Quoting: LinuxwarperEDIT: Wait Stadia doesn't support local play? It's strictly streaming?! I thought it did as a way to break into the market..

A very early test that used Assassin's Creed gave participants a normal copy of Assassin's Creed as a reward for taking part. You might be thinking of that. Stadia itself is strictly streaming.

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Quoting: LinasNot a builder-gamer myself, but I am curious to try it out. Is it any good without the DLC's?

I had the base game and... After Dark and the free bits.

My impression from my playthrough was that it was a glorious city builder and a terrible, terrible simulation. The traffic is a fudge, and the population explosions that you get from actually using the rewards from passing population milestones trigger inescapable death waves. Last time I checked they had no intention of fixing that, so I haven't played since.

There's enjoyment to be had, but they may well punish you for it.

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I am interested in this, but this statement is not promising:

QuoteWhen speaking to the developer E-Line Media about the Linux version they stated, "The production team is working out a plan that will launch Linux as soon as we are able.".

Two weeks from release and they don't yet have a plan for releasing on Linux.

Really they should have had Linux builds going throughout the development process, to more easily find Windows bugs if nothing else. This sounds quite a lot like they're going to wait a while after release (because release time is hectic for everyone) and then discover that it's toooo haaaard and throw their hands up in the air. As we've seen too many developers do in the past.

I hope I'm wrong.

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Quoting: DadSchoorseThat's close to useless for Proton since games don't give the driver HLSL, they have bytecode in form of DXBC or the newer DXIL. Also translating shaders to SPIR-V is quite fast and not the bottleneck in DXVK afaik, the problem is the missing state information so that pipelines can only be compiled at draw time without a state cache hit.

I suspected that was the case, but there's the ability to handle those hopefully coming too. It was the "how do we turn things into SPIR-V?" part that I was commenting on.

While Microsoft has historically used many methods to lock people into their ecosystem, shaders don't seem to be one that they're trying: developers with their existing DirectX knowledge and existing DirectX tooling can relatively easily produce things for Vulkan.

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Quoting: rkfgThis is a very interesting tech! I wonder how they implemented it. The D3D shaders are stored in the game resources which can be in whatever proprietary format the developers choose so they can't be automatically extracted and transpiled to SPIR-V (the Vulkan binary shader format).

Actually, Microsoft open-sourced a compiler to turn HLSL (the DirectX shader language) shaders into SPIR-V, which has been integrated into the Vulkan ecosystem.

QuoteNow, thanks to Microsoft open sourcing their HLSL compiler, the Vulkan community has been able to work cooperatively with Microsoft to make HLSL support in Vulkan a proven choice alongside Khronos’ own GLSL shading language.
...
With feedback from the Vulkan community, Google, LunarG, NVIDIA, and Valve have steered an effort to resolve these and other issues by adding SPIR-V legalization to Vulkan’s HLSL shader compilers.

Edit to add: I have no idea whether Fossilise or DXVK or anything else actually uses DXC, but it's there.

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Quoting: soulsourceThat's also the reason why I am barely reading the Steam forums for our own titles any more...

You might find this article interesting.

QuoteThere were plenty of moments in the last 3 years when our mindset and resolve to be nice in the face of hate were challenged to the core. I have all the respect in the world for everyone in the service industries who tries to do a good job. To serve is a noble profession, and to do it well is not easy at all. I think a key to success is to treat it as a serious job, and divorce it from being personal. Someone who says mean things and has unreasonable demands might just be having a bad day. Our responses had the power to perpetuate the downward spiral, or to lift someone up. The above quote was one of the worst emails we’ve had (and there were quite a few like that). That this player was reported in game multiple times by multiple people was no surprise. We then gave him a warning, which he confused to be a temp ban. He then got incensed and wrote us an email.

Initially, seeing all the text that I highlighted in red was tough to take. I had to walk away for a bit to collect myself. When I returned to the email and calmed down, it became easier to see the text that I highlighted in blue, which was the point he was trying to make. He paid for the game and spent his hard earned money. He liked the game enough to gift 3 copies to his friends. He misunderstood the warning for a ban. Once I understood the issue, it became easy to reply. I also appealed to him to help us maintain and grow this community while reminding him of ours as well as Steam’s terms of use and community standards. The player never expected me to reply, and once I did, he was nice enough to help us and turned his behavior in game completely around. We’ve had quite a few players with a similar encounter, and the majority of these players actually stayed with the game over hundreds of hours of play. With over 60K player reports investigated, we ended up giving out warnings only about 4% of the time. Only 0.3% of the time did we issue bans of varying degrees. We take players’ hard earned money seriously, and we try to appeal to people’s humanity and reason over heavy handed policing, and I think it has worked for us.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumPorting houses usually don't get access to the update code until after the windows team has finished their part, by this time usually the update is announced and has a deadline.

With the broken Borderlands 2 they changed the status from "we fixed Mac and we'll get round to fixing Linux someday if we get round to it" to "we'll fix Mac someday if we get round to it" after it broke for a second time. That was months ago. There's no reason to think that they'll ever fix this one either. They haven't even said they will.

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QuoteAspyr Media, who ported it to Linux, still haven't even gotten Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel updated on Linux since the last update almost a whole year ago.

I chose not to buy Civ 6 specifically because of that. They made it clear with that that they weren't interested in actually supporting their Linux releases. If Feral had ported it instead I'd have bought it.

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Quoting: MohandevirIn fact the GeForce now subscription is not about Netflix like access...

True, but those are the two models: buy and stream from your own collection (Stadia, Geforce Now) or stream from someone else's collection (the Xbox thing and the PlayStation thing).

Quoting: SalvatosI could see the Proton whitelist become the streaming lineup.

Yes, that was my thought, too.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAny streaming service is gonna need a revenue model of some sort.

Also true. It wouldn't necessarily need to all be new revenue, though; as something that Steam provides that other services don't, it might reduce the pressure for them to lower their cut of sales, and if customers with potatoes have a reason to buy more expensive AAA games then revenues generally would go up without a specific line item.

Or it might never happen. That kind of scheme follows Valve's pattern of using what they already have to make things more attractive for customers and suppliers so they can keep the flow of money going, and fits the kind of work they've collectively found interesting enough to do so far.

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Quoting: MohandevirUnless the "Steam streaming service" goes free, there is a possibilty that there will be a limited set of games available, lacking lots of popular titles.

Time will tell, if it ever becomes a thing...

Free is the way that makes most sense. They have a shop, their client also already streams games;let the customer buy the games as normal but have the option to stream from Steam Machines In The Cloud as a value-add if the customer's Internet is better than their gaming rig. It builds on what they already know how to do. A Netflix-style subscription service would be quite a swerve.

It might still be a restricted selection, depending on which ones they get running on Linux and whether it's optional for the publisher for the game to be included in the service.

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