Croteam are continuing to be one of my favourite developers

They are the favorite AAA-developer! IIRC, they were the first to announce and deliver the visually stunning AAA title, Serious Sam 3, on Linux. Valve don't quite count, of course they would have ported all their games if they started all this. But Croteam not only jumped on the Linux train first, they delivered a great game with astonishing performance and visuals right from the first release AND they continue to polish it and their other titles further with Vulkan and even VR. They're also very open and are not afraid of tech talk on Steam forums discussing graphics tricks and performance optimizations in general. That's rare nowadays and I appreciate it.

Of course, in terms of released titles Feral are way ahead but among the game developers, not porters, Croteam shine the most brightly (for me, of course).

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They have some issues with AMD (as usual) and libraries versions. For some people it works with the shipped libraries, for others strictly with the system ones. The video cutscenes also don't work for everyone. I had almost no issues, except some Alt+Tab/Fullscreen crashes, maybe it's already fixed.

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In case you didn't google it, here is the cheat [External Link]. It's a unique beast because it's totally FOSS so it must be much easier for VAC to detect than private cheats.

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4 times might be a bit of a stretch but hey, better safe than sorry! I usually multiply by two and it's mostly fine.

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The game itself looks gorgeous and the devs are nice. Kornel Kisielewicz, the main developer, regularly streams his livecoding on Twitch so the game is partially opensource already (if you can keep up with the walls of code). And they ponder the idea to maybe opensourcing the engine later (but don't quote me on that! Just heard it on one of the streams a while ago). On a side note, it's really good to stream your work progress, explaining things to the audience helps yourself better understand it [External Link].

I hope it'll come up really polished because the devs are mainly Polish (badum tsssss) and we know a lot of innovative and just great titles from Poland (CDPR's The Witcher, Flying Wild Hog's Shadow Warrior, Techland's Dead Island/Dying Light, 11 Bit Studios' This War of Mine etc. to name a few), and they're pretty friendly to us, the Linux folks. I dunno, Polish games just feel different to me, in a good way, for whatever reason. And I think Jupiter Hell is not going to disappoint as well!

EDIT: completely unrelated, but after this much time the devs have to learn to set realistic deadlines on KS. They always require 2x-3x time they promised initially, no exceptions, it happens to everyone, everywhere, all the time (me included)! It's December already and they planned Early Access in November, now it's pushed to March. But it's so much better to plan it on, say, July 2018 and instead deliver earlier! Not that I don't have anything to play in the meanwhile and of course I'm not complaining, but it's still surprising.

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You haven't played "To The Moon"?! That's absolutely inexcusable, go get it and play! A rare gem with pretty simple but charming graphics and lovely music. Not everyone likes it, have to admit, but same could be said about any game. It's important not to "oversell" a title as it happened to me with Undertale. I had my expectations raised way too high so in the end it was not that exciting at all. But I would cautiously assume that if one likes romantic anime, "To The Moon" is a must play, it has all the required ingredients. Of course, I'll get "Finding Paradise" as well.

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Quoting: Seegras

Quoting: hardpenguinBut most of Linux users use Steam in English.

My whole system runs in English, even though it's not my native tongue. It even runs British English, because otherwise the spellchecking is totally WRONG ;).

Huh, same here though I'm russian. There are several reasons behind that. It's much easier to google for any error messages and issues in English, the answers are much more constructive and useful usually (in Russian I often find highly upvoted lame jokes instead of a real solution). Also Steam Linux games have a long history of issues of all sorts when run in other than English locale. Like non-working input or startup crashes. It's being constantly fixed but really it's easier just switch to an English locale and forget about that.

And I also use en_GB.UTF-8, not because of spellchecker but because in the US they have that absolutely nonsensical AM/PM bs (they can't even agree on whether midnight is 12 AM or 12 PM, lolwut).

EDIT: Oh, this thread is a month old, haven't noticed.

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Quoting: emptythevoidThis is interesting because I've suspected a <recent> loss of FPS in Borderlands 2, a game I play regularly. I'll have to check what nvidia driver I'm using at the moment on my 970.

I wish we had a field and an API here on GoL to autofill the current videodriver version or a commit/version of Mesa build (or even most of the fields). These days it's as crucial as the hardware configuration. It could be as simple as a cronjob/systemd timer that runs a script once a day. The script collects that info and updates it on the site using a private API token for the user. Also would be great to have a BB-code (and a corresponding button to insert it) like [mygpu] or [myhw] that inserts all the relevant data into your comment as it is at the moment of posting, so it doesn't autoupdate later.

The use case is simple, a new game/port comes out and many people post things like "it runs great for me!" or "stutters like a dying horse" and so on. Would be handy to put that tag so that others know on what exact configuration it happens without the need to click "View PC info" each time which can also be updated later so it becomes irrelevant.

What do you think, Liam?

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Unfortunately, I only see one scenario of noticeable Linux share growth and it's a nasty one: Linux exclusives. The thing that Valve denied right off the bat. But seriously, the Windows gamers don't see any benefits to switch right now. Why bother with switching if everything already works on Windows? Yeah, Win 10 telemetry, ads, updates, bla-bla-bla, but that's still not enough to change the platform. It's like relocating to another country or maybe even anouther planet. It's not something you'd consider until you're absolutely done with the world around you as it currently is. And it usually takes a lot of time and hardships to endure. We're not there yet and the only force to push them as I see it is the same damn exclusives that sold trilliards of Switches, PS4, XBox and so on.

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They've posted a link [External Link] to apply for the beta. You'll need to sign an NDA (in electronic form so basically just click a button). There's an interesting field: About Yourself: *Why do you think you will make a good beta tester?

I think for us, Linux gamers, this is an easy one (I'm not saying you should just copypaste the following sentences into that box of course!). We're well known as the best bug reporters among casual gamers (not professional QA staff I mean) so the developers might expect stacktraces, syscall logs and even GPU profiling. Tell them about your own skills in this field, whether you're familiar with gdb and such tools, locating/reading/analyzing/sending logs, reproducing and localizing issues (both gamebreaking like crashes or freezes and logical like gameplay mechanics not working as expected) etc.

Sometimes making the game run is a so fun challenge that it's a game itself. The devs also seem to highly appreciate this, look at this thread [External Link] for a good example. But of course, the respect has to be mutual, if the dev doesn't care about us and don't even reply to bug reports, well, expect the same from the players.

Proxy Studios has an exceptionally good record in my book, they absolutely do care about the Linux gamers and they do fix the Linux-specific bugs reported. So if you want to make the upcoming game better, wait no more and apply for the test!

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