Quoting: scaineWe might be small, but there's a reason that so many indies support Linux - 1% of 14M active users is still a bloody huge number. It might not make sense for the Ubisoft's and EA's of this world, but for an indie, opening the door to a market of an additional 10k+ gamers, many of whom will rate you higher because there's no EA or Ubisoft...

Also quite a few indies just use Linux as their own main OS, so they actually better support it than Windows. ’Cause, StackOverflow indicates, Linux is a primary OS for (at least) work for over ~20 % of programmers out there. And a lot of indies are just some of those programmers who, at one point, decide to start writing game. ;-)

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QuoteI'm not entirely sure if it will be at all useful for Wine or any Linux-related projects, but it's still good to see another open source effort from Microsoft. Hopefully with more of DirectX being in the open, in future it may be even easier for ports to happen from DirectX to OpenGL/Vulkan.

I am pretty sure it will make glslang guys life much easier with their attempt at compiling HLSL, and that certainly will benefit Linux gaming – as game programmers will need to write shaders in only one language for both Vulkan and D3D.

Wine also does (for now) translation of HLSL → GLSL, and it probably will stay that way for some time, but anyway code of the compiler will probably make it easier to enhance that translation. And, perhaps, later Wine will replace it with glslang’s HLSL compilation or other way of translation directly to SPIR-V (at least for Vulkan-capable hardware). Will see.

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Hmm. This staging version has broken for me controller support through x360ce in “Ori and the Blind Forest” (it still works without problems in “Mass Effect” though). Strange, the game must do some weird magic with calling into xinput API, and Wine Staging 2.0-rc5 must have changed something related to that.

Probably I should file a bug report, since this does not seem to be an issue a lot of people is going to come along.

EDIT: No need to file a bug. Apparently adding other xinput translation dlls (xinput1_4, xinput9_1_0 etc.) from x360ce solved the problem for Ori.

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Quoting: tuubiI think any respectful use of the red cross symbol to depict health and first aid services in entertainment and media does more good than harm, by reinforcing the recognizability and power of the symbol. I just don't see what this is supposed to prevent.

Sure, you shouldn't be allowed to paint the red cross (or the red crescent) on your murdermobile, but that's very different from what happened here.

Truth is, the non-military medical personnel and first-aid kits in most countries also cannot and do not use the symbol if they are not directly related to the Red Cross organization. The preferred emblem for the first-aid kits is a white cross on a green background (but others, like white cross on red are also used), the emergency personnel and vehicles use mainly the Star of Life (although red Maltese cross, orange cross etc. is sometimes used, also apparently they use red cross in Russia, violating the Geneva conventions). The Red Cross (and Red Crescent, and Red Crystal) are used by military medical personnel and by Red Cross itself.

So it seems the Red Cross is fighting to keep the red cross associated with the wartime medical aid, with treating injured soldiers in an area of military operations, and not with any trained (or not) emergency-medical personnel during peace. And there is no military and war in Prison Architect.

It’d be interesting if they sent similar email to some game in an actual war setting using that symbol – because that would be (IMO) a proper use of it.

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They should just use the Star of Life, which is pretty much universal ambulance marking today.

The mere existence of the Star of Life shows that the Red Cross can be pretty touchy about the sign. Also, the emergency doctors and medics I know, who also do not want to be associated with the Red Cross, and prefer the Star of Life sign.

As can be read on the Wikipedia: “the Star of Life was created after the American Red Cross complained in 1973 that the orange cross too closely resembled their logo, the red cross on a white background, its use restricted by the Geneva Conventions.”

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Quoting: tmtvlFirst reaction: yeah, I know there are Vulkan bindings for Rust.

Rust rewrite of Rust with Vulkano would be a great practical pun. ;-)

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The Talos Principle is 75% off. I might grab that.

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14 % increase of Linux visits on pornhub? I didn’t see that cumming!

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Quoting: liamdaweA different platform using Vulkan will not change our situation. Windows is a much bigger platform that exists right now and supported Vulkan day-1 just like we did. So far not much has changed there.

Windows also have extremely popular D3D, so Vulkan on Windows won’t get traction all by itself. Something other than Windows must push gamedev industry into using it in DX’s stead. Until now this “it” was Android. Now Nintendo joins.

I believe if Apple platforms also had Vulkan support, there would be no problem with killing D3D12. Unfortunately, and somehow contrary to the intuition, Apple’s Metal and their whole wheel-reinventing with proprietary programming tools makes it worse for Vulkan and Linux more than for Apple platforms, which have their funding and support and it won’t change (even if programming for it means additional work).

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Web development is a pretty good analogy here. Multimedia APIs situation is very similar to what the web looked a decade ago – everyone was targeting Internet Explorer, ActiveX, later with Silverlight, closed video formats for embedded playback, etc. This made a lot of it unusable on Linux and its open browsers, with a lot of stuff displaying “you need to use IE to properly display this website” or similar messages. Pretty analogically to D3D vs OpenGL situation.

Now, similarly to what happened to the web, broader adoption of Vulkan and OpenGL might convince more game devs to use those open APIs. And the more they use Vulkan (and/or OpenGL), the bigger chance that the next shiny engine will use it, that new tutorial “how to start writing your game” will be based on it, that books will get written on it, and in effect much higher portion of all devs will write using Vulkan/OGL.

Will they automatically release for Linux? No. But it will be easier for them than rewriting the whole DX stack, they won’t have a mental blocker about working with hated technology (some people really hate OpenGL, so porting D3D into it is painful for them), and the whole market will become a bit friendlier.

Also, when Vulkan becomes popular (gets used in games ported to Windows from Nintendo), those Vulkan games for Windows will work better on Wine. And games working well on Wine will convince a few more people to switch to Linux, which will make the Linux marketshare bigger…

So, sure, Nintendo choosing Vulkan won’t automatically save us, it won’t bring a lot of Linux games next month. But it’s not true it is not beneficial for Linux gaming and for open standards – it is, and every new adoption of those standards on every single closed platform with funding is a good thing, as it leads the industry out of MS vendor lock-in, makes open standards more viable, and removes stigma of being useless from them. And those changes are needed for Linux gaming to progress.

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