I wish these change logs had a little more detail on what the *general* issue was fixed that resulted in a particular game being fixed. The idea that all these little tweaks have to be done for every specific game is terrifying, and makes proton seem totally unsustainable, but I know the real situation must be better than that because of all the non-"playable", never mentioned, and even "unsupported" games that run just fine.

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I definitely find the epic side of this story much more worrying than anything the developer did. Proton is a good approach for running games, but there being a positive long-term trajectory for games on open computer systems is contingent on vulkan becoming more widely used. This article makes it sound like epic's attitude to this is basically "meh, fuck it" which makes proton seem unsustainable.

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Quoting: egeeHeck yeah. Great game keeps getting better. iirc it's used Vulkan since day 1 so it's basically always run pretty good on Linux.

It is a great example of why native linux doesn't make much of a difference especially when a game uses vulkan. Unfortunately this often isn't apparent because many developers treat vulkan as a very low priority (looking at you Baldur's Gate 3).

I'm excited for this, those ships look very cool, NMS is always good relaxing fun. As much as I love it I've long been frustrated by how little they've been able to improve the experience of actually flying ships (though, mercifully, they did finally somewhat reduce the stupid asteroids... they should have reduced it a lot more). I also think the ship generation scheme could use a drastic overhaul. Trying to find a cool ship, which should be the most exciting thing in the game, by sitting at a trade port and watching them go by for half an hour, and then to wind up with a ship so poorly differentiated from what you already had is pretty bad. I would really love it if they did something significant here, but at the very least looks like I'll have another nice looking ship to fly.

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I hate to say it, but I don't yet think we are at the point in history when it's fair to lambaste developers over this.

For one thing, I find that often developers who do have native linux support don't know what they're doing. For example, I've recently been playing the fun and relaxing board-game-like "Terraformers". It has native linux support, but they put their game data directly in `$HOME`, which is, of course, infuriating. I have posted in steam forums requesting they fix it, and it seems the developers do not even know about XDG directories.

Another (yes, very frustrating) thing to consider is that, while I assume most of us on this forum probably consider linux to be the only sensible operating system for software development, this is true of just about everything except games. If a developer has any intention to sell their games, they have to support windows, I'm sure there are even reasonable arguments that it would be crazy of a game developer to have a primary development environment other than windows. As a maintainer of open source projects, sometimes people complain to me about windows-specific issues, and my response is basically "good luck with that". It's hard to blame windows developers for taking the same approach.

Modern wine/proton works so well that I don't think it's such a bad thing that we lean heavily on it. My main worry is that I fear proton development is now irrevocably tied to the commercial success of the steamdeck, which is definitely not a great situation.

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The steamdeck is a *portable* device, and we're not exactly talking about a gigantic gaming laptop so... doesn't exactly seem like a big let-down.

This does raise an interesting point though: developers probably won't care about games on linux that are too much for the steam deck to handle. It'll be interesting to see whether valve acts like they care about them.

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Quoting: BumadarCan this be compared to Rebel Galaxy? I was extremely surprised by that one, the music helped of course but also the freedom it gave next to the story.

It's not all that different from Rebel Galaxy Outlaw in that they are both arcade-style space combat games in an open world, but beyond that they are quite different. I was sorely disappointed in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, I thought their flight model was terrible, and their emphasis on the weird "auto-tracking" feature in which your ship would automatically point toward your target was downright bizarre. Everspace 2 has a flight model very similar to the first game, which I'd describe as in the vein of Freespace but a bitter faster moving. There's also *waaaay* more "stuff" in the game than was in RGO, it takes a lot of cues from more traditional action RPG's: there are tons of weapons, equipment and ships with procedurally generated stat variations. "Borderlands in space" would not be too bad a description.

I'm ultimately more excited about more "realistic" and "systems-based" space games than this, however even as someone who considers himself a huge fan of that genre, I think the developers of those games spend all their time making a cool simulation and don't know (or even sufficiently consider) how to make it into a *game*. The developers of Everspace 2 seem to have taken the approach of taking what they know has been successful for games in other genres and making a space game which is fun first, while superficially satisfying all the requirements to be considered an open space game along the lines of elite. It's an approach that the genre desperately needed to see more examples of.

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I am super excited about this. I already have about 15 hours in the game, but I've been trying not to sink too much time into it while it's still in EA. I'm a huge fan of sci-fi and space games and this developer definitely knows how to make them fun. I'd already highly recommend it to anyone thinking about picking it up.

Also, have never had any issues with it whatsoever in linux under proton (it's unreal engine, so that's not surprising).

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lol yup, I hit this last night, and it was a very confusing failure mode.

I was not even using steam at the time, it was tucked safely away in its own workspace (I use the qtile window manager). I was hitting the key to open a new terminal and... wtf? For a minute I thought maybe there was something wrong with my rather elaborate keyboard (zsa moonlander... which has never had *any* problems btw). Luckily, I already had a terminal open somewhere else, and tried opening a terminal from within it and got X11 telling me that the maximum number of clients was reached. I never got this message in X11 before, so it was quite surprising, I later discovered that by default X11 allows a maximum of 256 clients, which might even be a fundamental limitation since it seems to use a `UInt8` as a client ID. I realized that steam was causing the problem pretty quickly as I had just recently updated it (and was on beta).

In retrospect I wish I had looked at the list of clients to see what the hell it was steam was opening.

This, btw, is a great demonstration of why gaming in linux is so superior to gaming in windows: whatever bug the steam client might have introduced in windows, I never would have had the slightest clue what the fuck happened.

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I couldn't care less about Harry Potter, but it's encouraging to see big publishers caring about steamdeck, and, indirectly linux. Definitely something we never, ever saw before steamdeck.

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I have to say, there are plenty of games with "retro" graphics that I love (example: Caves of Qud) but so far I have found Dwarf Fortress incredibly obnoxious and I'm having a really hard time getting into it. It's problem is that it's a colony sim game, not an RPG, and as such it is of a genre where a good UI is *very* important (to me at least). Maybe more familiarity would make it seem less terrible, after all, the most popular conceptions of what makes a good UI are often not very good and don't really consider anything past the first 10 minutes of use, but, so far, I'm not at all happy with the Dwarf Fortress UI.

I've played Songs of Syx a bit, this update will give me a good reason to spend more time with it. So far I have found the "quality of life" much better than Dwarf Fortress.

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