Patreon Logo Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal Logo PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
Steam revamps profile privacy settings, Steam Spy no longer able to operate
11 Apr 2018 at 4:42 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: 14
Quoting: KimyrielleThe poor privacy controls were the reason why I didn't add friends to Steam at all. I don't want to broadcast all over the world which game I am playing when, and for how long. I wonder why people thought that's anyone's business?
Huh? Maybe your idea of friends is different than mine, but I surely want my friends to see when I'm in a game and what that game is.
My idea of friends is quite specific and involves a small number of people I know offline. However, various online thingies such as Steam have appropriated the term, which makes things confusing. What Steam or Facebook call "friends", I would call "acquaintances" (or in some cases, "random dudes who cold-called me on the internet for some reason" ) and yes, what I'd want them to know is quite limited.

NVIDIA dropping support for 32bit Linux this month, also dropping Fermi series support
11 Apr 2018 at 8:51 am UTC

Quoting: TheSHEEEP
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.
This is obviously not the case. First, I am a counterexample, as I had mentioned to MIRV pages above. Therefore you are empirically wrong. Second, a game on sale on Steam costs $10-20 (Cdn) or less per game. A new game computer to replace my old one costs $1500-2000 (Cdn). It is very easy to be in a situation in which one can afford the occasional $10 but not $1000+; what on earth is odd about this concept? Note that a thousand dollars is a hundred times as big as ten dollars. Two thousand dollars is two hundred times as big as ten dollars. Often, people who can afford x cannot afford 200x. Now you know; if you have been having problems with budgeting, perhaps this news may help you in the future.
Apologies for the sarcasm, but I think people leading with big posters of "Won't somebody please think of the children" (without a question mark, for some reason) while talking obvious nonsense are kind of asking for a bit, eh?
First of all, who the hell needs to spend ~1000€ to upgrade their years old 32bit piece to support 64bit?!
So if you are paying so little attention that I'm explicitly saying "$ Cdn" and then you come back at me with Euros, it's clear you have no room in your head for both making sense and your specially armoured high horse. No, in Canada three hundred bucks is not remotely realistic. Yes, if you're a computer nerd you have expertise which allows you to get computers cheap. Congratulations, I am not worthy etc etc., but other people have other expertise and interests and the cost in time to learn how to do it the cheap way is greater than the cost of buying retail. If that makes no sense to you, explain to me how you do your own car repairs, electrician work and plumbing among other things.

Yes, when you're a penniless student you can fairly easily save up for frivolous things. That is because you're a kid with no responsibilities. I have a family, kids getting married I have to help out, grandkids. In short, I do have responsibilities and it would be irresponsible of me at this time to waste my money on a new computer. At some point in the future I expect I will be able to buy a new computer; that day is not today and it would not suddenly become today if I had the benefit of your oh-so-magical expertise. Maybe when you grow up you'll understand.

NVIDIA dropping support for 32bit Linux this month, also dropping Fermi series support
10 Apr 2018 at 11:18 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.
This is obviously not the case. First, I am a counterexample, as I had mentioned to MIRV pages above. Therefore you are empirically wrong. Second, a game on sale on Steam costs $10-20 (Cdn) or less per game. A new game computer to replace my old one costs $1500-2000 (Cdn). It is very easy to be in a situation in which one can afford the occasional $10 but not $1000+; what on earth is odd about this concept? Note that a thousand dollars is a hundred times as big as ten dollars. Two thousand dollars is two hundred times as big as ten dollars. Often, people who can afford x cannot afford 200x. Now you know; if you have been having problems with budgeting, perhaps this news may help you in the future.
Apologies for the sarcasm, but I think people leading with big posters of "Won't somebody please think of the children" (without a question mark, for some reason) while talking obvious nonsense are kind of asking for a bit, eh?

NVIDIA dropping support for 32bit Linux this month, also dropping Fermi series support
9 Apr 2018 at 6:07 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: GuestThough I would be very curious if anyone is running a 32bit (hardware) system with nvidia graphics, what are the reasons they're doing so.
My laptop is 64-bit and currently my main computer. But my desktop is still 32-bit.
The reason is simple: No money.
Or rather, the household always seems to have a higher priority money-wise. Sigh. I have a number of games that are sort of sitting there in Steamspace waiting for me to be able to get a more current computer.

Valve confirms their continued support for Linux gaming
5 Apr 2018 at 3:28 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Luke_Nukem
Quoting: Brisse
Quoting: elbuglione"some trying to justify exclusives and lock-in as a valid methodology"
Sadly... is valid, because is working!
It has no place in FOSS-philosophy, even when there's a proprietary store front in middle.
People need to stop viewing Linux as FOSS-exclusive. It ain't, and it won't build the momentum required unless big-money gets behind it (as evidenced by Valve pushing it).
People need to stop viewing FOSS as alien to big money. It ain't. When it comes to platforms and middleware, FOSS is commercially dominant across most computing domains, from supercomputing to servers/cloud to embedded and the "internet of things". It's just, the money doesn't mostly get hoarded by some entity controlling the platform. Google would have been hobbled trying to build their empire on Windows servers.
The desktop computer OS is actually a weird outlier where no big money entity or group of entities have yet seen a way to make dough replacing proprietary with FOSS, whether because there's something unusual about that particular market space or because MS is unusually good at ensuring nobody sees a chance to pull anything off. Doesn't mean it will never happen.

