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.

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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. :woot:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/ [External Link]

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

As 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.

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It's great to hear that they're getting closer to a native Linux release. With the latest Proton betas I've actually been able to play the game with the original DX11 renderer, which was great fun, though Proton can't do multiplayer as of yet so a large part is still lacking.

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That artstyle gets an instant wishlist add from me, loving every part of it - though the interior modules seem to look a little bit ugly with how un-integrated they get with the rest of the interior. Though considering how early it is in development that's probably going to change, they seem to be quite passionate about working on it after all.

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I just realized that if they collaborate with Valve a bit, this could make a great Steam Link device as well - seeing as they seem to be sunsetting that hardware, just write up a Steam Link app version for the Atari OS and add support for the native Steam Controller communication. (should be possible with a regular bluetooth chip and custom firmware as that's what the controller itself uses)
Or heck, just connect the controller over bluetooth, since the Steam Link already means network streamed games a tiny bit more latency (4-5ms) for the bluetooth stack won't be noticeable.

Of course, you should just be able to run the regular steam client in the other OS, but never hurts to support such things natively.

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Personally I can see why they'd set up the design in the manner that they've chosen, and I must say it sounds much more sane than other ways to do it.

To start off, they require a hypervisor, this is not up for debate. Console developers are very good at writing games that can utilize every little mote of performance in the hardware, they're generally much worse at writing things that are secure while doing so.
I mean, just look at the number of games that can be used to completely take over a console or even do much worse things.
The hypervisor is not there to make running open source software hard, it's to protect the console from the console games, and also vice-versa protect the console games from the console.
Additionally, being able to tell the game developers that their other OS feature can't be used to facilitate cheating means said developers will be happier about bringing multiplayer games to the console.

And considering what's said in those entries about the boot, they're planning a bootloader that will automatically boot from any bootable USB drive. Which means the VCS will act basically like a Raspberry Pi with the usb_boot_mode flag set. This is a massive thing, and while I'd love to be able to switch OS without having to insert/remove a USB key, it sounds like a really nice and both simple as well as safe way to do the OS switching.
(Notice how they explicitly talk about not wanting to run the other OS under their hypervisor, simply to keep said hypervisor simple and safe)

From how they're talking, you'll likely also be able to access part of the internal storage from said booted system as well, though it's basically guaranteed that they'll put in some kind of read/write protect over their system in that case - if only to make sure that someone doesn't accidentally brick the console.
Of course, even if they decide to completely wall of the internal storage it won't be impossible to hook up a larger USB drive - or simply boot the device / mount root off of iSCSI or some other network based storage. While IO speed might suffer, with USB 3.1 you can't really complain all that much, 5-10gbit is a lot of bandwidth after all.

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