Quoting: GuestStreaming needs a semi-decent 'net connection too. Ruling out Australia.

And many other locations, including the UK where I am. It's probably the only reason that we haven't seen more streaming activity yet.

Without the constant hacking attempts, botnets, spam and advert bloat, the Internet infrastructure would seem less bad, but it's difficult to see how these problems can be addressed successfully on a global network.

It wouldn't entirely surprise me, at some point, to find dedicated infrastructure being applied to certain categories of application, if that is the only way to achieve the required performance, athough the organisation and funding would be a challenge.

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The IT industry has always been like this. Every participant looks to create a business model that favours themselves, while exploiting the work of others.

When you have a major change in the competitive landscape, such as SaaS, streaming to a thin client, you can expect companies to jockey for positions.

I doubt that many GOL readers will be thrilled with the idea that this is how games will be provided in future, but it almost certainly will be, at least for the companies creating AAA games.

There are upsides to this model:
- everything will be available for Linux.
- DRM becomes meaningless.
- you don't need to spend on constant hardware upgrades.

But, of course, the downside is you then need a subscription/pay as you go/freemium revenue model even for single player games.

It will be interesting to see if any of the big developers stay out of this particular rat-hole, but the frantic activity around developer Web properties, portals and stores suggests not.

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A platform-neutral development base is a good reason to use Linux/Vulkan, as is the dominance of Android on end-user devices ( not the same as Linux, but the code can be easily converted ).

Mid-Long term many developers/publishers will want to control the revenue from their games through a streaming service, running the game on a server blade, compressing the I/O, player on any WebAssembly-enabled browser. It would be much cheaper and easier to produce licence-cost-free VMs using Linux than using Windows, so the games will need to run on Linux.

Google are experimenting with this in the US at the moment with Project Stream.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: etonbearsand it doesn't work with Proton or Wine either, so it's a non-starter at the moment.

Which is interesting, as the early word on Proton was that anything utilizing Vulkan should work with it, and X4 does. Now, I realize it's not quite that simple, but it's disappointing that a 100% Vulkan utilizing game doesn't work with Proton out of the box...

Well, Proton/Wine are aimed at transparently running games/software that are coded solely for Windows APIs. I am guessing that Egosoft now have a less Windows-oriented codebase, to make X-platform easier, and this might push it out of the normal envelope that Proton/Wine reliably implement.

There are still large numbers of Windows APIs in Proton/Wine that are empty stubs, and "hosting" windows code on other operating systems will always throw up occasional edge-cases that you don't know about until you encounter an error.

From the reports I have seen, the problems with running under Proton are related to resource location and unpacking, so X4 doesn't get far enough before crashing to assess if Vulkan under Proton works.

I don't think it will take them very long to get their Linux version running once they get to it, but that will not be until the Windows version is largely bug-free at the engine/hardware level. Bernd ( the founder/CEO ) specifically said that the engine coders that would work on the non-windows versions have been given windows bugs as a higher priority.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: FredOI'm finally getting Helium Rain. I haven't played a space trading type game since Freelancers! I had hoped they would bring Elite Dangerous to Linux at some point, but it never happened...

Consider buying X4: Foundations when the Linux port is finished. Seems to be an amazing game.

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting. Bernd says maybe sometime in the first half of 2019 we'll get a beta. Maybe; X-Rebirth was closer to 2 years for a Linux release.

There probably are not enough Linux sales for it to be important to Egosoft, and it doesn't work with Proton or Wine either, so it's a non-starter at the moment.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeCiv VI should be native and running on ext4 anyhow, right? That's kind of an odd one.

GTA V was weird, because I had to install it on my SSD, otherwise it'd never finish loading. But then it bugged out and kept trying to validate it.. I ended up uninstalling it because I haven't had the time to play it since it came out for PC all that much. I think I tested it with switching between driving with the steering wheel once it came out for the PC and haven't really played it since.

I really should give Civ VI another shot though, been too long since I played a Civ game...

Hmmm, your GTA V experience and mine with Civ VI/M2TW do suggest a regression to me. I have had a lot of games on disk, updating as they see fit, since 2013 without any issues, and suddenly they fail...

I should also probably look at Civ VI again once I get it to install. I quite liked it, but prefer the fully expanded Civ V to the un-expanded Civ VI. Generally, Civ VI doesn't seem to have particularly positive comments, so we may not even get all the expansions.

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I always thought this one looked like it might be interesting, mainly because it does not follow the usual tropes. It will probably be more fun than the real 1960's UK, which had been on something of an economic slide since WWII. The space race was fun to live through as a kid though.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: slaapliedjeWeird, my GTA V install is in a forever 'validating' loop today. Anyone else seen something similar?

Yes, I have had that a couple of times recently. The first time was resolved by moving the game from an NTFS formatted disk to an ext4 disk, but recently Civ VI also went into an update loop. I have deleted Civ VI for now, as I am expecting to move games to a new larger SSD soon, but Civ VI was also on NTFS, so that may also be the problem there.

Huh, nope mine is already on an ext4 SSD partition.

The Civ VI behaviour was particularly strange; the update started by saying 250MB was needed, but when it reached 250MB it flipped to wanting 550MB, then eventually fail to install and reschedule a 250MB download.

If your issue is on ext4 and mine on NTFS, it may be an occasional regression in their update code, I suppose.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeWeird, my GTA V install is in a forever 'validating' loop today. Anyone else seen something similar?

Yes, I have had that a couple of times recently. The first time was resolved by moving the game from an NTFS formatted disk to an ext4 disk, but recently Civ VI also went into an update loop. I have deleted Civ VI for now, as I am expecting to move games to a new larger SSD soon, but Civ VI was also on NTFS, so that may also be the problem there.

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Quoting: KlutzI installed Fallout 4 with the recommended xaudio2_6 and xaudio2_7 tweaks through winetricks, setting them to native/built-in. Does the FAudio addition to the new beta version mean I should now remove these tweaks?

No, the FAudio in Proton does not include WMA support. You can compile your own FAudio library with WMA, but it seems to be broken at this point, so you get no speach.

Eventually this needs to be fixed.

You may find that you no longer get occasional audio crashes as some of the audio paths have changed to use FAudio at a low level. I have not tested that, but others have reported an improvement.

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