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Latest Comments by Ardje
You can grab Alien Isolation the full collection from Humble Store super cheap right now
17 Mar 2017 at 2:39 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: lucifertdarkIf I didn't already have it in my collection I would, but I paid £20 for it last year.

ps. I haven't gotten past the first encounter with a Xenomorph yet, it made me jump out of my skin & I haven't played it since. :D
I am stuck somewhere around the doctors offices if I remember correctly... Meeh... I whish they had a setting "I am too old to pee in my bed". But actually jumpscares are more like a stress thing. I don't like it. Kinda why I really don't like doom3 even though it is a magnificent piece of eye candy and has some kind of story.

NVIDIA might have more open drivers in future on Linux
17 Mar 2017 at 9:38 am UTC Likes: 2

I have a simple guide: I look at the amount of continuous effort a company has put into maintaining their or generic stuff in the linux kernel. The top is: intel (generic and intel specific), amd (I haven't looked closely but I assume mostly ati and amd specific, although they try to make things generic), samsung (generic and samsung specific). redhat is not a harware company, although it really is one of the top investors.
Nvidia is simply not among those. Ok, they are better than Qualcomm (not hard though), but even broadcom >> Nvidia in maintenance and support.
These are just kernel support. If we are going to shift focus to generic opensource userspace software, I think Samsung will even top Intel. And in generic opensource we have a new player called Valve...

This guide means multiple things to me: if I buy a samsung phone I will never feel cheated, even if the software sucks, because in a way I will be investing in my own company.
Same goes for intel and amd. I've stopped buying nvidia due to their anti-competitive gameplay: they do not compete on technology, they only try to lock developers and users in.
But since Valve means a lot to linux I did buy an expensive steam machine without any regret (which of course only has nvidia inside).
And most of the games on steam... I don't mind if they are bad because a % goes to valve that invests in opensource, which I use to profit from. Capitalism as it was meant to be.

NVIDIA might have more open drivers in future on Linux
17 Mar 2017 at 9:24 am UTC

Quoting: TheRiddick
Quoting: AimelaJust look at G-Sync,
To be fare the new Freesync2 is closed loop just like g-sync also. I don't know if AMD will be able to sell freesync2 with the way they intend to do it (exclusive product selection among other things).
But at least freesync is a standard. A standard on HDMI 2 and on DP1.2 . And yes, it might be that it's not as good as G-Sync, but the point is that it is easy to implement on all monitors.

Editorial: On paying for Linux games when you already have a Windows version
15 Mar 2017 at 5:16 pm UTC Likes: 2

I would rebuy the GTA series I already have (for wine) if it came out on linux if necessary. Absolutely no problem with that.
The same with every game I already own as windows only and now gets a linux port.
I rebought games again and again...
First on CD, since the CD's are unreadable I now only buy on steam or gog, but last few years steam only, as GOG had no support or patches for lgogdownloader.
Now I buy only linux, and I will rebuy all the games I do not have a linux version if it is necessary.
I will even rebuy the linux versions of games I already have...
Heavy Gear 2, awesome, but support is exit.
Any loki games that do not run anymore.
Prey... that was an awesome icculus port, which I will buy again, if I can just press buy on steam big picture.
UT2004, UT, unreal... all those with official linux ports. I would buy those again to have a <click here to install> in steam big picture.

A look at how much RAM you might need as a Linux gamer
14 Mar 2017 at 12:47 pm UTC

Quoting: M@yeulC
Quoting: ArdjeIn the FortressCraft Evolved forum, a linux guy was asking about why fortresscraft demanded 400MB/s throughput on his SSD. While he did not notice any slow downs he was wondering about that.
Turns out he had no swap partition. So after adding the swap his SSD almost went silent.
So even if you are on SSD, always, *always* use a swap partition. The swap is used to swap out not frequently used anonymous allocated memory. Every bash you start, any program linked to gcc will start out initializing memory it will never use.
In his case, his anonymous memory usage (i.e. the memory used by the game) made the kernel continously page in the static game data at a rate of 400MB. Adding swap made it possible to swap out a large part of the almost static allocation of unused memory.
There are a few things I didn't understand in your post:
1. Without a swap file or partition, how could the kernel page to disk (aka swap)?
2. Why would a swap partition reduce swapping to disk?
1) It can't swap out anonymous memory. because it had no swap. That means it can only discard RO/non-dirty pages, and hence it was reading with 400MB's all the pages it had discarded. It's called trashing, not swapping.
2) If you allocate a lot of memory, but don't actively use most of it, that memory can better be used as cache for other stuff. So it needs to be backed up somewhere, and that's exactly why you need swap: to page out dirty but infrequently used memory.

