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Latest Comments by Ananace
Remember the SMACH Z handheld? It's apparently going to be at E3 this year
4 June 2019 at 9:06 pm UTC Likes: 3

Well, I'm most definitely going to have to give this a second look. Back when I first saw it I didn't really feel like there'd be that much of a need for a handheld Linux gaming machine for me, but today - with Steam Play and the general improvement in Linux releases - I'm most definitely going to want to have the ability to play games on the go like it offers.

And of course, the fact that it basically integrates a Steam Controller as well is just amazing.

I looked at doing the Steam remote streaming before, but as I play most of the games I'd use this for on various public transport and on countryside trips, the connection just would not be good enough for even the very lowest of quality. So something that can play the games directly is a real godsend, especially since it seems far nicer to carry around than a gaming laptop.

What are you clicking on this weekend? Let us know your current favourites
1 June 2019 at 8:39 am UTC

Well, I'm not so sure I'll be getting that much Linux gaming time in, going to be busy during the weekend with the LinCon gaming convent - board games, card games, pen-and-paper, that sort of stuff.

Going to try and do some more laps on Dirt: Rally though, seeing as I've figured out a workaround for it's inability to load my profile.
Or possibly try out some Dungeon Siege for nostalgia reasons (Probably 2 with the mod that adds the DS 1 content), seeing as I literally just last week found out that it's on Steam. Should hopefully work fine with D9VK too, which will be fun to test.

Deep Rock Galactic continues being some of the most fun I've had in a while, thanks to Steam Play
16 May 2019 at 11:28 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Luke_NukemHmm, I'd like to see DRM free games be released using either snap or flatpak now, even better would be Valve incorporating one of those in to Steam.

Seriously... several dozen distros. All packaging the same user apps and games, just differently, for a massive duplication of effort. Can we please embrace snaps and flatpaks, and get a "base" Linux install, with all user apps installed this way.

Well, Valve are already incorporating Flatpak into their SteamOS since a while back, for installing desktop-mode applications.
They've also answered earlier questions/comments about having been looking into technologies like such.

So while I doubt we'll see Steam games becoming Flatpak/snap packages, I wouldn't be surprised if Steam starts adopting some features from Flatpak (or snap), if only to further reduce the work game makers have to do to support Linux.

DragonRuby Game Toolkit, a cross-platform way to make games with Ruby
20 April 2019 at 5:19 pm UTC

Ruby actually has its' niches where it's really quite heavily used as it turns out.

My job as a Linux sysadmin deals almost exclusively in Ruby development, because all our major tooling uses Ruby in one way or another. From Foreman - our server orchestration and lifecycle-management tool - which is a RoR application, to Puppet - our configuration management tool - which is regular Ruby, as well as smaller things like the set of fog gems that abstract away cloud service communication.

Valve announces new networking APIs for developers and Steam Link Anywhere
14 March 2019 at 8:06 pm UTC Likes: 5

I imagine that their "100% reliable NAT traversal" is just them hosting a series of TURN servers on their impressive infrastructure.
Since it also provides DDoS protection, and hiding of IP addresses, that would make a whole lot of sense actually.

It would also easily explain why the service in question would be limited to Steam's services.

For the people who are less aware, TURN servers are basically just echo nodes, to which you and the other part both connect and which then just echo the traffic between your connections. This is a 100% reliable way to bypass every single NAT, as it is just like any other connection to a server, which then facilitates peer-to-peer data transfer through it.

What have you been playing recently and what do you think of it?
18 February 2019 at 12:55 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: stretch611
Quoting: AnanaceWith Factorio you sit down to do one thing, only to then realize that suddenly four hours have passed.
Dirt Rally doesn't rob you of the time comprehension as much, you really feel every second when you're busy wrestling your car around the track.
Ahh, Factorio... probably my favorite... I can't wait, about a week and a half until 0.17 is released.

The Factory. Must. Grow.

And yeah, with 0.17 looming too I should've probably done this latest factory as a modded run before doing a vanilla 0.17 one.

What have you been playing recently and what do you think of it?
17 February 2019 at 10:48 pm UTC Likes: 1

When it comes to native games I've been enjoying a mix of Factorio and Dirt Rally mostly, both are a great fun - though for different situations.
With Factorio you sit down to do one thing, only to then realize that suddenly four hours have passed.
Dirt Rally doesn't rob you of the time comprehension as much, you really feel every second when you're busy wrestling your car around the track.

Though since Steam Play exists I've been doing quite a bit of Anno 2070, Warframe, and Deep Rock Galactic as well. All great fun games, and all working really well under Linux - though with a tweak or two in the case of Anno and Warframe.

The open source Morrowind game engine 'OpenMW' is going to officially bring in multiplayer
11 February 2019 at 8:59 am UTC Likes: 1

Bear in mind that as 0.45 is already in RC stage - and has been there for a while, most of the really cool recent stuff will probably end up in 0.46.

Not that 0.45 isn't filled with goodies though.

Gaming and Linux graphics talks at FOSDEM 2019
10 February 2019 at 11:54 am UTC

There was a really nice talk at DevConf.cz about direct hardware acceleration in virtio as well, though in that case focused more on the hardware developers themselves directly implementing virtualization support into their devices.

I've been hoping that the virgil project will grab onto Vulkan and all the extra features from there though, with DXVK and all it should be possible to even run it as a Windows driver and just convert all Direct3D stuff into Vulkan calls to the Linux host.

Unity have changed their terms of service, which has essentially blocked SpatialOS and streaming services
10 January 2019 at 11:56 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: liamdaweUnity have responded: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

I think I can see what Unity is trying to get at here;

QuoteAs an example, if you have made a Windows or Linux player build of your game to be an authoritative game server and run that on a server in-house, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual. If you rent a server or pay for a cloud instance to run the game, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual.

However, if a third party service wants to run the Unity Runtime in the cloud with their additional SDK, we consider this a platform.

So basically they want their ToS to basically say that you're not allowed to do Game as a Service - or Game-Server as a Service - systems. You're only allowed to run instances of your game on systems that you implicitly own by paying for them, so systems that are owned by other providers aren't allowed to run your game for you unless you - as the games developer - pay them to do so.

Going to be interesting to see how they're planning on writing this in legalese without making it really easy to abuse, as you could easily misconstrue this to mean that players aren't allowed to host their own servers for your games, meaning you have to provide all server hosting if you want to do Unity games.