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Latest Comments by saildata
Start your engines as DiRT Rally is now on Linux, port report & review
28 Apr 2017 at 8:28 pm UTC

Quoting: Frank DrebinSo yeah, I was wondering when the game got announced for Linux if my oldish PC could run it. I had Dirt Rally on Windows already but I hated dual booting just to play one game...

My computer specs: i3 Dual core 3,3 Ghz, GT 520 GPU (1GB RAM), 10 GB RAM. So my specs are wayyy below the minimum specs. But the game runs on lowest settings quite well; I was surprised to see when I used the ingame benchmark tool to notice that the average FPS runs around 40 FPS!

So well done Feral! No more dual booting for me :) . Only problem I've had is that I couldn't bring my career save (30 hours in) to Linux version, apparently due to some version incompatibility.
I feel like everytime Windows does a final signoff a penguin gets it's wings (or whatever the equivalent is, lol!) Congrats!

Looks like you're on the same DE I started on (but in Mint 14) I still have it installed as one of my spare, "rescue Arch" installs because it's like an old pickup that just keeps on going. I've actually always found Mint on Cinnamon to be dang near as fast as Arch on Gnome... with 99% less install effort! (send any hate mail to Liam :)

Do you plan on moving to Gnome when Ubuntu proper switches over, or are you sticking with Cinnamon?

EDIT: Sorry! I looked up and saw your comment -- didn't realize it was 2 months old : / I'll double check next time!

Sumoman, the hilarious UNIGINE-powered puzzle platformer with physics is now out on Linux
28 Apr 2017 at 8:19 pm UTC

Quoting: stormaIt appears to be working a bit better after the update #3. It has finally loaded for me on my HTPC Debian testing system where before it would just run in the background.

Though I do have a white screen in place of graphics.
The work around for the white screen is to add/create .drirc and add the following.
<driconf>
    <!-- Please always enable app-specific workarounds for all drivers and
         screens. -->
    <device>
        <!-- mesa commit b0ff18bd3441ce7f28354686934440a92826eaf8 -->
        <application name="Sumoman 64-bit" executable="sumoman_x64">
            <option name="allow_glsl_extension_directive_midshader" value="true" />
        </application>
    </device>
</driconf>


Next problem is to sort out why it isn't working for the steam controller.
Hey Storma, sorry I haven't been online to check my messages. Yeah, I noticed #3 seems to be working for me too. If #4 is also good, then I'll update my review noting the changes.

What gets me the most out of this entire ordeal is the attitude from such a small team (2 people?) I felt like I went out of my way to provide helpful debugging info multiple times. Enough to rack up "2 hours of gameplay" on the Steam odometer without actually playing the game. Only to get s* on by auto-replies. But alas, we have a game that was bought, paid for, and finally loads the first level ;)

F1 2016 won't be coming to Linux, as sales of F1 2015 weren't strong enough
28 Apr 2017 at 8:14 pm UTC

For anyone who catches this in the next 21 hours -- all the DLC for GRiD Autosport is 75% off at the Steam Store. [External Link].

Maybe it's the kid in me who played hours of "street racing" games, but the Drag Pack for $1.25 was a steal! The comments are plagued with people complaining about a lack of burnout before the race, but hey, what can you get for $1.25 other than a McNasty from McD?? I didn't get all of them, but definitely used up about $4.00 of credit on some hand picked content.

The entire game+DLC is $17.50 for anyone who doesn't have it. It's by no means DiRT Rally, but there are a lot of us here with more than enough hours on this game to make it worth while!

Finally, there are also 2 free DLC, including a high resolution texture pack (dropped my 1070 to it's 20FPS knees on Ultra!) that you don't even have to download now, just click on the link in Steam and it "adds it to your library" (assuming it wouldn't drop off later, but we've seen worse..)

