Don't want to see articles from a certain category? When logged in, go to your User Settings and adjust your feed in the Content Preferences section where you can block tags!
Latest Comments by silmeth
Graveyard Keeper from Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild is out with same-day Linux support
16 August 2018 at 9:36 am UTC

Hmm, the gameplay video looks a lot like Stardew Valley – with the same fishing mechanics, similar dungeon crawling, and even farming on your land – but with corpses, cemetery-related skills, and witch-burning instead of countryside festivals.

Do they have / plan any form of multiplayer (Stardew Valley coop is quite fun, when you can share your farming, fishing and adventuring duties with somebody else)?

Anyway, it looks cool, probably gonna buy it, but I too would rather see working gamepad support.

Facepunch are no longer selling the Linux version of the survival game Rust (updated)
28 July 2018 at 7:25 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: GuestEr, the bugs are in Unity. That is down to the Unity devs to solve. This is like saying if you have problems driving your car, you should become a mechanic and fix it.

[…]
If Ford uses a transmission from Dana corp and that transmission is crap in the car you buy, you don't call Dana about it, you call Ford about it.

And even though Dana is responsible for the broken transmission (or Unity is responsible for the broken state of the engine), Ford is still responsible for creating and delivering a broken car that uses broken parts (or, the game dev using a broken Unity build, for delivering a broken game).

When you do any software whatsoever you don’t just happily upgrade every dependency you use and push that to production. You first check if the new versions don’t break the software, and only if they don’t, you release a new version with upgraded deps. If the new version introduces bugs that break your software and you cannot fix it yourself, you file a bug report and wait for the fix.

Desperados - Wanted Dead or Alive has been updated with official Linux support
5 July 2018 at 9:28 pm UTC Likes: 20

Bought it, launched it, and now I cannot turn it off – ’cause the menu says “Exit to Windows” and I most definitely do not want to see Windows on my desktop after quitting. ;-)

Great Linux games on Steam currently under a fiver
25 June 2018 at 10:26 am UTC

Also, you can install Kodi directly on Steam Link to make it into a proper media center. Which makes me want to buy this for my father, even though he does not use Steam…

Damn, a box for retroarch + Kodi for 11 PLN is helluva deal. But for some reason buying Steam Link with the intention of not actually using it with Steam seems somehow wrong to me…

Does anyone know if the Netflix plugin for Kodi works on Steam Link?

EDIT: Hmm, the new Netflix plugin requires Kodi 18, which AFAIK is not yet easily installable on Steam Link. But when it is, as SL is an ARM device, the Raspberry Pi version of the plugin hypothetically would work.

DXVK for Direct3D 11 over Vulkan in Wine has a new 0.60 release
22 June 2018 at 11:05 am UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: ajgpIm waiting for a fix to the stream output issue; I know either Vulkan needs to implement the feature, or a workaround needs to be built into DXVK for the witcher 3 (though then how many more workarounds will people want for their pet game!)

They could either:
  • look at how The Witcher 3 uses stream output and hack around it (implement a probably-fast half-baked stream output working for The Witcher) – that could work fast (depending on how actually the game uses this feature, what stream output guarantees do they actually rely upon) and that would require additional hacks around this feature for every other game that uses stream output,

  • implement complete stream output by themselves using only the current Vulkan features – this would make The Witcher 3 work as expected, as every other stream-output-using game; but as Vulkan offers no features similar to stream output with similar guarantees, they would need to come up with some clever implementation that potentially might give huge performance hit at the end – so everything would work correctly, but painfully slowly; this is AFAIK basically the same what wined3d does to some D3D features not present in OpenGL,

  • wait for Vulkan to add its own stream output (or rather transform feedback, as that’s what OpenGL calls it) API and wrap D3D11’s one in this hypothetical new Vulkan one – then again all games would work, and it should be fast, since Vulkan drivers would implement this probably the same way it’s implemented in Windows D3D11 drivers.


