Latest 30 Comments

(now known as Welcome to Basingstoke)

Wise decision. Understandably, the town proper gets priority on many a search engine when searching without the "welcome to".

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This is simply not true anymore and you need to update your sources. It was true maybe 5 years ago but today the difference between native packages,

Microsoft edit was released this year.

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Speaking as an owner of a RX 6800 I'm not very worried that RDNA 2, the same chip that's in two consoles and the Steam Deck, will loose support.

"New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch," an AMD spokesperson told [Tom's Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpu-drivers/amd-clarifies-that-rdna-1-and-2-will-still-get-day-zero-game-support-and-driver-updates-discrete-gpus-and-handhelds-will-still-work-with-future-games)

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Picked this up after reading your article and it is really good! Quite a lot of strategic depth, varied missions, and nice map design. One of those "simple to learn, hard to master" kind of games. Worked out-of-the-box on desktop Linux, but apparently limited controller support so might not be great for Steam Deck.

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Are there benchmarks of old nVidia GPUs comparing old & new drivers with new games? Is nVidia actually still optimizing games for old GPUs, say 1080 or 2080?

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Partial Controller Support
* Xbox Controllers

I really need "Full Controller Support" to be happy on a Steam Deck.

There are many games from the 2000s to 2010s I play a lot on Steam Deck, but what they have in common is that they have Full Controller Support.

It puts a dent in the fun when you constantly notice you are playing a game that was never designed for your device -- it makes it impossible to be immersive.

I think Serious Sam could stand to gain a lot of ground and fortify their cult following by giving some some tender loving care and quality updates to their most famous old games.

Plus a few bucks to buy into a franchise pushes sales of later games. People have a tendency to want to collect.

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Its still a slap in the face, its anti consumer and planned obsolescence.. They have apparently backtracked to say those older cards will still get optimisation, fixes etc based on market needs

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Maybe they're taking the same route as Microsoft is taking with Windows 11. Sorry but in order to receive driver updates you have to buy a new GPU from us.

Anyway, it's another...

Linux Wins!

Flawless Victory!

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Is text-to-speech actually the same technology as generative AI? I feel like it should be a different thing, but I don't know.

TTS is just a implementation-agnostic description but you can be pretty sure that any modern TTS will be LLM based.

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Not got the update yet on topgrade -- anyone else got this issue?

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Same as you @Tam. I tried it a few times over the years, and i never really found the appeal.

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I love this game. The origian campaign was very linear to teach you how the game functions. I love playing the Conquest with a friend. It is a challenge and different each time. Plus with all the different clan types, there is so much to learn and get better with.

I'm a huge fan of the old C&C games and love this game just as much. So I'd say give it more of a try, especially the Conquest with a friend going through the randomized campaign and rewards.

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i'm not sure what AMD is aiming for here...

not going bankrupt?

going bankrupt faster?

protecting the Steam Deck from being used on Windows?

forcing other handheld gamers to replace windows with GamerOS?

making win10 users hate win12 even more when they are forced to jump?

🤔

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I'm annoyed on behalf of my friend since she has a RX 6700 XT. I picked out the parts at the beginning of 2023 because her now husband wanted to surprise her with a new computer. We went with it because it was the same price as the 3060 12gb at the time. She has no need for an upgrade as the main games she plays e-sports games, games like peak and R.E.P.O, and alot of FFXIV. Tho she hates updating drivers so she probably wouldn't mind too much.

I used to not recommend AMD cards to my friends do to not liking the Vega windows drivers when I was on windows, do to bugs I had and the terrible OpenGL performance since we played a lot of Minecraft back then and it would prevent us from playing games on Citra together.

