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Latest Comments by Kithop
According to a Stadia developer, streamers should be paying publishers and it backfired
23 October 2020 at 12:12 pm UTC

Considering how many games have lengthy cutscenes (i.e. movies), I'm tempted to say that in some ways, this guy's not wrong. For certain games, the 'stream' is basically just the streamer watching and commenting on these lengthy cutscenes. Probably stuff like the interactive storybook stuff Telltale was known for, or extremely linear RPGs where the main gameplay is a ton of repetitive grinding.

Some games, when streamed, are closer to an MST3K deal. Others are not - this argument doesn't hold for sports games, racing, most FPSes, party games, etc. Sports games are interesting, too, with the whole licensing of actual, real players and teams. Music is, of course, a whole other thing on top.

All that said, the technical / legal arguments and the actual realities of streamers helping boost a game's popularity collide in a way that really just needs clarity. Devs now have to account for streamers playing their games, and publishers need to make it clear what is, and isn't OK with the content they're licensing to you, because in many cases *their* hands are tied on e.g. music and likenesses. Bonus points for those who put in a 'streamer mode' toggle that does things like mute or swap out said music or content.

Then you have companies like Nintendo who can be quite aggressive in taking down content that isn't transformative.

As long as the rules are clear before you purchase a game with the intent of streaming it, or the game at least offers a streamer-friendly mode, that should be fine. But by the same token, some games that rely heavily on, say, licensed music (think Rock Band/Guitar Hero/etc)... as a musician I can totally see the argument that y'know, you're not really any different than Spotify or another music streaming service, even if there's a game going on over top, and legally you're likely responsible to ASCAP/BMI/SOCAN/etc. to pay the artist their (tiny, fraction of a penny, sadly) cut.

That said, I could see bigger streamers and services wanting to move to that kind of model around music - paying the artist guilds the appropriate licensing fee that e.g. a bar or whatever pays to have music, and then they're covered to stream whatever copyright music they want because they're paying the monthly/annual license.

Not everything a game dev or publisher puts out is 100% their own IP and content. Going after streamers for extra money is counter productive. But legally, someone likely has to get paid for streaming use of that content, if it can't be avoided.

7 Days to Die has a massive overhaul with Alpha 19 out now
21 August 2020 at 1:15 pm UTC

Quoting: wintermuteIt's been a while since I tried this, have they added an option where local co-op players spawn in the same location rather than miles apart?

Not officially, but if you use NitroGen to generate a world and start on that, there *is* a 'shared, single spawn (Co-Op)' option that I've used with success on our private servers.

You don't get to pick *where* that spawn is... but it does start you all together. Plus, you get a ton more options for tweaking worldgen, including importing your own height and biome maps if you want.

7 Days to Die has a massive overhaul with Alpha 19 out now
20 August 2020 at 6:50 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: stormtuxI tested the Vulkan renderer but I am affected by the huge delayed input. I tried to run with various configurations (vsync off, compositor off, lowered the graphics settings) but I have not yet found a solution.
The frame rate of the OpenGL renderer is rather low and I hope that the Vulkan will have better performance. Ideas for solving this problem are welcome .

If I remember right, the key on my end was using MangoHud's own VSync override plus the in-game VSync config toggle. Some combination of the two being on together or one off and one on tended to either trigger the super delayed input bug or resolve it. I've been getting DiscordOverlayLinux working as well, and that requires the KDE Plasma compositor to be on, which works fine in OpenGL, but I haven't tried that with the Vulkan renderer yet.

I used GOverlay to set both OpenGL and Vulkan VSync to 'Adaptive' system-wide, enable MangoHud system-wide, and I *think* in 7 Days to Die I have the in-game options set to also have VSync on and that works. Turning any of the VSync settings off is what triggers the input lag for me, but I suspect it's probably because 'off' is only really 'off' in one layer of the entire stack, and the extra frames are..backing up/being buffered somewhere..? Maybe? If you manage to turn all VSync settings and the compositor fully off I suspect it might work.

Could also play around with the nvidia-settings app to see if there's any other VSync / Flip-to-Vblank settings there you can tweak, but 'all on' or 'all off' seems to be where I had the most luck.

7 Days to Die has a massive overhaul with Alpha 19 out now
19 August 2020 at 6:24 pm UTC Likes: 4

Also, in case anyone's curious about testing Vulkan or just running MangoHud with it, here's my doozy of a Launch Options set in Steam:
Spoiler, click me

 
export MANGOHUD=1;export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json; qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor suspend;mangohud %command%;qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor resume


This turns on my install of MangoHud for performance tracking, specifies my nVidia card as the primary/only Vulkan driver to load (otherwise my Intel iGPU takes first priority and it fails), and temporarily disables KDE Plasma's compositor while the game is running to avoid an issue with VSYNC and really really delayed inputs.

