Quoting: mircallaThe driving looks fun but how are the tracks?

https://wreckfest.fandom.com/wiki/Maps [External Link]
Shows a lot of them (not all due to not being completely up to date AFAIK). There's way more than just pure derby tracks, a lot of them are more for actual racing just with the potential of still wrecking other cars while going for the best position ;)

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Absolutely great and fun game! Our group of friends is playing it regularly, like at least every second week, for a few hours :) Though we'd all love if they had added nitro boost like the predecessor FlatOut 2 has.

IMO the menu UI is absolutely horrible though. I mean, selecting cars takes a lot of time as you can't click the car you want and directly confirm your selection but rather you have to wait 1-2 seconds until it actually loaded the preview of the selected car. And as the server moderator selecting tracks without any kind of preview / thumbnail? Really? In 2018? C'mon ;)

The biggest gripe for people who only want to have fun with friends and are not into playing the single player stuff: You have to unlock a lot of cars by playing solo. Some can be unlocked by spending the earned in-game cash that you also get in MP but this would take lots of time. No idea why there's no way for servers to say "you can select any car you want (and own in terms of DLC)". Luckily there's a mod that unlocks all of them: "Give Me Every Car And Part".

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One part we already know not to be true, is a requirement of Epic Online Services authentication, as the developers of Brawlhalla showed in their own testing with the new integration which worked without users touching Epic's services directly.

Unfortunately that's not true. EOS authentication *has* to be done to use EOS EAC. The users just don't see it, as EOS authentication is independent of an EGS account ;) (Unless they block access to EPIC servers in their firewall or similar stuff, which seems to be the case for some users as we have seen with our game)
Still, it does create an EOS "account" internally that maps your SteamID to that EOS ID, but that's about it. EOS does not get to know anything other than that (and obviously things like your IP while being connected to their backend, the same way that EAC servers would have anyway)

Hopefully the actual work involved in moving from old EAC to new isn't too much, but it's a reason why we've yet to see any really look to do it.

It's not *that* much, but it's still *way* more than flipping a switch as some people read into EPIC's announcements. Well, actually EPIC's announcement was correct *if* you were already using EOS EAC, but for those that have to migrate from legacy EAC it's more due to adding a new framework, including all the steps to authenticate, verify users etc. The EAC APIs themselves are *mostly* the same though.

Quoting: rustybroomhandleIf I were them I would not bother doing the work to integrate a completely different version of EAC. Sounds like they might as well just drop EAC and switch to a different solution like BattlEye.

*That* is definitely way more work though ;)

Quoting: master94gaEAC with EOS that is the new version talked in this article doesn't require any login at all for the users.

See above, it does not require a login but does authenticate with EPIC (i.e. EOS) services. For some users that's indeed too much already, even though EAC is part of EPIC anyway so using EAC alone would have exchanged the same data with them already.

Quoting: rustybroomhandleI also still do not see what the point is of sticking to older anticheat solutions because surely that's the one thing you need to be up to date.

The security features from EAC update on the backend without a game dev doing updates to a game. It's just the integration with the game that the game devs need to update themselves.

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The developer also mentioned recently that they plan to start removing older versions of the game, a bunch of which are available as opt-in Betas. They said it's due to limitations with Steam, so if you do have a game on the 19.x series you might want to make it go out with a bang.

Yeah, Valve only allows 25 "betas" per game (even when asking them multiple times to allow more as it should not cost them anything :( ). And we hit that limit already. But the recent ones are not going away soon, more likely we will drop off older releases first. Also, the current statement was more about us not keeping 19.0 to 19.5 available, as some people still played those instead of 19.6 ;)
(And as a last resort you can still just make copies of older versions. Even when they are no longer "available" on Steam you could still play those copies)

Quoting: TheRiddickThere is a option for Vulkan but its never been updated and doesn't really work; it be nice if they updated Vulkan and moved to it as the default.

Unfortunately it does not work like this. We can't do anything on Vulkan, other than making sure our shaders work. The heavy groundwork and bugfixes need to come from Unity - and by upgrading Unity from 2019.x to 2020.3 in Alpha 20 it should already be a lot more stable. And I know some people, both on Windows and Linux, have played with Vulkan even in Alpha 19 without issues and better performance compared to GLCore (as one would expect). It just seems that the combination of Unity's Vulkan implementation and certain GPUs and their drivers is still not really stable at all.

Quoting: TheRiddickAlso this be a great game to get VR edition or something down the line.

