Somehow this reminds me of the time on Red Dwarf when Lister played pool with planets.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Man. 100% to developers . . . nobody can say Itch is all about the money.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

IMO Invisible, Inc. is an excellent game. 75% off?! Grab it and run like a spy.
Heck, at that price you should buy it just to congratulate them on the stylish name.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: whizseI think you mean Wayland instead of Cairo [External Link]?

Oh, man, you're totally right. Computy stuff has too many names. And, you know, I may be exaggerating the difficulty; maybe they'll get support.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: chrI don't know much about Cairo. I read the Wikipedia article, but care to share something about relevance to AMD or Nvidia or about Cairo's future importance?

Welllll, I'm not a technically knowledgeable person, I'm more interested in strategy and politics. But my take is this. Up until recently, display on Linux was run by X. This has some great things and was impressive in its day, but despite many efforts with some success to update it, it has become long in the tooth and so X developers eventually plotted its replacement, which is called Cairo. It probably isn't entirely a "Dump X and everything in it and put Cairo in instead" kind of thingie, they seem to be salvaging a fair amount of old stuff, but still--the end game is that display is being managed in a fundamentally different way.
This has taken bloody forever to do and even more of forever to gradually get integrated into everything else that needs to tell the system to display things--notably though not exclusively desktop environments and window managers, like Gnome, KDE, etc etc etc. And as this has moved along, it has been necessary to basically keep X going alongside Cairo, so everyone's still kind of using X so far even if they've started moving to Cairo. Which means so far it's sort of workable for NVidia to ignore Cairo (which they apparently have some kind of weird proprietary reason for doing).

But. More and more distros, more and more desktop environments, are getting the bugs and missing features worked out of their Cairo implementations. At some point they're going to start dropping X. At which point if you have an NVidia card, what you'll have is a graphics card which cannot talk to the piece of Linux running graphics. I gotta figure that's going to be a serious problem. At a minimum, X is going to be still available but kind of deprecated with less and less maintenance, while Cairo gets all the features. Plus, there are reasons they put all that masses of effort to do a new X-like thing, and some of those reasons are relevant to gaming; if you're stuck with a card that uses fallback legacy X instead of Cairo, there's going to be disadvantages to that even if X is still kind of there.

As you can see, that whole analysis and not a single mention of a technical feature; I don't really know about that stuff.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If our 1,000 player alpha team of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint doesn’t love the game, then we’re going to work on it until they do, because we know if they don’t love it we can expect to get murdered in Early Access.

Very sound thinking.

We ripped out the grid, replaced cooldowns with a slick recharge system, wove in a deep and emergent RPG storyline and elevated stealth and hacking to first-class citizens in the turn-based scenarios.

That does sound rather interesting. And honestly, I'm always up for another quality Shadowrun-ish game.
Wonder if they've played any Invisible, Inc.? There's a game that does turn-based stealth rather well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKillerAny indication from anywhere what the hold up was? I'd imagine that AMD and Intel not having hardware to support it would have left the aims of the extension fuzzy at the beginning, but they'd have known what was going into their silicon a long time ago. Was it an oversight? Or some tricky problem that needed solving?

Still, I'm glad it's finally here, and hopefully the delay hasn't lost Vulkan critical time with developer mindshare relative to DirectX 12.

Edit:

They've also confirmed that the overall functionality has been unchanged since the provisional release.

Ugh. So they just told everyone not to use it for 8 months for literally no reason. Great.

Edit 2:
So, reading through the notes it seems that the problem was trying to have both easy mapping from DXR to Vulkan and easy mapping of Vulkan to Metal. It turns out that they can't have both, and they've decided to ditch Metal. That makes sense for our use-case, but it sucks for Khronos, since MoltenVK was an explicit target for them. I can see why they wouldn't want to take that decision quickly.

Apple have been such tools about this stuff.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: chr

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: chrI want to support them, but I also want an AMD GPU. :/

From the regularity of roughly this comment every single time there's an article about System76, I gotta figure at this point they have to be leaving a bunch of money on the table by not doing some models with AMD.

Either that or it is trivial to write amotional anonymous comments online without any backing in actions.

That isn't an "or". Sure, many of the people who say they won't buy one because no AMD wouldn't buy one anyway. But this place represents a chunk of System76's core market, and if lots of people in that market say they're not going to buy things with NVidia it would be foolish to assume they're lying. It's not like it's impossible to buy a broadly similar laptop from someone else with AMD in it.

A few years ago, NVidia was what Linux users were mostly going to be using unless they were total purists who didn't care about graphics performance because the NVidia drivers, closed though they might be, were far superior. At many price points the NVidia cards, too. But there has been a massive shift since then, and at this point not only do many Linux users prefer AMD, but it's clear that for many NVidia is a deal-breaker. Not only that, but the future looks like it will reinforce this trend. AMD drivers will continue to pull away in quality and ability to play well with other parts of Linux. Cairo is only going to become more important; NVidia's refusal to work with it is going to move from annoyance to major pain. And the closed nature of NVidia's drivers is just going to keep throwing up pain points. A lot of Linux users see that as the direction things are going, so while NVidia is still kind of competitive right now, if you want a card that's still going to be useful a few years of Linux upgrades in the future, many people see AMD as better.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If they were the only big corporate donor, I'd be worried. But they're just one of the pack, this won't put them in a position to take the reins.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Babylon seems pretty tough. And kind of fun to play--I can see myself going out there grabbing those boosts and going "Oh, yeah, eat my dust inferior civilizations!" every time that gave me the complete free tech.

View this comment - View article - View full comments