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Latest Comments by Liam Dawe
Steam now has over 3,000 Linux games available
11 Feb 2017 at 12:23 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: EndeavourAccuracy
Quoting: liamdaweThe exact count for me right now is 3,008!
Same here in the Netherlands.
When I set "Narrow by OS" to SteamOS + Linux, and set "Show selected types" to Games, the overview on the left says "showing 1 - 25 of 3008".
And remains 3008 when going to page 121.

(This is when sorting by Release date. For some reason, all other sorting - except, for obvious reasons, User Reviews - gives me 3163. The store has had this inconsistency for years.)
Other sorting methods show games due for release that haven't actually released yet.

Croteam say Vulkan 'is the way forward', Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter due in 'weeks' with Vulkan
10 Feb 2017 at 9:08 pm UTC

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: liamdaweFinances: They split their possible purchases across more stores, if they don't hit the payout threshold on GOG they won't get paid, but if they stick to one store they are more likely to get their money.
Are you saying that GOG have a threshold of sales they require, before starting paying anything to developers? That's the first time I hear such thing. I thought they simply pay percentage of every sale. On the other hand, I don't think games of Croteam are in danger of underselling. They are quite good and popular in general. Way less known studios and games are selling through GOG, and apparently have no such issue.
Yes, GOG and Steam both do, I'm sure itch.io does as well.
That's probably related to the above, but again, GOG isn't tiny, so they can compensate their support efforts with more profits. And again, less known games and smaller studios do it apparently successfully.
I've spoken to developers (who will remain anonymous) giving me low figures from GOG. GOG is, sadly, just not big enough for some developers to consider it. I think it's fair enough, they aren't a charity, their time has to be financially worth it.
I'm not sure about different versions (I suppose GOG only offer the latest one, or some version + patches to latest one in some cases), but I don't really understand the trouble with upload. GOG accept some tarball from developers, and they themselves (i.e. GOG) already package and put it out. What's hard with having some rsync set up between GOG servers and developers? It should be a no brainer, there are tons of solid and production proven upload / sync tools out there. I'd like some comments from GOG about why this can be a sore point.
There's a fair bit more involved than simply uploading a tar for developers, especially when it comes to rolling patches. The guys at itch.io even did a big blog post on their work to make uploading and patching easier for developers. There's a surprising amount of back-end work involved in this sort of thing.

And all this is without even getting into online support. That splits development time and support yet again to support more for less gain on an additional service.

This is why it slightly frustrates me every time people moan about no GOG support, GOG just don't offer what some developers require. Still, I don't expect everyone to just know this sort of stuff which is why I try to explain it calmly :)

Civilization VI released for Linux, video and port report (updated)
10 Feb 2017 at 8:08 pm UTC

Quoting: Creak
Quoting: M@GOidCheck out this image I putted in my first post on page 1. There is no way a FX8350 would be on par with a Core i7 4770k if the game is only mono-thread in Windows. And pay attention to the i7 in the top spot, is a 8 core part, like the one Liam uses.
Indeed.
It would need more investigations though, just to be sure that all the cores are effectively used.
Now, if it's true, I'd really be interested in knowing why Asypr couldn't have multi-threading on their port (and I'm talking about the whole game engine multi-threading, not just the renderer). Maybe that was the part of the "evaluation" problem.
It could be anything, time, money, resources. For an AI heavy game, you would have thought it would at least spread that out. It's likely to do with the original engine and how much time it would have taken (for a smaller porter) to do, who knows, I don't, but the game itself clearly only used one core for me.

Getting the 'threaded GL dispatch' code into Mesa is causing some issues, Valve might use a white-list
10 Feb 2017 at 8:06 pm UTC

Quoting: CreakI know that I won't change the mind of all the users in this forum, but if I can convince you @liamdawe that GL threaded is good, but not "that good", and that the game engines can be multi-threaded even without the GL threaded feature. Then maybe you would post new articles that won't get the hopes too high for your users.

As a developer in the game industry for 11 years now, I have some knowledge. I completely understand that you don't have to trust me on what I'm saying, but you have access to people that you trust more (Valve, Feral, Aspyr, ...). Ask them your questions like: "is it possible to do some multi-threading in a game engine even though there is no threaded GL?" or "What kind of algorithms can be multi-threaded in an engine apart from the 3D part?"

