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Latest Comments by scaine
Stadia gets resolution options per-device, discount for everyone and more Android
12 Jun 2020 at 10:10 pm UTC Likes: 1

Considering it's £9/month, I decided to give it another chance, despite my general loathing of the cloud-based model. I enjoyed a couple of hours of Destiny 2 for free, and I figured that this might be my only route to trying PUBG longer term.

But when I went to try Destiny 2 for "one last shot" before my two month free trial was up, I couldn't play it. My input was completely buggered. My mouse was "trapped" in the lower-right hand corner of the screen, and wouldn't move out of it.

There were hundreds of suggestions online - chrome flags, resolution changes, DPI adjustments, mouse accelerations changes. But isn't kind of the whole point of Stadia that it's cloud-based and so largely bug free and platform independent? But I can't even play their games from one month to the next without hitting those bugs? On the same PC?

I cancelled last Sunday - the payment was due today.

Ironically, I have a brand new all-AMD PC now and I'm curious if it's fixed. But too late now.

art of rally looks terrific in the latest trailer and it will be on GOG too
12 Jun 2020 at 10:03 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestThe graphics are fantastic but there isn’t even one second of gameplay in this trailer :( No idea what the game is like…
I'm a bit confused. Nearly the whole trailer is gameplay, albeit it a lot of that gameplay is then shown from cinematic effects (there's a few seconds of actual gameplay shown intermittently).

Am I missing something? Maybe the trailer was updated after this comment?

Regardless - worth trying the demo, as TobyHaynes points out! The Itch link for that is in the article.

June's Humble Choice is out with Supraland, Overload, Barotrauma and more
12 Jun 2020 at 9:56 pm UTC

Quoting: pskosinskiBTW I received today an email:
Interesting deal, but honestly, I'd prefer to keep the option to pause.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
12 Jun 2020 at 9:56 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: ageres
Quoting: scaineDenuvo is a kernel driver for DRM, as well as anti-cheat.
Denuvo anti-cheat is, but Denuvo anti-tamper is just an obfuscator. It hurts performance on weak CPUs but doesn't mess with an OS afaik.
Steam DRM, on the other hand, prevent Linux gamers from playing a bunch of PS360 era games: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/753 [External Link]. Those games run fine with cracked exes though.
"Just" an obfuscator? Weirdly, that sounds like you're defending it. Maybe you are. I suppose some people might prefer Denuvo to CEG because at least some Denuvo games run in Proton, but given that those games run with higher CPU, and lower framerates, at that point, I don't really care if it's a rootkit or not, I want nothing to do with it.

Can you imagine if this was applied to cars, clothes, or hell, burgers?

Cars: worse performance, you can't lend to a (insured) friend. Maybe you can only fill it from certain stations, or drive it on certain roads. Probably costs more as a result.
Clothes: Harder to put on, doesn't last as long, can't dye it, can't hand-me-down to others. Probably costs more as a result.
Burger: tastes longer to cook, can't share it with your son/daughter. Probably costs more as a result.

It's just weird. My entire steam library is mine and mine alone. When I die, even if I give the steam login to my children, they can't transfer the games to their account, it's completely locked. They're scaine, or nothing.

Defending DRM is such a strange position. And I know I've done it in the past, but the more I think about it, the more annoying and invasive I realise it is. Maybe one day I'll give up on Steam, but that would require a linux-friendly competitor to offer DRM-free gaming on a platform with vaguely similar features... and I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
11 Jun 2020 at 8:48 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TheSHEEEPIf a game just requires you to run Steam in order to run in, what's the big deal? You open Steam, start your game, done. Big deal. I don't see the problem here.
Well, you just probably haven't run into it, so you think it's not a problem. I was on a train fairly recently (before lockdown) and it was a five hour journey. I opened Steam, I had no internet, went into offline mode, and then discovered, infuriatingly, that several of the games I wanted to play wouldn't start, because it had been months since I'd played them on that device, and I didn't have any internet to "prove" I owned them.

It's by degrees, of course, but DRM pissed me off massively that day.

