"We don't go to Ravenholm anymore."

When I first played the original Half-Life, it didn't seem that impressive at first. However, once I played past the part that was included in the Half-Life: Day One demo, it started to get a lot more interesting to play. At the time, I was surprised at the depth. It did end up dragging a little after you got to the alien world, but not much. The last boss in that was not a pushover compared to the other things you had to do in the game.

So by the time Half-Life 2 came out, I was anxiously awaiting it already. I bought it and played through it fairly soon after it arrived (translation: 'I bought it the first day it came out' - Edit: OK, OK; I pre-ordered it and it was sent directly to my house). It was extremely impressive in just about every way at the time, and even my brothers who never played the original enough to appreciate it ended up liking 2 a lot. It was interesting that the aliens that were one of your main enemies in the first game considered you a hero in the second game ( "the Freeman" ) for freeing them from being controlled by the alien you defeated at the end. Of course there were several unforgettable moments, including the ominous words of the young girl I quoted at the top of my comment.

I have never played the episodes. I'm not sure I dare do that considering the effect they have had on others in making them even more determined to see a Half-Life 3. :)

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Games that 'may come soon' are possible because developers could add more games to the charity effort. Of course, the further along it gets, the less likely this probably becomes (unless there is some developer looking for donating some but not too much that doesn't want to use the limited copies approach).

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Quoting: bubexelFor that reason i edited my comment, after check dictonary i found that i missunderstod the word gimmick. Btw, when you talk about past? you mean 90's VR? it's ridicolous compare it with 90's and more with 50's. I doubt they had any tracking or the led screens we have nowdays. It's just stupid. Btw, i have vive, and the time i play games i use to play on it. I almost not playing screen games anymore. I havent much time to play, that time i use to pay it on VR. Comparing those things from the "past" make me guess you didn't tested any of those modern VR head sets. (i'm not talking about mobile phone VR that is ridicolous).

I had already written and posted the reply before I saw your comment was edited. I have no wish to offend.

You may notice that I said in my first post, "It's plausible that improving technology could change this." I didn't rule out that VR could still become wildly popular because of improvements in the technology. However, improvements in the technology don't guarantee that it will become popular. The most likely point for improvement to actually make a difference is when virtual reality actually looks and feels like reality, and I'm still not sure that would make it catch on.

My point was that VR has been impressive for a long time. Even the Cinerama first person perspective demo films from the fifties, which certainly have their flaws, are still impressive to experience in a Cinerama theater. Virtual reality being impressive doesn't mean that it will actually become popular. It's been around for a long time, and it's been applied to games for a significant amount of time. There hasn't been one particular breakthrough, but especially as applied to gaming it has been steadily improving for years. That hasn't made it popular yet. I'm not sure that it's something that will ever have more than a limited audience because I'm not sure it's something that most people really want, regardless of how well done it is.

Incidentally, tracking has been around in the headsets for a while. I'm not sure exactly how long, but it seems like they had it in the nineties. I'm sure it must be more accurate now than back then. I think the new screens help combat some of the issues like headaches and motion sickness better than the old display technologies. I think the graphics capabilities of newer GPUs are probably the most effective improvement for making the experience more enjoyable for games rather than just impressive tech demos.

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Quoting: bubexelI don't see it as "gimmick", for me gimmick is like Wii from nintendo, that your movements do something in the game. In real virtualty are you in game, you have a gun in your hand, you touch the things. Is like say, football is gimmick, have no sense.

I get the impression you are not a native English speaker, so I can understand that you might not be clear on exactly what a gimmick is. Or perhaps there is some other reason you don't have the same idea of the word "gimmick" as I do. The first definition from Dictionary.com is, "an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, especially one designed to attract attention or increase appeal." A gimmick is basically anything that catches people's attention based on novelty and/or "the cool factor." It doesn't matter whether it has legitimate benefits or not (that is, the benefits of something being legitimate don't make it not a gimmick).

Really, though, I don't see your point. Virtual reality being more like reality doesn't make it any less of a gimmick. If anything, it makes it more of a gimmick since it's not actual reality. Also, we are not nearly at the level of virtual reality that you imply in your comment. You can't actually touch things in VR. In many cases, you are expected to use a controller. The most convincing VR environments give you controls that offer only indirect interaction with the environment like shooting a gun from a stationary position or controlling a car or another vehicle with physical controls very similar to the controls presented in the game.

Regardless, my point was that if someone puts on a VR headset and watches an environmental demo that imitates an exciting experience*, it grabs their attention. That makes it one hundred percent a gimmick. However, in the past most people have found that a game environment is more comfortably enjoyed through a monitor than "immersed" in virtual reality.

(* It should be noted that this technique and some elements of virtual reality have been around since the invention of the original three camera movie making process called Cinerama, originally demonstrated to the public in 1952, which ended up being too cumbersome to really catch on, though some movies like How the West Was Won were originally shot with this technique and can still be viewed that way (along with some of the VR demo movies) in one of the few remaining Cinerama theaters.)

