Quoting: soulsourceIf anyone wants to check the official documentation about certification, it can be found here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/compat [External Link]

What I consider interesting (as in: it annoys me) is the phrasing of the controller support requirement. It allows games to get verified that don't support gamepad input, because the touchpads are considered part of the Deck's physical controls. Any game that can be played with a mouse automatically passes this requirement...

Not all games that don't support controller will automatically pass: "Interacting with any physical Deck controls using the default configuration must not show non-controller glyphs." So even if the default layout is using touchpad mouse (which is perfectly valid for, eg, point & click, strategy, or FPS games) the game can't use "left click/right click" or "WASD." Use of the touchscreen (which is also one of the Deck's controls) is also excluded from being adequate for Deck Verified testing.

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I hope they can also fix up the text size to get that green tick. Seems like it should be good on the Deck.

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What have you been playing?

In April I've mostly been playing Syberia 2 and Bridge Constructor Portal. I've got to the penultimate level in the latter, now. The little one's mostly been playing Dead Cells.

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Quoting: EikeI fear they've just been assimilated. Has there anything on Twitter or the like about the game?

Not as far as I know; the band got split up for HL:A, and then not much. But I think the game would be really good, and super sweet on the Deck, so I'm holding out hope that they get round to it one day.

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Perhaps finally Half-Life 3 (yeah likely not but I can dream).

HL3 couldn't be anything but disappointing. In The Valley Of Gods is what I'm dreaming of. Of course that probably wouldn't need aggressive driver performance optimisations.

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Fixed video playback speed issues in METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN.

FINALLY. It never should have had the green tick before they'd done that.

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Quoting: scaineTo be honest, I'm not sure this will lead to native anything. I think all they're trying to do here is make their stuff run better on the Deck.

The thing with Proton and the Deck is that if you really want your game to work (rather than having it work by accident and maybe break by accident) then you need a Linux testing pipeline even without a Linux build. Valve have provided debugging tools to help with that part. The making of a Linux build is much less work than setting up the Linux testing pipeline, and makes it much easier to fix should the game accidentally break. How many developers do the first part, and how many go on to do the second part, time will tell.

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It's a pretty terrible name, and Ubisoft have historically been not good to work for, but this

Work with the rest of the engineering staff to help them expand their cross-platform mindset

is how all developers should be thinking.

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Quoting: F.UltraThe most likely scenario to me is that it is the very same that happened last time, aka that this is Internet Cafe data, people using a rented machine at such a Cafe would have no problems from any of my above mentioned reasons to just click OK on whatever they get since it is not their machine.

Not just "last time." There's something like 18 months of uncorrected data, which is why that had to be scrubbed from Liam's Steam tracker, and then the same thing happens every 3-4 months and does get corrected. The double-counting problem isn't an easy one to solve - you can't keep track server side because a whole bunch of machines behind one IP address is what you'd expect to see from a cafe, and you can't keep track client side because it's standard practise to roll back the machines to a standard (no malware, no cheats) image, so the client "forgets" that that machine has already participated in the survey. So every now and then we get a massive apparent spike in Chinese users and people ("Chinese is now the most used language on Steam!") pretend that the data are valid.

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Quoting: elmapulyeah, sony tried to turn playstation in an pc (remember Ps2 linux or the otherOS option on ps3?)

It wasn't just Sony; the Dreamcast also had an Internet connection (and could run Windows). And now the consoles are x86 machines, and you definitely don't need Windows to watch media, or access the Internet, or play games. And the Xbox was just after Microsoft had successfully killed Netscape (if everything is on the Internet, there's no particular reason to use Windows over some other OS) by including IE with Windows (exactly as they do with the Windows Store and the requirement to have a Microsoft account now). Exploiting dominance in one area to crush any competitors coming from a different area is a standard pattern for Microsoft, and the only times they've really failed at it - Android and Chrome - were simply because they weren't willing to outspend Google. They can outspend everyone in the gaming space, as can be seen by them being able to throw 70 billion dollars at ActiBlizzard.

they failed at it and gave up, there werent any pressure to improve windows for gaming since then.

Until Valve.

im not saying microsoft didnt had any incentive to improve directX, but to improve the windows version of it, they fought playstation with xbox instead of with windows, until valve came with steamOS, sundelly microsoft started to talk about dx12 in public, ported their xbox exclusives to windows pc and did many other moves like that.

It was DirectX 11 that got a boot up the bum from OpenGL. It had been just sitting there since 2009 till that point. Then it got a whole bunch of point updates. DirectX 12 came about because Mantle (which formed a basis for Vulkan) was clearly better, so they made a DirectX version of Mantle (DirectX 12) just like Apple made an Apple version (Metal).

but linux will never die,

Microsoft can't kill it, although they gave serious thought to how they might try (see, for example, the Halloween Documents). All they can do is try to marginalise its use and support, and keep developers dependent on Windows-only technology.

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