I won't go into the old "what if Steam goes under" argument, because I'm a realist and I don't think it's likely. Even if it happens, I have libraries on Humble, Itch and GOG, so it'll be a first-world problem no matter how much I lose.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPOf course, those Windows "kernel driver" things are a whole different subject, but that also goes into anti-cheating, etc.
Denuvo is a kernel driver for DRM, as well as anti-cheat. It's where I draw the line for DRM. Despite Steam pissing me off a couple of times in the nearly 16 years I've been customer, I can tolerate its DRM. But rootkits, kernel drivers, always-online (Steam needs a check-in every two weeks) checks and other blatantly anti-consumer crap like that can just do one. No money from me.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
11 Jun 2020 at 3:55 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: ShmerlImagine police placing surveillance cameras in yours and everyone's home "just in case", because someone might be a criminal. You get the idea why that's wrong. Exactly the same thing is wrong with DRM.
This is a great explanation of DRM. What a metaphor! The assumption that you're a criminal - the "just in case" assumption that no consumer can be trusted. Oof. Superb.

The crazy thing about this attitude is the almost barbara-streisand-effect it has on people who want to pay for a service but can't, because... DRM. You see it all the time.

I recently ran into it trying to play Driver: San Francisco on Steam. You can't, because Ubisoft have pulled the game from the internet in its entirety (no-one is really sure why). Even though I still have a Driver: San Francisco entry in Steam, it doesn't run, it fails with a "Failed to retrieve valid key" error. Turns out, the ONLY WAY to play this game now, is to pirate it!!

The same thing happens on Netflix, when they region-lock. People want to watch, want to pay, but end up either torrenting, or VPN'ing their way in. It actively creates "criminal" behaviour. Let's say that again - it ACTIVELY creates the behaviour that DRM is trying to prevent. You couldn't make it up...

Honestly, I kind of thought that with the death of DVD and then Bluray over the past decade, there would be a better attitude to all this (from Publishers) by now. But nope. I don't think it's getting worse... but it sure isn't getting better.

Linux gaming overlay MangoHud levels up with a new release
11 Jun 2020 at 11:09 am UTC

This looks great - but every time I go to try it, I'm reminded that it's a build script that installs manually, and I'm really determined to keep my system as clean as possible and do less of this generally. Luckily, there's a chance that a PPA will be coming along for it (https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud/issues/34 [External Link]), so fingers crossed.

AMD Wattman-like open source app CoreCtrl adds NAVI support
10 Jun 2020 at 1:30 pm UTC

Noticed this article in light of just having updated to a fully AMD PC. But, sadly, Mint 19.3 is based on Ubuntu 18.04, which isn't supported by CoreCtrl. You need to use the non-LTS Ubuntu 19.10, or LTS Ubuntu 20.04 to run this. I guess I'll have to wait another fortnight for Mint 20 to land.

Adding my PC details here:
!My PC Details

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
10 Jun 2020 at 10:20 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: mphuZ
..how in relation to DRM-free gaming that "98-99% of players don't care"
But it's true. Does anyone disagree?
If anyone agrees with DRM, they're insane. That's actively being okay with your rights being diminished. Convenience is a whole different argument remember, that should be entirely separate. There's also a big difference between not caring and not actually understanding how shite some DRM really is.
True - if you had to choose between a Steam with DRM and a Steam without, no-one (absolutely no-one) would choose the DRM version.

But of course, I do choose Steam over GOG, and that's because of convenience. I like the time tracking, the achievements, the friend notifications, workshop mods, chat, and easy voice integration, I benefit from their multiplayer framework. I value the auto-updates, integrated Proton and one-click installs. GOG has... none of that, but they're DRM-free, and they're better curated. Maybe if you're on Windows, GOG is a better proposition - you have the Galaxy client that at least offers some of the Steam features I just listed.

Itch is certainly miles ahead of GOG these days, for us penguins.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 10:03 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: DesumThis dev aside, I tend to shy away from GOG even though I am highly sympathetic do DRM-free gaming. The reasons are that, as a Linux gamer, GOG is simply a bigger hassle than Steam. I have to sort out libfoo problems with 70% of the games in my library that have native support (frankly, I have less problems running ancient Win32 games in Wine often enough). GOG should also be looking to, at the very least, piggy back off of Valve and Codeweaver's work with Proton. But nothing has even been mentioned there.

And all of GOG's recent moves point to a deemphasizing of the DRM-free stance of the platform. We already have games like Granda 2 phoning home, for example.
This isn't about Linux though. He's removing the game from GOG. Completely.

But yeah, from a Linux perspective, GOG is just worse for everything. Worse support (do they refund?), no client, no Linux target for Devs, no multiplayer framework, no chat, no achievements, no trading platform...

It's just, worse. But hey kids, it's DRM free!

As minority (Linux gamers) of a minority (anti-DRM gamers) we'll be waiting a looooooooooong ass time for 'Good Old Games' to give a shit about us, let alone some lone developer who didn't do his research for his niche, if pretty, first person puzzler.