• Add support for downloading patches and DLC for GOG games

I don't think Minigalaxy can handle patches yet. In fact, it simply fails to update or install some games lately. I guess I'll give Lutris a try as soon as this new version hits the PPA.

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Quoting: Mountain ManSo is this just a graphics overhaul of Portal 2, or is it going to be an entirely new game?

According to the tagline on their site [External Link], it's "A new community-made Portal game, in tribute to Valve's iconic series".

EDIT: Ha, Liam might want to scroll down to the Press Quotes section. They were quick. :wink:

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Quoting: BTRE

Quoting: rustybroomhandleYes, people's favourite reason to visit a web site is so that the site owner can speak to them like he thinks they're assholes. You falsely assume people read every word you write. In this case why would someone who already knows how to use syncthing do that?

It seems strange to me to come to a site, not read a short article, ask a question that was covered explicitly by aforementioned article, and then get offended that you're referred to the article for the answer and claim that there should be no expectation that someone reads the entire article. A "whoops, sorry, didn't see that somehow" seems more sensible instead of doubling down on silly outrage.

I blame Reddit.

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Quoting: axredneck

Quoting: Guppy

Quoting: JahimselfOn the screenshot, if you watch it full picture, and look the first face on the foreground, you can better compare native to other FSR. You can observe how it alterate the overall image.

The white bit with the "carbon fiber" texture? yeah I did wonder why the 'quality' seems to double the size of the pattern not of the other seems to do that.

It is called "dithering", and unfortunately when you upscale image it upscales too, independently on FSR or bilinear on any other.

Doesn't look like dithering to me, more like a crosshatching pattern.

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Quoting: CaenthWhere were these companies for the Iraq, Afghanistan and Syrian wars? Ow, and lets not forget Algeria. If you want to help the Ukrainians it's better to do this through other official channels than to fatten the bank accounts of these hypocrites.

Which companies? I know you don't mean ICRC / Red Cross / Red Crescent? If you do, maybe you just don't know that they've been doing their part to aid the victims of pretty much any war you can name since the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and they've done this with funding directly provided by governments, but also by companies and individuals. They're probably the least controversial medical/humanitarian charities around.

They definitely were in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. And in Algeria's war of independence as well. All of this information is actually very easy to find. I'll let you do your own research as they say. Just google/ddg ICRC and whatever region or country you're interested in. Try "Red Cross" or "Red Crescent" instead of ICRC to get even more results. You're welcome.

And if this is about the game stores, think about it for a minute. Game key sellers like Humble Bundle and Fanatical, and especially independent game stores like itch.io didn't actually exist during most of these conflicts. I think Humble Bundle is the oldest at around 11 or 12 years, so they should have seen the end of the Iraq War, but they were a tiny American retail/tech start-up back then, selling smaller bundles of (often excellent) indie games. The founders could have opted to go and do charity work in Iraq instead, but you can say that of anyone.

Of course, they were more recently bought up by a company I'm not happy with at all, but that has nothing to do with this bundle by Fanatical so whatever. And no, I didn't buy Humble's charity bundle, I simply made a donation to an international humanitarian charity I trust, and that I've supported with small donations for years.

Itch was definitely not in a position to push efforts like this even a couple of years ago, even if they've been around for a decade or so. Schemes like pay-what-you-want and free hosting for jam games aren't likely to make them oodles of cash. They did their first big charity bundle in 2020 I think, which raised their profile a bit. And bought them a bunch of haters as well, but that's just the price of being decent these days.

Don't know that much about Fanatical, except that they're British, and used to be called Bundle Stars, but hypocrisy might be a strong word there as well. Not that it even matters. All proceeds of this bundle go to Red Cross, so that's the organization you should be focusing on.

Obviously no charity can make everything better, nor is a game shop likely to suddenly focus on political activism exclusively. And yeah, they will be more vocal when a conflict hits closer to home. That's just how we are. If you say you're different, who am I to claim otherwise, but even the most empathetic person in the world can't take on every injustice. We have to pick our battles, figuratively and sometimes literally, or we'll never get anything done.

The best we can do is to support organizations with a decent track record of getting things done and actually helping people. Like the Red Cross, Unicef etc. Of course there's a bunch of expensive bureaucracy involved with any large organization, private or public, and these days big bosses everywhere are likely to get paid way too much, but at least these organizations are relatively transparent. We know and can actually check that our donations aren't wasted on blackjack and steak dinners.

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Quoting: Guppy

Quoting: JahimselfOn the screenshot, if you watch it full picture, and look the first face on the foreground, you can better compare native to other FSR. You can observe how it alterate the overall image.

