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Silence from Daedalic Entertainment is an absolutely beautiful story-rich adventure game, my thoughts on it
By knro, 23 November 2016 at 8:08 am UTC Likes: 1

Wow I'm sold! Just bought it on Steam, thanks for the review!

The 'A Good Bundle' game bundle on itch is a pretty good deal, supports charity
By buenaventura, 23 November 2016 at 7:36 am UTC

Did trolltrump just wander in here? :P I am very tempted, nice initiative! Must be very hard to be positive in the USA today.

Also, check out the latest humble bundle, TIS-100 for free (or more if you want I guess). No reason not to try!

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By lucifertdark, 23 November 2016 at 6:52 am UTC

I made the mistake of adding Snappy to my system a while back, it took me two days of fighting to get rid of it, every time I removed it a stray piece would cause the whole thing to reinstall, it's worse than a bloody virus & I want no part of it again thanks. If Flatpak is anywhere near as bad as that they can keep it off my system.

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By tumocs, 23 November 2016 at 6:31 am UTC

Quoting: minjCorrect me if I am wrong but this feels like an end of Steam on Arch/Manjaro? We are constantly plagued by obsolete libs in steam runtime. What happens if we remove them? Will Steam 'fail over' and re-download itself immediately?

It's already possible to run steam without runtime and arch even has the important compatibility libraries packed in repository. I wouldn't expect that to change just because they change the way to package the runtime.

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By minj, 23 November 2016 at 6:22 am UTC

Correct me if I am wrong but this feels like an end of Steam on Arch/Manjaro? We are constantly plagued by obsolete libs in steam runtime. What happens if we remove them? Will Steam 'fail over' and re-download itself immediately?

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By lucinos, 23 November 2016 at 3:42 am UTC

A comparison to other solutions

(biased towards appimage obviously, but still a usefull link)

https://github.com/probonopd/AppImageKit/wiki/Similar-projects

Ittle Dew 2, the Zelda-like action and adventure game released day-1 on Linux
By InverseTelecine, 23 November 2016 at 3:03 am UTC

I really enjoyed the first one. The puzzles were not just heavily inspired by Zelda dungeons, they also PLAYED like them in that they were really clever and well-designed. The kind of puzzles that keep you motivated the finish them. So I have high hopes for the sequel.

Personally, I'm hoping for a little more story to flesh things out this time around. The first game's focus was always on the puzzles, but brief dialogue sections now and then really made the game feel more alive to me. I really like Ludosity's characters and dialogue. They have a great humorous style and I did find myself wanting more of it in the first game. Either way, I'll definitely check it out sometime.

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS massive patch released, with multi-threading goodness
By boltronics, 23 November 2016 at 2:27 am UTC

Quoting: subSuch a great game. Yet, not for me. Damn, I still want a great story-based single player campaign,
and I'd pay extra for it.
My order of Emperor: Battle for Dune arrived today from eBay. It's supposed to work great with Wine. Just finished Dune 2000 the same way.

Too bad I've already finished all the C&C games, but I'll take whatever RTS I can get my hands on provided it has a good single player campaign experience. I've also been desperately waiting for Grey Goo to run under Wine (since the devs have shown no interest in SteamOS), and it's almost there - something I test regularly. It's been on sale for $6 with all DLC in a bundle with a bunch of other games (over at BundleStars IIRC), so will be dirt cheap when Wine fully supports it.

The 'A Good Bundle' game bundle on itch is a pretty good deal, supports charity
By InverseTelecine, 23 November 2016 at 2:27 am UTC Likes: 3

Maybe it's old news now, but I know I'm not the only one still depressed about things here in my home (USA). But people coming together and doing nice things like this really does make me feel better!

It might be tempting to write it off as just another marketing scheme, since Itch and the game developers will benefit at least from the increased exposure, but that kind of cynicism can ruin literally anything. You can only be so cynical about 100% proceeds to charity.

Sometimes people, even people running companies, do actually want to do something good for other people! I really need more examples of that like this right now.

The Linux & SteamOS port of Killing Floor 2 has been put on hold, it needs a developer
By boltronics, 23 November 2016 at 2:10 am UTC

Quoting: GuestThis is the last Early Access game on Linux promise I bought, sadly I had to learn the hard way. No tux = no bux.

Same story here. I put hundreds of hours into KF1. Most of the time I was playing under Wine since that gave a better experience than the native port (which wasn't even compatible with new game modes due to game breaking bugs).

But Tripwire added support for GNU/Linux well after release, so I figured having them make a new game would see them ensure GNU/Linux was a priority from day one (they said as much at the time) and hence make KF2 on GNU/Linux a first class experience. Obviously, it didn't work out that way at all. What's worse is that the game remains unplayable under Wine to this day. Complete waste of money, and that was the first and last time I got burned by purchasing a game based on a promise.

