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I realize more and more, with every passing day, that a healthy portion of these so-called developers have actually no clue about their own trade. But hey, being a "professional" just means you're trying to earn money with what you're doing, not that you're actually good at it.

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i kickstarted this because of the linux stretch goal.

wonder if i can get my dolla dolla bills back.

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Quoting: calvinMicrosoft can't go walled garden; it would enrage enterprise, and that's a primary market for them - much larger than gaming, despite its status as a growth market.

You're gonna have to explain that one to me.

Apple is very walled garden; and for whatever reason enterprise loves Apple. Microsoft's biggest product is Azure (and patents/licensing). Windows doesn't net them nearly as much, or at least so I've been told.

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Microsoft can't go walled garden; it would enrage enterprise, and that's a primary market for them - much larger than gaming, despite its status as a growth market.

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well on the business side of things, Microsoft won't completely go walled garden until they know they have all the major companies on board with it. So far EA has their own storefront setup that I don't think they want to relinquish everything to the MS store anytime soon.
Everything is in flux, which is why things with SteamOS have stagnated. But with more vulkan development around the corner. all throughout next year should start the next evolution of gaming, which is where we will see DX12 and Vulkan go head to head and we find out the performance is almost identical. with some edge cases of each API having better performance over the other.

plus wine will get dx12 support which I'm really curious to see what sort of performance there will be. (i'm assuming there will be little to no performance hit). which will be all the more reason for Steam to incorporate their own version of wine at that point, as part of their runtime. this will help to alleviate most compatibility issues on Steam OS.

When it comes to the mainstream gamers all they want is for things to work without much fuss. it all boils down to what games can I play and what is the performance compared to price. Where as most of us geeks it doesn't matter so much.
Wine, Vulkan and DX12 development will be a good time for Steam OS to try to shine. Which will be over the coarse of the next couple of years.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, as I said,

QuoteI have yet to see a smidgen of evidence that Steam Machines in specific helped foster game development on Linux.

So yeah, I think your talk about all the games and so on, implying that they are there because of the Steam Machine, is simply wrong.

Oh really?

Quoting: FeralThe catalyst has been the Steam OS and the Steam Machine. That convinced us that Linux could support AAA games.

Are you sure sir?

Quoting: Aspyrwhen Valve decided to enter the market with SteamOS we knew we would be well positioned to service a small but growing community

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I've said this before, but it's worth saying again. People need to stop thinking of SteamOS as a competitor to Windows. I doubt that was ever Valve's intention. As someone above already mentioned, Steam Machines were an alternative to those people who were going to leave Windows anyway and switch to consoles. Valve is making a boatload of money from Windows gamers, and all they've done is add even more revenue from Mac and Linux game. For them it's a win-win situation.

Steam as a whole is their platform, not just SteamOS. They have multiple streams of revenue coming in. That's actually good for us because it means we'll still get games even if SteamOS isn't highly competitive because Valve doesn't depend on it to stay afloat.

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Quoting: scaineThe occasional indie game might be badly packaged, but it's rare. Windows requires a lot more nit-picky stuff to get games running than Linux. On Linux, you double click and the game launches. On Windows, it launches two, sometimes three, separate launchers - directX, .net framework at least.

No, this is not how it works on Windows. The only time I see multiple windows pop up is during an installation procedure the first time it runs. Even UPlay has gotten less intrusive. Yes, it's still another layer of DRM, but it's gotten much better. Once the game is fully installed, it runs on a button click.

Quoting: scaineThen, if it's AAA, you might find that the game doesn't launch, or has terrible performance until you update your graphics driver. If anything goes wrong after that, the stock support answer is "update your graphics driver, update your computer" and until you do that, you're stuck.

To be fair it's almost always best to run the latest drivers in any operating system. I've never had a game not launch on day one, even before downloading the latest driver updates.

Quoting: scaineAnd until a few years ago, when they started asking for the directx output, they didn't even have an established way to get information pertinent to fixing your issue.

