Frankly, those books were a pretty lame gimmick anyway. Or rather . . . it was innovative, kind of, but the whole concept just didn't work well with print. You're looking at a small paperback to start with, and once you've not only divided it up into a bunch of branching storylines and included the directions and whitespace you need for it to be comprehensible, each "story" is bloody tiny. Plus you spend the whole time flipping back and forth. Works way better on computers, and I say that as a lover of print books.

Of course at the time it was basically an attempt to recreate some of the ideas behind paper and pencil roleplaying games, except as something you could do alone. It pretty much failed; even to this day, the most amazing computer game still can't be that much like having a real human game master. But I guess it was better than nothing.

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Quoting: edoDoes latest MS office works flawlessly? That should be a goal for wine guys

True, although IMO office stuff is a much more solved problem than Adobe stuff. For the most part I actually prefer Libreoffice to MS Office, because I still dislike the ribbon thing (and I like the way Libreoffice shows whether you've saved or not), and I think for most typical uses they're almost indistinguishable. Now and then I run across a feature in Word that's actually handy, and spreadsheet people who want to fiddle with graphs a lot may want Excel, but for most people the features of Libreoffice are fine. Things changing how they look when you send your document from one to the other can still be a problem, but not so much if you're careful with your fonts, and you can always publish your document as a .pdf to freeze how it looks.
But Adobe stuff is different. The GIMP is great and all, and so are various other Linux image-y programs, but it seems like there are a whole lot of pros and semipros out there who have serious functional reasons why changing from Photoshop is hard or at least significantly annoying. And .pdf . . . we can look at them fine, and maybe do one or two things to them, but as far as I can tell there's nothing remotely like Acrobat on Linux. Far as I can tell this is because Adobe are bastards who like fucking Linux up (Flash! Gah!), and I'd rather see them and everything they do consigned to the pits of Hell, but sadly it seems to me like it's a big deal for Wine to be able to run some of the key Adobe software.

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Quoting: Creak

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: BrazilianGamerThe IL2CPP issue has been a big one. Nice to see we'll get rid of it

Would someone mind explaining what that is and why it's an issue?

It is a transpiler that takes the intermediate language (IL) from C# interpreter and convert it to C++ (CPP).

Then the C++ code is compiled to the targeted platform.

The result is a binary that runs faster than if using the .net framework.

Doc: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html [External Link]

So, a bit like Vala?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: BrazilianGamerThe IL2CPP issue has been a big one. Nice to see we'll get rid of it

Would someone mind explaining what that is and why it's an issue?

I think it has something to do with the Canada Pension Plan.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library GuyInteresting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.

Probably something to do with the fact that 10.15 drops 32 bits support. And 10.14 was released on September 24, 2018 so it's not that old.

I always get mixed up with release numbers after .s not being decimals. I was imagining a sub-release sometime between 10.1 and 10.2, which would have been long ago, but of course that's not it.

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Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.

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I have no real needs for them to port anything; my library is full of stuff I haven't had time to play, anyway. But I'm happy for everyone else if they port good stuff.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: mao_dze_dunAlso, you manage to get game time? Lucky man. I just lie in bed remembering the time when I could game as much as a I wanted :D. My wife casually mentioned I should maybe sell my PC and perhaps get a laptop, to which I reacted: "No! NO!!! This is a line we are not crossing!!!". Hey, I got to play for like 1 hour of Dark Souls: Remastered weeks ago, so yay... I guess... :D. At this rate I should be done for my daughters second birthday next August. I need a Switch...

:D

My two daughters are two and a half, and I can't say it's gotten way better lately... :)

Things should start to quiet down in about, oh, four years. Hang in there!

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: EikeThe trouble with both tactics, "No Tux, no bucks!" for more native games as well as Proton for more Linux gamers is that they didn't work. We tried the former one for years, and Linux ports were on a decline lately, then Proton arrived over a year ago, and the number of Linux gamers didn't rise.

You may be right but I think it's still a little early to tell with Proton. I mean, for most of that "over a year" it's been in beta. Is it out of beta yet, even? And for the most part, the only people who have heard of it are people already running Linux. That obviously isn't going to help people to think of trying Linux.
Proton isn't going to significantly accelerate Linux adoption unless/until some kind of product is released that runs Linux and uses Proton's ready access to Windows games as a selling point. And there's not much point in a company funding Proton (as Valve have) unless they plan some such product (or, OK, maybe just to use the threat of such a product to keep MS from pushing them). But I don't expect Valve, or anyone else, to try to release a product that significantly requires Proton as a selling point until anti-cheat issues are resolved. Anti-cheat just blocks too many of the most popular games.

So I'd want to claim the jury's still out on what effect Proton is going to have. We won't know until someone tries to use it for something, and either succeeds or fails.

Which brings up another concern valve money tap am starting to worry they will go ahh well we tried and we didnt gain any traction.

That's certainly also possible. But I have the impression Valve is very, very, very, very, very rich. What they've been doing, with the exception perhaps of the big "launch the Steam Machine" phase, is not a huge expense even just for a hedge against future contingencies, let alone if they have actual projects in mind.
The very fact that they could keep up their current level of effort forever and never notice it is actually one of the stronger counterarguments against my theory that they must have something in mind. They might just be laying groundwork so that if "just in case" ever happens, Linux will be as ready as possible for whatever play they might need to make with it, because what the heck, it's cheap insurance. It might even just be that a few upper-level Valve people have sentimental attachments to Linux; many developers are fond of Linux for its open source nature and its so-much-less-broken-than-alternatives status in many non-desktop roles.
Nonetheless, I think balance of probabilities is that they have some kind of strategy.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: EikeThe trouble with both tactics, "No Tux, no bucks!" for more native games as well as Proton for more Linux gamers is that they didn't work. We tried the former one for years, and Linux ports were on a decline lately, then Proton arrived over a year ago, and the number of Linux gamers didn't rise.

You may be right but I think it's still a little early to tell with Proton. I mean, for most of that "over a year" it's been in beta. Is it out of beta yet, even? And for the most part, the only people who have heard of it are people already running Linux. That obviously isn't going to help people to think of trying Linux.
Proton isn't going to significantly accelerate Linux adoption unless/until some kind of product is released that runs Linux and uses Proton's ready access to Windows games as a selling point. And there's not much point in a company funding Proton (as Valve have) unless they plan some such product (or, OK, maybe just to use the threat of such a product to keep MS from pushing them). But I don't expect Valve, or anyone else, to try to release a product that significantly requires Proton as a selling point until anti-cheat issues are resolved. Anti-cheat just blocks too many of the most popular games.

So I'd want to claim the jury's still out on what effect Proton is going to have. We won't know until someone tries to use it for something, and either succeeds or fails.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but why would anyone other than Valve be funding "Proton"?
Wine, on the other hand, companies (including Valve) do fund.

A default packaging of wine for gaming (without needing Steam) is really needed if gaming is going to go that route. That's not something Valve alone can fix - distros, GOG, itch.io, etc, really all need to come together for a GNU/Linux gaming desktop experience, rather than Steam/Linux gaming desktop experience.

That was sort of my point, actually. Valve made (and therefore funded; it wasn't free, it cost them something) Proton. One would expect they expended those resources for some reason; just allowing existing Linux users to have a slightly better Wine doesn't seem likely to be that reason.

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