Let me know if anyone wants to get a round-robin GOL drag tournament going! :D

Sumoman, the hilarious UNIGINE-powered puzzle platformer with physics is now out on Linux
5 Apr 2017 at 12:35 am UTC

Quoting: PozzuoliI feel the refund lurking.
Hah, it's not lurking. I get the feeling it's a certainty at this point... what will replace it?? Good luck, and happy hunting :)

Transport Fever releases a big usability patch, Linux version performance still an issue
4 Apr 2017 at 3:37 pm UTC

Ok, so finally crossed this one off my wanted list and got it. WOW! It may come down to other factors, but running on all ultra, change AA to x 2 and resolution to 1080p (the fonts like ~50% of games I've tried are unreadable at 2160p, and not that much better at 1440p), I'm seeing steady 60fps, which matches the monitor. There isn't anything I can find in options or the config files to disable vsync.. I'll see if it changes by forcing it off through the driver, but honestly it keeps everything fluid.

I've only made it through the tutorial, so maybe like Civilization 6 it will also slow down as more objects are moving about and the game is calculating more items per frame.

I will say that it's a complex game and that a player could spend many hours fine tuning any given area of their strategy. I kind of felt the same way about Cities, and even times ten :) on Civ6 (but this is my first Civ to play). I especially like the active community and the open API for Lua and other mods such as custom textures.

They pushed another patch this morning, but I don't think it relates to performance from the forum posts. Thanks for bringing this up again, Liam, it made me review why after a year I hadn't even given it a chance.

F1 2016 won't be coming to Linux, as sales of F1 2015 weren't strong enough
4 Apr 2017 at 3:26 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: BeamboomI see several of you guys discuss user ratings and the motive behind them. You should stop caring so much about the user ratings and read the professional reviews instead. There it is properly explained why they set the score that they do, furthermore they use a lot more fine-grained score system than a simple thumb up/down.
Edit: Let me clarify, I agree with the value of professional reviews, not that anything was ignored.

I agree and have said many times that I value the community (and pro, thanks Liam!) reviews far more than Steam reviews. My interest was in the inflation, e.g. the words people were writing didn't match up with the review classification. After more digging I found out it all comes down to positive reviews/total reviews, which is neither an accepted way (outside of HS algebra) or an honest method of reporting. It's one of many things they need to change, but as long as the $$$ are rolling in they have no incentive to do so, especially if it would result in lower ratings.

So I wouldn't say I care more than the community reviews, but (1) they often cross over (e.g. dialog on GOL and then read that same person's review on Steam) and (2) if they're running Linux, they can't be ALL that bad :) Also, I try to take into account all the information I have available before making a decision. I can't just write off the information on Steam, but I can give it a lower weight, per se, in my decision for buy/no buy.

I hope that the impression wasn't given that the feedback here is anything less than a treasure for anyone gaming on a Linux OS.

Sumoman, the hilarious UNIGINE-powered puzzle platformer with physics is now out on Linux
4 Apr 2017 at 3:14 pm UTC

Sorry. It may have just been coincidence or maybe it triggered something else? Who knows. I've learned to not mess with it as long as it's working!

Even after reporting the fix and explaining it, they responded with a link to "how to submit a bug report". I don't know why I even bother saying anything to them anymore -- they don't read.

Maybe it's a team of bots that desperately needs some logic update :| It's just frustrating to go through the trouble of hunting down possible fixes, testing it on/off to see if it's reproducible, write up what's been tried and found to work, only to have their side completely ignore it and continue on with the customer support script like it's the telephone company.

Oh well.. life goes on :)

F1 2016 won't be coming to Linux, as sales of F1 2015 weren't strong enough
4 Apr 2017 at 1:52 am UTC

Quoting: SkullyReal Shame :( Codemasters F1 games are awesome. Porting 2015 was a Bad choice though. It was missing soooo many features that we come to expect from the series. So a lot of people like me just skipped it. Even though it was ported to linux, there was no way I was ever going to buy it that year. I own all the others. The fact it was released so late made it even worse, as 2016 was just around the corner.

This is 1 series that keeps me and alot of my friends needing windows. Ofcoarse we hoped 2016 would be ported, but we already own it. Although we would of held off a little if it was announced to be on linux within a a short time after the windows release.

Please Port a worthy version of F1 either day 1 or very soon after and see what happens.
Edit: I didn't realize my unintentional pun (see below) ^_^

I wonder how much the engine (pun intended after I noticed it!) has actually changed? They invested so much in 2015 game that it seems like 2016 would be an instant green light, if nothing else to help recover costs from previous release, unless 2016 was truly going to be a massive effort.