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I'm still not sold on VR. Generally, it seems like it's interesting to people as a tech demo gimmick, but when it comes to actually playing a full length game, people would rather not use it. That's just going by the last twenty-five years or so. It's plausible that improving technology could change this, but I've learned not to be convinced by "the next big VR release" ahead of time. I have a wait and see attitude about VR at this point (especially since I'm not at all sure there are any cases in which I would prefer it over a normal PC gaming experience myself).

As far as Steam Machines go, it's possible that exclusive titles would boost sales and help make it more successful. That's the way it works in the console world, and Steam Machines are intended to be like consoles.

However, for Linux in general, exclusive titles don't really make any difference. In the computer world, the game market follows the general use market. If general use followed the game market, Amigas (or maybe Atari STs) would be on top right now instead of Windows based machines.

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Quoting: poke86

We have several original IP's that we will be bringing to the platform in 2017

What exactly do they mean by "original"? Stuff they will be creating from scratch, or existing franchises that just haven't made it to Linux yet?

Well, normally "original" titles would mean games that they developed themselves rather than ported for someone else, regardless of whether they were already on other platforms or not. I suppose it's also possible that he just meant games that haven't yet been released on any platform, that is, games that are new this year.

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Quoting: Alm888And I'm honest about it. Pardon me for breaking this nice little sheeny world where everyone loves Valve® and prays to St. Newell.

That's hardly the case. A lot of Linux gamers aren't thrilled with DRM, and thus aren't thrilled with Steam. However, Valve does happen to have boosted Linux gaming a lot in the past few years, and they at least appreciated that fact.

Quoting: Alm888The Valve's attempt to hijack Linux gaming and replace it with its own controlled DRM-ed OS (even if it is based on Linux for now). That's sufficient for me.

Valve is all about the store and digital distribution. Yes, they are concerned about DRM, but not at the OS level, since they don't sell the OS. They want to make you dependent on their distribution service and not be able to break away from it. This is true in Windows as well as Linux, and they couldn't care less which system you are using as long as they don't get squeezed out, and that's what Steam OS is about, a way to be sure they don't get squeezed out by Microsoft. As long as they are assured they can not be squeezed out, that's all they need.

Quoting: LeopardI'm not talking about "will/will_not work on $distroname}". I'm talking about replacing Linux with SteamOS™.

SteamOS is a Linux distribution, and it cannot be simply replaced by BSD. The games don't run on a virtual machine that can be made to run on any kernel. They are completely dependent on the Linux operating system. If they replaced Linux with BSD, they would immediately make all the existing games incompatible. Existing tools for making BSD run Linux software are highly unlikely to work very well with games. The overhead for developing such a thing is very high and totally unnecessary for Valve and their goals. They can meet their most nefarious goals without doing that (that is, they can make you dependent on Steam to run your games that you purchased through Steam). Your comments about 'removing Linux' from SteamOS reflect a lack of understanding of the technical side of things and the business side of things.

The point is not that Steam is better than you imagine them to be. It's that Steam can be as evil as they want while continuing to support Linux just the same way as they do now. They don't care about the OS other than as a means to an end. All they care about is the digital distribution store. If you are going to continue this line of reasoning, at least try to come up with a plausible benefit for Valve trying to replace Linux, which would involve a great deal of time and expense, and would render all the work they are doing now obsolete.

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Quoting: Ads20000Yeah, but I think Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage do this better because different apps can share dependencies where the developers know this to work and bundle their own dependencies/dependency versions otherwise. Also it means they don't have to resort to their own scripts but there's one packaging system that does it all (though granted it's split between these three different systems at the moment).

There can't be very much sharing of dependencies at all since these packages are supposed to work on almost any distribution (so perhaps not none, but very little). I just wanted to point out here that these things aren't really new, though the sandbox to protect the system is a new twist.

Quoting: Ads20000Well maybe they were wrong, the new system, as I said, resolves the old rolling vs stability dilemma (and before people argue rolling=stable, firstly tell me that you've used rolling for a while and you've come across no bugs or manual config - i.e. a complete noob would've been able to use it - and secondly consider that it might not work perfectly across different hardware or sets of software installed (for EXAMPLE, it might work worse with KDE since their packages might find new dependencies more troublesome etc) Granted, cadence releases have not really achieved this either, but given their testing schedule they are more likely to do so).

Well yes, if your graphics driver doesn't support the latest version of OpenGL/DirectX then yeah it won't. Still, you don't need your whole system updated with upstream packages from the ground up all the time with only a few days to see what's messed up - it's a recipe for disaster, unless you're already an experienced Linux user who knows how to get around issues.

