Quoting: GuestGuess they were waiting for amdgpu to be in an official kernel release.

Not really. Hybrid driver going to use out-of-tree kernel module that built with DKMS for quite some time. Many parts of AMDGPU nowhere near to get accepted into upstream, e.g DAL.

Quoting: ChloeWolfieGirlTIL Mines an AMD Radeon R7 250 2GB Idk how drivers usually go but does anyone know if AMD will add Vulkan support to this card?

It's SI (GCN 1.0) card so it's currently unsupported within AMDGPU. Bridgman has said they looking for solution to support these GPUs in hybrid stack and said ask him week later, but keep in mind it's might take many months before that support appear.

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Quoting: PeciskSo they backported it for 14.04 and now work with kernel for inclusion in mainline. Nice.

Keep in mind they only backported it to 14.04.4 which mean 4.2 kernel. It's likely wont work with older kernels.

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Quoting: srlsboyThese R9 cards aren't cheap. At newegg, they start at $175.

Kernel module inside driver package have "CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_CIK=y" option set so it's should work on cheaper GCN 1.1 hardware. Bridgman told many times they supporting it from very beginning in their out-of-tree module. Of course it's may not work that well since it's beta.

There is also going to be SI (GCN 1.0) support eventually, but that might take a while.

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I suppose many don't know about that, but there is open source project called KaM remake:
http://www.kamremake.com/ [External Link]

There is no Linux maintainer and code isn't really compatible with 32-bit as far as I aware, but it's feature complete and superior than old game. There also active multiplayer that work without any issues.

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Quoting: NyamiouWake up! Where do you think all this games on Linux come from? For most developer there is only one way to get your game on Steam and it is through Steam Greenlight and games that have Linux support seems to need less time and effort to be Greenlight.

It's not the case of this game anyway. Owner of GSC does have direct contacts with Valve for sure and have no problem with getting it to Steam.

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Quoting: maodzedunI'm really curious about performance. The game seems pretty enough and they claim that it will be running with no problem on 3-5 year hardware. With up to 10 000 units on a maps my guess it will be really taxing on the CPU.

Basically CPU requirements depend on how exactly simulation designed and more realistic mean more demanding. So for example your game may have real 3D landscape or heightmap, actual projectile simulation with different types of damage including splash and collision detection with many units having collision boxes of different size. That would be really demanding because even effective pathfinding is hard enough task when you have tons of units that behave differently.

On other side you may have fake 3D map (when actual simulation is work in 2D, but units rendered in 3D), very simple 2D collision detection that can be optimized a lot because there just 2-4 boxes in-game, units that always hit (or success determined by rand(0,1) pool), etc. Back in 2001-2003 when original games were released it's was totally possible to have like 20,000 units in game, and I think I managed to built like 80,000-100,000 via editor and it's worked.

So there is a lot of ways to make not demanding simulation when you creating "traditional RTS" that just need to look good while inside it's may do exactly same calculations as game in 2001 had. After all it's what actual fans want.

Quoting: maodzedunThen he said they've used OpenGL which I was under the impression was not particularly great at multi-threaded performance being an aging technology.

It's possible to implement multithreading optimizations on any API, but old one's just not really designed for that usage so you'll have a bit more overhead and likely will need fix few quirks of specific drivers.

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Quoting: OrkultusIt's about time! Next we need the unity plugin for the browser!

That plugin is dead because just in two months NPAPI going to be completely removed from Chrome on Windows [External Link]. Considering Google's ChromeOS devices now have quite big market share in the US there no way game developers going to abandon Chrome support.

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Quoting: MaelraneI wonder why they put in resources into a renderer that "only" runs on one out of three supported platforms. I mean, OpenGL does work under Windows (I must know, I have been creating an OpenGL-engine from scratch for an universitary course and it needed to run on Windows :/).

It's pretty clear why Valve doing that. They care more about their games success rather than OpenGL / SteamOS. There nothing wrong about it because all effort they put into Linux is just long-term investment into products they already have.

SteamOS is not way to make money for them, but their insurance from Microsoft dumb moves.

Quoting: MaelraneYes, it was and maybe is crippled compared to DX, because MS was (and is?!) trying to push their own technologies for their platform, but personally I see Valve in a position where they could say:
"Well, dear customers, it's MS that is crippling OpenGL, so it's not us whom you should blame!"

Let's say fair MS never really crippled OpenGL since they're stopped slowing-down Khronos. They just ignored it completely for last 15 years and all bad things they did (e.g some Windows Update drivers lack OpenGL support) aren't that huge.

Valve able to fix OpenGL on Windows, but sadly they didn't even tried to do that so far. I left several thoughs on that in comments to post in Rich Geldreich's blog [External Link].

Though to fix it they have to put pressure on GPU vendors and it's may be harder that I think. Other issue that fixing GL on Windows and forcing users to update drivers may end up being bigger benefit to MS than Valve / Steam.

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Quoting: amonobeaxI have 7,0Mb/s. I live in Brazil and never payed attention to where the server was from.

It's doesn't really matter if server is EU or US because game isn't sensitive to high latency, but if you have connection stability issues or low bandwidth this is serious issue. So you better start with checking what downstream download you have when game start lagging and if it's less than 4.5Mb/s then it's your issue.

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Quoting: pete910One thing that is really starting to piss me off is the reliance on a outside server to run both multi and single player games.

Connection to developers server is optional and if your PC powerful enough to handle server and have 8+GB RAM then server is starting locally. Though you can still enforce game to use developers server or local server if you want to, but without amount RAM needed game will fail.

Quoting: pete910If I had know about the need for a 3rd party account to play I would have not bought it!

3rd party account isn't mandatory except you want to play online. Anyway having own multiplayer lobby it's only way to keep unified multiplayer between Steam and non-Steam players so developers don't have much choice there.

Also if you use Steam offline mode or run game outside of Steam then it's won't ask about login. And even if you bought it's on Steam you can still download DRM-free version there [External Link].

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