I've never gotten to this point. I've gamed on PC since the original Doom, and I've never had to call a company to give them any kind of log file because my game didn't start. Not saying it doesn't happen, I've just never experienced it.

Quoting: scaineSure, Linux gaming has less performance, and sure, we're missing a few triple-A titles, I might have bought. But it's a whole lot more reliable and consistent than my fifteen years experience of gaming on Windows.

I don't miss it at all, and luckily, no game will ever have the ability to make me reconsider Windows as an option. That ship has sailed.

That's fantastic that you're so committed to Linux, I've recently decided to dual boot because I'm sick of the built in spyware from Microsoft, however, Windows gaming is not as you describe it.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'm no expert, but it seems to me the general consensus is that DX12 is quite good, very similar to Vulkan, and is in fact a significant improvement over DX11.
While as near as I can make out Windows 10 is worse than Windows 8 in many ways, I can see the argument that it is better from a gaming/game developer perspective.

It is better but at the moment for the gamers, dx12 didn't delivered what it should, performance gains of dx12 versus dx11 in the games that have support for it are marginal in most of the cases, for someone change to Windows 10 just for it at the current state isn't a good enough reason.

Most probably the dx12 game performance isn't stellar due to most engines being dx11 focused and the released games being in production for quite some time, except by ashes of the singularity which is one game that had good gains, especially for AMD GPUs because since the inception of the nitrous engine: low level APIs were considered, at the time mantle.

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Well, as I said,

QuoteI have yet to see a smidgen of evidence that Steam Machines in specific helped foster game development on Linux.

So yeah, I think your talk about all the games and so on, implying that they are there because of the Steam Machine, is simply wrong. No doubt many of the other moves Valve did, such as SteamOS, were done as part of a push to make the Steam Machine work out. But, just because something didn't do what you intended it to do, doesn't mean it's useless. Those moves did not drive the Steam Machine to success, and the Steam Machine did not in turn drive further success for desktop Linux because it created negligible sales of either hardware or software and so the size of Linux overall as a game market was not appreciably increased. If that positive feedback loop had taken hold (Steam Machine market share significant --> Makes Linux platform a bigger game target --> More games for Linux & Steam Machine --> Desktop Linux & Steam Machine more viable --> Steam Machines, and maybe desktop Linux computers, sell more --> Steam Machine market share even more significant --> and so on) we would be looking at a very different situation for Linux gaming right now, one where Linux as a gaming platform was growing rapidly rather than coasting at the "new normal".

But the moves still in themselves helped Linux gaming massively. They did create that somewhat fragile "new normal" we are inhabiting. It's just the Steam Machine itself didn't end up contributing.

As to a hedge--one might argue that a platform which has failed to sell once makes a less effective hedge/threat than a platform which is as yet unreleased and so an unknown quantity. The Steam Machine might actually be more effective at the role you point to there if it had never been released yet and Valve were still just talking about the possibility. It's hard to call that success.

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Sad, out of the wishlist at least for now.

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Quoting: EdmeneWell the few gaming related things in Win 10 are dx12 (didn't show any major improvement in comparison with dx11 in general) and the xbox app (make the performance worst due to game recording if you don't disable it).

I'm no expert, but it seems to me the general consensus is that DX12 is quite good, very similar to Vulkan, and is in fact a significant improvement over DX11.
While as near as I can make out Windows 10 is worse than Windows 8 in many ways, I can see the argument that it is better from a gaming/game developer perspective.

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Quoting: Redface

Quoting: barotto

Quoting: wleoncioit's up to Valve to create a suitable competitor

Valve cannot create a suitable competitor to Windows.
Why the hell should I use SteamOS, which is nothing more than a crippled console OS, when I can use Windows, a full blown operating system??? Which, by the way, allows me to play the entirety of the Steam library at full speed.

We need a polished and complete desktop OS.
Ubuntu was promising 10 years ago, now it's a clusterfuck.

SteamOS has its flaws, but being a crippled console OS is not one of them.