On my side, I won't say more about this, because I can feel that I'm getting angry at fighting against hopes and beliefs, and that can be very frustrating.
I'm well aware of the upsides and downsides to it all, as you say I have contacts in many studios and they all complain about OpenGL, especially the multi-threading. An engine being multi-threaded is different to OpenGL, that's obvious I don't think I ever said the are one and the same, so not really sure what you're getting at there.

Croteam say Vulkan 'is the way forward', Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter due in 'weeks' with Vulkan
10 Feb 2017 at 8:04 pm UTC

Quoting: ShmerlNice, but when are they going to release their games on GOG? They aren't some legacy publisher, so what's stopping them?
A lot of the time it's a case of finances, time and GOG apparently not having very good tools for uploads, versioning and so on.

Note: I'm generalising here, not specific to Croteam.

Finances: They split their possible purchases across more stores, if they don't hit the payout threshold on GOG they won't get paid, but if they stick to one store they are more likely to get their money.

Time: They have to do support across another place, think what you want, but that alone will suck up a fair amount of time.

GOG tools: I've heard from a number of people that GOG's upload tools aren't great and they don't allow different versions like Steam do. There is a reason so many actively choose to use Steam for their builds as it's easy to manage lots of different versions, especially when in development or generally updating titles.

Getting the 'threaded GL dispatch' code into Mesa is causing some issues, Valve might use a white-list
10 Feb 2017 at 3:41 pm UTC

Quoting: Creak
Quoting: liamdaweThat's outdated, it's now enabled by default in the driver and NVIDIA stop if it detects that it's reducing performance...apparently.

See this driver update: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/nvidia-37809-beta-driver-released-adds-opengl-threaded-optimizations-by-default-and-more.8940
Be careful here, they're just talking about the threaded GL optimization. My link is about all the other tweaks that are done in the NVIDIA drivers and are game specific.
Ah you're right, wires crossed :)

Getting the 'threaded GL dispatch' code into Mesa is causing some issues, Valve might use a white-list
10 Feb 2017 at 3:30 pm UTC

Quoting: Creak
Quoting: MblackwellNvidia's current driver doesn't have a whitelist for multithreading, instead it enables it on everything and performs some heuristics and disables it on the fly if performance is being affected.
I'm not sure it's "on the fly", I think it's more integrated profiles for specific games, as better explained here: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Nvidia-optimize-specific-games-via-driver-updates?share=1 [External Link]
That's outdated, it's now enabled by default in the driver and NVIDIA stop if it detects that it's reducing performance...apparently.

See this driver update: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/nvidia-37809-beta-driver-released-adds-opengl-threaded-optimizations-by-default-and-more.8940

Getting the 'threaded GL dispatch' code into Mesa is causing some issues, Valve might use a white-list
10 Feb 2017 at 2:36 pm UTC

Quoting: CreakOh "whitelist"... I don't like where this is going...

This is exactly what proprietary NVIDIA and (ex-)AMD drivers do and it has a lot of repercussions on the maintainability and stabilization of the drivers. It is also a pain in the ass to debug since each and every games will have their own special tweaks specified in the drivers, which means more code paths to debug.

Oh this is a BAD idea..
It shouldn't be as complicated as you think, it is after-all only checking a single white-list for one feature to see if they need to look at that code. That's until they make it smart enough to not need the white-list. Sure, it adds a bit of complexity, but everything they add does. Like Marek keeps saying, it will not be enabled by default so users shouldn't run into problems.

Day of Infamy, the WWII FPS has a big polishing update, take a look at my video
10 Feb 2017 at 2:23 pm UTC

Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: liamdaweA single new map and two new game modes aren't something I would consider to be major by themselves though.
2 new maps, both Foy and Crete are playable now :)
One of those maps is a W.I.P so it's not actually finished :)

As for what I would consider, unsure, but not as small as that. It is a major patch, as noted, due to how many tweaks and fixes it does, but since when was two game modes, one map and one w.i.p map huge new features? :P

Day of Infamy, the WWII FPS has a big polishing update, take a look at my video
10 Feb 2017 at 2:07 pm UTC

Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: liamdaweThis update doesn't have any major new features
Dude, new maps and new gamemodes! :D
A single new map and two new game modes aren't something I would consider to be major by themselves though.