I don't personally like multiplayer gaming, so I don't have a horse in this race, but I will say that cross play needs to be a thing. It's a popular feature these days, and Valve needs to cooperate with it.

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LOL... as if I'm going to listen to that creep, who offers carrots to publishers to sell their games exclusively in the Epic store. Epic is a publisher oriented service, NOT user. He has personally said that. They even allow publishers to disable user reviews on games. They couldn't give a toss about you. "Fck you, pay me"

That said, now I'm going to have to be careful and check to see that games are not using EOS, lest I go through the motions only for refund. I screwed around for most of the evening trying to get Returnal to launch, it was the EOS services... I was having IPC issues, the launcher wouldn't even get off the ground. It looked like it was glibc related (I had just upgraded glibc the day before that... latest kernel API headers too and a GNU bootstrap after that). It could be the kernel itself too, I'm always on the latest release (or "mainline" in the case of a .0). I've not had any trouble with anything else I've been trying to do, so pfft to that...

P.S. Middleware is trouble, I don't care who it is, EA, Epic, Ubisoft, all of that can stuff up perfectly good games from launching. The difference is that Valve makes sure theirs works for us.

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This is pollution, these containerized packaging systems.

It wastes/duplicates resources.

The applications are linked against someone else's stupid old libraries instead of my optimized ones.

You can STILL have compatibility problems when the system is using newer APIs than the libraries in the container or the common ones in the runtime that have to interface. Not ALL libraries are provided in the container environment.

The real motivation for this is borne from lazy distributors that don't want to provide the environment their users need to run applications and want to get out of compiling packages for third party software.

The biggest WHINERS are the commercial distros too, the ones that have the most resources. You don't see distros like Arch whining about providing a full environment with multilib dependencies for software and games. Hell I keep my applications running... flying by the seat of my pants even, so these hard done by commercial distributors certainly can keep things running too without resorting to this sort of kludgery.

I have real reasons why I hate this shit, it's not just philosophical objections.

Here's another personal example of running afoul of container environments. Even Steam's Proton builds give me problems because they are linked in stupid containers. This was like a revelation to me when I discovered the reason for the inconsistencies.

My proton-tkg builds use my toolchains and link against my system libraries with the exception of some in the Steam runtime to interface with Steam and run in its Proton container. Guess what? They work for every single game. I used to have to use multiple different Proton builds (some older, some newer, some upstream wine based) for different games because some code paths in them were always broken for something. For another example, the proton-media-converter (libprotonmediaconverter.so) for mediafoundation NEVER worked for me (I had to use mf-installcab to install the Microsoft libraries for Unreal 4+ games) until I compiled it with my own properly bootstrapped rustc, and linked against MY gstreamer libraries. All that time I just thought that was poo that didn't work. This is different from using the Proton-GE build system too, which does everything in podman containers now, downloading toolchains and everything from Valve and those builds suffered from the same problems, for me. (Worked for some things, not others, and protonmediaconverter NEVER worked)

No containers for me, that just won't work for my flow.

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Ya know, last time I had God of War installed, I noticed while testing it (proton upgrades, mesa etc.) that performance was horrible, and it wasn't just shader compiles (which were initially hitchy, as it's a big shader heavy directx11 game). I seldom blame the kernel, I thought "f'ing Proton". I was about done with that game anyway (3 play throughs) and soon reclaimed its disk space and thought no more of it.

I knew of that splitlock sabotage, but didn't think it was affecting me.

Something here that's a bit confusing:

From Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/kernel.rst, the sysctl knob is either 0 or 1:

split_lock_mitigate=0

This is the equivalent of warn (which will be rate limited, but not tunable by you)

From Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt, the kernel command line parameter is:

split_lock_detect=off,warn,fatal,ratelimit:N

So the kernel command line parameter actually sounds like the better deal, with more control. I am adding this to my kernel command line instead of sysctl.d/

split_lock_detect=off

I'm going to try God of War again soon, it's been a while now.

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Knoppix was amazing back in the day. I think other distros learned a lot about hardware detection and automatic configuration from Knoppix.

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Steam is a very gamer oriented service, and it shows with those numbers. Do that, and you'll make a metric shit tonne of money along the way.

Epic, Ubisoft and their ilk don't get it. They want a piece of that pie themselves, but they have to force people onto their platforms.

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Quoting: Liam DaweIt doesn't install EGS, it installs Epic Online Services. Quite a few games use it. It's not a big deal I don't get the fuss over it really, most of it is largely the usual "epic bad" stuff.

Thanks, so it's just Epic's middleware that the game uses. Partly why I didn't believe it (installing the store client) was because it's not an Epic game. I'll give it a try, then. It sounds like something I want.

You're right, it's the usual "epic bad" from me, though.

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I just read a user review for this:

Posted 15 February
Its a good game, runs great on a 2080, i'll recommend when they remove the epic games store install on startup. I didnt buy it on steam to install EGS.

Is that true? Can anyone confirm? I was about to go and purchase this right now when I saw that. That would be absolutely unacceptable to me if that were the case. I don't want to waste my time and bandwidth downloading it only to delete it for refund.

I'm thinking that's not true, but now Valve IS allowing other game client pollution, like EA and Ubisoft, so I can't say that with high confidence levels.

P.S. Looks like it is or at least was true. I found other reviews complaining about this too, and they are getting a lot of "helpful" votes. Ah well, I guess it's not to be. I'll not tolerate that, I detest Epic, their store client and the very oxygen they consume.

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I had that get turned on by accident (steam client update did it once) and it was horrendous. I'd rather compile and cache my own shaders, thank you. (The pre-cached shaders are probably pretty darned practical on the Steam Deck though, I would expect)

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I appreciate that this is working again. I installed it again last night and tested it out and it works decently.

Unfortunately, the Windows version I have in GoG works considerably better. The Linux "port" is that eON wrapped shit, which is less than ideal. Running it through OUR DXVK -> Vulkan is much better translation.

It is also a better experience in general, as it does not have that annoying, delaying "Connecting to 2K account" and that stupid "not linked... press [J]" 2K icon in my menus. That can take several seconds and what would happen if it stalled?

It is also a better experience in that configuration isn't buried in "~/.local/share/irrationalgames/bioshockinfinite/GameDocuments/My Games/BioShock Infinite/XGame/Config" with the game saves buried in "steam/userdata/yoursteamidnumber/8870/remote/SaveData. The addition of the 2K launcher changed that.

In the GoG version it's just appdata/local for the config and Documents/My Games for the saves, in the wine prefix like normal.

So thanks (but no thanks) for all the fish.

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