Well, you can force it to act like a real desktop Linux if you know what you're doing. But its reason for existence is to be a console OS. It is almost certainly easier to wipe it and install Mint or something than to get SteamOS itself configured to be a good desktop.
But it's ludicrous to complain about it. Valve took Linux and used it to create a console OS so they could ship a console. Now barotto is complaining that (shock! horror!) SteamOS is a console OS. Well, duh. There are plenty of good Linux desktop distributions; SteamOS isn't one of them just like whatever they stick in routers isn't one of them--it's not supposed to be.
Valve has not so far attempted to create a competitor to Windows; they seem to have assumed that Ubuntu, Mint, and so on were handling that side of things. Valve adding one more desktop Linux distro would have just caused resentment and it probably would have sucked anyway because that's not their expertise. Instead they tried to create a competitor to Microsoft's Xbox, which would synergize with desktop Linux. They didn't succeed, at least not so far, but SteamOS has acted as sort of a reference implementation for gaming and a target for game developers. I suspect that nowadays distro rollers who care about desktop users try to get in sync with SteamOS for the gaming-relevant stuff so games will run.

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Ignore it, please or delete if possible Liam.

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Well the few gaming related things in Win 10 are dx12 (didn't show any major improvement in comparison with dx11 in general) and the xbox app (make the performance worst due to game recording if you don't disable it).

I don't see many gaming improvement in Win 10 actually, plus you have less privacy (especially if you didn't changed the privacy settings) and UWP that isn't good and I don't know if has support for advanced monitor syncing like freesync and gsync (but hey now is possible to play XBOX games :|, a possible way to locking the windows platform and don't have access to the executables), the only thing that has truly improved is the UI that in Win8 had some problems of usability for PC as for the Windows update we all know that is worst now since you can't choose what to update, it just updates and the maximum you can do is postpone to a certain time of the day and sometimes takes a long time to Windows finish the update process.

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Shouldn't your character float and have a lot more eyes? ;)

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Besides 2001 it also reminds me of this scene from Dark Star View video on youtube.com , the question at 2:27 and the reply is one of the best lines in a movie ever :-)

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Quoting: meggermanIm starting to think a lot of these issues are not so much that Linux is complex, but that these 'developers' are artists / designers / basic coders with lots of engine specific experience. i.e they are not traditional 'programmers'. A slight spanner in the works outside the sandbox that they work within and it's just straight faces all around.

As people have said Vulkan will help with this, but so would hiring someone who understands programming and computers as a whole into the game studio. It often seems this is an Achilles heal of Linux development, many don't even have a Linux test rig. A few proper desktop/OS level programmers could send bug reports and have things fixed upstream for other studios & the FOSS community to benefit from too.

Feral interactive seem to have a good bit of this concept sorted. So its not Linux as much as it is inexperience and poor resourcing.

That and also that they all start with the Windows version first (and only ever have programmed for Windows). In my experience (as a systems/server programmer and not a game dev mind you) I have found it much easier to create a project in Linux first and then port over to Windows with a few changes and compiling under MinGW so one still uses GCC than writing it in Windows first and then trying to get it work in Linux.

There are lots of situations where the same code runs fine in Windows while segfaulting in Linux leading many to first blame Linux before recognising that the bug is actually in their own code and that Windows where simply shadowing the problems (i.e the libc memory functions have much more protections than the Windows counterparts, this one bit me extremely hard when I switched from Windows to Linux some 17 years ago). Which is also why many people who port over to Linux fix several bugs in their code that they didn't know existed before.

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Quoting: barotto

Quoting: wleoncioit's up to Valve to create a suitable competitor

Valve cannot create a suitable competitor to Windows.
Why the hell should I use SteamOS, which is nothing more than a crippled console OS, when I can use Windows, a full blown operating system??? Which, by the way, allows me to play the entirety of the Steam library at full speed.

We need a polished and complete desktop OS.
Ubuntu was promising 10 years ago, now it's a clusterfuck.

SteamOS has its flaws, but being a crippled console OS is not one of them.
Its based on Debian 8 and you get root access so you can change almost everything except the proprietary drivers from Nvidia, AMD etc.

