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Latest Comments by soulsource
Diluvion, the deep-sea exploration game now has a Linux beta, but you might want to wait for a bit
29 Apr 2017 at 8:33 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: GuestHow exactly did they build it for Linux without a Linux machine to compile it on? I'm confused by that. Seems like if it was wine wrapped (i dont know if it is) they would still need Linux to make it, or could it be possible to do that on a Mac?

I know its probably a stupid question but I don't know much about the process of porting.
You could easily set up a Linux cross compiler on Windows (okay, not that easily, but it's certainly doable, just look at the CLFS [External Link] book), but in this case not even that is required, as the game is afaik using the Unity Engine.
Unity games consist of an engine binary together with (more or less) platform independent game code (C# or JavaScript - either way it's compiled to bytecode CIL-code [External Link] and then run by a Java-VM Common Language Runtime [External Link] - in this case, Mono [External Link]).
So, in principle, all the developer has to do is to click "Build" in the Unity Editor and select Linux as target platform. That would be the ideal case of course, and in reality there will very likely be issues, as often some platform specific things sneak into the code if one does not regularly test on all target platforms...

Steam now has a bunch of Anime shows you can buy, also a sale on Anime games
1 Apr 2017 at 2:36 pm UTC

From the comments on Steam it seems that some shows are censored too, so customers not only have to deal with Flash and sub-par encoding quality, they also don't get to see the full episodes...

An explanation of what Mesa is and what graphics cards use it
7 Mar 2017 at 10:49 am UTC

AMD is not really complicated. Actually it's as easy as this:
If you need either OpenCL 2.0 or OpenGL compatibility contexts (if you don't know what those are, you don't need them), use the proprietary drivers. In any other case stick to the open source drivers.

The Mesa GLSL shader cache is now enabled by default
7 Mar 2017 at 10:44 am UTC

Quoting: CreakThe increased FPS is simply because there is less stuttering due to shader compilation in between two frames. The number shown is an average after a few minutes of gameplay. Mainly you won't see an increase, but you will feel that the games stutter less (from the second time you launch them)
Mesa did cache those shaders also previously, but in RAM, meaning the slightly increased frame-time was only occurring once per game-session per shader. With the new patches those shaders are being cached on disk, and mesa does no longer recompile them every time the game is restarted.

An explanation of what Mesa is and what graphics cards use it
7 Mar 2017 at 6:49 am UTC

The same question, about open-sourcing their proprietary GPU firmware, of course also applies to Intel [External Link].

Razer looking to improve Linux support on their 'Blade' series of laptops
6 Mar 2017 at 7:42 am UTC Likes: 2

Yep, Optimus is a huge PITA, but sadly there are very few (none?) high-quality laptops with dedicated AMD graphics available, and Intel Iris Pro is quite expensive.
I'm hoping for the Zen-based APUs to improve the situation...

AMD officially announce Ryzen 7 CPUs for launch on March 2nd
22 Feb 2017 at 7:00 pm UTC

Quoting: salamanderrakeThe important question here is, do the boards have PCIe 4.0??? If its 3.0 it is barely forgivable, but if its still at 2.0 AMD is dead to me.
The CPU itself directly offers PCI Express 3.0 x16 (which is of course connected to according ports on the mainboards), and the more expansive boards have an additional PCI Express 2.0 controller in their northbridge.
(Source: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/56340/amd-ryzen-explained-motherboards-cpus-more/index.html [External Link] )

Wine 2.2 released with even more Shader Model 5 instructions and work towards Direct3D command stream
19 Feb 2017 at 4:33 pm UTC

Quoting: lejimster
Quoting: Leopard*snip*
It should work with Padoka and Oibaf I'm pretty sure. From what I read Padoka has Vulkan and bleeding edge stuff and Oibaf is more stable.

You won't find gallium-nine on official wine because they refuse to have it upstream.

I personally don't use Ubuntu/Mint, but I run on the latest mesa-git and wine-staging with gallium-nine support and its very good.

Have fun.
And I still don't get their reasoning behind refusing Gallium Nine for it being too vendor specific (AMD, nVidia), but supporting CUDA, which is even more vendor specific (only nVidia)...

Aspyr Media state they are looking at ways to improve Civilization VI performance on Linux
16 Feb 2017 at 3:19 pm UTC

Quoting: barottoRight now Civ6 uses 1 thread. I have a 4 cores cpu, this means that only 1 core is being used. This also means that fans are not spinning and I can play in complete silence!
Yes, it's a bit jerky at times, but in a game like this I value the lack of noise much more than 60fps.
Civ 6 has a frame limiter, so you should be able to reduce system load also with proper multithreading.
Anyhow, if you consider your CPU fan noise disturbing, I'd recommend to buy a better cooler. They are not that expensive, and good ones are a real pleasure to the ear. My current CPU cooler is a Scythe Mugen 2, and while it is clearly audible at full system load, it's far from annoying.

Back on topic though: I'm really happy that Aspyr is working on multithreading the game, as, when comparing it to Windows, it becomes obvious, that on Linux Civ 6 is strongly CPU limited.

Diluvion, a deep-sea exploration game with RPG elements may be coming to Linux
15 Feb 2017 at 8:45 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Luke_NukemBecause of Ubuntu being outdated most of the time, I kind of wish devs would target fedora stable releases as well / in replacement of.
What we users benefit most of is developers working on/supporting older/conservative distributions. Almost all libraries on Linux follow the rule of changing the soname [External Link] when they change their ABI [External Link] in an incompatible way. This of course does not mean that the libraries cannot get additional functionality with newer releases, as long as they don't break the old ABI by this. So, if one develops an application relying on newer functionality of a new version of a library, it will not run with older versions of the same lib. The other way around, developing the application with an older library version, and running it with a newer one (of the same soname), should always work, though. Problems only arise if applications ship their own libraries and do not read the documentation of said libraries (for instance Steam devs never read the libstdc++ ABI doc [External Link], otherwise they would not ship a copy of said lib together with Steam, causing breakage whenever the system-installed libstdc++ is newer than the useless Steam-supplied copy...), or if applications use an old, no longer supported ABI version of a library (for instance the old GTK 1, which is not shipped by distributions any more).