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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Mojang working on new launcher for Minecraft, Linux might not see support
26 Jul 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 Jul 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 Jul 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 Jul 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 Jul 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 Jul 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 Jun 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 Jun 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).

Starbound developer comments on Linux support and their SteamOS icon
10 Jun 2016 at 4:15 pm UTC

Quoting: STiATPainless Linux-Support has two sides:
It's probably painless to support stuff if you're using the right libraries to get all the window management, input and stuff done.
What can be a pain, especially for graphically more... challanging products is still the graphics stack. Ye, a lot of is done there, but we're not quite where I'd consider it a good state.

Still, ye, Linux numbers is minimal, and I can understand business decisions on not supporting Linux. Though, it's always nice if we get a game :-).
I think that the pain that some devs feel with Linux is that they try to handle it like just another version of Windows, realizing that there can be a world of difference between the two systems and cry wolf. Now I'm no game developer but I do develop software for a living and I always write the Linux version first and then port to Windows and every time it's a real pain to do, so I image that the reverse must be true for devs that are used to how Windows works as well.

We are now importing sales from Steam to our Sales Page
9 Jun 2016 at 9:50 am UTC

Quoting: NyamiouMake sure you don't extract data that is not exposed by the public API, because databases are also protected by copyright in the EU.
Looks like Liam is scraping the public Steam Store so there is no way that he could expose non public data.