Latest Comments by soulsource
Story-driven RPG 'The Thaumaturge' is now Steam Deck Verified
9 May 2024 at 9:06 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: ElamanOpiskelija
Quoting: soulsource
QuoteCreated in Unreal Engine 5
And here we have our reason why it performed poorly initially. Getting Unreal 5 games to run well takes quite a bit of work...

Only in GOL we can get the luxury of reasonable takes like this. Steam forums, on the contrary...
I can only guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's because of the target audience. The Steam userbase is basically a mirror of society as a whole, while here we are mostly people interested in tech stuff.

I, for instance, made the above statement, because I am working with Unreal professionally. Unreal 4 was a lot lighter on the hardware by default than Unreal 5. Not that Unreal 5 couldn't perform well, it just needs a bit more work to get it to do so.

Story-driven RPG 'The Thaumaturge' is now Steam Deck Verified
8 May 2024 at 1:18 pm UTC Likes: 2

QuoteCreated in Unreal Engine 5
And here we have our reason why it performed poorly initially. Getting Unreal 5 games to run well takes quite a bit of work...

The Machine Age DLC for Stellaris out now along with free Andromeda update
8 May 2024 at 1:06 pm UTC Likes: 1

And here I go again, sinking another couple of hours into that game..

Adventure Mode Beta out now for Dwarf Fortress
18 April 2024 at 8:04 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: NathanaelKStottlemyerI really need to get around to buying Dwarf Fortress on Steam. I haven't because I'm a bit scared I'll not be able to manage the new UI. I tried the free version with the new UI and couldn't figure out anything.
The new UI isn't great...

Last time I played, it was also still quite buggy. Basic stuff like building stairs sometimes didn't work at all (building an up-stair from dug-out area into non-dug-out area), other times it was extremely clunky (building stairs from non-dug-out area into dug-out area)...

Linux continues to be above 4% on the desktop
10 April 2024 at 3:04 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor people without big budgets, you can actually be limited in what you can use your computer for just because you don't want to buy (or bloody rent!) the software and you don't know there's another way.
Don't forget about piracy. Most Windows users I know don't care about legality and just pirate whatever they can for their home PCs. Not sure how much this experience can be generalized though.

Dwarf Fortress hits 800,000 sales and no sign of it stopping
8 April 2024 at 2:28 pm UTC Likes: 2

I still prefer the old UI and work assignment though. But I also love the new music... Maybe I should just download the soundtrack and play 0.43...

Old School Rally plans full support for Steam Deck - got me feeling nostalgic
8 April 2024 at 1:39 pm UTC

Quoting: hjahreThey could have tuned the graphics down a notch ;)
https://youtu.be/00-zImTwJOc?si=545gSun4MU-T5T7W
I had a pirated version of this back in the DOS days...
Thanks for bringing back those memories.

(Btw: Does anyone know where one could download a legal copy of this game to play in DOSBox? Seems GoG does not have it .)

Check out the Manjaro Linux lead talk about the Orange Pi NEO gaming handheld
8 April 2024 at 8:43 am UTC Likes: 6

Sorry, but this presentation feels a lot like they took the German Manjaro guy, and forced him to present slides that were originally written in Chinese and translated to English via Google Translate. The horrible AI voice in the advertisement video at the beginning of the presentation doesn't help it either.

I love the Denglish though: "Millimeter-Quadrat".

XZ tools and libraries compromised with a critical issue
30 March 2024 at 10:20 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: kaktuspalme
Quoting: bonkmaykrGentoo users probably having a field day laughing at us right now compiling all their stuff from scratch.

Doesn't change anything if the sources are get from the tarball.
Even worse, Gentoo had marked a potentially affected version as "stable" and rolled it out to their regular (as in: not testing) user-base...

At least they are doing the sane thing and roll back to the last version from the previous maintainer.

EA anticheat arrives for Battlefield V in April, will break it on Linux / Steam Deck
28 March 2024 at 9:27 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Bogomips
Quoting: soulsource
Quoting: BogomipsAnd then making the program itself hard to decompile and analyze at runtime.
The other way 'round. Making the server side secure enough, that even if the whole game were open sourced cheating would be a non-issue.

I agree that security by obfuscation does not work but in a game it depends what we describe as secure enough.

Most of the time the server send a lot of data to the client then wait for the feedback so the cheating happen on the client side that send back a perfect hit (if we talk about FPS) then the server update the other clients.

So what should be secure? If the client data is changed directly in memory, the data itself would be ok but not the result.

We could avoid to send other players' position to the client until they are really visible (could be a huge load on the server and need a fast synchronous connection, the client cannot interpolate anything).

We could cypher and randomize the memory allocation on the client.

Or we can use AI server side to check super human behavior but sometime a lucky reflex can hit in the same area than a bot (but not in the long run indeed).

I think a lot of different tools/methods could be used together but computer resources consumption should also be kept low to be effective. The subject is vast.

Yeah, I was describing my ideal-case scenario, and it's certainly not an easy to solve problem.
If the client gets the information, the player can cheat. If the client does not get the information and has a lag spike, the player might get an unfair disadvantage as they don't see/hear a potential target in time to react...

The client would also need an approximate position in order to hear the targets, and they could still visualize that with a cheat tool to see through walls...