Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: silentprocyonFrom same thread in the Steam forums:

LevaOpaki [developer] Jul 5 @ 12:25pm
For now only windows servers on offical provider but Linux will play with other PC players when is done.

Not sure if the word "done" is referring to Linux client, or EA period.

That's quoted in the article too FYI. Their wording means when the Linux version is done.

Edit: Also, apparently it does work in Steam Play, someone did a video [External Link].

Not surprised it works in Steam Play . . . it's Croteam, right, so it's probably Vulkan.

They only "produce" it, whatever they mean by that. Development, as noted is by Gamepires.

Oh.

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Well of course you can't just tell them what to do. They're cats.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: silentprocyonFrom same thread in the Steam forums:

LevaOpaki [developer] Jul 5 @ 12:25pm
For now only windows servers on offical provider but Linux will play with other PC players when is done.

Not sure if the word "done" is referring to Linux client, or EA period.

That's quoted in the article too FYI. Their wording means when the Linux version is done.

Edit: Also, apparently it does work in Steam Play, someone did a video [External Link].

Not surprised it works in Steam Play . . . it's Croteam, right, so it's probably Vulkan.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: lucifertdarkSince Valve brought us Steam play my list of Steam games playable in Linux has gone from 950 to 1400, I now have 75% of my Steam games playable in Linux with little to no effort on my part. To say I'm impressed is an understatement. :D

Is that playable, or installable? The games might not actually run.
And they were probably playable before through wine. Steam Play changed none of that, it just means more focus going forward of Valve supporting running games in Steam through wine.

Food for thought: might Valve try this on Windows at some point? Not all games built for XP will run on 10 I suspect.

They might, although one might argue it would be strategically unsound. If they want to erode Windows dominance, fixing Microsoft's breakage so Windows does games better isn't really the way to do it.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: scaineBecause of the nature of Proton, I can see a lot of potential abuse of the refund system, along with bad reviews, as Wendigo suggests. Buy a game, doesn't run in proton, leave a crap review, refund game.

Reviews aside, can you elaborate on what part of this you consider abuse of the refund system? I would definitely refund a game if I buy it intending to run it via Steam Play and find out it doesn't run well enough. The 2-hour allowance is very well suited for this kind of demo/test run approach.

It generates false sales data. You get "money", pay your expenses, then you have to return the money. That can be a disaster, since that's what developers live by.

If people are using the refund system to get refunds after trying a game that doesn't work on Proton, I expect it would usually happen before the developers even realized they had a sale, let alone used the money for anything. They'd check that day and it'd be like oh, a dozen people bought and then refunded since I checked sales last time.

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Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.

So how does this work?

Is it in reference to Microsoft Windows-based games bought through Steam, or can I run any old .exe file and Steam will setup it up via WINE for me?

Bought through Steam. As I understand it, if you just have some program from elsewhere you still have to run Wine the old fashioned way. People have been speculating how one might get around that but I don't know if anyone's come up with anything.

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One thing that occurs to me is that this may be a boon to the Wine project in a way. The Winehq platinum/gold/etc list was kinda notorious for getting out of date. With all these people playing on Steam, already on a single centralized platform with easy feedback methods, the picture of just what works and what doesn't and how and why may become a lot firmer, allowing faster improvement. It may also attract new people to work on Wine because it will be right in view, front and centre for a lot more people, and perceived as more important.
There's always been a perception that Wine would never really be "done", but at the rate it's been developing lately and at the rate it may develop now with even greater focus on it, that perception may turn out to be mistaken. Well, at least for people with AMD graphics, where the community can make sure it all works.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: no_information_here(...)

Thank you very much, that West Area Computers story is very interesting and quite uplifting. A bit like the story of R. Admiral Grace Hopper.

But it is not what i have in mind. The story i had heard (which may be false) described an army of people doing extremely basic operations. People selected with no mathematical education so an not to be distracted by it. Extreme mathematical Taylorism. Maybe it is an urban legend.

I read a science fiction novel where they did that. "Souls in the Great Machine" and sequels, by Sean McMullen. It was pretty good.

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Quoting: baccilus

Quoting: NeverthelessIf this doesn't help then what will?

That is right. If this doesn't help, nothing can.

