SS3 is totally awesome. I completed it twice, first solo and another time was around NY2015 with a dozen of Steam friends. We screwed up the enemy power settings so they were as tough as if there were only one player (and there were 10+) so we just pierced through levels destroying everything on sight. I suspect no one got the story at this speed. The story isn't very important but still a good addition to the massacre as there's a lot of Sam's jokes.

In the end, it was a great fun and we managed to "speedrun" the game in one evening. I also noticed that a couple of Linux players, including me, were loading before everyone else on each map. Even though the other player had HDD and I was on SSD, we were always first. Nice touch on optimization I think. Overall, the performance is one of the best among modern AAA-games on Linux. The graphics are still top notch, there are many secrets around and the maps are HUGE. They often feel like the open-world games ones.

If you don't have time to complete it solo, bring your friends on board like we did, it doubles and triples the fun!

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Yes, but again, it's not very suitable for gaming rigs. No advanced audio info, nothing about gamepads/joysticks/race wheels. Though it shows the DE/WM info and properly describes the CPU.

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Quoting: tuubiWhy reinvent the wheel? Just copy-paste the contents of Steam's System Information dialog. I don't know if this feature would be worth it though. Lots of parser code just to save the user a handful of clicks.

Sure, that would be the easy way. However, Steam doesn't show the exact CPU model for me for some reason while it's available at /proc/cpuinfo and the frequency is also off by 400 MHz. Though I don't think there's a need to replicate the Steam stats, it's better to complement them. And for that we need more info than Steam provides. As an example, it's possible to get the audio info from PulseAudio without asking the user, the number of channels, the exact sound card name (Steam only tells the short name), whether the microphone is connected and so on. It's also possible to detect the DE (for me Steam shows the WM name only though I don't have a DE so maybe it just knows that), the availability of gamepad/racing wheel, the mouse model and number of buttons it has etc. Yes, it's a considerable effort, I'm not saying it's a one evening task, but that stat would be much more interesting and complete than the basic Steam summary.

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How about writing a simple bash script that gets most of the related system information automatically and allows the user to copypaste it to the site (just a text area that's parsed automatically would be fine)? Just like Steam does. It could also cover some audio configuration that was mentioned here some time ago. And of course, the user should be able to correct any field that was filled incorrectly by that script.

As it should be cross-distro compatible, starting a github project might be a good idea so everyone could participate.

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Quoting: Spl-iteasy, get more sales, then delay like mad, then deny ever promising a linux version

anyone out there that wants to buy a tinfoil hat ? I have a few in stock

Pffft, hat isn't needed. The tactic worked flawlessly with Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Carmageddon remake, why stop now? The old FOSS rule says: release early, release often; the new rule is: announce early, release never. Don't forget to grab the cash tho'!

Well, anyway, not everyone is bad. Even those who postponed (read: cancelled) the Linux version not necessarily are scammers. They just need to be open about issues with other platforms and post updates on their progress if there any or lack thereof. And of course, refund those who paid for the Linux version.

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Quoting: Guest355.11 has worked very well for me (GTX 660). It’s the 358 series that made Steam crash. But I don’t know about "NS2".

Natural Selection 2. I tried 352.79 today, Steam indeed doesn't crash but NS2 does. I suspect that the crash was fixed in 36x.xx on the driver's side as it was present for pretty long time, random crash just during the game. NVIDIA even investigated it and pointed to the game binary but I suspect they made a game-specific fix in the driver eventually like they do for lots of Windows games. And I'm grateful for that.

The performance isn't very different in Tomb Raider between 352.79 and 361.19 actually. Maybe 1-2 FPS at most while in the heavy zone of the map. I had about 15-18 FPS there, the very beginning of the Roth arc. BTW, setting __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 helps to get another 3 FPS while loading the CPU for 50% more. Normally I have 200% (it's actually using threading, yay!) and after enabling the optimization I've got 250-280%. To easily switch it on I've created a script like this:
#!/bin/sh
env __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 "$@"
and saved it under the name /usr/local/bin/glto, then I put "glto %command%" to the launch parameters of the game and voila.

Too bad Feral still hasn't sorted out the issue with XCOM 2 as it has such a massive performance hit on 361.xx branch. It doesn't really look like a driver-only issue (the new GLVND architecture and such) since other games aren't affected.

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Quoting: Mountain ManActually, the Linux version of XCOM 2 ran comparable to and even slightly better than the Windows version. It was Firaxis who "downgraded" some of the visuals in the performance patch. Feral just ported those changes into the Linux version.

View video on youtube.com

Wow, that's quite surprising! Then I guess some hope's restored, though XCOM 2 was released recently and costs much more than Tomb Raider after three years. So it's much more likely to be optimized. The driver issue still stands as I see and unfortunately 35x.xx branch just isn't for me, NS2 crashes with it frequently and Steam crashes as well when changing game category.

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Quoting: pedrojmartmSo unoptimized you say. I think is very well optimized, it is a Dx game that now runs on OpenGL.

Look at the link Liam provided [External Link], it shows that even Wine is better and, being a brilliant piece of software, it's still not a sentient programmer that's able to debug and optimize the game code. It just translates D3D calls to OpenGL and performs much better than the OpenGL version of the engine written (presumably) from scratch. Why is it so?

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I have no doubt Feral Interactive will push out future patches to improve things.

Yeah, just remember Shadow of Mordor and XCOM 2, how improved they were after the initial Linux release. Hint: just a little, nowhere near the Windows performance and sometimes by downgrading the settings like in XCOM 2.

It's pretty sad to admit but "semi-native" ports from eON perform much better, sometimes even better than the original (ARMA 3). They suffer from stuttering on shader compilation, they crash or freeze from time to time (BS:I wasn't fixed if I'm not mistaken) but when they work, they're better than fully native ports from Feral.

Don't get me wrong, I love Feral and their work, they've already brought several AAA titles to Linux which aren't available via Wine or otherwise. And I don't care much about Windows and FPS there as I don't have Windows for 8 years now. Those are just facts about optimization that probably could be improved further. I'd like to read some technical insights from the Feral programmers, how they do their ports, what challenges they meet, how they profile the game and fix the bottlenecks etc. Maybe knowing the technical difficulties and that some things are just plain impossible to implement fast enough would spice it up a bit.

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The unique diplomacy card-game system isn't covered here as well as the budget system (you have 3 minutes to spend the budget and then it's converted to research or whatever but money is basically lost) and Newtonian fleet dynamics which may feel not quite good at times (but it's realistic!). The game has a lot of unique features, maybe because of that it's not too popular, sadly. People want to have something familiar but instead they're overwhelmed with new concepts.

I also had some severe multiplayer issues like heavy CPU hogging when the game is paused and weird ship desyncs (it was reported), would be interesting to check if it's fixed.

Overall, I easily recommend this game for everyone who wants to try something fresh and unusual in the genre. You won't be disappointed.

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