The white bit with the "carbon fiber" texture? yeah I did wonder why the 'quality' seems to double the size of the pattern not of the other seems to do that.

Maybe something like a "fixed scale" post-process pixel shader? I mean, they might simply render a bitmap or algorithmic pattern on top of certain objects, maybe masked with a Gaussian high-pass filter to keep it from flattening and overpowering the underlying shape. That would mean that upscaling the resulting image simply upscales the pattern as well.

I'm not completely certain but I think the other faces/heads actually show the same exact pattern, unscaled but blurred or simply at a lower opacity. Anyway, I think this bears a relation to how constant width outline algorithms work these days, now that fixed function pipelines have been made completely redundant.

To further support my hypothesis, I see the pattern clearly in the "Balanced" and "Performance" reference images as well, maybe slightly larger and blurrier than in "Quality". Not quite sure it's a 50% difference between the extremes though.

Forgive my ignorance of proper terminology. I'm obviously out of my comfort zone. Now someone who actually knows something about 3D graphics should feel free to tell me I'm an idiot. It's fine, I can take it, and will be wearing my dunce cap for the rest of the day as usual.

To get back to the actual topic: The gradient banding on "Performance" and slightly jarring effects of sharpening bother me a bit. But I suppose "Quality" does give an illusion of native resolution quite convincingly, if you ignore the surfaces where textures get oversharpened to (over)compensate for the inevitable blur. I know we're not all equally sensitive to that particular pet peeve.

In "Balanced" mode, something a bit weird happens to the guy sitting in profile on the rooftop in the middle distance, against the sunlit cliff face. Amplified motion blur from the new temporal scaling algorithm?

But honestly, my trusty old 1080p TV screen just keeps telling FSR to get a real job. My GPU can still run everything I throw at it at this resolution, without ever raising a ruckus. Well, except for things it was never designed to do like RT I suppose.

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Quoting: PhlebiacFor the Fanatical bundle, even if everybody paid triple, that's still less than $0.5M. Maybe they will add more keys for some of the games?

That's still a decent wad of cash for the charity. I've directly donated pitiful sums around the price of a brand new indie game (10-30€) to various charities, but I feel like every little bit helps. Maybe it only covers the cost of some basic supplies, but so what? And maybe $150,000 only covers the cost of running a single field ambulance for a month or a blood bank for a couple of days, I have no idea, but surely that's not insignificant.

I suppose Fanatical (a UK-based key store with a limited catalogue of keys they source directly from publishers) takes a smaller risk by limiting the amount of keys they stock to what they're pretty much guaranteed to be able to shift. Which is fine. It's not supposed to be a competition after all. This gets them a bit of PR, making a bigger splash than a blog post or a tweet.

Quoting: HyperLoserThe bundle is already out of stock ! :shock:

Seems so! And it made a tidy $155,316 for the Red Cross, which actually should cover the annual salaries of a couple of essential Red Cross employees on the ground, so that sounds like a decent haul. 💰

BTW, the minimum price for me was a bit over 16€, which rounds up to $18. I didn't check the receipt yet, but VAT is the likely reason.

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Bought it.

The Ukrainian Red Cross is a worthy cause to support, no matter what you think about the war. Couple of games off my wishlist in the bundle as well.

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Quoting: dpanterStill wondering when the Mint team has had enough of Canonicals canonicalisms and instead adopt LMDE as the real/only Linux Mint version. To name just one example, LMDE packages Chromium now since Canonicals betrayal with the snap-deb.

The same Chromium package is available in Linux Mint, so that's not a very good example.

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Quoting: PublicNuisance

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI normally prefer turn based over real time with pause for combat but the dialogue branches and story to this is enough to make me wishlist it.

Same here.

In a cRPG I'm primarily looking for an exploration-filled adventure in an interesting, fantastical world. And preferably tomefuls of lore to read and interesting characters to meet. Combat is often (but not always) an unavoidable component, but if it happens to be real-time with several units/characters/things to manage, it tends to just stress me out.

Thankfully the fighting in classics like the Baldur's Gate series and Pillars of Eternity wasn't too difficult if you didn't rush through and made sure to get kitted out properly. I'm looking forward to checking out the optional turn-based mode in Pillars II.

Spoiler, click me

But first I need to get through a big shame-pile of RPG goodness. Rushing through isn't exactly an option if you've got an obsession to map out every nook and cranny, read every codex, grimoire, scroll and shred of napkin you come across and exhaust every branch of dialogue available. An easy hundred+ hours every time. And I'm ignoring all the other genres in the pile here...

I didn't know POE had a turn based option, i'll have to check that out.

The first one doesn't but the sequel apparently does.

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