Total War: WARHAMMER released for Linux, port report and video
By KimmoKM, 23 November 2016 at 1:47 am UTC

It would have been nice if Creative Assembly did a first-party port but my fears some months ago appear to have been unfounded. The performance is fine.

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By ertuqueque, 23 November 2016 at 1:32 am UTC Likes: 1

As far as I know, Flatpak is more distribution agnostic than Snappy, Snappy has some Ubuntu-ish stuff that some people (developers) are not very comfortable with when packaging for other distros... At least that's what I've read.

The Linux & SteamOS port of Killing Floor 2 has been put on hold, it needs a developer
By Nyamiou, 23 November 2016 at 1:20 am UTC

The fact is the more Linux ports, the more game developpers that know Linux are available on the market. And the more game developers that know Linux on the market, the less expensive the cost of porting / building for Linux. It's one of the main reason we had such an explosion of the number of games on the platform.

But still, game developers with Linux skills are probably still not that common, so I'm not surprised that some studios struggle to find one.

The lack of a big number of developers knowing the platform well is still probably one of the reason (maybe not the major one) we don't get some AAA, and this one is definitely going to be solved by time.

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By Nyamiou, 23 November 2016 at 12:55 am UTC

It could be great if they could find a solution so that the Steam Runtime doesn't break on bleeding edge distributions. Also at some point they'll need to find a way to provide multiple version of the runtime, so that newer games can leverage new features that weren't available a few years ago.

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By Grim85, 22 November 2016 at 11:53 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: ismaelbonatoI vote for Snappy!

That would be like choosing Mir over wayland

Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters announced for release on November 29th, new video
By cRaZy-bisCuiT, 22 November 2016 at 11:28 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: KimyrielleI played city builders since the days of the original SimCity, but I always play with disasters disabled. It's no fun building a great town just to have it partially destroyed every other hour. It feels like the little brother storming into your room and accidentally trashing your Lego castle. Yeah, it's realistic. But fun it is not.

But I suppose this was the last feature that EA pile of garbage still had going for it over Cities Skylines, so I can understand why they added it.

I'd rather get a proper dynamic seasons model down the road. :D

That all being said, I will buy the DLC anyway, just to support this great game.
You do repeat yourself frequently! :'P

Total War: WARHAMMER released for Linux, port report and video
By edddeduck_feral, 22 November 2016 at 11:09 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: edddeduckferalThe centralised server concept was popular in the late 90s but it has increasingly been replaced by peer to peer based multiplayer which is more robust and removes the overhead of maintaining dedicated server hardware.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of dedicated servers; even in P2P game clients have to synchronize somehow or you can end up with two players believing they have each killed the other one :). But yes I haven’t followed the state of the art of network game programming recently…

Amusingly that example you used is what can happen when things go wrong.

I recall a couple of matches I played on a game a few years ago during development when that exact scenario would play out. As the games got more out of sync your opponents moves would get worse (as they didn't know what you were doing) and you'd start to win. Sadly same thing happened on both machines and you'd end up both winning and freaking the results code right up.

Cossacks 3 to come to Linux soon, finishing touches being done
By Avehicle7887, 22 November 2016 at 11:00 pm UTC

Quoting: adamhmThis was also released on GOG today; no idea if the Linux version will be made available there as well though. I posted in the release thread asking GOG about it and have emailed GSC about it too.

Thank you for that, I hope the Linux version comes to GOG too, that would seal the deal for me.


Been a while since I've played an RTS and the original Cossacks was never part of them so this will be a new experience. Looking forward to it :-)

Total War: WARHAMMER released for Linux, port report and video
By edddeduck_feral, 22 November 2016 at 10:41 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: numasan
Quoting: edddeduckferalIn theory, however many WM's can have a large negative impact on game performance depending on the various settings and features it might use.
Really? Looking at these tests with AMD and Intel GPUs, I wouldn't call it a "large" impact, but who am I to argue with Feral:
AMD
Intel
I understand that Feral only wants to officially support one environment, though.

I would take the results of a single test like the ones above as one single example in a clean environment. It's not that a performance delta always happens (as those tests prove usually the difference is minor) however it *can* happen.

Usually things are fine but then you'll find someone has lost performance and in the end a WM or more usually a WM setting has been isolated as the cause of many weird edge cases. It's more a point of reference about an area that can cause issues not that is always causes issues.

In most cases WMs work just fine but if you have an issue checking your WM is something worthwhile (after you've checked your drivers).

Quoting: numasanRegarding the MP difference, it really is a bummer. Reading the CoH2 answer, I thought it was an engine specific issue? Will all ports suffer from this? I looked forward to this game, mostly because some of my friends have been pushing and recommended it when it came out (and I like the Warhammer fantasy universe), but now I have to tell them we can't play together, and they wont understand the technical reason :( They most likely have moved on to other games anyway, so in a way the MP issue doesn't matter anymore I guess.

In any case, thanks Feral for working on the port!