Although, one blind spot of our current age is that it tends not to occur to us that there are entities other than megacorporations which have a lot of money. States as significant economic actors in their own right have been out of fashion for a while now. But I would not be surprised if the era of the hyperglobalized economy is easing to a close and geopolitics is going to once more, for some countries at least, have a significant impact on their economic policies rather than it being all the other way around as it has tended to be. So like for instance, it seems clear that the US, no matter who is in government, is firmly committed to Cold War with Russia and, increasingly, China (and Iran and whoever they alienate next). Thus far this has had little impact on trade between the US and China, and until recently it seemed almost senseless that it could. And yet things seem to be drifting that way. My point is, there have been a number of false starts in the past, but it's not implausible that at some point some sizable countries may just say once and for all, for realz this time, they don't want to be sending their money to Redmond and they don't want the NSA's back doors and they will now be making a transition to Red Flag Linux or Great Bear Linux or whatever and the patriotic citizens will be welcoming this if they know what is good for them (and if things were tense enough with the US and it was sold right, the patriotic citizens might not actually mind). It would be a weird and somewhat uncomfortable way of having a major increase in desktop Linux, but it could happen at the rate things are going.

Valve confirms their continued support for Linux gaming
4 Apr 2018 at 5:30 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: NonjuffoI have to admit that it took me a while to understand why being called a "fan site" was bad. After all this is a site mostly for fans(?) of Linux gaming. Then the connotation came to me via a flashback from 1998: Comic Sans, frames with scrollbars on all sides, animated "under construction" GIFs and borderline psychedelic color schemes. Ah Internet, you were so pure and full of promise once.
It made me laugh more than anything, as in, what do you have to do to be taken seriously?
Come now, Liam. Of course you can't be taken seriously. It doesn't matter what your content is like, or how many people read it, or even how much money you make. To be a non-fan-site, you need to be a tiny vestigial appendage of some huge publishing company that doesn't give a shit about what you're doing except to occasionally make sure you're properly advertiser-friendly. God, couldn't you at least pretend to go to the occasional quarterly budget meeting? At least try to, like, borrow some commissar from an HR department to kowtow to if you don't have one of your own? Really, without even that minimal kind of effort you expect to be taken seriously? ;)

RetroArch to gain a feature to improve input latency in the next release
4 Apr 2018 at 5:03 pm UTC Likes: 1

OMG, down to only 440 FPS?! How could that massive performance loss possibly be worth it?!1!?11?!!

AMD has announced 'Radeon-Rays' an open source ray tracing SDK using Vulkan
4 Apr 2018 at 5:00 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat would be the rub, though (well, one of them). Once all your customers are stuck on one platform and you're dependent on the tools made by the vendor of that platform, they can take as much of your profits as they want, because you have no other choices. It's the vendor's tools or you're not selling anything.
Why do people think companies struggle so hard to gain monopolies? Why do people think laws got passed against monopolies in the first place?
the issue is, is not an monopoly.
its sony (ps4) vs nintendo (switch) vs microsoft (xbox and windows with play anywhere) vs valve and others on pc.

game makers have no reason to support linux, if it where: one side linux, other side microsoft monopoly, sure, some of then would chose to support either linux or both linux and windows.
but that is not the case, they arent afraid of ms monopoly that aint gonna happen.

sure support windows/mac/linux is cool, that is a reason to use vulkan.
but xbox right now is more profitable than mac and linux.

android could be a savior for us, but the types of games that are made for android are very different from the ones made for pc/console.

Final fantasy 15 tried to make an dumbed down version for mobile (ff15 pocket edition) i'm not sure if it sold well, but it has completely different assets.

now with the remake of secret of mana, they made graphics that could be ported to mobile easily (instead of dumb down the graphics).

other than that examples, i dont see companies having more incentive to use vulkan than to use DX12.
if they can afford they will use both to see where they get better results.

game engines on the other hand, have clients that make games for mobile and clients that make games for pc or console, they have an good reason to use vulkan (or both but giving priority to vulkan)
Your comment isn't really relevant to what I was saying. I was commenting on the idea that many studios would be happy to be locked to a single platform, and making a general point about the implications of such locking. In the abstract, like. It wasn't about the specifics of what platforms what is on right now.

But, talking of such specifics, your comment also misses a huge factor. It may become accurate in the future, but right now there is another huge platform that DX12 does not cover and Vulkan does: Windows < 10. Mostly Win7 I guess. There's still a LOT of that out there, and there will be for a couple-three years yet. So unless you're expecting your game to have a pretty dang robust "long tail", the "Not yet on Windows 10" market looms large, and you lose it if you go DX12.
UWP isnt compatible with Vulkan nor any program with opengl above 1.0
that means that vulkan apps cant run on xbox, hololens and whatever else microsoft put on the market.

currently lose the xbox market would do more harm to the pockets of the developers than losing mac/linux.
Did you in fact read what I said before you replied to it?

Valve has removed the Steam Machine section from Steam
4 Apr 2018 at 3:33 am UTC

Quoting: leo523Valve spoked about that!! They not stop to help Linux.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/ [External Link]
That's interesting.

Make Sail, the exploration and boat building adventure game is now in Early Access
3 Apr 2018 at 5:02 pm UTC

So is tacking possible?
. . . I want to make the boat from Waterworld. Really dumb movie, but such a cool boat.
View video on youtube.com