I started recommending AMD cards again (if they where just gaming) starting with her computer because AMD resolved those issues. But now I question it since me and my friends don't upgrade computer that often and we don't all have a lot of money. We just upgraded half our GPUs from basically high school this year RX 580 4gb --> 2080ti(Does Video editing and 3D modeling), 1660 ti --> 5070 ti(just wanted to stay on Nvidia), Vega 56 --> RX 7700 XT(Me). I just recommended a RX 9070 to a friend since they want to upgrade their whole computer from high school (it can't update to windows 11 and they can't use Linux) we build for $500 with a RX 570 4gb and want it to last some time but now I question how long that card will get updates and if I should tell them to change it to a 5070 since they are still saving up for it.

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It worked fine a few months back, but it doesn't start anymore after the big update, doesn't matter which version of proton I use. Go figure.

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I got a malicious steam chat a few days ago, at first I thought it was a real person and their tag was funny so I said hi.

Then they just started spamming a link to a FREE STEAM GAME... its a fake website that is designed to steal your login and password which I didn't provide, naturally.

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I bought this game when it first released and have been lauding it any chance I have, it's criminally neglected, probably because of the original asking price

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Hopefully sensible defaults for this

Added UI scaling option

will fix this

it's rated Steam Deck Playable.

since it's small text that stops it getting the green tick.

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However, I notice that this no longer seems to be the case as when I went to re-install the game, they now want some money!

They explain why [here](https://puppygames001.itch.io/basingstoke/devlog/1096455/a-great-big-halloween-update):

Unfortunately for Linux users it's no longer quite as free as it was, coz we're hurtin' for money, but the good news is, it's only ten bucks! If you can't get a few weeks' fun out of ten bucks, you're tired of life! Or wasting it on coffee, as you will.

I purchased it full price back then to show support so I still get access to downloads. It was on "Name your own price" with Mac/Windows at $24.95 USD or more, but Itch is also weird with price changes and tiers.

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but your enemy evolves too, unleashing horrors like “The Creep”

Oh, is this the surprise prequel to the Creeper World games?

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This is getting serious. 💣

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With how things are going on Earth right now. I'm rooting for Mars. lol

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Can't imagine my 6800xt being considered maintenance only. Thank god for Mesa

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This used to run like absolute dog ass and needed severe tweaking to even hit 30 fps at all. Is there a preset now to avoid the console commands haxxoring?

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I'm looking for somebody(ies) to sell me on Northgard. I bought it a couple years ago and started playing through it but it felt... shallow? Like there was a direct "when this external event happens, this is the single thing you need to do in response" gameplay loop. It just didn't feel especially strategic to me. Am I missing something? Does it deserve another chance? If so, how much time investment is required to get to satisfying gameplay?

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Back in 2019, Puppy Games made this [free to Linux users](https://puppygames001.itch.io/basingstoke/devlog/70568/basingstoke-is-now-free-for-linux) on itch.io.

However, I notice that this no longer seems to be the case as when I went to re-install the game, they now want some money!

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For the reference, I linked it in the other thread, but if you are curious, here are places in Mesa and dxvk/vkd3d-proton that deal with game specific fixes:

* radeonsi (OpenGL) and non radv Vulkan: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-mesa-defaults.conf
* radv (Vulkan): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-radv-defaults.conf
* dxvk: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/config/config.cpp#L21
* vkd3d-proton: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/master/libs/vkd3d/device.c#L541

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Agree with others: it's wild to me that the 6800xt will now be considered in "maintenance mode" on windows machines. I used that card right up until recently and it's still perfectly capable of running anything at all on 1440p ultrawide at high settings. I even ran Avowed this year on it which is a shitty ue5 engine game (the engine being shitty, not the game lol, the game is great) and it ran 60fps on high. Which is incredible!

That's some pretty shitty behavior by AMD. But I am still glad we've got Mesa on linux!

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thanks for the heads up about denuvo. completely lost interest in this now.

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But what kind of support? Do they add new features or are they only fixing bugs?

Everything. The current branch (580) has Maxwell support. They've said that they'll drop pre-Turing from the next branch, though, whenever that happens, after which 580 will be a legacy branch.

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