Never tried VR myself unfortunately, but I thought FPS games are typically not good for VR due to motion sickness, unless you used something like "teleportation" of the player, which in turn is bad for immersion etc? *I myself* don't see VR as a good fit for 7 Days, but I would not be deciding on that anyway :D

As for the "Still in EA" discussion: I can see how it is annoying for some people with the updates breaking saves, especially when you are mostly into the building aspect. For most people though the game becomes boring when playing a certain save for too long anyway though, and starting new is what keeps it interesting. So even for that there's not only a real downside for everyone ;)
But other than broken savegames (which isn't forced btw, most versions could be considered stable enough to just keep them and don't update unless you want the new stuff): What's bad about a game being in active development? After all you get lots of new stuff every year or so without ever having to pay again. Once a game is considered "final" you either get little to no updates (both in terms of content as well as fixes) from most devs or you at least have to pay for it in terms of DLCs. Even as a regular player myself I honestly simply never get why people would want a "this is final" sticker slapped on a game instead of getting free updates even if it meant it had an "Alpha" sticker on it :D

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Seen the bundle ... then again I have almost all of the Worms franchise. Still we only play W:A because that's yet the best game in the franchise (and still updated every now and then due to the dedicated community).

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Quoting: Liam DaweAs for Vulkan, I assume that's because Unity's Vulkan renderer in the Unity version used by 7 Days to Die was still rough.

In my experience it already became quite a bit more solid with the update to 2019.2 in A19.

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Seriously Liam? The Food and Health bars made it into your top 5 of changes? ;D

Quoting: SolitaryI don't think the Dynamic Music System is working in Linux,

Yes, it's still disabled in Linux due to the mentioned crash. Actually I'm not sure if we can't work around that though and as the DMS is more "important" now I'll have a look myself ... Linux users would be missing out quite a big part otherwise :(

Quoting: SolitaryDid someone manage to run it with Vulkan without constant crashes? Specifically Nvidia, but I wonder how AMD works too.

Seems to really depend on the GPU/driver combination, some play without issues (and obviously better performance than GLCore) for hours, some crash all the time.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääWhat's good too, is that it's not an actual kernel driver with root permissions?

This driver seems running in user mode so it thinks it is in the kernel, but actually in a user mode process.

It can also be seen as bad. This effectively means that EAC is being kept happy while it's not being able to what is happening on the system. If it is now possible to create some sort of cheat outside of wine, then it would essentially an exploit. If this is possible on Linux, it would be possible on Windows as well. At best EAC would try to fix that. At worst, they decide that they might switch to more drastic options. While it's pretty cool that they managed it this far, I'm still not hopeful for the future.

I feel the same.
From a technical perspective, this is pretty amazing.
But it really doesn't solve the problem in a way that would make EAC happy, does it? It isn't hard to imagine Wine keeping EAC happy, while you run something else neither Wine nor EAC has access to on your machine.
In the end, it would probably only serve to increase the pressure on anti-cheat devs to either fully support or fully block Linux.

And I don't think any of us would like the result of that decision, at least not at the current market share.

Asked EAC what their thoughts are on this. I fear the same as Ehvis, namely that this is basically a working EAC bypass that needs to be fixed instead of supported.

Also note that EAC *does* fully support Linux. There are games that do that just fine, only game devs that don't care about releasing for Linux are affected as Wine is what's not supported, as that's "neither" Linux nor Windows. I suppose the only way EAC *could* be supported in Wine would be if EAC designed an EAC client module specifically for that purpose, that's basically closer to the Linux module but interacting with the Windows runtime of the game.

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Besides the issue of no security updates on SmartTVs it's also simply an issue of not getting new apps either. Our Panasonic will probably never support Disney+ as an example (actually I think it never received *any* updates for any part of it since we got it like 5 years ago ...).

I consider SmartTVs to be similar to iMacs. While it's nice in the beginning to have a good working combination (and thus integration of both parts) of the content provider and the display unit after some time you got an outdated content provider but the display unit will be just fine for years. So screens are one thing where I don't want anything else to be integrated. Just give me proper interfaces to the outside (A/V) and that's it.

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Having a full-featured open source "console" desktop from Steam would be cool imo. So not only Steam's BPM but something that resembles consoles more. Supporting streaming services in the interface (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify etc ...), playing videos from the local network, maybe support for Plex. So that you could really use that thing as a TV box and not have to hop around different interfaces for everything but games. Maybe they'll get there ...

Either way I wouldn't care about the underlying distribution ... the SteamOS thing (for me) should just work as-is, I wouldn't use that for desktops anyway.

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