Quoting: chimpy

: What do you think about the Steam Deck?

“I'm still waiting to get my hands on a devkit, but from what I've gathered it is running LINUX, so that means all the ports, we've done for the Nintendo Switch (Unavowed, Primordia) will be easily portable to it.

I wonder what he means by that exactly. Is he saying at an OS level they are similar (I don't know what the Switch's OS is based off of) or maybe the various APIs are similar/the same like how Vulkan is available on the Switch or maybe other reasons?

I was thinking more like, porting to Linux gets you the Steam Deck's OS, porting to the Switch would involve getting it working for the controls and making sure screen size and stuff work, which would then kind of apply to or at least be adaptable to making those things work on the Steam Deck.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: melkemind

Quoting: headless_cyborgI'm curious about Rise/Shadow of the TR because their Feral native ports are IMO perfect so they should be the way to go.

They're good ports but not perfect. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is still receiving updates that Feral hasn't added. They could go back and update all their games, but it's probably not profitable at this point.

Wine/Proton is an open source solution, while Feral's wrapper was not. Dare I say this is a better solution?

Dare whatever you feel like.

But Wine/Proton is an open source solution... using a proprietary API to run closed source .EXE and .DLL files on Linux.
Which does not sound too great in my ears.

IMHO, it's a "better than mostly nothing", but not a "Wow, FLOSS!"

Given that the context is "Best way to play commercial closed source games", I don't think noting that the open source way to do it . . . plays commercial closed source games . . . is a serious criticism.

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Suddenly I feel like there should be a game about spelunking cows: "Caves of Cud".

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Quoting: hephaistion

Quoting: IvancilloI don't like all of this emulation things.

Proton is not an emulator.

Yeah, yeah, but you know what they mean.

For me, while I get their point, I think it's shortsighted. The problem is, Linux gaming hasn't been going anywhere. Without Valve it would have been far more nowhere than it is. At our size in the market, it's a major chicken-egg problem: Few were going to release their games for Linux unless there were more Linux buyers, and few were going to play games on Linux unless there were more games released for it. And as a side note, few would be likely to use Linux as their desktop at all if they couldn't play their games. At best, the status quo undisrupted sees Linux dragging along with a few decent games and stagnating market share; at worst, even the level we're at turns out to be a long-tailed artifact of the failed "Steam Machine" push and we gradually get fewer and fewer games released, trickling down in the general direction of where we were before Valve's initial Linux push.

So. Here's Valve, trying to break the cycle. They back Wine and DXVK and use 'em to make Proton, with the potential to allow nearly all games to be played on Linux so close to native as to make no practical difference. And yes, in the short term that means fewer games actually developed for Linux natively.
But they also release the Steam Deck, a mass market game machine running Linux, which would not be practical without Proton. If it goes well, suddenly the market share for Linux gets far larger, making Linux a much more noticeable development target. If they succeed, the chicken-egg problem will be, if not broken, at least seriously weakened. And Linux gaming in general becomes significantly more practical for a wider variety of gamers, making growth more plausible off the Deck as well.

So yeah. If the Steam Deck fails, and market share doesn't grow, then Proton could turn out to be a long term net negative. But the status quo is not tenable anyway.

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There's a paradox about this, to me. I like Itch, and I think the Itch people are really good people, doing exactly the kind of thing I want done. They're surely the only store that would do a thing like this, for instance.
But precisely because they're the kind of people who would so something like this, I don't really want to take advantage of it, because I want them to get some of the money. On the other hand, if some other store did this I'd be totally up for it, but those other stores never would.

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Well, if you're going to break into the GPU market, now seems like a good time. I mean, even if the GPUs aren't competitive, it may not matter as long as they're THERE.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: BeamboomHere's hoping that this will also make Cyberpunk 2077 work again, after the massive patch yesterday...!

Just a quick update on this: It seems it was an installed mod that caused the problem. Worth noting.
So all is good in the hood, and I've started a new playthrough :)

EDIT: Nope, today it won't start again. yesterday I did a fresh install, I bet that if I do do again it will start again... until I start it a second time. something is amiss here...

Have you tried sacrificing a chicken?

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Says it also supports doing various old Linux distributions. Maybe I could use it to play my old Loki games.

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Quoting: RCL

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut it is not just very likely but an absolute certainty that, if that calculation were to shift such that they thought there was a net gain from such action, they would do it in a heartbeat. And Sweeney would cheerfully lie his head off about it.

No. It is a very, very wrong view not just about the company, but about Tim personally. Please don't say that if you're trying to talk to me. While I am not a close friend, I know him enough to not allow such opinions of him.

I fear if you want to tell me that, you are speaking to the deaf. And untrusting. So you may have to re-evaluate what you are capable of "allowing".

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Quoting: RCLSimilarly, anti-cheats (at least ones I am aware of) don't do keylogging, screenshotting, disk searches, or other sketchy stuff that indeed could put them into the malware category. Everything that they can possibly do is laid out in that legal agreement (which, granted, few people read carefully), and all these activities are limited to enforcing the integrity of the game.

I couldn't say about game companies in specific, but I do know that many other kinds of companies violate the law all the time--the actual law, let alone probably-unenforceable EULAs. And what any given anti-cheat does is subject to change without notice any time there's an update.
Probably most anti-cheats aren't doing stuff like that. But we wouldn't have much idea if they were, and we do have the Sony example. We don't really know how many other "Sony rootkits" might still be out there.

And in this case, we're talking about Epic. Now, very likely, relevant decision-makers at Epic believe that the risk, including reputational, vulnerability to lawsuits and so forth, would seriously outweigh whatever gain they could get from using their anticheat as a spying tool. But it is not just very likely but an absolute certainty that, if that calculation were to shift such that they thought there was a net gain from such action, they would do it in a heartbeat. And Sweeney would cheerfully lie his head off about it.

Frankly, I think you're a little too optimistic about airport security, too. I've heard stories, particularly from the US, "land of the free cavity-searched".

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