You don't need swap on another disk, if you think that, you need to rethink why you need swap. It also doesn't have to be a partition, it can just be a file. All disk access will quiet down when the infrequent used dirty pages are written to disk, because frequently used data (like the program) wil be in memory all the time.

Now if you have a swapfile and stuff still starts trashing (I tried running btrfs fsck with 700GB swap and 16GB RAM, but it still died after running 6 months of intense trashing with an out-of-memory trying to repair 200GB of metadata), your system is too small, or the software is broken (btrfs fsck was broken in this case).

Planet Nomads plans an Early Access release in April
14 Mar 2017 at 12:33 pm UTC

Quoting: artvandelay440To what end, I have no idea, but bugs are now expected in a paid product far earlier and with more acceptance than they ever have, or so it seems. Am I the only one noticing this trend?
I notice that thinks like early access tend to do 2 things: 1) fund development on a project you would whish to have in the future. 2) Let you participate in that future.
Planet Nomads was in alpha for engine and interaction development. They also made a seperate branch for content. The engine+content is what's planned for early access.
The alpha worked for me. But it has no content. The early access has a lot more content.
And I just funded it with the knowledge that in 2 years or so I can play a great game. Most of my investments payed off well.
I think a good example of a working early access is ARK: survival evolved. They are now getting shit on, because they had to rollback 30 hours of database after a bug that got exploited in the early access phase.
They are planning wise in time: They planned release last year, and have only postponed to release this year. Only a 1 year delay for a game like that is pretty awesome.
Still that 30 hour rollback got a lot of people with 3000h of fun time wanting a refund of the $30 they paid.
DOS was delayed about 2 years for the linux release, 1 year for the windows release.
But yes, there is crap too...

2Dark released without a Linux version despite promising it during crowdfunding
14 Mar 2017 at 10:53 am UTC Likes: 2

I think it must be clear that a linux version is not a feature of the game. A linux version is essential for the one paying for it, else he cannot play it. In other words: lacking the linux version in my opinion is not a partial delivery, but actually no delivery at all.
I think kickstarter probably now has contracts that prevent projects from having delivered nothing at all.

What have you been playing recently and what do you think about it?
10 Mar 2017 at 3:22 pm UTC Likes: 1

dead island until I discovered that:
dead island definitive edition was the same
ARK: survival evolved
Fortresscraft evolved
Mad Max
Saints Row 3

ARK and fortresscraft are endless games of course, as the goal of the game is to play it as long as possible.
Dead Island is a very nice openworld game, works perfect on linux, graphics are awesome.
There are of course much more games on my shelf that I intend to play...

A look at how much RAM you might need as a Linux gamer
6 Mar 2017 at 12:25 pm UTC

In the FortressCraft Evolved forum, a linux guy was asking about why fortresscraft demanded 400MB/s throughput on his SSD. While he did not notice any slow downs he was wondering about that.
Turns out he had no swap partition. So after adding the swap his SSD almost went silent.
So even if you are on SSD, always, *always* use a swap partition. The swap is used to swap out not frequently used anonymous allocated memory. Every bash you start, any program linked to gcc will start out initializing memory it will never use.
In his case, his anonymous memory usage (i.e. the memory used by the game) made the kernel continously page in the static game data at a rate of 400MB. Adding swap made it possible to swap out a large part of the almost static allocation of unused memory.

A look at how much RAM you might need as a Linux gamer
6 Mar 2017 at 12:18 pm UTC

Quoting: STiATAnd browsers on modern sites today easily eat up a gig of RAM.
That's exactly what steam (big picture) is, hence liams 1GB :-).
Anyway: it's funny to see chromium eat 1GB of ram while midori eats 90MB for the same crap. And I mean chromium when it was build on webkit, now it is build on blink it still uses 1GB though.