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Latest Comments by STiAT
Paradox announce Cities: Skylines 2, plus a The Sims-like game and more
8 March 2023 at 8:57 pm UTC

Quoting: Klaas
Quoting: STiATFor Cities: Skylines 2 I really hope for a better engine. I am really having issues on my larger Cities with the Performance, and I'm running a 3070Ti... which should not have issues with a game like that at all. Does not matter if OpenGL, Vulkan or via Wine/DXVK, I do have performance issues maxing at 15-20 FPS.
I haven't looked at the exact numbers, but I assume that the game is massively CPU bound. It also requires huge amounts of RAM.

I'm not convinced that a sequel will solve the issues that they haven't been able to fix in all those years.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X and 50 GB of RAM should be sufficient as well. The graphical detail in the trailer, if even in-game, looks like being a different engine.

Paradox announce Cities: Skylines 2, plus a The Sims-like game and more
8 March 2023 at 8:51 pm UTC

Holy... I would love a game like The Sims from Paradox. That's yet another series Maxis does not really invent upon but just brings out DLCs, where I thought it would be about time they did invent and make a sequel.

In this field I have my eyes on ParaLives too, but Paradox and a Sims-Like game? That could be great.

Looking forward to that.

For Cities: Skylines 2 I really hope for a better engine. I am really having issues on my larger Cities with the Performance, and I'm running a 3070Ti... which should not have issues with a game like that at all being able to run games which are a lot more intensive (as M&B 2, Far Cry 5 / New Dawn, Witcher 3, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn etc.). Does not matter if OpenGL, Vulkan or via Wine/DXVK, I do have performance issues maxing at 15-20 FPS, which makes me give up again and again since it's really hard to play with that kind of experience.

Flathub seeks funding to add payments, donations and subscriptions
27 February 2023 at 11:33 pm UTC

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThis would be particularly unappealing for Adobe, for example.

Most of Adobes software is actually web-based now. Distribution shouldn't be much of an issue. The issue is supporting it, and what Valve did in the gaming sector is taking over support for Steamdeck and Proton. Nobody will do that unless there is a market share worth investing into.

Nobody needs to talk to dozens of entities (distributions), they talk to Valve. And I think that's a key point of success there, Valve takes care it runs basically anywhere as long as it runs on a reference platform (which was originally debian based and is now arch based). And a device with actual market share of course. And I think we can agree Steam Deck pretty much gained some share.

Flathub seeks funding to add payments, donations and subscriptions
27 February 2023 at 11:06 pm UTC

I personally still think the companies profiting from open source should stem such funding. As a contributor of my time I do not feel compelled to do financial invests as well as time invests into anything.

I do not think you should put that purely on users either. 100 grand for companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook or similar are pocket money. And big projects as Flathub are worth it.

I think it would often be better to just provide infrastructure and traffic for free, so those projects do not have to stem those costs. And it costs those companies basically nothing to provide that.

Valve tricks Dota 2 cheaters and then bans 40,000 of them
23 February 2023 at 7:51 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: STiATHe really played as if he'd see and aim through walls, though it was his playstyle to start attacking through corners by sound, and sometimes by chance since he knew players would cam there and sniper through walls.

I've never been good at any FPS, but I once was called a cheater because I knew where and when I needed to jump and throw a grenade at the very beginning of a round to catch the one guy who sure was running into a certain direction from the start of the level. Fun. :)

Neither was I. It's fun, but I'm terrible at those kind of games :D. Except for MOHAA and CS 1.6 as a Sniper.. no idea why, but there I was really good. Nowdays, I just have too bad reactions for that. I was known to melee-sniper... I'm dead now before I think on trying.

Valve tricks Dota 2 cheaters and then bans 40,000 of them
23 February 2023 at 7:11 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: BogomipsI fully understand the challenge also the other way around, when I had a CS:S server (for 8 years) me and a friend developed a ton of plugins to manage and blacklist cheaters and make their life a nightmare by monitoring them. We also had a remote client console with alerts when nobody from the team was playing. It was fun too see them rage quit because everything was logged so when reconnecting with the same IP or SteamId everything was put back (K/D ratio, money, names), network stats were also monitored when choke and latency where out of thresholds the player was slowed down automatically.

Fun part is, when I turned 18 I actually started to work for a server provider and took the other route as well. We provided customers with tools to monitor players and know who they watch when they're online. Without client side tools it's damn hard to accurately detect them though without a human watching. We had automatic ban too, but that failed a few times too. I had an example of a really good player which I got the proof by watching him play. He really played as if he'd see and aim through walls, though it was his playstyle to start attacking through corners by sound, and sometimes by chance since he knew players would camp there and sniper through walls. He was just a really good player, but I can confirm - the performance he had was not because of cheats because I watched him play live on a LAN, my software identified him as a cheater though.

Software can fail as much as people can. Unless you're on the client as Valve seems to have managed. Then you can be pretty accurate if you know what you're targeting.

Valve tricks Dota 2 cheaters and then bans 40,000 of them
23 February 2023 at 6:43 pm UTC Likes: 2

While i actually developed cheating software (wallhacks, aimbots etc.), I never released any to the public and never really used them besides testing them.

It was a technical challenge, and actually a very interesting one for me in my younger years (was about 14-16 years old back then, since that the cheating software and anti cheat came a long way and it would be a lot more complicated today). Yes, we still learned assembler and learned how memory actually works back in the days :D.

Using them isn't fun though, not today and wasn't back then (besides that they worked, that they did work actually was fun to me as a proof of concept :D). Multiplayer is about measuring your skills against others, having an unfair advantage isn't a challenge, and isn't actually fun.

But I guess some people just want to be on the scores lacking skills and don't mind. I am rather happy to celebrate any good play I do fairly than using cheats. Even though, getting fewer by the year, I'm close to my 40th birthday and those youngsters just .. have very fast reactions. Compared to me anyway :D. I soon will need "i'm a dad" opponents to come out on top. Are there leagues for that? :D.

Shader cache downloads being a nuisance? Valve may have solved it
16 February 2023 at 6:44 am UTC Likes: 1

Note that you still need to download the full shader cache once, and get increments after that.

I will probably disable background processing again, depending on how many updates I get daily having 50 games installed.

Steam still has to process the whole cache, it's just downloading less. And I do not play all games I have installed all the time, so background processing is a waste if the increments happen often on a lot of games.

10 years ago Steam released for Linux
15 February 2023 at 8:01 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: mr-victory
Quoting: STiATAnd to celebrate it:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/8076#issuecomment-1430641159
YESSS! Do I need to opt in to beta for the fix?

No, that's a server side fix according to Pierre, I've verified that with BF5 (160kb download instead of 3gb).
You need to re-download the full shader caches once, after that you get increments. At least that's how it seems for me at the moment :-).

And hopefully only if increments happen, but we'll see that over the next days.

10 years ago Steam released for Linux
15 February 2023 at 6:43 pm UTC Likes: 3

And to celebrate it:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/8076#issuecomment-1430641159

Thanks Pierre/Valve. I hope they really nailed that, was annoying me out of my pants to have daily shader downloads of 10gb+.