I agree -- I don't think it was them, as the general reviews prior to them porting it were not fantastic to begin with. But, hindsight is 20/20 so it's easy to look back now and judge the decision. We have no idea what business motivations or incentives were involved to get the game on Linux.. maybe they were light on work and as was mentioned, forecasts were (always are) wrong. You use the information you have, make the decision, and learn.

I guess they're saying they learned and it doesn't make sense. I also am impressed with the honesty, that means a lot to me as one of their customers. Many companies wouldn't have touched the question and let it just sit there forever without an answer.

F1 2016 won't be coming to Linux, as sales of F1 2015 weren't strong enough
4 Apr 2017 at 1:46 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: saildata
Quoting: leillo1975
Quoting: ageres> Reviews: Mostly negative.
I wonder why sales were poor…

F1 2016 has "very positive" rating though.
I don't understand why the reviews are negative. The game is not excellent, but it is not so bad either. Maybe people had too high expectations.
I've looked at this before with Steam review data and found that Linux reviews were on average about 10-15% higher than Windows and about 5% (not sig.) higher than Macs. Note that was across all games.

Specific to simulation games, around 5% of Windows users rated above 90% while Linux users had over 12% of simulation games rated above 90%.

I have my theories on why this happens, both in general and simulation game specific, but would really like to hear what others think. These are not based on anything than 'gut feeling' and general observations regarding possible causes:

(1) One possibility is that Linux users are more inclined to fix any errors and then perhaps give a good rating later on, without thinking about the initial experience but rather the current experience.

(2) (I may be guilty of this as well) Linux users may have a lower "bar" for what they feel is a good game and are more likely to give a good rating even with the exact same glitches a Windows user might experience (and give it a negative review).

(3) My final theory on this is that we research and read reviews in more detail before purchase, and are more likely to be more selective therefore purchasing games that we would naturally rate higher (e.g. some people said they don't feel like they enjoy the 'F1' genre)

I actually just thought of one more as I was writing these down, but I won't bore you and suspect that someone may point it out what would be my #4 :)

I'm sure Steam has all this info and the answers :) as they can slice the data much more granular that is made in the API.
Your first two possible causes are coming from one , simple and hurtful truth.

We need games desperately (especially AAA titles) and when they released it we accept it regardless of bugs and performance. Those reviews are mostly positive (forgive me about that) because they think 'if we lick this developers or companies ass ; we can get sequel or more game from them. '

Just like lying to a woman or a man to get access in their pants. Cave man thoughts and behaves simply continues even if we don't realize.

People can't get it. Companies are like prostitutes ; if you have enough money they don't care about your opinions.
I hadn't thought about the perspective of, "we should be positive if we hope for future releases". That is a valid point. I also hadn't considered your comparison of companies to, err.. ladies of the night :)

I thought F1 was good.. until I got DiRT Rally. That really raised the bar for me. I grew up playing Forza on 360 and other games like that (can't remember the name of the PlayStation game atm) that were truly tough games. I think that's why DR really hit home for me and is among one of my favorites.

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it!

Transport Fever releases a big usability patch, Linux version performance still an issue
4 Apr 2017 at 1:41 am UTC

This has been on my wish list since before release.. I studied Op. Research in grad school and LOVE sim games, especially management resource games. Every time I go to look at it, it seems that someone's review talks me out of it. I do like Cities, but as others have said there are many differences. I was really hoping that this patch would fix the major bugs..

Has anyone played the new Winds of Trade? The description details gives a lot of hope, but the negative reviews have me a bit worried. For example, it mentions a dynamic world economy, contracts, and others that make me think that it would be a great econ. type sim.. but certain reviews say that these features are over-promised and under-delivered. On the flip side are people saying it's the best ever, so maybe it truly is a love it/hate it game.

If anyone has a favorite that perhaps I've missed (I actually haven't played some of the classics like TTD, should I?) let me know because I'd definitely take a GOL recommendation over someone on Steam that I don't have a prior basis for.. speaking of.. it would be nice to see in Steam reviews whether a person is generally positive or negative to help determine whether their review holds any weight/ do they give EVERYTHING a thumbs up/down.

Thanks --