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Latest Comments by Kithop
Here's how Starfield runs on Steam Deck and desktop Linux
6 September 2023 at 7:15 pm UTC

Quoting: grigiOk, feedback on running it on Mesa git.
Yes, it's definitely more performant.

BUT

I'm having glitches all over the place, so I'm downgrading to mesa 23.2rc2 again.

Yeah, I ran into this with `mesa-tkg-git` on Arch Artix, ended up building Mesa 23.2-rc3 myself just now. 23.1.6 is I think missing that important Vulkan extension (sub-20fps), while 23.3.0/-git has all sorts of flickering artifacts and eventually a hard lockup.

So far a good 45-70fps at 1080p Low on my laptop in New Atlantis, so totally playable. Just got to play a bit more to validate the stability. ;p

No Man's Sky - Echoes Update is out adding a secret society of robotic aliens
24 August 2023 at 11:02 pm UTC Likes: 3

I want to love this game so much more, and it's not the fault of the developers by any stretch. I've played a *lot* of Elite: Dangerous and the space flight and combat in this feels *super* 'Arcade-y' by comparison. I get it, it's a console thing and that's ostensibly not really been the point of this game.

But I *love* me some infrastructure building simulators like Factorio and Satisfactory, or games that at least have it as a big component like Raft and Subnautica (and Astroneer and 7 Days to Die and..). No Man's Sky also really scratches *that* itch for me in a lot of ways, but weirdly not as great of a co-op experience I'd have liked.

I feel like my ideal game would involve something with robust base building, 'proper' Elite / Wing Commander-style flight controls and mechanics (and yes, that's even already Arcade-ified a bit, I know), and a great co-op loop where you can have a team of people working together on a series of ever-bigger projects.

No Man's Sky feels to me like it scratches the surface of so many itches (hooray: we can build underwater bases and have little submarines to go exploring in! We can acquire a big trading fleet of ships that your friends can visit!), while rarely ever getting deep enough to really satisfy me fully (boo: underwater bases seem kind of pointless when the 'ocean' feels like it's barely ankle-deep. That big fleet of trading ships really boils down to a menu screen you interact with to send them off to farm resources.)

I can see what they're going for and I love it - I want more of it - but it forever feels like I'm just kind of sampling something that could be so much bigger. And I don't even know if that kind of game is feasible.

7 Days to Die gets another huge overhaul in Alpha 21
27 July 2023 at 4:29 pm UTC

Yeah - other people are reporting you need to use the native version for EAC support now: https://www.protondb.com/app/251570#ef6II47171

For what it's worth, at least on AMD, we're both easily pushing 60-120 fps at 1080p on her Radeon 7600 and 1440p on my 6800M using Vulkan on Medium-ish settings.

Turning down/off Shadows helps *immensely* as those burn CPU time; again, would recommend running with MangoHud and eyeing your GPU load vs CPU load, RAM and VRAM usage, etc. and using that to inform you where to tweak settings until you break through whatever bottleneck(s) you have.

The game *is* a big open world dynamic voxel thing, remember, so it'll never reach the same kind of performance as something with statically baked maps, so temper expectations accordingly. Dips to the mid-20s FPS on blood moons in multiplayer are normal regardless of how beefy of a rig you're on - even on Windows. The MP server's CPU & network make a big impact there too.

7 Days to Die gets another huge overhaul in Alpha 21
27 July 2023 at 4:18 pm UTC

Quoting: CraigHSo, question here: Are any of you playing multiplayer?

Since a21 came out I cannot use proton at all (for this game) or I'll get kicked for an EAC violation for a file that seems to get updated periodically in the proton path. I can do opengl, it's a bit crap framerate on a 1080 + 3700x / 32GB. Last couple times I tried Vulkan directly, crashes were pretty random from 5-30 min never more -in multiplayer. Solo was better, but hardly crashproof

I should say it was fine under a20, with proton.

It has a native build, and I vaguely remember reading somewhere that EAC is supported only in that native build; honestly I'd just try running that without Proton and see if that works for you.

Side note - I host my own private multiplayer server for my friends and I have EAC just disabled on it entirely. Works (mostly) fine, aside from the odd Mono threading related Unity crashes for some clients, but again - my wife and I run the Linux native builds with Vulkan and have AMD GPUs, so I'm not sure if there might be an nVidia-related regression or not.

7 Days to Die gets another huge overhaul in Alpha 21
21 July 2023 at 8:19 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: foobrew
Quoting: g000hStrange that you're getting those results. Your PC isn't too different to mine, and I'm getting over 100 fps.

Wow, that's quite a difference. I'm also running a Ryzen 5 (2600) and only 16GB RAM but I have plenty available when the game starts (~10GB). Also running at 2560x1440. I'm just trying to run the standard Navazgane map also so nothing special there. No mods either.

I think I might try forcing it to use Proton instead of the native client just to see if it makes any difference. Not sure what else to try.