The 'export MANGOHUD=1' covers Vulkan while 'mangohud %command%' covers OpenGL, as I understand it - you can actually still use these options in the default OpenGL renderer without issue.

I've used GOverlay to force Adaptive VSYNC for both OpenGL and Vulkan modes, and left VSYNC on in-game. With KDE Plasma's compositor running, it seems to do the whole 30 <-> 60 fps jump with changes in effort, while with it temporarily disabled, it can run at other framerates in between without noticeable tearing.

7 Days to Die has a massive overhaul with Alpha 19 out now
19 August 2020 at 5:55 pm UTC Likes: 7

I've been hosting a private server for my friends and having a lot of fun with this while it was the latest_experimental build. Gameplay-wise, it feels like the gear curve is a bit stretched out now (it took us a lot longer than normal to start getting the loot we were used to in A18, but some of that could be us not necessarily focusing our skills down to the end of a single tree right from the start, and a lower XP % boost than we used last time), and there's more of a focus on traders now than before.

Stamina regen has been nerfed quite badly for hand tools when mining, even for the one on our team who went down the Strength tree and got all the relevant perks, making you rely a lot more on things like a steady supply of coffee, or a high level auger and supply of gas instead.

Also, the sounds... the auger sounds horridly obnoxious, now, and I think it generates a lot more on the heatmap than before. Mining near the surface during the day, I'd have to stop and shoot at least 2 or 3 mini-hordes of zombies being 'attracted' (spawned) by my augering, per 'reload' of gas. So it really feels like they've nerfed mining in general - meanwhile, our trader person who joined us late caught up real quick. It's almost better to just quest for and buy your ammo than it is to mine + smelt it yourself from the raw materials.

I'm not sure how I feel about that balance change just yet. It's definitely something that I think is more fun as a group - and being able to have 8 instead of 6 people in your party max now I think is a sign that's where they're going, too.

Server runs great on Linux, of course, and the default OpenGL client has been rock solid for me, too. I have tried the experimental Vulkan renderer on nVidia here, and it 'works' but likes to segfault + crash to desktop quite regularly, especially if you're moving too fast (e.g. exploring an area in God mode flight in single player). Definitely not stable yet, but they don't claim it is. :)

A weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently
15 August 2020 at 8:43 pm UTC Likes: 3

Fired up a private 7 Days to Die server (also Linux!) for my friends and trying out the latest_experimental branch (A19).
Also have Empyrion: Galactic Survival's 1.0 working via Proton just fine.
World of Warcraft via Lutris / Wine.
Sometimes Europa Universalis IV or Hearts of Iron IV on my own.
Honestly kind of spoiled for choice these days, which is great!

Purism reveal their powerful privacy-focused Librem 14 laptop
3 July 2020 at 4:35 pm UTC Likes: 5

I can't in good conscience recommend Purism as a company any more. The concept and tech is good, but the company itself has acted poorly as a community member, and that's without digging too deep.

A bit of background: Mastodon is an open source, self-hostable, federated (via ActivityPub social media project that, in a nutshell, basically replicates + tries to fix the perceived flaws in Twitter. There are a few flagship style instances, and many, many smaller ones hosted by special interest groups, local communities, fandoms, that sort of thing, and each of them can set their own rules and codes of conduct for their members. If there's a conflict between two instances with incompatible rules, they can individually opt to 'suspend' federation with each other - basically putting the offending instance on a blacklist that prevents the servers from interacting with each other, kind of like a spam/abuse filter.

GoL has a Mastodon account, linked right in the page footer, FYI - go follow them! :)

Here's where things start to get political...
Spoiler, click me


The vast majority of Fediverse (aka Mastodon, Pleroma, and other compatible software) instances, including the Mastodon flagship mastodon.social, have what I'd consider fairly reasonable rules + codes of conduct. Of course, open source tools are open, so anyone with the skills to put them together can do so, and it wasn't long before instances started sprouting up for 'free speech fans' at best, and wholly blatant Neo-Nazi & 'Alt-Right' at worst. These instances would sprout up, and deliberately target other instances with users who are LGBTQ2+ or racialised, and harass them with barrages of threatening messages, so instance administrators had to get into a game of whack-a-mole, suspending federation with a handful of these new instances a week to help protect their users from that kind of abuse.

