Quoting: Guest... we need to make sure they know they won't get our support until they support Linux in return. ...

And therein lies the rub, we simply are not in a position where "they" (except a minority of devs) care if we support them or not. And if we would have been in such a position to begin with then Steam Play / Proton would not have been created either so while the one is due to the other I do think that you have that order in reverse in your argument.

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Quoting: Avehicle7887

Quoting: F.UltraHowever 0.84% vs 3.26% of Steams 90M users results in 756000 vs 2934000 potential customers and close to 3M potential new users is probably above some threshold for publishing houses to plan to put resources into support. Where exactly that threshold is I don't know but so far it seams to be above 0.84% for at least Linux.

I always found those percentages to be a bit misleading, primarily because Linux is a much better gaming OS than Mac. It is quite obvious why Mac appears more popular since the OS is sold with the hardware and Linux is not as widely marketed. For every new Linux user, you get 10 more Apples right off the shelf and the % starts going higher right away.

Quoting: F.UltraSo I would still argue that with or without hype we are still a bit too few for game publishers to care.

Chicken and egg situation sort of, the publishers not caring is part of the reason why we're still a bit too few, how are we supposed to do that without them feeding us games? I've seen quite a few people around saying they would try Linux if game x and y ran. The situation has improved over the years, but we need a bigger push to fix those last few issues with Multiplayer anti cheat software.

Yeah it's a bothersome situation where our platform came after the market already decided that it was Windows (PC) or Mac that defined a computer (after Commodore, Atari and so on died) coupled with the anti competitive business practice by Microsoft that enabled them to take the 95% market share.

So it will be an uphill battle for many years to come and during that time we simply have no leverage to demand native games like Swiftpaw thinks that we can.

Steam Play might not be the magic bullet that helps our market share grow to the needed threshold but at least it allows us existing users to enjoy a far wider variety of modern games.

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: F.UltraYeah I'm almost 100% sure that the game developers are looking very intensively at how we 1% perform our purchases when determining their future road maps for which technology or platform to use.

And Mac's 3% sure make a big difference in their "thought train". :)
Honestly, I think it is more about perception. "MacOS" (or "OSX" or "MacOS X" or whatever) and Macs' in general are well-established products, known since the notorious "Mac vs. PC" ads and often viewed as THE "PC" (misused as the euphemism for Windows) alternative. Mac users often even refuse to call their Macs "PCs". Meanwhile Linux is not perceived as something serious in the personal computer market.

I agree that the macOS hype of course also plays a part of it all, as you write macOS is known even among non computer users while there even exists computer users that have no clue that Linux exists.

However 0.84% vs 3.26% of Steams 90M users results in 756000 vs 2934000 potential customers and close to 3M potential new users is probably above some threshold for publishing houses to plan to put resources into support. Where exactly that threshold is I don't know but so far it seams to be above 0.84% for at least Linux.

So I would still argue that with or without hype we are still a bit too few for game publishers to care.

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Quoting: GustyGhostWhenever you purchase and run a Windows game through a translation layer, you are effectively shouting from the rooftops: "I want the Win32 / DirectX formats to forever remain the dominant standards in computer games!" or "Please Microsoft, please please please keep me locked into your proprietary standards, this is my covenant with you!"

Yeah I'm almost 100% sure that the game developers are looking very intensively at how we 1% perform our purchases when determining their future road maps for which technology or platform to use.

With that I don't mean that you shouldn't vote with our wallet, just that Steam Play is currently such a small blip on the radar for the game devs that they completely ignore it. The problems that we have comes from having a 1% user base, if we where larger (like macOS) then it would be a completely different discussion to have but we don't.

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Quoting: Avehicle7887So they're willing to make a Trilogy native port for Mac because they 'feel sorry for them', but not for Linux because it runs well on Steamplay. That's more than enough reason for me to stay far far away from buying it and besides, I don't see Steamplay on GOG now do I?

As for the Bard's Tale 4, I'll be happy to buy it when it's done.

No, they are putting resources into creating native macOS ports due to macOS users having a far larger user base than Linux. That the trilogy happens to work fine with Steam Play on Linux just happens to be a happy circumstance. I'm quite sure that if Steam Play didn't work then they would still make a macOs port and just not mention Linux at all.

