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Latest Comments by rkfg
Prepare a glass for some more Wine as DXVK 0.62 is out with possible performance improvements
14 Jul 2018 at 10:13 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: legluondunetIs WIne and its derivated (DVK...) the future of Linux gaming?
Game developers could find here an easy way to port their games for Linux gamers.
In the end, the only thing that should truly matter is the actual end-result. Does it work, does it work well and is it supported? If a game developer packages it with some form of Wine and you can tick those three...then it shouldn't really matter much.
We're all aware of the games that has a Windows version working better in Wine than the native version. While it's kinda shame, if you think about this for a minute it only means that sometimes Wine is worth a shot. Native versions and purity is good to have but not always an option, really. Wine is mostly considered a necessary evil because it's often cumbersome to set up and mess with the library overrides and tweaks. If the developer/publisher/porter do that for you so that your experience is the same "click the play button", does it still worry you? I think I can happily live with that. And I guess Gaben is moving in exactly that direction.

We Happy Few has a brand new trailer out
13 Jul 2018 at 10:36 pm UTC Likes: 1

Well, whatever. I can still hope that they chose to publish this game because it was close to their own genre preference. Personally, I'm more interested in the story mode (and not sandbox) and if it's something like Borderlands, Saints Row or GTA (without vehicles) I'd be one of those happy few for sure. The genres on Steam don't tell much though the reviews are pretty good.

We Happy Few has a brand new trailer out
13 Jul 2018 at 10:27 pm UTC Likes: 1

Yeah, but like I said they're publishing the game. Usually the publisher has some preference or style for the games they release so some key elements are expected. Except the bigger names like Microsoft that released too many different games already.

We Happy Few has a brand new trailer out
13 Jul 2018 at 10:22 pm UTC

It certainly looks interesting (and weird). Kinda Bioshock × Postal mashup with eerie background. Looks like it has a story but at the same time it has crafting, unlocks and probably some grind? Hard to tell. But hey, Gearbox is the publisher so no wonder it might have a Borderlands feel as well (a game that I adore a lot, too).

DXVK for Vulkan-based D3D11 in Wine version 0.61 is out with improved performance
29 Jun 2018 at 9:37 am UTC Likes: 2

There was a rumor that Valve hired the DKVX developer and considering all the other things (MoltenVK, active participation in Vulkan spec and drivers development, Linux support etc.) I can speculate that a year from now or maybe even earlier, given that DXVK seems to be very focused on GTA5 and TW3, they're going to introduce partly-supported Steam Windows games on Linux and probably Mac via DXVK => MoltenVK. I think it's quite the reason behind the acquisition and open-sourcing MoltenVK, to make it work with the already very good DXVK. Just like they do for the keyboard+mouse games in Big Picture (it's unsupported but you can try if you dare). Steam might create a separate wine prefix for each game, automatically install missing libraries and do overrides if required and in the end provide an experience similar to PlayOnLinux or Lutris. Or even incorporate those projects to some extent.

The bridges are built from both sides. The porters and devs are porting to Linux, Valve is doing their part for those who didn't agree to for some reason. We, the customers, benefit from all those efforts as well as Valve and the devs.

Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass has new screenshots and a much bigger world
13 Jun 2018 at 8:33 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: rkfgThat Russian word on the crane means "sunflower seeds" it's so weird. The graphics look even more detailed than before, truly badass. I guess this is exactly the type of games that would benefit greatly from using Vulkan, they could fill the screen with hundreds of enemies using all the cores efficiently.
Just to keep expectations in place: using Vulkan gives a lot, but doesn't mean that hundreds of enemies can be on-screen at once. Especially if they're animated and need some form of interaction with. Such scenarios can quickly become GPU bound, or data transfer bound. Vulkan will not help in those cases.
There's more to it than that, but broadly speaking Vulkan only helps if CPU bound.
Sure, but not just CPU bound due to whatever reason. Say, if the game is bound by AI or complex sound calculation Vulkan isn't going to help either. But it helps when you need to feed different types of resources to the GPU (from my understanding after watching the Feral talk), like constructed pipelines, textures, shaders (or is it the same as pipelines? Not sure) and vertex data. I'm not an expert and I have no good knowledge of what exact part of a renderer could load the CPU apart from sending data to the GPU.

So yeah, maybe it's not that beneficial for many identical objects (instancing helps with that) BUT it could help with streaming a lot of data for big, seamless and diverse environments. And SS4 promises exactly that.

I found a short but sweet presentation from NVIDIA [External Link] that shows how one can benefit from Vulkan's multithreading support. Basically, it's updating buffers and shader compilation in parallel. For example, you can update animation data (which is done fully on GPU in modern engines I believe) for multiple objects at the same time instead of doing that sequentially.

Valve are easing up on what content is allowed on Steam
13 Jun 2018 at 6:30 pm UTC Likes: 1

Exactly! There's no power in following trends, agendas and religions. Allowing all of them at the same time is what the true strength is.

Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass has new screenshots and a much bigger world
11 Jun 2018 at 9:50 am UTC Likes: 4

That Russian word on the crane means "sunflower seeds" it's so weird. The graphics look even more detailed than before, truly badass. I guess this is exactly the type of games that would benefit greatly from using Vulkan, they could fill the screen with hundreds of enemies using all the cores efficiently.

Not a single desert level was created while making this game.
Wow, so there are people who hated those. I wonder why, they're cool once in a while for a change.

The Endless Mission is a single-player story game that allows you to modify the world
11 Jun 2018 at 9:29 am UTC

The link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzxm4WtVUt0 [External Link] isn't displayed as embedded video and only https://www.youtube.com [External Link] becomes an actual clickable link. So to open the video I have to copy it manually and paste into a new tab.

Same issue in this comment which is weird as in my own above it's linkified properly.

The Endless Mission is a single-player story game that allows you to modify the world
11 Jun 2018 at 8:56 am UTC

Those interested in metagenres could try The Magic Circle (btw, Liam, take a look at that youtube url in the article, seems to be a parser error). It's short but fun, although it doesn't mix real genres it allows to somehow reprogram the world from within.