One of the more 'interesting' things that happened was an alt-right social network called Gab forked a copy of the Mastodon (and Tusky - a popular Android client) codebase, and migrated to it, with the same kind of results.

By this point, instance admins were starting to get very suspicious of new systems connecting + trying to federate with them, checking the self-proclaimed rules + code of conduct pages, and in many cases making the move to suspend federation before the first interactions even happen. In some cases, there's nothing posted there at all, so you either dig deeper or give them the benefit of the doubt and let it slide, waiting for the potential first reports of abuse.

Here's where Purism gets involved: they, too, fork the Mastodon and Tusky codebases, to... put it behind a paywall as part of their paid service offering, Librem One. To a network of instances where people put in communal effort and run off of donations, that read a little weird, but hey, that's their call. Canonical, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. all charge for some of their offerings despite being open source, right?

Users start signing up for Librem One, getting their new account on the Fediverse, and... some of them start sending the same, targeted, hateful and abusive messages to other instances. Now, when this happens from an instance that you otherwise normally trust or at least want to give the benefit of the doubt to, you can use the built-in reporting feature to report a user's harassment to the instance admins - of both the sender and receiver - who can each opt to act; the receiving instance can suspend receiving messages just from the one offending account, for example, but when it becomes a pattern, the onus is on the sending instance - i.e., where the abusers have their accounts - to act. Basically, to moderate their own platform.

As more and more abusers realised they could spend a couple bucks on a Librem One account and gain access to their targets, more instances on the receiving end started reaching out to the admins on the Purism side to report them. When no answer was forthcoming, the follow up 'what gives?' led to an interesting exchange - Purism actively refused to moderate their instance, because these were paying users. No matter how detailed the reports, no matter how egregious the messages coming from their users, they were paying users, first and foremost, so aside from 'don't break our servers', there were basically no rules. Higher-ups at Purism doubled down on this messaging, so pretty much every instance I've interacted with started suspending federation with Librem One - their only recourse to stem the tide of abusive messaging coming from it, and have been extremely wary of Purism ever since.

Other little tidbits show up from time to time, like how their Marketing Director ragged on Mozilla for supporting RiseUp.net, saying they were supporting domestic terrorism, and then tried to backpedal when called out for it.

tl;dr, Purism is naive at best, and actively courts the alt-right at worst. Don't give them your money.

System76 announce their 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen powered Serval WS laptop
11 June 2020 at 4:27 pm UTC Likes: 11

Yeah... I got all excited until I read 'nVidia'.

Nope, no thanks. Never giving them money again if I can help it, until they follow AMD's lead and properly open source + get their drivers into mainline, like AMDGPU, which works miles better on my partner's newer desktop w/ an RX 580. No more losing video drivers every time there's a kernel update.

Hopefully it's just a lack of decent options on the AMD side being available in channels yet, so give it another 6 months and maybe this will change.

Come tell us about what you've been gaming on Linux lately
17 May 2020 at 8:43 pm UTC Likes: 3

Some of mine, lately, console stuff like Animal Crossing notwithstanding :)
  • Empyrion: Galactic Survival via Proton which works basically flawlessly

  • Hearts of Iron IV (yay Paradox Grand Strategy)

  • Tabletop Simulator for my friends' D&D sessions (bonus: I learned how to import & convert the .STL from HeroForge in Blender to import it!)

  • 7 Days to Die not super recently, but we had a dedicated server + long term build going - will come back to this for sure]

  • Factorio one of my friends are big into this and want to drag me back in for a session soon

  • Eco on a break from it for right now but eagerly following along with the upcoming 9.0 update


Paradox are giving away Cities: Skylines - Parklife DLC free until April 26
21 April 2020 at 4:48 pm UTC Likes: 4

I mean, I'm okay with this, in principle.

'Please sign up for our newsletter about the game you bought from us, and we'll give you a bit of free DLC for said game.'

It's a marketing thing because they want more eyeballs on their newsletter, and the DLC is the carrot. Hey, you already bought the game and maybe some other DLC for it, right? So it's at least potentially mildly interesting to hear what they're presumably wanting to get a bunch of people on said newsletter for (e.g. announcing new DLC, or Cities: Skylines 2, or whatever).

Humble does the same thing all the time with their game giveaways; you have to be subscribed to their newsletter.

Also nothing stopping you from unsubscribing right after you get your freebie (but of course, they hope you forget to). But it's definitely not a 'free thing out of the goodness of their hearts' campaign, that's for sure. ;)