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Latest Comments by CatKiller
Nightdive Studios confirm Linux and macOS ports of System Shock are cancelled
22 May 2024 at 4:58 pm UTC Likes: 11

Quoting: finaldestI think the Linux gaming community needs to make a push for official support using Proton as an option. I don't like relying on Proton simply because the publisher can simply wash their hands and claim no support was guaranteed unless on windows. I have no problem using Proton but I want official support should a problem arise.
FWIW, although it's currently not that common, "official support and testing for the game in Proton" is the second-highest-paying tier of my "more Tux, more bucks" hierarchy. Quick précis of the tiers, since I've laid out the full reasoning here enough times that people are probably annoyed by it.
Full price: native games
Half price: games with official support for Proton
75% off: Deck Verified Windows-only games
90% off: game happens to work in Wine (for now)
Won't pay anything: game doesn't work on Linux at all.
The more a game dev supports me as a Linux gamer, the more financial support I'm willing to give them in exchange.

EA SPORTS WRC is adding EA anticheat, breaking another game on Steam Deck / Linux
20 May 2024 at 8:54 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt's certainly the preferred solution. But I dunno, if cheaters can get around anticheat, which as far as I can make out they can, I don't see why Wine/Proton couldn't. It'd have to be an unofficial version, ideally developed in some country/ies where it is not illegal to circumvent blah blah blah. So there would be problems with distributing it. But it could surely be done.
Then they'll just check for Wine & Proton and ban anyone they detect using it. That's not a solution.

That's why you need the developers & publishers on board, and for that you need market size.

EA SPORTS WRC is adding EA anticheat, breaking another game on Steam Deck / Linux
18 May 2024 at 5:58 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: westurnerWhat are some solutions to anti-cheat on
Linux?
Grow Linux so that it's too big a market for anyone to decide to just ignore. That's it; that's the only solution.

Proton Experimental improves Halo Infinite, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and more
17 May 2024 at 3:44 pm UTC Likes: 2

Plus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.
It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.

Ghost of Tsushima single-player only on Steam Deck due to PlayStation Network features
16 May 2024 at 4:43 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: GuestI think at this point, I’m worried that at some point PlayStation is going to start charging money to play their games online on PC.
Why would they?

They copied that idea from Microsoft since Microsoft got away with it for Xbox. Microsoft haven't done that for PC games (although they do offer a subscription service).

Sony have always had a fully-loaded foot gun, but this doesn't seem like a realistic fear at all.

Ghost of Tsushima single-player only on Steam Deck due to PlayStation Network features
16 May 2024 at 4:40 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TevurIt's a shame that Sony at first secures a place in PC Gamers heart for bringing great games like Horizon, God of War, Returnal, Last of Us and more to PC and than so clumsily tear it down with this absolut very bullshit.
Why?
WHY? It makes absolutely no sense at all.
On the offchance that you genuinely don't understand this:

Sony already has a platform that handles storage, sales, updates, achievements and player chat for hundreds of millions of players. Of course they'd rather PC players used that than Sony having to pay Valve 30% for the privilege of using their equivalent. They're way better provisioned than the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Paradox, or Epic, who are all trying to do the same thing.

Rolling PSN out for PC players is going to take time and money, though, both of which would be wasted if there isn't actually a market for PlayStation games on PC. So you port a few games as a trial balloon - older ones, that aren't really selling PlayStations on their own any more - so if they flop you're only out the porting costs rather than the cost of the full network rollout as well.

If that works, try a simultaneous release for PlayStation and PC to gauge how much you gain from PC sales relative to how much you lose from PlayStation sales.

Then you have the data for which will give you the best outcome - rolling out PSN for PC, giving up 30% of your sales revenue on PC, or giving up PC entirely.

Ghost of Tsushima single-player only on Steam Deck due to PlayStation Network features
14 May 2024 at 5:07 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: PenglingErm, weren't there people out on the interwebs saying a couple of weeks ago that PSN requirements weren't going to lead to new launchers and similar stuff being added to future Sony PC releases? :huh:
There are people on the Internet who say anything.

This one's been flagged as having PSN integration for ages, and was always going to be part of having PSN as a Rockstar/EA/Ubisoft-style parallel store and launcher move. The lesson recently was that you can't accidentally sell games that need a thing in countries where you don't have the thing.

Luxtorpeda adds Classic Marathon for playing the Native Linux version via Steam
14 May 2024 at 3:15 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Pyrate
the steam linux SDK is like 8 years old
Is that true? How is Valve and other developers releasing Linux Native games recently then?
No. If you want to do hyperbolic complaints about the age of the target libraries because you can't be arsed to do a Linux build, you'd say that they were 12 years old. That's the original "scout" set, from the very beginning of Steam for Linux, based on Ubuntu 12.04.

If you build against a "scout" container, you actually get mostly libraries from "soldier" except for those that have to be from "scout" for ABI compatibility. "soldier" is based on the libraries from Debian 10 in 2019. This (building against "scout" and getting "soldier") is the currently recommended set. You can't build against "soldier" directly and release on Steam.

There is also "sniper" for future games, based on Debian 11 from 2021. If you build against that someone from Valve has to tweak the configuration before it can be released on Steam because the plumbing for making that work with a tickbox in steamworks is being done at Valve Time.

Lose yourself in the Steam Endless Replayability Fest
13 May 2024 at 8:44 pm UTC Likes: 6

Nova Roma
Thought, "oh, that looks interesting; I'll put that on my wishlist"... and it was already on my wishlist.

NVIDIA switching to open kernel modules by default in future driver update for Turing+
13 May 2024 at 5:24 pm UTC

Quoting: Augustus-OctavianWhat is the broader implication of this, explain this for a noob please :grin:
By itself the implications aren't huge.

Historically all of the Nvidia driver on PCs was closed source. Binary blob user space and binary blob kernel modules. But the kernel is GPL and the kernel devs want things in the kernel (rather than running on the kernel) to be GPL. That conflict between GPL and proprietary on the interface of the kernel has led to a lot of tension and a lot of friction.

Having a clear boundary between open source kernel modules and proprietary user space & firmware removes all of that, without the need for GPL condoms or other shenanigans.

Nvidia having open source kernel modules at all is a big step in the right direction. Nvidia making the open source kernel modules the default going forward is another big step in the right direction.

But in terms of end user impact, there ideally won't be any: things will just continue to work whichever modules you're using. It'll just be less frustrating, and hopefully more efficient, for the people doing the nitty-gritty of making a particular bit of hardware work well.