Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: tuubiI only buy games that are officially supported on Linux

I may now open a can of worms but my question is genuine: Why?

Because I think it matters. I often vote with my wallet.

Besides, even with that self-imposed "limitation", I can barely keep my wishlist below a couple of hundred titles at any given time.

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Quoting: AzP

...their final blog post...

...and they'll be showing off Zink...

Isn't it his own blog, or are there several people writing it?

Doesn't really matter. The grammar is perfectly valid.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: dubigrasuWhatever the today status, those porters, VP/Aspyr/Feral/etc deserve our (at least mine) gratitude, they kept the Linux gaming going as best as they could.

Absolutely. I purchased everything Feral pushed out out of sheer principle.

But surely we must agree that we are happy those days are behind us.

I'm not sure we must. I only buy games that are officially supported on Linux, and until we see more first-party Linux releases of bigger budget games, I can't really be too happy about porters giving up on our platform. But let's hope that Proton actually works as a stepping stone and actual supported Linux releases will follow, like the more optimistic among us like to predict.

I'm not too bothered though. I've always got my wishlist bursting with excellent indie releases so I'll be fine either way.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: tuubiWrapped ports can make Linux look bad in comparison, but they're better than nothing as long as they're properly supported on Linux.

Better than NOTHING, true. But they most definitely made Linux look real bad.

I doubt it had any lasting effect on anything though. Linux is doing fine. And I would never have bought and enjoyed those games if the ports didn't exist, so it's a bit hard to really agree with this line of thought.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: alejandro-bringasmmm yes, but they work fatal, Bioshock Infinite always have performance problems in my GTX 1060, in Windows I easily run it in Ultra 60fps, not here.

With Proton I get a very similar performance to Windows with a bit of stutter (shader cache) but it is 99% playable, much better than the native one.

Back then I always said that I suspected those "ports" from Feral to in reality be more of a "wrapped" than "ported" game. I stand by that. I think they had their own "wine-like" layer they applied to the games, where the "porting" were merely customisations for that wrapper.
Yes, I know there are Linux binaries, but noone knows what goes on in there.

Bioshock Infinite is a Virtual Programming port, and they used "eON", which is their proprietary Wine-type solution. Feral had their compile-time D3D translation layer, a bit like Valve's ToGL, but they never simply wrapped Windows binaries and called it a day. And I'm not sure all of their ports used that translation tech anyway.

Also, the few VP ports I bought might not have performed perfectly, but they did the job (even Witcher 2 after a few updates), and I had fun playing the games. Wrapped ports can make Linux look bad in comparison, but they're better than nothing as long as they're properly supported on Linux.

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In the Main Gamepad graph I see separate bars for "Other" and "Others". What's that about?

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: denyasisIs that the little joystick like thing in the middle of the keyboard? My thinkpad had one back in 2004. It wasn't bad at all. Didn't know they still did things like that.

That's the thing, it's had various slang names for it over the years... but yes, it's a little red nub you rub to get things done. Certain models still have it. Also another reason Thinkpads are epic, is that they have three mouse buttons on them, which is fantastic for *nix as they all tend to correctly use the middle mouse button!

I've used two Dell business laptops over the years (higher end Latitudes) and both had the trackpoint/joystick as well. Only one of them had three "mouse" buttons below the keyboard though. I guess they didn't fit on the 14" model or something.

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Quoting: natis1I feel bad for these lowend laptop makers considering the deck is about to come out. They're not bad devices and for pure productivity the larger and higher res screen is nice but I imagine if the deck gets accessories that make it more into a convertible laptop it could swallow most of this lowend market

Even as someone who avoids using laptops, I very much doubt this. Tablets didn't kill the laptop market, and neither will the Steam Deck.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: hell0

Quoting: F.UltraServer side checks however is a major performance pain, having it client side means perfect load balancing. So it's not only about being "lazy", it has a real impact on the number of simultaneous clients you can have per server.

There isn't really a need to run the checks in real time or on the same server as the game's logic. In fact it's probably a pretty poor idea to validate every action synchronously as it would lead to horrible game experience in most scenari due to network latency. It would also let cheaters know exactly what was detected or not.

The correct approach to server side anti-cheat is to analyse information statistically to find outliers and then determine whether these outliers are just good players or cheaters (using human validation if necessary).

Let's imagine a cheat letting you fire a weapon faster than intended and let's say the server records every hit. That's all we actually need. After each game the server can ship that game's record off to our anti-cheat analyser. The analyser looks at all hits recorded and find that player A has over 10 hits within 5 seconds with a 10 second reload weapon, player A gets banned.

Better yet, proceeding this way lets you detect cheats that may be invisible to normal players. If your 10s reload gun reloads in 9.75s that's an advantage but nobody will notice it with certainty. If it happens once, it could be chalked up to some weird lag compensation or chance. However if a player consistently reloads ever so slightly faster than possible, a machine will catch it over time.

In short: you should think of server-side anti-cheat as some sort of replay watcher/analyser bot, not a validation of every keypress in real time.

This approach I like! Of course it requires analysis of quite a lot of data since even with a "low sample rate" there will still be quite a lot of events to go over for each session so I think that this is still not something that every single small studio can handle, but then again a 3d party expert could sell this as a service.

It does sound like a better way to do it than traditional server-side equivalents, but doesn't solve the problem that the instrumentation needs to be built into the game engine and the anti-cheat service needs to either be bought or developed. There will always be (a majority of) game devs who take the easy/quick/cheap way out and rely on a client side solution, often added as an afterthought.

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Quoting: MayeulC

Quoting: slaapliedjeCan we please have one with a 10key?

What is a 10key? something that inputs "10"? Never saw anything like that, especially not in keybindings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenkey [External Link]

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