They could have done something similar as Google with Android, using the Linux Kernel and some libraries but then no way for users to escape the Steam client. Instead the bundle a desktop too which is very spartan, but its open to install every Linux program you want and have access too.

I have installed some GOG games for example.

Steam Big Picture is limited compared to the window mode, but also that is possible to run steam in window mode if you want.

It is in fact the first console since the Amiga CD32 I got interested in and bought for above reasons, and also that it is PC hardware, so if I at some point should want to then I can install another Linux or even Windows.

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As to the privacy, I've noticed a trend. Basically, each version of Windows invades your privacy more thoroughly and tries to control your updating and whatnot more aggressively than the version before.

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Quoting: JahimselfI'm sorry to doubt the Dell argument about steam machine, as windows 8 and 8.1 still have better performances over windows 10 and 7 on gaming.

And now that windows 10 is going even more against gamers with UWP platform, with lower perf than windows 7 and 8.1, microsoft is fine for dell?

This does not make much sens, but most of the devs intervening on that debate was saying the same as dell, and in the end many of them have accepted to work on UWP which really is a shame for them.

Luckily as you say Liam, Linux gaming is still growing, and getting better everyday thx to the devs who actually care of other platforms and don't fall in the UWP windows 10 only trap.

If steam don't get too much money from MS to accept to make crossplatform with UWP it will be a good point for valve in the future of Linux gaming.

I think that we should read it more like "Win8 was going against the gamers but with the release of Win10 there came DirectX12 and also gamers didn't seam to switch away from the platform so we now see it as a non-issue.". This is the problem with monopoly players like Microsoft, they can abuse their user base in every way or form and they will still remain loyal to the brand because "there is no alternative".

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: chrisq

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe future is unknowable, therefore you can never say anything has failed, ever. We may be back to horses and carriages in a few years after civilization collapses.
But this is not a useful way of thinking about the issue, certainly not from the perspective of a Linux enthusiast who is assessing whether Steam Machines have made any real difference to Linux gaming.

I could just as easily turn you bs around and say that something isn't a major success in the first hour it's released, then it is a failure.

The problem is the people saying the Steam Machine has failed are saying "Well it failed to do this, and it failed to do that, so it failed", and the people saying it didn't are saying, "Well, you can't say it failed just because it failed at this and that, that's too narrow" but you're not suggesting any alternative measure. You're not saying "Well, if it had failed in these other ways, that would be failure". You end up effectively just saying there's no such thing as failure. It's a cheap way for it to be impossible to lose an argument--no matter how many more areas people point to where the Steam Machine failed, you can always just say "Nope, still too narrow, you can't say it failed just because of that". But it's bogus, your position becomes meaningless. If you won't allow some set of criteria we could judge success or failure by, your denials of other people's criteria are empty.

QuoteYour problem is that he didn't make that distinction, it was about if stream machines were a success or not, not whether they made a difference to Linux gaming. If that was the case it would have been even better though. Steam machines are the natural conclusion to valve's Linux gamble. It has taken us from a handful to 3000 games in a couple of years.
Obviously there greatest thing to ever happen to gaming on Linux.

Except the current pace of games arriving for Linux was basically reached well before the Steam Machines were released and then continued even after it became clear to game developers that the Steam Machines were not going to impact game sales. Valve's push for Linux more generally had a big impact; I suspect that had a lot to do, for instance, with creating enough pressure to put Linux enthusiasts in major game engine producers in a position to make them work for Linux. And those engines themselves supporting Linux was a huge win; it brought the cost of cross-platform down to where even the small Linux market share was likely worth it. Even Valve's creation of SteamOS was significant. Even though it's not really a major distribution in terms of actual users, it does I think create a target for game developers so they can ignore the mass of distros if they want, and a centre of gravity so that people doing Linux distributions can say "OK, if I want games to run, make it compatible with SteamOS".

