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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Latest Steam Hardware Survey shows Linux has grown, by a tiny amount (updated)
2 August 2016 at 9:22 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: TacoDeBossYeah, it's pretty disappointing. I would move back to Windows and give up the fight, but since I've started getting into programming, that's not an option. Not about to go from using Gedit and make to edit and run code for FREE to trying to pirate Visual Studio because you have to be a millionaire to buy it.

I will not tell you there's a free edition of Visual Studio - or that VS is the best IDE I've ever tried.
No, I won't, because I want you to use Linux!

Each to their own I guess, myself I would rather code everything in nano than use VS. Not to mention how horrible VC have been since VC6 with their "four new versions of libc for every new release of VS", that Microsoft themselves don't even use that is quite telling.

Headlander, the new game from Double Fine Productions will not come to Linux
28 July 2016 at 9:31 pm UTC

Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: zilot>metal

I thought this API was a joke. Why the hell someone would support Apple idiocy instead of forcing them to implement vulkan ?
Haha, seriously? Double Fine using Vulkan instead of Metal would force Apple to support Vulkan? :D

In case you weren't joking: Metal's not that bad as an API, even if it's completely unnecessary and everyone would be better off without it. And if there was any hope of Apple supporting Vulkan, MoltenVK would not be a thing.

You make a fair point of why they didn't use Vulkan, and I think most reasonable people would agree that using Vulkan would be a no go for a project that started before Vulkan was released and also a no go since they obviously want OSX compatibility, but why not go with OpenGL. Are there some magic in DirectX11 that is nigh impossible to implement in OpenGL?

If I had to guess the issue is that their devs have experience and knowledge of DirectX and not with OpenGL so that is the way they went.

Mojang working on new launcher for Minecraft, Linux might not see support
26 July 2016 at 9:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: KithopWait, people still use the vanilla launcher instead of a modpack one like FTB, ATLauncher, etc.?

... wait, people still play vanilla? :P

Yeah, I don't think this is going to be as big of a deal as it's made out to be. There's ways to launch Minecraft right off the command line - it's just a Java app. If for whatever reason the official Mojang one stops working, there'll be alternatives abound.

It depends what the new launcher is written in - if it's Java as well, then I can't see it being difficult to support Linux with it. They probably just don't test it that well.

The launcher is not only used to launch the game, it also handles i.e upgrades and authentication with the Mojang servers.

Rust has now sold over 30 thousand copies on Linux
21 July 2016 at 7:38 pm UTC

Quoting: whitewolfguyInteresting than this numbers be disclosed so openly, this represents 0.82% of linux players, a close number of steam hardware survey.

I think that you forgot to total the numbers ;). The Linux sales is 0.78% which is lower than the 0.80% from the HW survey, it seams that OSX however at 3.94% sold better than the 3.60% they have in the HW survey so for some reason the game is more popular on Mac than on either Windows (95.3% vs 95.50%) and Linux.

Actually it's quite impressive numbers for Linux sales considering how many reports there are about the game not working very well.

That Gary complains about the sales is probably because he sees the large number of close to $8 million for totals vs the $700k, i.e he probably got blind by the larger number and have as of yet not realised that any business that would pass a (mostly free) increase of sales by 0.8% would have their management replaced on the next share holders meeting.

Linux version of VIDEOBALL being blocked by publisher, developer comments on it
19 July 2016 at 11:13 pm UTC

Could be that the publisher had to pay for the port? Or simply that the devs have developed the game on behalf of the publisher and thus have no power over further development.

Undertale now available for SteamOS & Linux and it's on sale
18 July 2016 at 6:27 pm UTC

Quoting: GrimfistInsta-Buy! I was waiting for the port since the release of the game, and lovely Toby delivered! This will shorten my freetime until WoW-Legion release a lot! :D

Instabuy here as well, guess how surprised my son will be (he have been downloading a lot of undertale mods for other games such as Binding Of Isaac et al for a while now).

When should i386 support for Ubuntu end? Help Canonical decide
1 July 2016 at 11:43 pm UTC

Just strange that they use a survey for this when they have download stats for their ISOs and their i386 repository. And "solving" multiarch via snap, please no.

Developer breaks silence about 'The Silent Age', a point-and-click adventure for which a Linux port was promised
1 July 2016 at 11:36 pm UTC

Quoting: HyperdriveIt would be really interesting to better understand the issues that gets reported when devs face issues with Linux ports. What does the "texture" issue really mean for instance? Is there a 32/64 bit mess up? Are the APIs incomplete on the Linux side? What is it?

In this context it probably means that they wrote the shaders in DirectX on Unity and the DirectX to OpenGL translation in Unity borked some of them so that some textures looks wrong. Since too few write their shaders in OpenGL to begin with we can only hope that the momentum behind Vulcan will change this.

Game porter Ethan Lee on packaging games for Linux
19 June 2016 at 9:47 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: sarmadtgz archives don't have a way to specify dependencies. If the game doesn't have any extra dependencies then tgz is good enough. If it does then you better have a proper package otherwise the user will need to hunt down dependencies which is a pain.
No, the games must provide the libs they need. That’s even quoted in the article here…

Edit: ok no it’s not explicitly quoted :) … But that’s what’s needed. Only insane developers make distro packages such as .deb for their games. Besides, installers are not "proper packages" as you say and I was comparing tgz to installers, not to packages.

Making a .deb is hardly insane, there is no problem to create exactly the same package with a .deb (or a .rpm for that matter) that you would with that "installer", all a .deb or .rpm does is basically a .tgz plus executable (optional) scripts. I'm guessing here that the installer in question however handles key management to "prevent" piracy and that is of course not built into .deb or .rpm so that might be a reason (which would rule out a .tgz as well).

Here's my own Linux OpenGL vs Vulkan test for Dota 2, not much difference for me
16 June 2016 at 5:17 pm UTC

Now I don't know how much effort Valve is putting into this but it would be interesting if they could create a blackhole driver, i.e a driver that does nothing but yet returns every value that it should so that the game engine thinks that everything is OK. This to sort out if the different between Windows and Linux are really the drivers or not, because wasn't one of the things about Vulkan that the drivers would not be involved as much as they are in OpenGL? (I have no experience with graphics programming I might add).