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Latest Comments by soulsource
Crown of Pain could turn into the next great match-3 RPG
11 Mar 2022 at 12:43 pm UTC

Usually I don't like pixel art, but just like Loop Hero, this game's visuals manage to catch my eye.

ELDEN RING is out and Verified for Steam Deck
25 Feb 2022 at 8:09 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Essem
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: EssemI'm kind of confused in regards to how it was verified when the game doesn't seem to work out of the box.
Verified for Deck, which is different to all the distros on desktop.
That's fair, I do wonder what they've done differently on the Deck to make it run however.
The SteamWorks API has a "IsRunningOnSteamDeck()" function. Maybe they go down a different code path wrt. anti cheat if they detect it's on the Deck?

1 week from release, Steam Deck hits well over 640 Playable games
18 Feb 2022 at 4:44 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: thelimeydragonI do wonder if they really are going to go through everything. There is a ton of just complete junk/trash on Steam that even if it did "work" it's still pure rubbish that no one except for gag-gifts would buy.

things like this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1595780/Inno_World/ [External Link]

and this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1551910/Race_On_Ice_2021_Pro/ [External Link]
That "Race On Ice" is basically Unreal's Vehicle Template with a tiny bit of UI, some quickly hacked-together levels, and that's it...

If there were more than one week of work needed to make it, I'd be very much surprised...

Hades from Supergiant Games gets improvements for the Steam Deck
16 Feb 2022 at 4:08 pm UTC

Quoting: pbYes, please. I hope they do that with their other games, too. I'd gladly replay Bastion or Transistor on the Deck. I imagine there's not a lot to fix to make sure they get that tick.
I guess they need to add on-screen keyboard support for SteamWorks (if they don't have that already), but that is relatively straightforward.

Eggnut decide not to bring Backbone to Linux officially
10 Feb 2022 at 9:44 am UTC Likes: 13

Quoting: dpanterAnd yet, somehow they managed to make a Mac version of this Unreal Engine 4 game.
Single player, no anti-cheat or anti-tamper as far as I can see, it's using FMOD, XAudio, Bink2... so what was the problem here? :unsure:
I can only think of one potential explanation:
They focused fully on Windows development, and treated all other platforms as "let's get those working later". This means that all engine issues they encountered and fixed/worked around during development were those that affect the windows build. If you have one of those per week of development, well, that's filed under "overhead".
All engine issues that are specific to Linux were left undiscovered until they finally started the porting process, and they probably were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of problems...
In other words: "Expected that porting to Linux is clicking a button in the Editor, but turned out it's actually a list of 100 Unreal Engine bugs we need to work around or fix. We don't have the resources for that."

(But again, this is just a potential explanation for which I am sadly speaking out of experience with another Unreal game and another target platform - which happened in the end, but one year after the Windows release. I do not know if this applies to this particular case.)

Over 120 titles are now Steam Deck Verified
4 Feb 2022 at 2:20 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: inlinuxdudeGenital Jousting? Haven't heard of that one... it sounds.... interesting.. haha
I haven't played it yet, but seen some gameplay videos. It looks absolutely hilarious.

Valve has tested 'thousands' for the Steam Deck, 60 currently Verified
1 Feb 2022 at 1:56 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoImagine being a proud owner of an SteamDeck and, after hitting "play" to That game, You only see this: *snip*
Quoting: Liam DaweThat wouldn't get Deck Verified though.
This is a placeholder video put there by Valve until their backend finishes transcoding the game's video files to a codec supported by Proton.
I do not know why they decided to transcode all h.264 videos of all games, but my best guess is that it's cheaper than paying for an actual h.264 license for Proton.

For details see the discussion in the Steamworks Developers Group [External Link] about this.

Valve has tested 'thousands' for the Steam Deck, 60 currently Verified
1 Feb 2022 at 10:06 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: BeamboomI find some of those whitelisted as downright *weird* that they've spent time on testing. Looks so ridiculously random.
They've got unpublished test results. The initial batches of published test results were just to test the store interface, with limited numbers in case it didn't work. I expect they wanted a range of ways that the testing failed so that they tested each part of the interface.
Ah, that makes sense. Gotta say, I too was first thinking, "Oh, if they've tested thousands that's great! Hang on, if they've only got sixty to show for it, that's really bad!"
But yeah, probably it's not like that. I hope.
Another thing that plays into this is that in order to get the green checkmark, games need go get Steam Deck certified [External Link]. One requirement for certification is that one of the two on-screen keyboard APIs of Steam needs to be supported.
The more convenient of those APIs currently cannot be tested without an actual Steam Deck [External Link] (and not every game studio has access to those yet). The other one was (up to the Steam Deck announcement...) only relevant for Big Picture mode, so there was very little incentive for developers to actually support it.

This means that games that have reached the end of their maintenance phase will very likely never get the green checkbox, only the yellow one.

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition gets an official HD model and texture pack
27 Nov 2021 at 6:27 pm UTC

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: soulsource
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: Arcadius-8606Anyone have the beamdog client installed properly? Thought I would give this some support and it's a no good install for POP OS 21.04.

Harfbuzz version too old error.
Yeah, this is one of the issues with how people package things. It makes more sense to have a build server set up. Create a repo for the current distributions at time for release, then add a new repo as they come out, and have some post install stuff for upgrades.

This way a new package automatically gets built with the correct dependencies. Problem is getting the build server to handle the main distributions.
Building games can take hours. If you want to do a separate build for all major distributions, that's a massive waiting time...

I'd rather package once on Debian Stable and then just test if the built package installs on other distros.
In addition, I'd do what Unity does, and link a lot of libraries statically. Not all, of course, only those where it makes sense from an upgrade- and security-standpoint. For applications packaged by the distributor static linkage is not a good idea, but for standalone programs packaged by someone outside the distribution I think the advantages (being independent of system library versions, no need to integrate with the package manager,...) outweigh the disadvantages (higher RAM usage, higher HDD usage, responsibility for security updates,...).
This is about the distribution clients, not the game itself.
Sorry for misunderstanding. I thought you were talking about building/packaging of games.
What do you mean by "distribution client" though? Distributors build their packages themselves though, so how could their packaging influence games (apart from shipping older libraries than those the game links against - what is again a problem of the game packaging targeting too new library versions)?

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition gets an official HD model and texture pack
26 Nov 2021 at 7:30 pm UTC

Stupid question:
The HD textures seem to be breaking shadow casting for me. Anyone else has this issue?