We've done loads of games with multiplayer and only a few can't play with Windows due to the reasons we posted on that link. So far these have been games by Relic (DoW2 / CoH2) and Creative Assembly (Total War franchise). We have many other games like the racing games from Codemasters and the XCOM series that support cross platform multiplayer.

Quoting: GuestI’m surprised that there are math issues for multiplayer. Isn’t there a single server responsible for making sure everybody is in sync, taking important decisions and sending back the new positions and events to all players? In my (limited) experience with multiplayer game development it is a requirement.

The centralised server concept was popular in the late 90s but it has increasingly been replaced by peer to peer based multiplayer which is more robust and removes the overhead of maintaining dedicated server hardware.

There are many reasons for choosing one over the other which you can check out but as with all things multiplayer code and protocols has gotten more complex over time compared to the good old days of hosting a quake server on a headless box in your cupboard. :-(

[edit] Typo fixes

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By tmtvl, 22 November 2016 at 10:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

Title and article aren't really meshing together, seems more like Valve is planning on doing their own take on things (problem: we have X competing standards, attempted solution: create a better standard, problem: we have X+1 competing standards).

Of course in this case it could actually work if they decide to integrate some VCS and P2P type functionalities to facilitate global rollout of updates.

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By kalin, 22 November 2016 at 10:05 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: ismaelbonatoI vote for Snappy!
why ?

Cossacks 3 to come to Linux soon, finishing touches being done
By Liam Dawe, 22 November 2016 at 9:59 pm UTC

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT
Quoting: adamhmBest to wait for confirmation that the Linux version will be coming to GOG - it would suck to buy it and then find out that the Linux version will remain Steam exclusive. This has been the case with a lot of other games released on GOG & it's something that they really need to work on IMO :/
What's the next thing you do ask for? Linux is not enough, it has to be DRM free on Linux? So the next level are native BSD Games?
It's not unreasonable for Linux gamers to want a Linux version of a game on GOG, if the game supports Linux.

I have asked my contact at GSC Game World to confirm if the Linux version will come to GOG. I will post a new article with their answer as this article will likely be buried by other news by the time I get an answer.
Quoting: archmage24601Does anyone know if it will have cross platform multiplayer with windows?
They claim it will.

Total War: WARHAMMER release date announced for Linux, Tuesday 22nd of November
By slaapliedje, 22 November 2016 at 9:42 pm UTC

I think that's a challenge to crush the Apple users... Make..apple sauce!

Total War: WARHAMMER released for Linux, port report and video
By Liam Dawe, 22 November 2016 at 9:25 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: renegat0x0So I see the benchmarks were executed on ubuntu. I am not sure if it is a good approach. The games are released on steamos. I do not know if it is hardware or software issue, but I see a big difference when running on mate and on openbox with compton. The latter solution is much closer to steamos. I have nvidia card 950 and am running linux mint 18 mate.
I test on the most supported and tested distribution when it comes to Linux gaming, as does Phoronix when it comes to his main benchmarks. Penguin Recordings also uses Ubuntu and most others it seems do too. It's the most sane option.

Total War: WARHAMMER released for Linux, port report and video
By numasan, 22 November 2016 at 9:13 pm UTC

Quoting: edddeduckferalIn theory, however many WM's can have a large negative impact on game performance depending on the various settings and features it might use.
Really? Looking at these tests with AMD and Intel GPUs, I wouldn't call it a "large" impact, but who am I to argue with Feral:
AMD
Intel
I understand that Feral only wants to officially support one environment, though.

Regarding the MP difference, it really is a bummer. Reading the CoH2 answer, I thought it was an engine specific issue? Will all ports suffer from this? I looked forward to this game, mostly because some of my friends have been pushing and recommended it when it came out (and I like the Warhammer fantasy universe), but now I have to tell them we can't play together, and they wont understand the technical reason :( They most likely have moved on to other games anyway, so in a way the MP issue doesn't matter anymore I guess.

In any case, thanks Feral for working on the port!

GOG are running a big sale, lots of titles up for cheap
By badber, 22 November 2016 at 8:41 pm UTC

What? They just got one sale done. Well, time to check if there's anything I want again... :P

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By ismaelbonato, 22 November 2016 at 8:40 pm UTC Likes: 2

I vote for Snappy!

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By mehari95, 22 November 2016 at 8:19 pm UTC Likes: 2

Does anyone know why they chose Flatpak over Snap?

Valve are looking towards Flatpak functionality for Steam
By MayeulC, 22 November 2016 at 8:14 pm UTC Likes: 1

Pretty nice answer (and pretty nice to have an answer at all from Valve :D ). Thank you, Pierre-Loup.
Yep, Flatpack technology makes sense here, IMO. I just hope it won't make it too difficult to use more recent libraries *instead* of broken ones that might be shipped.

Total War: WARHAMMER released for Linux, port report and video
By lagh, 22 November 2016 at 8:04 pm UTC

Hehe. I don't even meet the minimum requirements.
That is actually quite sad :(