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Latest Comments by Ardje
HTC Vive PRO HMD pre-orders open, standard Vive has price drop
28 Mar 2018 at 6:32 am UTC

Quoting: ShabbyX> For Linux gamers, I'm not sure if makes much sense picking one up right now. Not only is Linux VR support still quite raw, there's not a great deal of titles available.

It may be hard to raise us above 1% in sales in general, but if many Linux-exclusive gamers buy VR headsets, it would be easy to make us say 20% of VR market. That would be good for us.

We are at a point in history when we are not affected (much) by the chicken&egg problem w.r.t to VR. Not buying headsets because there are few games will only make sure this problem will become a reality for VR as well.

I would encourage people to buy headsets if I were you, Liam.
I did not think of it that way. But that's a good idea.
The problem with the current vive though is that it has no hardware adjustable IPD (2 screens).
But if the price drop is ok..

HTC Vive PRO HMD pre-orders open, standard Vive has price drop
27 Mar 2018 at 11:46 am UTC

Quoting: CorbenI'm still thinking about getting the Vive Pro. It really is a heavy price, especially compared to getting just the HMD with the connector box and not a complete bundle. So it's targeted for owners of the original Vive as an upgrade. Getting a complete bundle would put another 300€ for 2 base stations and another 290€ for two Vive controllers on top of the price of the Vive Pro. Man, that accessories is as much money as the old Vive bundle.
I was already discussing that with someone that already has the vive...
But buying his vive would still mean I need to buy the accessories, which has the same price as just a vive (599.96 euro for the accessories vs 599.00 for a complete set).
It does have an advantage that vive owners probably can buy a second vive for cheap, and have 2 VR setups working at the same time... You just need a pair of extra controllers and another PC, as the base stations just need to be there.

Robocraft Royale could see Linux support if their release goes well
27 Mar 2018 at 7:53 am UTC

If Battle Royale is the same as Last-Man-Standing, can we please call it LMS? I am too old for hypes.

The SMACH Z gaming handheld has switched to AMD Ryzen & Vega, pre-orders start soon
21 Mar 2018 at 11:29 am UTC

Quoting: slaapliedjeI'm the proud owner of two Atari Lynx's and two SD Lynx Carts. :) Brilliant machine for the time, too bad it had poor battery life and Atari wasn't able to market it very well and get developers on board...
I almost feel bad for giving my two Atari Lynx I away to a friend. OTOH, he really gives them TLC, that's worth something...
But sd-lynx carts... You can finally play alien on it!
Or all the other games that exist but were never ever sold. Actually abused as road filling in the USA. Blasphemy!

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition release date announced for March 27th, day-1 Linux support
10 Mar 2018 at 11:36 am UTC

It works fine on the GPD WIN as far as I could configure.
I still need to configure the controls to have any meaning in NWN.
Another thing is that there is no fullscreen (yet), and the gnome F11 refuses to fullscreen it.

The original NWN seems to be able to do fullscreen, but somehow it messes everything up and displays the neverwinternights halfway the screen.
But it still works.

The developer of sandbox RPG Kynseed would bring it to Linux 'if the demand is there'
8 Mar 2018 at 11:46 am UTC

I used to have an agreement with a local software shop. I told them to sent me 1 linux game every month that they didn't sent me already, whatever the price.
It was an easy agreement, and it dried up pretty quickly without me loosing significant money.
These days it's hard. I have to make choices. I wish steam had budgeting helpers. I can afford 100 euro a month, and it should just auto-select from my wish list the games that are appropriate for my budget.
But I have to choose everything by myself these days, so I stopped buying :-(.
There is so much I still want to buy, but I am limiting my buying but then I feel bad for those that I did not buy.
It's hard to be a satisfied linux gamer these days :-(.

SteamVR beta updated to fix a radv crash and 'fixes' Vive Pro on Linux
8 Mar 2018 at 11:02 am UTC

Quoting: TheRiddickField of view: 110 degrees

When Vive gets a larger FOV such as 140+, then I'll be interested. My IRL FOV is quite high so 110 would look a bit like goggle vision for me.
I can assure you that screendoor is a bigger problem than FoV. You can easily adapt to the lower FoV, as long as you can quit looking at pixels or low resolution screens and start looking at the scenery. It's like the first time you look at a computer and move the mouse to look around you. Moving your head instead of the mouse really is an eye opener.
And 110 is already much bigger than 90 :-).
Also the pro has "hardware" IPD correction (you have two separate screens. Trust me when watching stereoscopic content like games, IPD correction is important). The resolution seems to low at that FoV to do something about low resolution or screendoor effects.
(My FoV was also very high until I got night contacts. Now I have a very high FoV with a warble at the edge of my correction.)
I hope somewhere in the future it's possible to render lowres big FoV and very high res low FoV.
Maybe by having 8K screens and upscale lowres and overlay highres in the middle?

Khronos Group has released Vulkan API version 1.1 today, new NVIDIA beta driver & AMD driver available
8 Mar 2018 at 10:04 am UTC

Quoting: noxHuh, the AMD thing sounds very interesting. They are combining the closed source and open source drivers into one package?
As far as I recall, the vulkan driver part was already intended to be opensource. But it took them a while to get there. So if you only use vulkan, the official AMD drivers should provide an almost full opensource path (maybe not for drm stuff though).

The SMACH Z gaming handheld has switched to AMD Ryzen & Vega, pre-orders start soon
7 Mar 2018 at 3:27 pm UTC

Quoting: NotSoQTI can't call the SMACH Z portable at all. It's big, seems heavy, uncomfortable, barely "handheld". Can't really imagine myself using one unless I'm at home, maybe even lying in bed (for like 1 hour max).
I must confess I had tons of fun time with my atari lynx. In the train, at work, at home. Even my girlfriend was playing crystal mines II. That was actually the last real game she played.
(the last game was wordfeud and some other mobile phone game).
I think the atari lynx is a tad bigger than the S-MACH Z.
Anyway, would be cool to play those games on the S-MACH Z, upscale from 160x160 roughly to 10x bigger 8-D.

The SMACH Z gaming handheld has switched to AMD Ryzen & Vega, pre-orders start soon
7 Mar 2018 at 3:21 pm UTC

Quoting: Julius<snip>
All documented here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/2765
<snip>
But everything other than the microSD seems to be working great. And MicroSD really isn't the best medium for storing games. Probably stick to old roms and other stuff that doesn't need quick access.
Ah, yeah, I remember that thread. The big thing in the thread is the bm16ton (Ben Maddock)'s announcement of his kernel tree, which he really keeps up. I just wonder how the house fire happened. At least his tree is for the GPD WIN, and hans's tree is his personal workspace.
I will clone compile and install...
Hopefully the uSD will work without the timeouts.
BTW: this microsd should be "almost" as fast as the on board eMMC. The win emmc seems to max out at 160MB/s, and theoretically this microsd should do > 95MB/s read and write. My Xu3 made it 58MB/s probably because it doesn't support UHS-1 or maybe the kernel support was not there yet... And of course, the micro-sd detect works on it :-). But of course, always: eMMC >> microsd (in stability). But at least we can replace microsd.

My current project is running MIXXX with a "my first dj set" (hercules universal DJ). So loading .wav, aiff, or .mp3 should not be a real load.