Coupled with the update last year to show on the store page when a game's been abandoned in Early Access, this should bring good transparency to the state of games in Early Access.

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Quoting: PhiladelphusI must be misunderstanding this, because I don't really see much benefit from foveated streaming.

The benefit is in limited bandwidth. The Frame doesn't have a wired option - it can only be used wirelessly. Foveated streaming doesn't reduce the rendering load at all, it's true, but it does maintain the perceived quality of the image where bandwidth is limited or variable.

Should eye-tracking become a baseline expected feature of VR headsets following its inclusion in the Frame (and which will necessarily be the case for, say, ARM and Android games put on Steam for use on the Frame) then game devs can justify utilising it for foveated rendering, which does reduce rendering load. They haven't been able to rely on eye-tracking being available generally, so they haven't generally bothered with foveated rendering. Foveated streaming makes sensible use of eye-tracking orthogonally to the foveated rendering chicken-and-egg. Both techniques can be used together with headsets that have eye-tracking.

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Just a reminder that Luxtorpeda [External Link] makes it super straightforward to use ScummVM (and DOSBox, and various engine reimplementations) with Steam games.

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Over to you in the comments - what have you been playing the most recently?

For January I completed Unpacking, Hellblade 2 (streamed from my desktop to the Deck), Gabriel Knight and most of Gabriel Knight 2 (with Luxtorpeda).

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The vast majority for Meta platforms at 82%, SteamVR was next at 37%. Perhaps the Steam Frame will shift this over.

Facebook closing a bunch of VR studios and laying off thousands of workers, having wasted billions chasing a "metaverse," might also shift it over. I expect quite a lot of people are going to wonder whether that platform is the basket they'd like to put all their eggs in.

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Quoting: CaldathrasYet, I am not sure this is entirely GOG's fault. Oftentimes, it seems like the developer is slower to update their Linux packages on GOG than they are on Steam.

It's still GOG's fault. Other platforms got to use the Galaxy SDK to handle uploads and updates; Linux builds they had to use manual FTP and wait for it to be approved on GOG's side. They improved the process somewhat after a number of years, but it's still not as good publishing Linux builds as for other platforms.

Steam just has the same build and update pipeline for all platforms.

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Quoting: ArehandoroWill all Steam Deck Verified games run at 4K@60FPS? Cause they said all Steam Machine Verified games would...

4K60 with upscaling is what they said. And if the Deck can hit 720p30 (the Deck's performance floor) in a game, the Machine should definitely be able to do that game at 720p60 with the same settings. They haven't said that games have to look good after upscaling, after all. But realistically the Machine is going to render 1080p60 or 1440p60 for a lot of games and 4K60 for some, and likely with better settings than the Deck (but not Ultra settings generally).

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Quoting: Stellamy problem with Canonical is that they actively harm the Flatpak ecosystem. Kubuntu used to ship the flatpak backend, but Canonical got really angry at that and it got ripped out in favor of snaps. Requiring users to do an extra steps to install flatpaks is not user friendly at all

Kubuntu has never shipped with the flatpak backend already installed. It's trivial to install it if you want it, but it's never been installed by default.

You're thinking of Xubuntu, who also never shipped with flatpak enabled. When they floated plans to have a third install method by default - deb and snap already being necessary for the default distro packages - Canonical said no since that's gratuitously confusing for new users. Just like with Kubuntu and Ubuntu it's trivial to install flatpak support on Xubuntu for those that want it.

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You'll even get to craft nametags so you know who is who.

To be clear, you could already use name tags to name animals, but you could only acquire name tags (fishing, loot or trading). It's being able to craft the name tags yourself that's new.

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Quoting: datablobThat's cool, I think. Heh. I still don't entirely understand what ntsync does in practice, I saw that CachyOS also adopted it a while ago and read something about timing consistency. Can anyone elaborate?

Liam did a bit of an overview when it was about to land in Linux 6.14.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/01/ntsync-driver-for-improving-windows-games-on-linux-with-wine-proton-should-finally-land-in-linux-kernel-614/

The gist is that Windows has a function for a program to wait for multiple conditions and Linux doesn't. Wine first emulated that function in user space with the waits that Linux did have, but that wasn't great. But putting Windows in the kernel isn't great, either. So there have been progressing attempts to have the function working with proper performance whilst minimising the amount that having Windows games running bothers the kernel devs. ntsync is the third attempt, I think, with the first two approaches improving performance and the third improving correctness.

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