Quoting: badberThere are actually rules that forbid simply discussing the ethics of piracy on this site? Wow. That seems... Orwellian.

I don't think the site wishes to be seen promoting the use of piracy, however the site has no issue discussing the ethics of piracy. At least that's the impression I got from reading the comments.

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Quoting: liamdaweFor once, I am inviting discussion on it due to my own confusion on the legalities of roms.

That said, I still wont accept people talking up piracy like it's their right.

Discussing it is one thing, talking it up like it's totally acceptable is another.

Depending on the country you are in, making a rom (or backup) is not illegal. I believe this is the case for the USA and UK. Acquiring a digital copy of content you do not legally own is illegal.

If you own the content but download another persons backup, then you start moving into the morally grey area. I believe it is illegal in the USA and UK, however a lot of people consider it as acquiring the backup without all the effort.

As for the causes of piracy that is exceptionally varied. Some of the reasons I've heard are:
** People who wish to enjoy content but cannot afford it.
** Children unable to afford it and/or the parent denying it.
** People wish to own content that can no longer be legally acquired.
** Self-entitlement (any non/excuse will do).
** Not on preferred platform.

I'm curious whether the length of copyright (protects the content for 95 to 120 years) has encouraged piracy.

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Presumably they'll release before Rocket league.

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Listening to a few Dota developer videos they state that Dota is not really draw call limited. It doesn't make enough calls to throttle DirectX or OpenGL, so you won't see much of a leap in performance with Vulkan.

From the benchmarks between OpenGL and Vulkan on Linux it would suggest the problem is driver (or render implementation) bound. As for the performance variance between Windows and Linux, a mixture of driver, compositor, X11, and a whole heap of other things. I suspect some developers will look into what is causing this variance.

Bare in mind this is from a game in-which the DirectX 9 implementation is still the fastest, even compared to DX10/11 renderers.

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I'm not surprised. Windows is still the primary Steam platform when dealing with the VR rat race, Linux/Mac is not a priority particularly when the other competitors are not competing in that space.

Linux/SteamOS seems to be on a slow boil, it appears that Valve do not plan on making a big splash and encouraging/forcing users over. They want users to make the decision in their own time, eventually Linux/SteamOS will reach a tipping point for that particular user and they'll switch.

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Quoting: Mountain Man"Mac/Linux ports are one of my top priorities. I will start looking into it seriously very soon, I promise."

Translation: "Mac/Linux ports aren't my top priority, and I haven't even started looking into it. I make no promises."

If your game isn't coded from the very beginning with Linux and Mac support in mind then it's obviously not a top priority.

I would like to disagree with this comment, but it rings too much truth.

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Praise the Omnissiah [External Link].

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I am very happy with this news, if this is indeed the case.

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I look forward to its Linux release.

Any news on Rocket League, was it not meant to be released before the Xbox One version?

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OpenGL has a fair amount of hurdles that make it fundamentally slow. The two major ones from my experience is the state baggage and it realtime processing of commands. When an OpenGL command is made the CPU instantly goes off and starts communicating with the GPU. It's like a postman being given a letter and going to the house straight away to deliver it.

Vulkan on the other hand batches, you issue and command and it waits, it waits till the buffer is full and only starts processing them when you've told it to. This is like giving the postman a large box of letters and telling them to go deliver them all.

The two processing styles have advantages and disadvantages. But for games that issue a lot of commands the round-trip approach of OpenGL starts to add up in relation to time. To make things worse OpenGL retains a lot of state, uploading new geometry will deny other commands from being processed until the upload is complete, this happens as it's likely that the next command will be impacted by the new geometry.

Vulkan gets round this by using Command Buffers. You can upload geometry in one buffer while issuing commands in another buffer. If a command is dependent on the geometry add it to the Command Buffer that is uploading the geometry. This approach allows the developer to inform the GPU what is dependent on what. Side Note: This part is usually when a driver vendor would step in and start taking shortcuts.

I look forward to hearing more. :)

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