Quoting: BeamboomIsn't this to punch holes in the os layer and open up for instabilities, hardware conflicts and massive security issues?

The opposite. It's so that when a Windows application blindly uses Windows system calls on Linux they can be bounced back to Wine to be interpreted properly rather than naïvely followed or dropped. The seccomp framework already exists for trapping system calls, this is just to handle things more sensibly for this use case so that only Windows system calls need processing and Wine system calls can function unmolested. As I understand it.

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Quoting: PatolaDoes anyone know of any current use cases for this patch? Which Windows applications/games skip WinAPI calls to do syscalls directly?

The two I read about a little while ago here [External Link] were Detroit: Become Human and Red Dead Redemption 2. I saw reference to some other culprits elsewhere, too, but I can't remember which they were right now.

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Quoting: BeamboomIf I have understood what a shader is, I can not fathom how this works?

Shaders are programs that run on your graphics card. When GPUs first became programmable, rather than fixed-function hardware pipelines, the first programs they could handle were for light calculations, so they're called shaders, but every part is programmable now.

The programs are written in whatever language and compiled to a portable Intermediate Representation, which is compatible with whichever cards follow the relevant standards. Those IRs are generally what get distributed with games, but they still can't be run directly. They need to be compiled into a form that will run on the specific hardware.

Once you've compiled the programs it would be handy if you could save them somewhere so that you didn't need to compile them again; that's the shader cache.

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I've been playing this with my little one. He loves the setting and the setup, and is delighted when the crops harvest themselves.

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So, looking into it a bit more, as the documentation Liam linked to says, Unity uses platform libraries... but not on Linux. It doesn't use platform libraries in Linux even for the encodings that Unity supports: they wrote their own software decoder for VP8 and Vorbis and use that exclusively. That seems like duplicated effort for a suboptimal result to me, but they don't seem to have revisited it in four years, so I guess it's not a priority for them.

Interestingly, even on Windows, Intel had to write their own thing [External Link] to grab a video stream from Unity so that it could be hardware accelerated.

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Quoting: Liam DaweYes, it's specific to the Unity video player. I see it quite often when testing games for developers. The Unity docs make it very clear what they work with on Linux, as I linked.

Yeah, not doubting the accuracy of your reporting, just thinking that it's something that Unity could fix.

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If you're using Unity, for Linux and video codecs you need to use either webm / vp8 or ogv (info here) otherwise it's black screens and freezing as I've seen too many times in Unity games.

Is this a Unity problem? I thought the issue with games was that they weren't using platform codecs, but the Unity documentation there implies they do, and playing h.264 files on Linux hasn't really been a problem for quite a long time - unless your distro takes a free-software-only stance, which you'd already have needed to work around to install games.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumHappy to see this update landed within a timely manner.

It's not fixed fixed yet, though. There's still no cross-platform multiplayer. They've coincidentally prioritised the part that involves their customers giving them more money.

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Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: drlambHowever unlikely I'd die if Google (Stadia) and Valve formed a partnership.

Horrible idea! :O

Google getting bored of Stadia and Valve taking the infrastructure, and stable of Linux-native games, off their hands at a knock-down price to make available through Steam wouldn't be a terrible outcome, though.

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Quoting: LinuxwarperIt's meaningless to hope for Google to encourage devs to release locally on Linux when they aren't even providing that opportunity to even Windows users.

In the time before Stadia developers would make their games for Windows and take on the costs of supporting them on Windows, and a very small number with the skills to do so would also make their games for Linux and take on the costs of supporting them on Linux.

Stadia won't, by itself, encourage game developers to release a standalone version of any game, for Windows or Linux; quite the opposite, Google will pay developers not to release a standalone version if they think it will help their goal of growing Stadia as a platform.

But what it does do is force developers to learn how to make their games work on Linux with Vulkan - since that's necessary for a game to work on Stadia - and Google will provide resources to help them do that. What the developers do with that knowledge and the product they've created after that is down to the developers. Many are going to shy away from the (real or perceived) costs of supporting actual Linux versions on actual customers' hardware, but they'll all have learned how to make games without Windows and without DirectX, which has been a barrier in the past.

Some developers are going to say, "just use the Stadia version," just like some developers would say, "just use Wine." They want an easy life. Customers that aren't OK with that will miss out, and customers that are OK with that will be able to play games that aren't available natively. Just like if they were using Wine.

Whether a move to streaming is good or bad for gaming as a whole in the long run, it's too early to say. It opens up gaming to people whose Internet is better than their hardware, which might increase the size of the market so that more people can make more games. Geforce Now doesn't tie purchasers to one provider, but it does tie game developers to Windows; Stadia is the other way round, and Google's reputation for dropping services does hurt them. There are things like anti-cheat and enormous worlds that are easier to do "in the cloud" than locally. But there is less (real or perceived) ownership with streaming than local installs. It could shake out as good, bad, or neutral over all.

Personally, I'm more interested in a streaming service from Valve than anything that exists now. They have a better reputation for longevity than Google and they have a long-term investment in desktop Linux as a gaming platform. But it doesn't exist yet, except as speculation.

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