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Latest Comments by Ardje
D9VK sees a first actual release for getting Direct3D 9 games running on Vulkan with Wine
9 May 2019 at 4:03 pm UTC

Would be interesting to see how well this fares with wine under qemu on an android or other arm platform supporting vulkan.

Planet Nomads has left Early Access and feels like a big missed opportunity
4 May 2019 at 12:47 am UTC Likes: 2

I think I sunk more hours into planet nomads than into GTA V. It is a build game with strange physics. You get to play with all kinds of low level stuff. You kind of lego vehicles together, like a monorail and things like that.
That's how I left it.
That particular thing is pretty unique.
There is planet explorers that does a little bit of everything and is actually pretty good with story and all, and letting bots do the grind for you.
If you are into large scale automation you will have to look at fortresscraft evolved, my biggest time sink.
If you want to fly to different planets, and do some simple base building then no man's sky is your thing.
But none of those will let you use the lego you got and build something the developers did not expect.
If they all could work together and make one game. No man's sky to have and fly to different planets,
fortrescrafts massive automation setups to rain all those planets from their important resources,
use the Planet Nomads tool to create the planet exploring vehicles and rails and whatever. Have the bot management and a story like planet explorers...
And of course in vulkan and VR
That would be great.

NVIDIA are continuing to work on PRIME GPU offloading, with a new GLX Extension
29 Apr 2019 at 8:55 am UTC

<rant>
I am one of those lucky bastards that got his T430 with HD4000 only swapped with a T430 with optimus.
It's the biggest crap I've ever seen.
And with al the new systemd enhancements the crap pile even rises... (On ubuntu bionic LTS, you can't turn off optimus anymore once you've touched it, because some PID 1 has an open file descriptor to the DRI).
It would have been acceptable if I could just switch between HD4000 (with *better* support) and the nvidia (to get the minidisplay port working) on reboot basis, but alas, that does not work.
And due to systemd (fixed in a new release of systemd, so I have to wait 2 years or go for something like arch), the laptop has early thermal issues. It just adds 6W of thermal to your CPU (shared heatsink) when not used and not being able to shut it.
</rant>

I would love to own an i7 8809G, and have the freedom to select or turn off the GPU I don't need.
Or even go eGPU and then turn off the eGPU before undocking. Which of course can only be an AMD due to these kind of problems.

Valve have confirmed Linux support for their Valve Index VR headset, pre-orders on May 1st
9 Apr 2019 at 2:40 pm UTC

Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: ArdjeI don't know where it is build. Doesn't really matter. The Steam Controller as well as the Steam Link were shipped from the Netherlands when ordered from the Netherlands.
So there is not extra tax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgnWqoP4MM [External Link]
Amazing!

<rant>The experience with USA based assembly is pretty bad. Look for instance at openpandora. Or more near experience, once you sign the contract, the nice guys go away, and you get backstabbed by the real company.
Chinese and Korean companies are so much more reliable in that respect. No niceness facade, if you pay it is ok. They will also say how much, and they will help you.</rant>

So this is yet another surprise: Valve really invests into it's mother country's economy. Respect!

Valve have confirmed Linux support for their Valve Index VR headset, pre-orders on May 1st
8 Apr 2019 at 3:52 pm UTC

I don't know where it is build. Doesn't really matter. The Steam Controller as well as the Steam Link were shipped from the Netherlands when ordered from the Netherlands.
So there is not extra tax.

Woops - Valve accidentally put up the Valve Index, Base Station and Controllers unfinished store pages
2 Apr 2019 at 1:05 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Beamboom
Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: Hal_Kado
The cameras won't be for inside-out tracking, just for pass-through and maybe handtracking or something.
I would assume it's primarily for AR?
I think it is used to show your mom is in the room, so it is time to pull your pants up and stop virtual girlfriend and start beatsaber, all while pretending you don't know she is in the room.

Man, I wish I lived with my mom again, so I could just experience the awkward situation.

The Linux beta of X4: Foundations has been running nicely, a new update is now out
19 Mar 2019 at 10:13 am UTC

Joystick hotplug was the main reason X4 does not run on steamos... When you start the game and the steam controller switches to xbox mode, it crashes, while it starts when you configure the steam controller as an MKB.
So I need to test that \0/

The Linux beta of X4: Foundations has been running nicely, a new update is now out
19 Mar 2019 at 9:52 am UTC

The only thing I remember of the X series is the huge amount of things you have to learn. It's probably the only reason I did not play any of it, although they are all in my collection \0/ .
I remember flying with X2 through a few portals but then I got lost into what my mission actually was, and I think I ended up flying a long time through a red cosmos.

The Linux-powered Atari VCS is getting upgraded to AMD Ryzen, shipping dates pushed back
19 Mar 2019 at 9:26 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: DuncI'd almost forgotten about this. That said, the Christmas period is the right time to release something like it, so I wouldn't have expected to see anything until Q4 or late Q3 anyway, and this does look like a reasonable upgrade; the main complaint about the original spec was that it just didn't look powerful enough.

Wait and see. As before.
If they change it now, I don't expect them to release this year.
The Smach Z team had to design the core board themselves due to rhomb.io.
They are at it since late 2017. They now have working small series which need another iteration to squash the defects that were emitted by some of the units.
So that's about 1.5 years from a total new design of a cpu board before the now expected delivery to the crowd funder.

And you are right, the main reason I did not fund the Atari at that time, was that it came with an old soc, while the Smach Z was announced with a new soc.

The Linux-powered Atari VCS is getting upgraded to AMD Ryzen, shipping dates pushed back
19 Mar 2019 at 9:16 am UTC

Quoting: tonRI hope VCS really been launched or Linux especially Linux gaming will get bad reputation.

Seriously, I didn't want "Linux" word being synonymous as the word "scam". No thanks to lots of not-so-convincing crowdfunding program.
Mostly due to crowds screaming Scam, or worse, crying wolf when there is a kitten.
There are a lot of fake crowdfundings, and it promises everything, and never starting anything. They are easily spotted though.
There are also a few crowdfunding programs that get severely damaged by the Scam crowd, a crowd of teenagers that needs to scream at everything that the leader of the herd says to scream at. Actually, this can be found not only at crowdfunding.
So, personally, I don't think it would hurt the Linux "brand", until the leader of the herd will point at Linux as a scam. And no point in telling that leader that 1/2 his household runs linux, because the herd only listens to the leader.
Actually, when you think about it, it's a very very interesting scientific study, mod/crowd psychology. Especially since the crowd is now connected by internet instead of being in a small space.
Sorry, psychology, how absurd it may sound, was my second interest after electronics (Computers were essentially non existent, as the one computer we had at school filled a small classroom). Electronics obviously has been largely replaced by computing, especially since it was obvious that I would never understand antennas, and computer science classes: I did that literally sleeping.