Steam Machines themselves, not so much. I have yet to see a smidgen of evidence that Steam Machines in specific helped foster game development on Linux. Maybe a little bit before the release, but not after their (lack of) impact had been seen. Current pace of games being released for Linux is if anything in spite of Steam Machines, not because of them.

I cannot think of a relevant measure by which one could say Steam Machines were a success. Things could still change in the future, and if they did that would be a Good Thing. But it would take a concerted effort by Valve that tackled the weaknesses of the product--effectively a re-launch. After which we'd be able to say the new Steam Machines were a success. But the first iteration have not been.

The alternative measure is that they are in for the long haul, it was pretty obvious in my post.
You insisting on measuring success or failure at this time is meaningless if their strategy is long term.
I guess you could say that going from basically zero to thousands of games and support for the most used 3d engines for your platform is a way of measuring.

Also, you can't just look at steam machines by themselves, they're part of a whole.
SteamOS from Valve wouldn't make sense without steam machines, and steam machines without SteamOS is just a windows pc.

* Valve wants a way to secure their platform from windows store
* Hardware vendors want to secure their market share from microsoft walled garden + own hardware

Neither of these goals need Steam Machines to be a great seller now, they just need it to become and stay a viable platform for games. Before microsoft makes a move into becoming a walled garden, it makes little difference for either actors if the users are on windows or steamos.

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Quoting: scaineThen, if it's AAA, you might find that the game doesn't launch, or has terrible performance until you update your graphics driver.

Definitely not my experience.

It works far better than some folks here like to admit (or assume).

And this a major issue when it comes to getting more people use Linux for gaming.
I guess it's very unlikely someone switches to Linux due to the UX when it comes to games.
(There might be other reasons, though)
And when they do, they'll be most likely disappointed (in comparison).

I take it as a sad fact.

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Quoting: PixelPiFrom a German site:

https://vrodo.de/valve-virtual-reality-ist-die-finale-plattform-steamvr-fuer-osx-und-linux/

Money quote and translation:

QuoteValve is investing both in hardware and software and is convinced that the combination of virtual and augmented reality is "the final computer platform," says Ludwig in his presentation at the Steam Developer Conference in mid-October.

"It is difficult to imagine what could still follow a platform that controls everything you hear and see."

Therefore it is important that the new technology is built on open systems, according to Ludwig. Its definition of an "open platform" is as follows: It must run several devices from different manufacturers with the same software. Hardware and software should not be interdependent.

This helps to prevent gatekeepers from deciding which software and hardware may be made and published. According to Ludwig, an open platform promotes the will of all participants to engage in experiments.

I think Valves Linux's commitment is very sustainable and has a lot to do with VR. At this point Steam Machnines will become much more useful.

Also I think that Valve and the big publishers make already profits with Linux games. Nothing which finances the games themselves, but Linux ports creates additional revenue. One percent additional sales is very much. For many games this is maybe the profit margin. See Alien: Isolation for example. If you program games so that they are easily portable, you get an additional source of income. Large publishers calculate this way. They have to port their games on many platforms to be profitable. So I do not worry about more games, as long as our community does not shrink.

On the other hand Windows and the consoles are very important for the development of sophisticated games. Only if you have new developments you can port something to Linux. Obvious. Linux is much to small for primary development, but clearly big enough for high quality ports.

Interesting article, thanks for the link.

I like how the Valve Programmer states that they believe in open platforms.

Quote“Man kann sich schwer vorstellen, was noch auf eine Plattform folgen könnte, die alles kontrolliert, was man hört und sieht.”

Quoting: Google Translate"It is difficult to imagine what could still follow a platform that controls everything you hear and see."

Next stage could be smells and taste, and further and that is scary if it can control what people think.
Lets hope that companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google will not build brain implants in the future.

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Quoting: CorbenBut then there are coming big titles to Linux, thanks to all the hard work of all the porters and porting companies, so I cheer again. Just to realize, how much you have to fiddle around with those games, to make them work. There is always something you have to fiddle around on Linux, and it feels like it's a lot more than on Windows. Of course Windows also has its problems, but in general, it have to admit to get the impression, it's more stable in general. Even though it's running on even more different hardware setups.