I didn't mean to imply that anyone was right or wrong about the different approaches. It's much too subjective a topic for that to be the case. I was trying to point out basically two things. One was that this isn't a new idea; it's been around since RISC OS, and it's been around in Linux for over a decade (GoboLinux is 14 years old; and it takes the RISC OS approach). The second is that it doesn't solve every problem regarding Linux software distribution. There are things that a rolling release provides that these packages can't provide. I'm not saying that because I think rolling releases are the way to go or are a better approach than cross distribution packaging. I'm just saying that no solution is the answer to every issue. Rolling releases tend to be unstable. Traditional releases tend to be outdated. Cross distribution packaging tends to eat hard drive space and leave the system more susceptible to security issues while keeping applications but not system components more up to date.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with cross distribution packaging, but I'm not going to get excited about the potential of something that has been around for over a decade until I see it actually create some tangible benefits I haven't experienced before. I've known about the potential benefits for a long time. I'm way past getting excited about them.

The reasons why a Linux gamer in particular might consider using a rolling release aren't addressed by cross distribution packaging methods at all (you can't put Mesa in a Flatpak, at least not in a way that makes any sense).

Disclaimer: I have no rolling distributions in use at the present time. I have at one time or another had an installation of Arch, Gentoo, Siduction, AptoSid, and Linux Mint Debian Edition (back when it was completely a rolling release, at the time probably the worst rolling release I have run, i.e., it broke the most often and the most completely).

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Quoting: Ads20000The new Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage formats resolve the problem. App developers can bundle dependencies, thus they can depend on specific versions if necessary, or depend on the core system which has been tested as a unit rather than releasing updates for random libraries as they come in - if they happen to be OK with the core system's dependency versions. There's a cost to the size of applications, but given people have big hard drives and fast Internet these days, that's not really so much of a problem. I think the new Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage approach is a much better way to get stable, up-to-date applications and system than rolling releases are.

You should realize that the reason things are different on Windows is that packages in Windows are basically like Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage packages rather than any deep, inherent difference about the system. Also, this type of package is not really a new concept in Linux either. For example, Zero Install and the original iteration of AppImage (known as Klik) have been around for quite some time (both more than twelve years). Besides those efforts, proprietary applications have used a similar approach in Linux as in Windows with their own installation scripts (games being a fairly prominent example) for a long time. Anything installed in /opt is going to tend to include most of its own dependencies.

The difference in the systems is mostly about the difference between open source software and proprietary software. Open source software involves a lot of use of shared libraries, while closed source software has tended to share fewer and fewer libraries over the years to avoid "dll hell." You're much more likely to find several versions of the same library in different application directories in Windows. Open source software solved this problem a different way with dependency managers, like apt, yum, etc.

The reason why efforts like Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage haven't taken off in Linux in the past is because people thought that the disadvantages outweighed the advantages when it came to open source software. However, that does not mean that it can never catch on, especially with closed source software.

Of course that doesn't mean that these packages are a panacea for all library/component conflict issues. For example, whatever version of OpenGL your systems supports isn't going to change because you run a program from a Flatpak, the same as your version of DirectX doesn't change with an application in Windows. Basic system component updates will still have to be managed by the distribution.

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I've been using Linux at home since 1999 (I was introduced to it in 1998 at college while getting a CIS degree). I used to use Slackware for just about everything at home with some use of Debian at work, but when I started getting lazy about installing and maintaining my systems, I generally switched over to Debian and Ubuntu variations (but never Ubuntu itself). There are of course countless distributions that I haven't tried or haven't used recently enough to matter, so I will confine my comments to what has worked for me and people I've supported running Linux.

If I had a machine dedicated completely to gaming, I'd be more likely to run an Arch based distribution on it. However, since I am into photography and music, I have been running Ubuntu Studio (with KXStudio repositories added if needed) on my main machines (that's an Xfce based version of Ubuntu). I have also used Debian with a Liquorix kernel at times.

I've never been a fan of the more resource demanding desktops like KDE and GNOME. The environments you might spot on my computers could include at any given time Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox, Openbox with a panel (I'm drawing a blank about the name of the panel I've used recently), or IceWM.

Recently, the computers I've prepared for others (mostly relatives) either had Ubuntu Studio or Lubuntu on them (I've also used Xubuntu and LXLE in the past). They're mostly Core 2 generation machines right now. I've kept them on LTS versions since they receive updates for a long time even if the person doesn't bring the machine back to me, which it's surprisingly difficult to get them to do, generally because they seem to like them the way they are.

As far as what Ubuntu based distribution to use for a dedicated gaming machine goes, I would lean toward a properly tweaked Lubuntu. By default, Lubuntu doesn't use PulseAudio, but it is very simple to add if it works better for you (you just install it).

Other distributions I use are Debian Stable for servers and Salix OS Fluxbox or Debian with my choice of desktop for really old machines.

Of course, I've tried many other distributions, including Arch in the past.

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