Having recently done some upgrades to my wife's desktop (RX 580 -> Radeon 7600), a couple ideas to try:

* First, run the game with something like MangoHud with all the options on, and keep an eye on what's being loaded. Is your CPU constantly maxing out a thread, or is your GPU running at 100% load?
* Double check how much VRAM your card has vs how much MangoHud reports it using. If it's within ~1GB of max, try knocking your texture quality setting down one tick (if this makes a huge difference, your GPU was 'swapping' with much slower system RAM)
* If your CPU seems to be the limiting factor, the biggest performance impact I've found here is with the Shadow detail. I actually turned them completely off on my wife's desktop and it made a *massive* performance difference, as those are super CPU intensive.
* Of course, triple check your kernel & drivers are as up to date as possible, maybe check some other games or benchmarks to make sure something else there hasn't regressed recently.

Best of luck!

7 Days to Die gets another huge overhaul in Alpha 21
4 July 2023 at 7:22 pm UTC Likes: 1

For what it's worth, Vulkan has been working fine for a while on newer AMD GPUs - I've been running it on my laptop with a Radeon 6800M dGPU just fine. Performance is always a little shaky, of course, but that's the same for my friends playing on Windows too.

It's not too hard to set up a dedicated server, either, thankfully, also on Linux of course.

CurseForge and Bukkit get hit with malware for Minecraft mods
7 June 2023 at 1:57 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Wypmanif i play on the vanilla launcher, am i still at risk? or is this only affecting modded players

This sounds like it's specific to mods on those platforms; vanilla should be unaffected as there's no word of any sort of related compromise on the Microsoft / Mojang side.

That said, I was having issues with their authentication service last night so I'm not sure if they're aware and potentially taking things offline temporarily to audit them or not. Safest is always 'not to play at all until everyone gives the all-clear', but personally I think the risk is minimal if you're just on vanilla with the official launcher.

ASUS ROG Ally releases in June priced competitively to the Steam Deck
11 May 2023 at 2:54 pm UTC Likes: 5

So don't get me wrong - I have a 2021 'AMD Advantage' Asus ROG Strix gaming laptop that is my daily driver and spends 90% of its time in Linux, and while it has its quirks and drawbacks it's on the whole pretty good hardware wise. But I feel like this is kind of missing the point. New SoC is great performance wise, but as that review states: no touchpads (actually something I really like on my Steam Deck!) and the dodgy Windows experience vs. the work Valve's put in on SteamOS.

...and then the battery life kicker at the end. Yeah, you can get 8hrs out of it, 'just like the Steam Deck', if you drop to 720p and drop all your settings to Low so the thing isn't running full bore. Otherwise an hour and a half is a little quick for a handheld.

It'd be nice to have the option of brief, high power sessions and then a battery life preset, I guess, so at least they're trying something a little different, but if you already have a gaming desktop or laptop and are supplementing with a handheld, I feel like you probably want that battery life.

Iris and Sodium for Minecraft move to Modrinth away from CurseForge
17 April 2023 at 6:02 pm UTC Likes: 5

Considering the debacle with CurseForge blocking launchers like Prism from dowloading the constituent mods of a modpack, only for them to have to come up with a gross workaround that spam-opens a dozen+ browser windows and uses those to download, and now hearing that they're quietly decreasing the revenue share, and that their own launcher still doesn't have Linux support last I checked...?

Here's hoping this is the start of a move away from the private, profit-motivated CurseForge to something much more open, transparent, and for the community. I hadn't even heard of Modrinth until now, but I'm already impressed with what I'm reading.

The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2023
1 December 2022 at 4:57 pm UTC Likes: 8

I was honestly kind of expecting the answer to be something like:

'Whatever you're already using and happy/comfortable with' - but that only really holds true if you're talking about managed things like Steam and Lutris that do the vast majority of the heavy lifting for you (e.g the Steam Runtime based off of Ubuntu that everything seems to run against).

There are some really annoying things about Ubuntu for totally new-to-Linux users. Most people have interacted with Windows machines or Macs, and Gnome 3 might be a little hard to adjust to for them; my recommendation there would be the Kubuntu or Xubuntu spins (defaulting to KDE Plasma and Xfce respectively) for a more 'familiar' default UI. (And of course you can add and change that from any starting point; no need to reinstall because you want to use something different.)

The situation with snaps is also frustrating once you start getting into things, but *most* new users shouldn't be raging at Canonical just yet. If you've learned enough to start hating snaps (and systemd... and Pulseaudio...) and start hunting for alternatives without them, congrats! You're not the target audience for this article any more. ;p

Once you dive into the rabbit hole of non-Steam ports, though, yeah - the Ubuntu repos are pretty good. PPAs fill the gap beyond that in the same way the AUR does for Arch (& derivatives). You may appreciate a lot of software being built as and offering .deb files to install, too.

Ubuntu's not necessarily the 'best' distro, the most open, etc., but it's definitely got a lock on 'good enough to get started with'.

Just... be prepared to want to switch in a couple years as you learn and grow. :)