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Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
About Linux games being delayed: A chat with several game developers and porters
21 Apr 2017 at 7:06 pm UTC

Quoting: wintermute
Having Linux support fall behind other platforms is a sad reality that I think Linux users need to be understanding of. If a game is already released on another platform, then I'd have more respect for a developer who gives priority to existing customers over customers they don't yet have - the opposite only suggests that we'll be treated poorly when we are finally supported!
Except in the case of Kickstarters we're all existing customers, so we're already being treated poorly.
I don't quite get that. Hopefully we're existing, but we're not customers until we buy their product, which most of us are clever enough not to do before they actually release it in a form we can use. No Tux no Bux. If anything it's the reverse: Only in the case of Kickstarters we may in fact be "existing customers" before anything is released.

Ashes of the Singularity almost has Vulkan ready, doesn't have Linux on the radar right now
19 Apr 2017 at 6:46 pm UTC Likes: 1

So I'm going to take for granted that the game is not coming to Linux. It could still be an interesting test case for evaluating Vulkan. Surely this will be one of the first games running both DX12 and Vulkan; just testing the two versions against each other on Windows will yield interesting information about the speed of Vulkan, separate from the issues around Linux device driver speed etc.
Of course an ideal test case would be something that ran DX12 or Vulkan on Windows, and also Vulkan on Linux. No doubt one of those will be along in time.

Open source RTS 0 A.D. to get a 'Capture The Relic' gamemode and more in the next Alpha
18 Apr 2017 at 7:02 pm UTC

Guess I should really give it another try. Have a bad taste in my mouth from last time.
Years back I fired it up, figured out the interface a bit, built a couple new farms and a couple of javelineers or something, and just as I was starting to get the feel of that a bunch of enemy warriors showed up out of nowhere and wiped out my village. The numbers weren't even close. So I was like "OK, if my attempts to start figuring out how to play are going to be interrupted every five minutes by being wiped out and having to start over, I have other things to do," and haven't yet been back. But things are probably quite different by now.

All Walls Must Fall sounds like a Kickstarter worth some Linux gamer attention
17 Apr 2017 at 6:04 pm UTC

Little known fact about the Berlin wall: The Americans and Brits were doing large scale sabotage which was crippling East Berlin's efforts to recover and reindustrialize after the war (and killing quite a few people). The wall was originally as much a response to that as it was an attempt to stop people leaving.

Some thoughts on Albion Online with the final Beta
15 Apr 2017 at 7:33 pm UTC Likes: 1

One thing about the combat does bug me, which is where you and your enemy will end up practically on top of each other. They need to work on that a little, it's only minor, but still a little annoying.
Don't fix it! Let characters learn wrestling moves! ;)

Feral Interactive have released a new teaser for a Linux & Mac port to come
9 Apr 2017 at 5:29 pm UTC

Quoting: tmtvlThat says "tea". Is there a game about making tea? I dunno, maybe it's Alice: Madness Returns.
Tea Ceremony Simulator! Woo!

Canonical drop the Unity desktop environment for Ubuntu favour of going back to GNOME
8 Apr 2017 at 7:33 am UTC

Quoting: GrimfistBecause there is one thing that Unity 7 did absolutly right compared to ALL other Linux DE's out there, in times where 16:9 widescreens are the norm, vertical screen space is very precious compared to horizontal screen space. Having a monstrous launcher bar at the bottom is just bad UX design when you can have it at the left side of the screen, preserving precious vertical screen space and using the available but only 80% or so used horizontal screen space. And delivering such a good out of the box experience is what drives Ubuntu.
Really, ALL? So let's see, here I am using Mate, and I guess that thing on the right hand edge of my screen can't be a taskbar with a bunch of launchers on it because apparently ALL the Linux DEs other than Unity don't do that.

NVIDIA have announced the TITAN Xp and it's a monster
6 Apr 2017 at 5:43 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: inlinuxdude
Quoting: scaineI don't get who/what these cards are aimed at? This behemoth will likely retail for well over a grand, given that the plain 1080s are still around the £500-600 mark and the TI edition is £800-900. I mean, there's top-end gaming, and then there's just flushing money out the window!
IBM has worked with NVidia to incorporate their GPU's [External Link] into high performance computing servers. This could well fit into some supercomputer type applications (and could also explain the initial limit of 2 per customer?)..
If your supercomputer connection is true, that suggests they would actually have to do good Linux drivers since most supercomputers run Linux.
Thinking of graphics and drivers in Linux . . . this is not directly gaming-related, but has anyone else noticed that Canonical is apparently dumping the Unity desktop and going back to Gnome [External Link]? And so the thing is, that suggests to me that maybe they're dumping Mir as well, since Gnome are heavy into Wayland. And that would mean the absurd situation of the Linux desktop using two competing stacks for certain graphics stuff would be going away, and I think that would be good for Linux gaming.

Armor Clash II looks like a cheap RTS that could end up being fun, releasing soon
4 Apr 2017 at 4:35 pm UTC

I don't mind the look. I like that the vehicles stand out nicely from the background. I still enjoy original Starcraft; the gameplay's the important part.

Mad Max meets Vulkan in a new fully public beta for Linux, benchmarks and OpenGL vs Vulkan comparisons
1 Apr 2017 at 1:49 am UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: natewardawgI'm really failing to see how this is a naive view, haha :)
by naive i mean this:
'The thing that strikes me is that many of the Vulkan ports are in beta, which as a developer says to me, "We really care about quality and feedback and want to give as good of an official release (first impression) as possible."'
i dont think being beta menas they are commited, it only means its not fully tested/functional, bug free, or it can improve the performance in the future.

as i said, DX12 is older, if an game takes 3 years to be developed, you show what you're doing at the year 1, and say something like: its still in beta that means you're more commited to it than someone that waits until the game is almost finished to show any screenshots/video of it?

also, we cant compare the POV of an indie with the one of an AAA developer.
example 1:
indies may profit more from piracy used as an way to spread the word about their game, than have losses from piracy.
AAA studios, on the other hand, put millions in marketing, they don't need piracy to market their products.

example 2:
when the 5 first indie humble bundle where done, 20% of the income came from linux users, looking at this numbers you may think "20% of the market are linux users!" but the reality is: there were almost no games for linux, so people where willing to pay for anything and pay more for it.
among the linux user, the game was more popular since it where one of a few games avaliable.

that dont means if an AAA studio ported their games to linux, 20% of they profit still would come from linux users, especially, considering that for some AAA games 75% of their income comes from consoles an market where indies werent even allowed a few years ago.
The point about things being in beta does strike me as overoptimistic, perhaps. I'd agree that that isn't really an indication of anything much except perhaps that since Vulkan is so new those games haven't had time to come out of beta.
The general point that Vulkan seems to be acquiring games rather faster than DX12, however, seems pretty solid. It's an early data point, but at the current pace and given what some studios have said it seems quite unlikely that there will be only 20 Vulkan games out by the time Vulkan has been out for 2 years. And when you start thinking mobile--really, there's little chance there won't be a swarm of Android games on Vulkan within a year. And some of them will be ported to other platforms.

I see no indication that Vulkan development either has been or is likely to be restricted to "indies" so your point about indies vs. AAA doesn't apply. You're talking as if it's an issue of Linux games and the "all indies" stereotype vs Windows games--but the point here seems to be precisely that there are indications game developers are finding Vulkan a more attractive target for Windows development.

And I don't think your example 2 is really relevant to anything anyone has said, so it's kind of gratuitous.