia. Buy your game on Steam, download it to play it locally, or stream it to any PC or phone/tablet or TV. Stream it from your PC or stream it from a Valve server. All your workshop mods, your cloud saves, your Steam friends, etc, take them all with you anywhere you go.

Buy Portal 2 and download/install it locally to play on your PC, then stream it from your PC to your TV and play it with any controller you want, then stream it from a Valve server to your phone and play it on the train.

If Valve offered that service for free, (which they probably could because the overwhelming majority of users would prefer local gaming so it wouldn't be a commonly used option), Stadia would be dead on arrival.

For Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.

Boom, no need to ever install Windows for any game on Steam. No need to buy games on Google's or iOS's app store even, just buy it on Steam and stream it to your phone!

I'm calling it, this is what Valve is working towards. Valve is going to make it happen.

They would also have to invest a number of billions in new datacenters and bandwidth for that to happen on the scale that Valve operates (they have roughly 90 million monthly users) and they would have to build them locally all over the world. The costs of running stuff like this is extreme and is why currently only Google is pulling it off (and we don't know yet if they will pull it off).

The other services described in this thread is nowhere near to compete, Shadow seams to have only a small number of servers in California and Geforce Now seams to have only 300k users with some reports that performance is bad during peak hours (but to be honest I have just spent a few minutes googling this).

For what it's worth I worked as the CTO of a Cloud computing startup 11 years ago and had to design stuff like this.
Eike Jun 15, 2019
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Quoting: MohandevirNessus is pretty hilarious to read... Feels like he tried to run Linux from Scratch.

I didn't read the thread yet, but judging from Steam forums, the most aggressive anti-Linux people are those who wanted to use it and failed.
riusma Jun 15, 2019
Never had the "0 byte download" bug before... now I have it, niiiiiice!

Edit: it seems that it was only for the first launch after the update! :)


Last edited by riusma on 18 June 2019 at 9:05 am UTC
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