Quoting: Grifter

Quoting: GuestAre these turn-based games

Yes and no, it's designed to feel real-time and combat etc doesn't stop and let you think (though in singleplayer you can pause the game), but it has a turn based back-end (you have a little log window where you can see everything that happens in each round.

It's not really turn-based. Combat is divided into rounds, in which you can perform a number of actions, each of which takes a certain time to execute; priority for simultaneous actions is based on an initiative score. At least, that's the general idea for D&D on which it is based...so a long spell can be interrupted by a clonk on the head, for example.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI'm 40 years old and I can tell you that Vr was a commercial failure, is a commercial failure and will be a commercial failure, because of the high price of the hardware needed, and because the human is an animal of habits...

About the game... bleh.. Just what We need! Another digital card game.... ¬¬

I'm a little older at 56, but I remember looking at the 1990s VR while working for an "advanced technology group" in a UK financial services company. Everyone wanted it to be great, but it really wasn't. Most of the issues were to do with physical effects of VR unit weight and the inability of many people to adjust to visual input that does not match what they expect when moving their head.

The issues of price and weight still exist, but I guess will eventually be solved. I think the issue of perception problems will persist for a long time, as our understanding of how the brain works ( and whether any two brains actually work the same ) is far from perfect.

The people most positive about VR are, of course, those that don't experience problems. I would say VR is here to stay this time, at the least as a specialist market segment - if not for games, then perhaps for "adult" entertainment.

Having tried VR before, I know that I won't bother until they pay proper attention to being able to configure headsets to individual eye requirements ( to the standards of correction that opticians use ) and fully eliminate lag and jitter.

Even then, relatively few of the games I like would actually benefit from VR, in the same way that Artifact and other card games are not a natural fit. You cetainly CAN make card games and grand strategy games as VR games... but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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Quoting: WJMazepas

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: WJMazepasI tried to learn a bit of Vulkan, but all the information that i found was for someone already with experience in developing 3d engines.

I dont know if is possible, but i would love a tutorial that went with the basics, medium and advanced stuff with Vulkan. Showing how to write a simple triangle and then going forward. But explaining everything for someone who has not touched OpenGL before.

For learning all the stuff from the beginning, I'd recommend a book. For such tasks, nothing beats paper besides the keyboard. I cannot give specific recommendations on books about Vulkan, though.

Well i would love a good book. I tried to see some in Amazon but most of recommendations were saying that the goods were bad.

I'm gonna try to search again

Unfortunately, the modern graphics APIs are not easy to describe succinctly. Most of the books currently available do assume previous knowledge of 3D programing.

There are about a dozen steps required to set up a single shader pass, and you need to completely understand your data model before you can write a shader. This makes it difficult to provide a step by step recipe that you can follow, seeing what happens with each step.

As @mirv says, a more accessible route would be to provide a default set of API setup calls for a simple vertex/mesh model to allow immediate creation of visible shader output, then go back to describe how the shader output is supported by the API setup calls.

Vulkan is not magic. It doesn't make 3D programming somehow easier (quite the opposite) but it does mean that you can have a similar level of control over a GPU as you do over a CPU. That is, it does what you want, when you want, and nothing else.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: WJMazepasOnly thing we need now is better materials to learn Vulkan online, and then with more Vulkan developers than DX developers, companies would start to use Vulkan and the port to linux

Just curious, but what kind of better materials did you have in mind? I sometimes go Khronos talks, and those guys & gals really like feedback about this kind of thing.

I think the online Vulkan Tutorial is fine for anyone who should be thinking about using Vulkan directly - C developers with 3D development experience.

A list of gotchas and tips would be a useful adjunct, if one doesn't exist already.

I doubt it will be easy for anyone without prior experience of 3D get the hang of Vulkan quickly.

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Quoting: strycore@etonbears taking over Wine Staging would have happened if the project got abandoned by the Wine developer, which wasn't the case thankfully. The current build works pretty well and an official build of Wine Staging 3.3 is to be expected on Friday.

So who is now maintaining Staging for the 3.x series?

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Certainly a welcome announcement, but I would not expect either Apple or Microsoft to suddenly switch to Vulkan. Having a consistent and controlled GUI/Graphics Stack is central to both companies' business model.

The main potential issues for developers will be performance impact and ease of integration with development workflow. Don't forget that Vulkan/DX12/Metal are really designed as abstractions of the parallel processing environment on the GPU. That is good for rendering and some other tasks, but there are many other elements of games and simulations that will remain on the CPU, often using OS specific APIs for performance or ease of programming.

It's a necessary step for Vulkan, but I doubt it will lead to Elder Scrolls VI appearing on Linux.

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Lutris have tweeted that they intend to take over Wine Staging. They appear to have 3.3 working, but it will probably be a while before everything settles down, so curb your enthusiasm.

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Yes, the NWN toolset was never ported either. That was Borland C++, the NWN2 toolset was Microsoft C++ with an early version of .NET frameworks, if I recall correctly. It might actually be that mono on Linux would support a relatively easy port of the NWN2 toolkit, I'm not sure.

It's difficult to say which would be preferable; NWN1 used much simpler character and object models, which made that custom content easier to develop, but developing new terrain using the NWN tile based system was ( apparently ) a pig. NWN2 character/object models were more complex ( 10x the vertex count ) and they added newer rendering ideas like normal mapping that required extra texture channel. But the outdoor terrain in NWN2 was much easier to create resources for.

