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Latest Comments by soulsource
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They've got unpublished test results.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?

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition gets an official HD model and texture pack
26 Nov 2021 at 8:19 am UTC

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,...).

APT 2.3.12 package manager released, will no longer let you break everything
18 Nov 2021 at 4:13 pm UTC Likes: 12

I consider catering to users who intentionally ignore critical warnings a step in the wrong direction.

I'm not trying to be elitist, but seriously, if there's a very clearly worded meessage telling the user that they are going to break their system, it's the user's fault if they type in "do as I say"...

Kingdom Come: Deliverance gets shown off on the Steam Deck
17 Nov 2021 at 1:14 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: rustybroomhandleAgain, sorry for being a broken record, but devs just do not realize the amount of heavy lifting done for them by Valve/partners/community and probably don't appreciate it nearly enough.
This.
There is a steamworks forum about Steam Deck for game devs, and if you look in there, you get a glimpse of how much they actually do. There's also a lot of work going on beyond "just" being compatible to Windows APIs.

Here's some of what we've learned about the Steam Deck
13 Nov 2021 at 10:50 pm UTC Likes: 9

Quoting: elmapul"- SteamOS will have a read-only immutable main filesystem by default. Updates will be distributed as a whole image and so it will replace it. There will also be a developer mode to let you modify the filesystem."

that is the part i dont get...
how they plan to allow people to install stuff then?
i mean, either you will have to rely on stuff that dont mess with the filesystem (eg: flatpaks, app images) stuff that dont install, update or remove dependences.
or you have to use developer mode to install anything that is not on steam.
Yeah, it pretty much reads like they don't expect people to install stuff anywhere except for their Steam Library folder...
I guess the argument here is that the Steam Deck is mostly meant as a gaming device. That standpoint is understandable imho, as without external peripherals the device is not usable for much else.

If I were to use the Steam Deck in Desktop Mode, I honestly would nuke SteamOS in favour of a less gaming-centered Linux distro though.
(Okay, we all know I'm going to do that anyhow, because maintaining a Gentoo install is my favourite game, and the Gentoo team keeps releasing new levels for it. :grin:)

System76 creating their own desktop environment written in Rust
9 Nov 2021 at 5:34 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: soulsourceI just remember that I was annoyed enough to replace Ubuntu by Debian due to this, and to never look back...
You say that, but isn't that a Gentoo logo next to your avatar?? :grin:
Yes, but that came much later and not for any work-related stuff (if I could use Linux for work nowadays, I'd still be running Debian on those machines - the same for servers, btw.). Also, Gentoo isn't Ubuntu, is it? :wink:

System76 creating their own desktop environment written in Rust
9 Nov 2021 at 4:58 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: soulsource
Quoting: drmothCanonical's Unity, once the bugs were fixed, was actually really good.
Canonical's Unity was basically the Gnome desktop environment with Compiz as Window Manager (and some hacks to GTK). It only worked as long as you didn't dare to even think about opening CompizConfig. Once you even remotely considered changing any Compiz setting away from the GodCanonical-given default, your desktop was messed up beyond repair and your only option to get it working again was to nuke your compiz config files from orbit.

As unhappy as I am with recent Gnome, Unity was imho even worse...
As someone who frequently messed about with ccsm while using Unity, I do have to wonder what on earth you were changing to cause desktop instability!
Of course I exaggerated.
However by adding new features for Unity, some other features of Compiz got broken, and it seems I was just unlucky that those were settings I really wanted to use...
My memory is not that fresh any more, so I can't point my finger on which settings exactly caused Compiz to crash on launch, though... I think it was about focus following mouse or window snapping, but yeah, I'm not certain any more. In any case, it was nothing super-exotic, just stuff that I had been using with older Compiz versions before that.
I just remember that I was annoyed enough to replace Ubuntu by Debian due to this, and to never look back...
(Funny enough, with the switch to Debian I also ditched Compiz in favor of Xfwm, because I regularly hit swapping-hell on my office PC back then, and I found out that disabling compositing freed about 200 MB of RAM.)