Nonsense. I already mentioned some other things that could help in my wall o' text a few posts ago. One thing that would most certainly help is mass marketed retail desktop and laptop computers running Linux. I love System76, ZaReason etc. but they are small companies with small retail channels selling mostly to the already converted at arguably uncompetitive prices. I mean mass marketing by big companies with big retail channels, like if someone bought a computer at random they'd have a decent chance of happening to hit a Linux one. Basically, OSes will mainly be used in proportion to how many computers with those OSes on them are sold. Microsoft's stranglehold on pre-installs has always been the key to their dominance. Breaking it directly would absolutely work--it's just very difficult to arrange.

That's why Chromebooks are important. They are in fact a computer with a Linux OS slowly breaking the MS retail stranglehold. Note how they've been succeeding by defining a niche which can be seen as only quasi-desktop-computing and are now starting to expand out of it. Thing is they've got an established retail channel now, so stores aren't going to laugh at them when they want to expand/diversify it a bit.
Steam Machines were an attempt to do a similar thing, define a niche (a potentially quite large niche) that was not exactly desktop computing, and populate it with Linux boxes. It's a tough niche though, and both Valve and Linux weren't really ready. Linux at least is pretty close to ready now though, and this Proton thing is a significant piece of that readiness.

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Quoting: adolson

Quoting: mylkahave you thought linux would ever have AAA titles like tomb raider or hitman?

...yes. During the first big wave of Linux gaming, starting around 2001, we had a bunch of great games, including some pretty big titles, years before Steam even existed.

Here are just a few of what I played back in the day: Civilization: Call to Power, Descent 1-III, Neverwinter Nights, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament (and 2003, and 2004), FreeSpace 2, Heretic II, Soldier of Fortune, Heroes of Might & Magic III, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Majesty Gold, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Postal 1+2, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Railroad Tycoon II, Rune, Serious Sam: The First/Second Encounter, Sim City 3000 Unlimited, Sacred: Gold Edition, and more.

I still have most of my game discs, too. Some are Windows versions with binaries released after the fact, some are ports published specifically for Linux (usually by Loki or LGP), and some had the binaries on the disc alongside the Windows version.

The Sims was also available for Linux, ever so briefly, thanks to Transgaming's "WineX technology" (later renamed to "Cedega" ). They even bundled it with Mandrake Gaming Edition... Nobody remembers this shit but me?

Yeah, I remember. I can still get my Alpha C disk to run if I tinker more than I'm normally used to, although I think last time there was no sound.
I do think you have a point. This is clearly a play by Valve intending to grow Linux marketshare, because they fear Microsoft's moves may at some point kill their business, and if you take some of Gabe's statements at face value, because they like open. But, it might not work. I remember when Linux suddenly went from a few moldering Loki ports to somewhere close to as many games as Mac, I thought for sure that would be enough for a significant influx of the more casual gamers, especially since where people hate Windows 10 now, they hated Windows 8 then. That shift does not seem to have happened in numbers big enough to nudge Linux market share visibly. So this, too, may not be enough of a push to make a huge difference. In the end, maybe nothing short of some of the big computer sellers, like Dell and Acer and all the other hacks, preinstalling Linux on half their stuff (as in, half the boxes being sold on store shelves), will actually work--and MS has had fixes in there for a long time.

At the same time, I suspect Valve has some other shoes which it is positioning to drop. And then there is the side question of Chromebooks. Chromebooks have been quietly selling quite well for years now, but in the last year or so Google have started to quietly migrate them up the value chain. They're not all tiny toy laptops any more. At the same time, Google seems to have been somewhat sidelining the original "everything in the browser" gimmick in favour of letting ChromeOS be, to some extent, the real (Linux) OS it always was under the hood. Soooo . . . at some point, Google is going to be selling appreciable numbers of Chromebooks capable of playing actual games. Steamplay anyone? Voila: Mass marketed computers with a Linux OS preinstalled, capable of playing most Windows games (and of course a lot of native Linux ones, and Android stuff as well).

I don't think Steamplay is a slamdunk, particularly not all by itself. It lowers the barriers to switching (again) but the crowd who have any idea what switching even is remains comparatively small. But it is a good move, a fair number of people on the fence may well switch, and above all it does not strike me as something which is likely to be an isolated move. Add in Steam Machines redux, Chromebooks at the higher end, some other retail play, Sony going with Vulkan . . . there are lots of moves that could go with this. What's that overused buzzword--synergy. This is the kind of thing that can have synergy with other stuff.

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