NWN2 was overall a much better and more capable engine, but had a fairly big drawback for modders, which was their use of Granny3D ( RAD Game Tools ) to do the animation. There was a plugin to Blender for a while, which abruptly disappeared when RAD pointed out that Atari had not paid for that, and it never reappeared publicly. This meant that you needed to own or have access to £2500 worth of professional modelling software ( the devs used 3DS Max ) to create animations using the 3DS exporter they actually had paid for.

There was an unfinished, community developed, Python import/export plugin for Blender which allowed you to do at least some re-skinning and mesh manipulation. I tried to finish that plugin, and managed to expand it to include most model data types, including the model skeletons used in animation, but ran into the problem of Granny3D. I found enough information about Granny to be able to pull out animation curves from existing data files, but not enough to understand how to write animations into new Granny data files. Added to that, I would have had to modify the Blender internal representation for models to expose the necessary additional data. Obviously, as Blender is open source, that was possible, but the code ( at that time, at least ) was a mess and there were developer disagreements about direction. In the end I decided it would be unlikely I could finish a proper Import/Export for Blender, so I moved on.

That was all on Windows, of course, 10 years ago. RAD have since ported most of their tools to Linux and MacOS, including Granny3D, but modding would still be difficult unless an "NWN2 Enhanced Edition" included a Blender Importer/Exporter as well as a working toolkit. The original NWN toolkit at least had the benefit of properly documented data structures and no third party software was needed.

I'm blathering! You didn't need to know any of that, of course, but the more I think about it, the more I realize I really would like NWN2 on Linux...

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: Narvarth

Quoting: slaapliedjeIn case you missed these RPGs; Wasteland 2, Shadow Run, Bard's Tale (4 is coming!), Pillars of Eternity, Tyrant, Neverwinter Nights:Enhanced Edition, plus all the other EE games. Of course if you do like old school RPGs, GOG has all the gold box ones wrapped up for Linux too.

They are all old school /sometric RPG (i.e. Baldur's gate style). That's nice, but we have zero first person RPG with a non linear story and/or open world. Maybe Dying light (rpg/action) but that's all. One game.

Some games like Skyrim, Gothic 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance etc. are really missing on Linux.

Feral and other porters can only port games that fulfill a few basic criteria

1. The rights holder must want, or be open to, a Linux port.

2. The porter must believe the amount of work is justified by the potential return,

3. The porter and rights holder must be able to come to an agreement.

Many of the first person AAA games fail on the first criterion, as the likes of EA and Zenimax currently dismiss anything to do with Linux out of hand; but some are also excluded due to porting and support costs, or an inability to agree terms.

Personally, I like both Paradox grand strategy and CA's mix of strategy with real-time tactical battles, so I appreciate those ports.

However I also like CRPGs, both Isometric and 1st/3rd person, and both directed-path and open-world, so I also understand the frustration that these are thin on the ground. I am certain that Feral are aware of these frustrations, but it doesn't mean they can do anything about it.

One thing that interests me is the fact that Beamdog are releasing a new version of NWN. As a Bioware game, that should be EA property, unless they sold the rights off. Maybe I'll go look on the Beamdog web site...

Actually I think the rights to Neverwinter Nights might belong to Atari, Bioware wasn't publishing through EA until after NWN was released. The second one was as well, though it was developed by Obsidian, which I believe also developed KOTOR 2, which also has a Linux port, not to mention Pillars of Eternity. So NWN2 confirmed for Linux? :p

Yes, of course, you're right; NWN and NWN2 rights gained from Hasbro were Atari owned. I think there was some animosity after NWN2 between Atari and Hasbro. Beamdog must have been able to negotiate with Atari where they probably would not be able to with EA.

As you say, NWN2 was an Obsidian development for Atari; it would be great to have NWN2 available as it significantly better than NWN in many ways, and has some great fan-mod adventures ( Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale have been re-made in the NWN2 toolset, for example ).

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting, though; NWN was a generic C/C++ engine using OpenGL, whereas NWN2 was much more Windows-specific C++ using D3D9. The toolset, in particular, used Microsoft UI frameworks, and would be a lot of work to port.

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Quoting: Narvarth

Quoting: slaapliedjeIn case you missed these RPGs; Wasteland 2, Shadow Run, Bard's Tale (4 is coming!), Pillars of Eternity, Tyrant, Neverwinter Nights:Enhanced Edition, plus all the other EE games. Of course if you do like old school RPGs, GOG has all the gold box ones wrapped up for Linux too.

They are all old school /sometric RPG (i.e. Baldur's gate style). That's nice, but we have zero first person RPG with a non linear story and/or open world. Maybe Dying light (rpg/action) but that's all. One game.

Some games like Skyrim, Gothic 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance etc. are really missing on Linux.

Feral and other porters can only port games that fulfill a few basic criteria

1. The rights holder must want, or be open to, a Linux port.

2. The porter must believe the amount of work is justified by the potential return,

3. The porter and rights holder must be able to come to an agreement.

Many of the first person AAA games fail on the first criterion, as the likes of EA and Zenimax currently dismiss anything to do with Linux out of hand; but some are also excluded due to porting and support costs, or an inability to agree terms.

Personally, I like both Paradox grand strategy and CA's mix of strategy with real-time tactical battles, so I appreciate those ports.

However I also like CRPGs, both Isometric and 1st/3rd person, and both directed-path and open-world, so I also understand the frustration that these are thin on the ground. I am certain that Feral are aware of these frustrations, but it doesn't mean they can do anything about it.

One thing that interests me is the fact that Beamdog are releasing a new version of NWN. As a Bioware game, that should be EA property, unless they sold the rights off. Maybe I'll go look on the Beamdog web site...

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