Quoting: dude

Quoting: toorBut I don't really understand the effort that was put into it. Isn't Unity supposed to be kind of a one-push-button-port from the first place? Are there a lot of windows specific third parties in this game?

That's also my question. Unity game ported by Feral!?
Oviously the result must be a win as it is but why?

Thanks anyway Feral!

So I did a little research on the other Feral ports. It's as simple as running
strings LifeIsStrange | grep -i feral | less
strings LifeIsStrange | grep -i idx | less
on the first game (Life is Strange). Initially, I did just 'strings' to see anything interesting and found that 'feral' is indeed the watermark in their ports. Mentioned in some window, networking and input related functions like 16CFeralNetManager, 26CFeralGameWindowController, 19CLinuxFeralRawInput etc. Also, there's Mac OS path for the source files it seems, weird: /Volumes/BobSource/lifeisstrange/Companies/Feral/Development/Products/LifeIsStrange/Source/Src/D3D9Drv/Src/D3D9Commands.cpp

Idx comes from their IndirectX wrapper or rather, API implementation, referenced in the functions like 13IdxDXGIDevice, 21IdxD3D11ComputeShader and so on (the number is the string length, the common mangling for C++ method names but not quite the same I see with G++). So if these two traits are present in the binary, most likely Feral used their standard method of porting. I checked this on LiS and Dawn of War 2 at least.

All that said, LiS:BTS doesn't contain any of these strings so it must be a "native" Unity port, i.e. without porting the engine itself. It's logical, of course, if the engine already supports the platform but still one can have doubts. However, there are some interesting libraries in the game's directory like libLiSBtS_MoreDepthPrecision.so (not enough bits in the depth buffer that caused artifacts I guess? That's an interesting way to fix it) and a patch for libSDL in sdl_override/patch.

The game itself works absolutely flawless, smooth, fast, looks great. I completed the first episode on my big TV screen with the Steam Controller, loved it! The developers definitely took all we loved in the first game and carefully built a new game on top of that. The facial animations became much better! I'm used to quite exaggerated emotions and "wooden" (tired, uhuh) faces in games when they are animated by hand, i.e. not captured from actors, but here's something new: they made pretty subtle and life-like expressions. And not like in Disney/Pixar cartoons (good, smooth, detailed but not realistic) but like they should be in real life. Not for every character, not everywhere, but when they do, it shows.

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Quoting: jens

Quoting: YoRHa-2B

Quoting: GuestPerhaps we should thank the developers first?

He's not entirely wrong though, if this was a simple hobby project, nobody would fix their drivers for it and Khronos wouldn't even know it exists.

May I ask you how did you get started with DXVK? What I mean is, was it Valve that approached you first and had asked you to start DXVK? Or the other way around, did you started with DXVK for another reason and was it Valve that got interested in you/DXVK? Or did something entirely different happened to get you involved.

Hell yeah, I'd like to read the whole story with the details. Maybe Liam could interview YoRHa-2B? Not often such a "garage project" becomes viable and important and gains this much attention from the industry.

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Imaging being a one man creating a technology that moves a whole Linux platform forward that much. The best graphics API out there (that is Vulkan, of course) is going to add functions for your project specifically, not just for some particular vague goal. That's like being a second Torvalds I think, maybe even more (if we compare the code written by Linus himself and the amount of code accepted as patches from others). Yeah, funding from Valve is important but I've never seen this much progress in this little time. Two years ago D3D11 on Wine was something phantom and fragile, not ready for anything. According to Wikipedia, Overwatch was possible to run on Wine on Dec 12, 2016. D3D9 took years to be more or less complete and it's still not perfect, from features to performance. And yet DXVK provides nearly native performance and almost no artifacts in all these modern games! I guess Vulkan is also a big part of the success for this particular task of mapping a whole graphics API to the hardware from scratch. @YoRHa-2B does a marvelous work and certainly pushes Linux gaming, many thanks for that!

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Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: liamdaweUpdate: OpenGL, not Vulkan.

Pretty sure that's why it was delayed. They were probably planning to use Vulkan at first but ran into problems becouse the game requires stream output support which cannot be implemented properly on Vulkan yet. If thats the case then they basically had two choises: Either wait for Khronos to develop a suitable Vulkan extension, or fall back on OpenGL. Looks like they went with the latter. Maybe they initially did plan the former but changed their mind when Proton was released since the game works with PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1 %command%. Then again, this is just speculation on my part so I could be wrong.

From what I found this is only the case with DXVK specifically which is not something Feral uses, they have their own D3D implementation. Also, Unity3D already has native Linux support (and Vulkan too, but I'm not sure if it's stable/usable as of now) so I doubt Feral re-ported the engine using their own technology, it doesn't make sense. Most probably it was a middleware issue that took them this long to solve. Whatever the cause, I'm happy the game releases next week! Ready to visit the Feral store once again despite the economic situation in Russia right now.

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Hell yeah, another Polish title! If you played some slavic games before you know they have kinda unique spirit in them. Some sort of soul and openness I think.

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Mavericks is a revolutionary MMO tactical shooter developed by Automaton in partnership with Improbable and CryTek

Interesting. This might mean they are ready to release CryENGINE on Linux. Big if true.

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This is a great game, I played it for a while with my friends. Really massive scale, spectacular battles and demanding for good APM. The performance issues are REAL, we had huge battles with hundreds of units moving altogether through a sneaky portal on the enemy planet and the simulation slowed to a literal crawl. It wasn't lagging or rubberbanding, it was in slow motion. Hope they'll fix that eventually. If you played the original PA and it was kinda meh, try TITANS. It's overhauled, it's the game we were promised years ago.

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I'd love to play a Hotline Miami (-like) game with a story that actually makes sense without reading any 3rd-party sources, explanations and conspiracy theories. Like, just makes sense by itself. You play it and understand what this all is about.

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Tested Mass Effect 2, kinda wonky experience. Sound disappeared at the first launch, the game crashed on starting a new game (the error window was behind the main game window and the loading animation was playing over and over again so I waited patiently). The resolution was set to 800x600 but it's probably expected from an old game, I changed it manually to 1920x1200. It also said my hw is not supported so I should expect bugs. Then it crashed right after creating Shep but I restarted it and loaded the save, all was fine after that.

Also, tried Big Picture with Steam Controller. First time it also launched weirdly, probably in a minimized window or so, then it was fine. The game doesn't support controllers so I chose a popular configuration and it was good. I remember ME2 was quite solid on pure Wine but it was about 6 years ago. And yeah, graphics look quite dated now after all these AAA ported games, especially RotTR.

tl;dr I feel old now, thanks GabeN.

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Basically, software freedom is like having unit tests. Tests don't guarantee your software doesn't have errors (and freedom doesn't prevent things from going wrong) but they allow you to notice bad behavior and fix it early, before you rolled the changes into production. Shit happens all the time but FOSS allows you to fix it. Whether yourself or outsource it, still you're in control. Proprietary software literally means that someone else, the proprietor, is in control and you're just allowed to use it. Maybe. Sometimes. And don't do this and that. Never. And also that. Then pay us.

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