Quoting: GuestI see the usual garbage and slagging off the developers is being posted...

Why did they use Direct3D ? Simple. It's the best API for the desktop platform. Doesn't matter about "vendor lock in" when 90% of your market is on the platform where that doeesnt matter.

If they had just used Direct3D, that would be normal and fewer fusses raised. Porters are used to working from Direct3d-->OpenGL and surely have tools for doing so. The issue here is that they apparently took Direct3D and heavily modified it, resulting in a custom thing that nobody has any idea how to port from. I would be willing to bet that's caused plenty of problems besides just difficulty porting to Linux; it sounds like a really dumb move.
Further, they apparently did this while claiming quite positively that they intended to do a Linux port, even though one would think it pretty dashed obvious that those two things were unlikely to be compatible.

I think a few facepalms are quite justified. I also think one current in this discussion is very strange--there have been a couple of people saying basically, "Stop the criticism! They're engaged in moneymaking activities so they can't possibly be making mistakes!" Um, what?! Some people haven't been reading their Dilbert. People, markets are not efficient and lots of moneymaking companies make plenty of boneheaded mistakes. People do not get anointed with infallibility by the market fairy as soon as they start working for a profitable corporation.

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Quoting: inlinuxdude

Quoting: lucifertdarkWhat a shame they had to get Sting involved, it would have been straight on my wishlist if he wasn't part of it.

What do you have against Sting? Personally, I might buy it *because* he's involved. That, plus, "Goin' where the water tastes like wine" is a prominent lyric in one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs - "Goin' Down the Road Feelin Bad" (and also "Goin' where the climate suits my clothes")..

Ehhh, Sting's fine. He's done some good stuff and some bad stuff, I don't really care. Game looks interesting though.

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As I said in the other thread, it's nice to see this kind of intellectual ambition in a game. Just hope it doesn't disappoint, since these are some big challenges to take on.

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Quoting: razing32

Quoting: FredOYeap, I can also confirm that the Vulkan Renderer is fixed again with the Nvidia 384 driver. Back to slaying some Orcs then...

You are an Ork based on your pic :D

I've never heard that Orks were shy about killing one another. :D

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Clearly intellectually ambitious. I just hope their reach doesn't too far exceed their grasp. It'd be disappointing if they're all "The Questions Of The Ages" and then the answers turn out to be cliche ho-hum. But that's surprisingly hard to avoid--the thing about the Big Questions is that, y'know, lots of very smart people have speculated about 'em for a long time; coming up with cooler answers is very hard.
But I give them kudos for guts!

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Quoting: dubigrasuI think many of you are disappointed in SteamOS status because you are actually disappointed by the Steam Machines.
But remember that the purpose of the SteamOS in itself (as a distro) is only to run the Steam Client, which it does fine. Other than a newer Mesa for AMD users (and maybe more frequent updates) there's not much you can ask from it. It already does its job.

Actually, I think most of the discussion has been about Steam Machines, not about SteamOS. Your point about the purpose of SteamOS, as in just the OS itself, is quite accurate . . . but that's why there isn't all that much point talking about SteamOS and I don't think anyone much has been doing so. Basically SteamOS itself, not including user experience issues involved in the Steam client/Big Picture, is pretty boring.
To the extent they have been talking about SteamOS, they've actually been discussing a broader definition of "OS" to include the user experience it gives out of the box (and so things like integration of multimedia sources, in the way that consoles today tend to provide). This broadening is not unreasonable IMO. It's true that in SteamOS technically the OS is separate from the main user interface, the Steam Client, which can be used outside of the OS. But SteamOS is envisioned as a competitor to console OSes for which this is generally not true. So if you're going to talk about the things that PS4 does in its OS versus the things that a machine running SteamOS does not do, it's going to get pretty persnickety to note that the things SteamOS doesn't do wouldn't technically be part of the "OS" in the case of SteamOS. So for a lot of purposes I don't think it's a really useful distinction to insist on, in that it would lead to more confusion rather than less (and I think is actually doing so in this discussion thread).

All that said, I think there is actually room to criticize SteamOS at the OS level. There have been some decent updates just lately, but overall Steam OS has been lagging behind in its use of relevant drivers and other infrastructure relevant to graphics and gaming. This is a bad thing in something whose main purpose (absent actual Steam Machines) is to act as a reference OS for game developers. I suppose there might be arguments that SteamOS should stay fairly conservative to increase the chances that, if something works on SteamOS, it will work on many distros. But the improvements in Linux graphics-related abilities has been fast, making it worth taking advantage of them, while adding newer versions is fairly easy in most Linux distros. So I think it would be useful for SteamOS to be more up to date.

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I too have placed money in position of mouth. This interview was only a mild prompt, though--I've been intending to get this for a while.

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I like Car Wars, but I have to admit that green-and-black outliney retro-futuristic look would probably drive me nuts after a while.

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The lurking downer here is just that clearly Linux numbers in China are really amazingly low. China is huge, and probably will continue to gain influence over time; there being zip-all Linux there is a Bad Thing. We know some of the reasons behind it, I knew there wasn't a lot of Linux use in China, but I never realized we were wiped out this completely there.

As to the survey results themselves, I really have no more faith in this uptick than in previous more gloomy results.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: GuestGNU/Linux users can afford to ditch Valve. Something else would fill the void, quite easily.

It was literally decades before Valve filled the void in the first place. If we abandon Valve, how many more decades will we wait before someone else replaces them?

Valve only did anything as a backup plan. Gaming was growing before they did anything, even desura was there first. If Valve get uppity, I would simply go elsewhere. Power is with the users in the end, and it's good to remind companies of this sometimes.

I think you're a bit naive about this. Microsoft does not retain a desktop monopoly more than 20 years after Win95 because power is with the users in the end. Well, maybe "in the end"--as Keynes said about market equilibrium in the long run, "In the long run, we are all dead".
Monopoly power exists. Perhaps equally important, network effects are powerful; every major network* that the Linux platform is shut out of reinforces its status as a second-class citizen. Steam is a very major network; deliberately shutting ourselves out of it would reinforce the status of Linux as a second class citizen. That would be a really stupid strategic move if one wants Linux use on the desktop to prosper.

Not that any of this matters. Vanishingly few people are going to leave Steam because of something like this; calling for a boycott is an irrelevance.

* "Network" should be taken very broadly here to include any software ecosystem thingie that people on other platforms can and do use a lot. So for instance, MS Office, or DirectX. That's why it would be good if Vulkan supplanted DirectX 12, and it's good that Office runs on Wine (even though I personally don't like Office and never use it outside of work).

Microsoft may dominate desktop right now. They did so in the server space once upon a time. Funny what happened there.

You are mistaken. MS never had a server monopoly or even very close. Unix was always big; Linux just gradually became the biggest Unix.
The major reason MS were unable to establish such a monopoly was that they sucked so bad as a server for a number of years that the differences were readily measurable in money. That's much more difficult to establish on the desktop.
The situations are not remotely comparable.
But if you want a comparison, server Linux did not prosper by doing things like reject Samba. Desktop Linux will not prosper by doing things like reject Steam (or for that matter GoG's Galaxy if we can get our mitts on it). Not that you personally should use it if it doesn't fit your needs.

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