The occasional indie game might be badly packaged, but it's rare. Windows requires a lot more nit-picky stuff to get games running than Linux. On Linux, you double click and the game launches. On Windows, it launches two, sometimes three, separate launchers - directX, .net framework at least. Then, if it's AAA, you might find that the game doesn't launch, or has terrible performance until you update your graphics driver. If anything goes wrong after that, the stock support answer is "update your graphics driver, update your computer" and until you do that, you're stuck. And until a few years ago, when they started asking for the directx output, they didn't even have an established way to get information pertinent to fixing your issue.

Sure, Linux gaming has less performance, and sure, we're missing a few triple-A titles, I might have bought. But it's a whole lot more reliable and consistent than my fifteen years experience of gaming on Windows.

I don't miss it at all, and luckily, no game will ever have the ability to make me reconsider Windows as an option. That ship has sailed.

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Quoting: GuestUses a HLSL -> GLSL conversion, but I don't know the details. If they've got issues as a result of that conversion process though, they're going to have them with Vulkan as well.

Just depends what the actual problem actually is. More info needed.

Translation sounds far from ideal, I don't think anyone has a complete HLSL → GLSL or HLSL → SPIR-V translator so far. There is this effort, but it's only WIP:

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/200

Anyway, why can't they develop shaders in a unified fashion, and just export them into HLSL, GLSL, SPIR-V or whatever? What exactly are they using for creating shaders to begin with?

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The story would've been much different if Valve was as capable as Sony or MS in terms of pushing studios to support their platform. Sony was able to convince all studios to target PS4 way before PS4 was even on the market. If Valve did the same and marketed the Steam Machines as a new console and convinced publishers to target the paltform it would've been a success. People are comparing SteamOS games to Windows games because SteamOS is marketted as a PC replacement rather than a new console platform. Notice that no one compared the number of games on PS4 to those on Windows like they often do with SteamOS.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: ShmerlUnreal now is almost ready with Vulkan support. Can they use that?

From the list of issues given, it wouldn't help any. In fact, I'd say it'd cause them more problems due to the additional complexity in getting it to work. If they're having shader issues with OpenGL, there's a good chance they'd need GLSL anyway (though maybe an experimental HLSL compiler is in there, I don't know) and so they'd be suffering the same problems.

Hoes does Unreal handle shaders for multiple platforms in general? Don't they need to provide API specific shaders either way, so they are already using GLSL I assume?

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From a German site:

https://vrodo.de/valve-virtual-reality-ist-die-finale-plattform-steamvr-fuer-osx-und-linux/

Money quote and translation:

QuoteValve is investing both in hardware and software and is convinced that the combination of virtual and augmented reality is "the final computer platform," says Ludwig in his presentation at the Steam Developer Conference in mid-October.

"It is difficult to imagine what could still follow a platform that controls everything you hear and see."

Therefore it is important that the new technology is built on open systems, according to Ludwig. Its definition of an "open platform" is as follows: It must run several devices from different manufacturers with the same software. Hardware and software should not be interdependent.

This helps to prevent gatekeepers from deciding which software and hardware may be made and published. According to Ludwig, an open platform promotes the will of all participants to engage in experiments.

I think Valves Linux's commitment is very sustainable and has a lot to do with VR. At this point Steam Machnines will become much more useful.

Also I think that Valve and the big publishers make already profits with Linux games. Nothing which finances the games themselves, but Linux ports creates additional revenue. One percent additional sales is very much. For many games this is maybe the profit margin. See Alien: Isolation for example. If you program games so that they are easily portable, you get an additional source of income. Large publishers calculate this way. They have to port their games on many platforms to be profitable. So I do not worry about more games, as long as our community does not shrink.

On the other hand Windows and the consoles are very important for the development of sophisticated games. Only if you have new developments you can port something to Linux. Obvious. Linux is much to small for primary development, but clearly big enough for high quality ports.

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Unreal now is almost ready with Vulkan support. Can they use that?

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