The take from it is – there should not be many more workarounds for other games needed anyway – except for the first path which is IMO the worst of them all. In the two latter cases, they would just properly implement the D3D API, and every game using it should just work OK. The only problem is right now Vulkan does not provide any means to implement stream output in a full complete way that would also be performant – so one needs to either make it slow and hacky, or wait for some future Vulkan extensions.

And as some games might not rely on all guarantees provided by the APIs (eg. might not care about the order of vertices handled in a shader), it might be possible to take the first route – and actually hack something efficient around the game, but that will not be a correct D3D implementation.

We Happy Few developer joins Microsoft, still coming to Linux plus new trailer
11 June 2018 at 8:33 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: ajgpIsnt the rtheory on MS's buying spree that they are adding developers to theuir roster in order to bolster the XBox ones lackluster exclusive offerings. So sadly I would expect most of these developers to now code for Xbox exclusively or at the evry least any otehr platform would be further down the foodchain more than it already is.

IMO not so much ‘for Xbox’ but rather ‘for UWP’ – so I wouldn’t be surprised if their marketing claimed they all create multiplatform, buy-once-run-everywhere games, ie. ‘buy on MS Store and you’ll have permission to play it both on Xbone and on Windows 10’…

EDIT: yup, they already do that. ;-)

You can now pre-order the Linux-powered Atari VCS games console, a lot more details revealed
30 May 2018 at 10:20 pm UTC

I really don’t get why they would aim for kernel 4.10 in 2019, while they make their system Ubuntu-based and current Ubuntu LTS is on 4.15.

At the beginning of 2019 Linux 4.10 on a media PC will be quite outdated.

Gyre: Nova State is a steampunk-inspired open world RPG promising Linux support on Kickstarter
23 May 2018 at 3:49 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: ModanungDo you think my $5,- a month is suspicious too? In my case a mere $15,- would break the 3% mark of the first goal. ;)

Your goal is $666 per month, and I can believe that is your intended final budget for whatever you do to be able to continue without losing money and needing external financing.

Their Kickstarter goal is $116,733, while they themselves claim in their campaign that they’ve already invested $1,200,000 (over ten times as much as they want to get from the Kickstarter) and that the remaining budget is $3,100,000 (almost 30 times as much).

That suggests that either they really do not need financing from Kickstarter and it’s only a marketing device, or that the whole thing is really risky, they want to get whatever they realistically can from backers (thus relatively low campaign goal compared to the whole budget), hoping they can secure the rest of the budget later. Anyway, apparently even successful Kickstarter campaign won’t fund their game. They either are funded already or not, successful Kickstarter won’t change it either way.

EDIT: but on the other hand I am totally not a business person. As far as I am concerned, it’s totally possible that those three percent of their planned budget is exactly what they need at the moment to actually kick start quicker development and publishing of the game.

Gyre: Nova State is a steampunk-inspired open world RPG promising Linux support on Kickstarter
23 May 2018 at 2:58 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: ModanungLast month these spoiled former AAA brats tried to suck in CA$ 250k for the same project, btw.

Reading through comments there it seems they just did not think over the reward tiers thoroughly (eg. they did not anticipate any physical rewards for higher tiers), and so closed the first campaign and relaunched it. Seems OK to me.

What is more suspicious for me is what cbones noticed a few comments above – that their Kickstarter goal makes only 3 % of their whole planned budget.

Gyre: Nova State is a steampunk-inspired open world RPG promising Linux support on Kickstarter
23 May 2018 at 10:26 am UTC Likes: 5

Worked on by a former BioWare designer, fair multiplatform declaration: “The platforms are Windows 10, Linux, Mac, PS4, and Xbox One. The Alpha is likely to be Windows only. We fully expect to have Mac and Linux support for the Beta.”, no PC=Windows as in “PC, Mac and Linux” bullshit. And the steampunk setting. I really like that.

I’d like to see one day a bit more realistic human-focused¹ steam-punk (19th century but with steam analytical machines connected to telegraphic teletype networks) rather than Victorian-era androids that are far more high-tech than what we do have now, but still I like it. :)

¹ or urban fantasy, ie. with humanoid dwarves, goblins, elves, & other fantasy races, but without too much magic.