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Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: OdisejDoes Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.

I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.

My number is based on DF's test of Project Stream [External Link]. They are measuring not just network latency but total latency from button press to on screen reaction using a 120fps camera. It's possible it has been improved and will be improved further, but it will never be as fast as playing locally on a decent PC of course. I think Stadia will be fine for a lot of games but I wouldn't use it for stuff like Doom or CS:GO, especially since I like to play those sort of games at higher refresh rates than 60hz.

Interesting that the Xbox had 145ms there, Bluetooth in the controller perhaps plays a role there. But the article also shows that we are not talking about an additional 179ms of latency but between 67-100ms since the local PC also showed quite high latency.

This is all strange to me who works with low latency financial data where we constantly keep things well below 1ms, these numbers just look god awful to me :)

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Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: OdisejDoes Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.

I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.

Edit: And it surely can get way lower than that, we run one service where we receive financial press releases from various news agencies over HTTP where I've written a very low latency HTTP server to minimize latency. It calculates the latency from the moment of connect to receivment of the last byte+processing and as you can see it's in the microsecond range (this is a log from a Swedish news agency that sends from the Google Compute Cloud to one of our servers in Stockholm and each received file is between 2-3k in size):

jun 07 15:05:05 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [411us]
jun 07 15:10:47 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [433us]
jun 07 15:13:26 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [379us]
jun 07 15:24:10 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [314us]
jun 07 15:25:37 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [362us]
jun 07 15:30:29 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [414us]
jun 07 15:34:54 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [335us]
jun 07 15:46:19 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [430us]
jun 07 16:00:49 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [403us]
jun 07 16:02:00 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [372us]
jun 07 16:06:46 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [329us]
jun 07 16:06:54 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [335us]
jun 07 16:08:31 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [357us]
jun 07 16:10:05 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [378us]

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Quoting: OdisejA little bit late to the party so sorry for the late question. Is there a soul among us that can explain the technology behind this to me? I mean I am too old to understand some things especially when I think about lag and response of some games in the past. I still remember Duke Nukem 3D played over a modem with a friend and what happened if the modems had to reconnect or the line was too noisy. Or the pings we got with first lan an internet connections. I mean, so many things had to work just right for it to be playable.

Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

The main change from "back then" is that the latency over Internet (if everything works as it should) are orders of magnitude lower than what you could get over a modem.

Regarding how it works, you are 100% correct in your assumption in the second paragraph. They send a compressed picture to you ala Netflix/Youtube and you send the input to them so the performance of your local machine does not really matter.

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Quoting: Nanobang

Quoting: F.UltraYeah, boo on Google for providing a service that people might enjoy and want to pay

Excellent point! That's exactly what I wasn't talking about. It's probably frustrating to have so much to say but to never be able to actually really join any conversations, isn't it?

Quoting: F.Ultra... if happens to be a success it's only because people are not as smart or hip as you.

Obviously. Yes. But don't let it get you down, if you really apply yourself you might get there one day.

Kisses <3

Ok, so please explain to stupid little me how exactly "This latest outbreak, Stadia, is just the latest ploy to harvest money and data from its dewy-eyed herd of human ruminants" is "exactly what I wasn't talking about" when I wrote "Yeah, boo on Google for providing a service that people might enjoy and want to pay".

I mean how can what you wrote be interpreted in any other way? Now you might have meant something completely different and I'm willing to give the benefit of a doubt here but you wrote those exact words that I replied to.

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Quoting: NanobangGoogle is a plague. This latest outbreak, Stadia, is just the latest ploy to harvest money and data from its dewy-eyed herd of human ruminants.

In spite of the big "Linux" and "Vulkan" logos in the picture, I've no doubt Google is just going to be using these as resources to be exploited and not as members of the Communities that created them. I remember everyone being all atwitter about Android being based on Linux, too.

Unless Stadia is only going to stream Linux games and only ones that use Vulkan, I just don't see how this is going to end up being anything that will benefit the Linux Gaming Community. Admittedly, time will tell.

Still, until we know more, I'm glad Liam is keeping us abreast of the latest news on Google's latest in utero scam.

Yeah, boo on Google for providing a service that people might enjoy and want to pay for and if happens to be a success it's only because people are not as smart or hip as you.

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