Quoting: GuestValve gets too much credit in my opinion, and have basically bought goodwill by contributing to open source projects for the explicit purpose of having people reliant on their proprietary client. Microsoft also contribute to open source projects, yet hardly anyone (who isn't paid to do so) praises them in such a fashion.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: GuestI feel obliged to go off-topic and say that it might not be the coders, it might be management pushing for continual rabbits out of hats instead. I've seen that so very much that it's actually the more likely scenario. The coders themselves have probably performed miracles to get anything running at all under such conditions.

Usually, I'd agree.
But with Fatshark you really have to look at the history.
They have been taking forever to make even simple changes (you know, reminds me of CA a little) in their previous games.

There's also the fact that lots of other devs have exactly the same thing working just fine now.
Only Fatshark and their custom engine can't do it right ... ???

Of course, it is entirely possible that they don't have the manpower in the software-side that they'd need and they are just crunching the few coders they do have.
And those then don't have the time to look into Linux properly - we've all done it, it takes a week or two to get acclimated development-wise if you come from the crutch-driven world of Windows.

In the end, though, even bad coders are a management fault for not detecting that, so you're definitely right in that sense, no matter the actual issue at hand here.

Well, all I can say is that from what I've seen (and personally experienced) really don't be so quick to judge the coders.
Also "a week or two" is really....intense, if someone is moving from Windows to GNU/Linux. Obviously depends on a lot of factors, but even counting coder reprioritisation in weeks can be something a manager will baulk at. Better ROI spending the time to improve something else. Which is exactly what's happening here.

It's been nearly 9 months. They started looking at this in October 2021.

And I doubt they continually looked at it all that time. There's nothing to suggest they only just handed it over to Epic and Valve to sort out now - it would've been done some time ago. Yet nobody seems to be suggesting Epic and Valve have bad coders because they haven't sorted it out yet either.

I'm not suggesting they're bad coders. I just don't think they care. They'd have known about, raised and fixed the issue within days or weeks if they did. It's been 9 months while many, many other games have easily and simply enabled EAC or BattlEye.

I'm still unwilling to say that it's as easy for them as for others. They have, by their account, done everything that was supposed to make it easy and...it didn't work. Considering they're in the middle of Darktide, works fine under Windows (their actual target environment), I doubt the audience would be that large even with the Deck, and they could've spent ages getting nowhere, I think they absolutely made the right call here.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: GuestI feel obliged to go off-topic and say that it might not be the coders, it might be management pushing for continual rabbits out of hats instead. I've seen that so very much that it's actually the more likely scenario. The coders themselves have probably performed miracles to get anything running at all under such conditions.

Usually, I'd agree.
But with Fatshark you really have to look at the history.
They have been taking forever to make even simple changes (you know, reminds me of CA a little) in their previous games.

There's also the fact that lots of other devs have exactly the same thing working just fine now.
Only Fatshark and their custom engine can't do it right ... ???

Of course, it is entirely possible that they don't have the manpower in the software-side that they'd need and they are just crunching the few coders they do have.
And those then don't have the time to look into Linux properly - we've all done it, it takes a week or two to get acclimated development-wise if you come from the crutch-driven world of Windows.

In the end, though, even bad coders are a management fault for not detecting that, so you're definitely right in that sense, no matter the actual issue at hand here.

Well, all I can say is that from what I've seen (and personally experienced) really don't be so quick to judge the coders.
Also "a week or two" is really....intense, if someone is moving from Windows to GNU/Linux. Obviously depends on a lot of factors, but even counting coder reprioritisation in weeks can be something a manager will baulk at. Better ROI spending the time to improve something else. Which is exactly what's happening here.

It's been nearly 9 months. They started looking at this in October 2021.

And I doubt they continually looked at it all that time. There's nothing to suggest they only just handed it over to Epic and Valve to sort out now - it would've been done some time ago. Yet nobody seems to be suggesting Epic and Valve have bad coders because they haven't sorted it out yet either.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: GuestI feel obliged to go off-topic and say that it might not be the coders, it might be management pushing for continual rabbits out of hats instead. I've seen that so very much that it's actually the more likely scenario. The coders themselves have probably performed miracles to get anything running at all under such conditions.

Usually, I'd agree.
But with Fatshark you really have to look at the history.
They have been taking forever to make even simple changes (you know, reminds me of CA a little) in their previous games.

There's also the fact that lots of other devs have exactly the same thing working just fine now.
Only Fatshark and their custom engine can't do it right ... ???

Of course, it is entirely possible that they don't have the manpower in the software-side that they'd need and they are just crunching the few coders they do have.
And those then don't have the time to look into Linux properly - we've all done it, it takes a week or two to get acclimated development-wise if you come from the crutch-driven world of Windows.

In the end, though, even bad coders are a management fault for not detecting that, so you're definitely right in that sense, no matter the actual issue at hand here.

Well, all I can say is that from what I've seen (and personally experienced) really don't be so quick to judge the coders.
Also "a week or two" is really....intense, if someone is moving from Windows to GNU/Linux. Obviously depends on a lot of factors, but even counting coder reprioritisation in weeks can be something a manager will baulk at. Better ROI spending the time to improve something else. Which is exactly what's happening here.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: GuestAs the biggest seller of Windows games, remind me how exactly are Valve "getting away" from Microsoft?
Oh that's right, they're not.

???? The Steam Deck?????

Microsoft is trying to bundle everything into the Game Pass subscription, which pretty much creates an ecosystem where you just keep subscribed to Microsoft and spend most of your time with their amazing value.

The Steam Deck, on the other hand, is a platform that heavily incentivize remaining on Linux, by making a very convenient, fairly-economic, and flexible device that's also not very convenient for Windows use.

Steam Deck, on its own, is making Linux starting to be part of the consideration, to the point that even Square Enix mention it for their FF7R on Steam announcement. Ideally, that would create a loop leading more Linux releases, enough to at least be a big enough market that Steam and Linux doesn't lose to the combination of Game Pass, PS Plus, and Epic.

Before Steam Deck, there really was a good chance that they'd get rolled over by the combination of those three, and it would have been out of their hands. But now they have good long term hope, and most of their fate are reliant on things that they can control - which is their own development of the Deck as a platform.

That changes things considerably as even if everything else went wrong and Microsoft does shit that threaten Steam's viability as a platform for Windows games (a real possibility before Microsoft Store's failure, but now brought back as due to Game Pass), with Aya and OneXPlayer interest in SteamOS, they are looking to have a platform that they could keep selling games to.

They're happy to keep selling Windows games, mind you, but the problem is if there isn't anyone to sell them to or if the platform makes it less viable because Microsoft controls Windows and theorically could fuck with Steam if they manage to find a way to do so without major backlash (see: Game Pass).

So yeah, they now have a platform that they also own and control, without the horrendous amount of commitment that Canonical had to make and then fail at. If they're already making their own platform, why the fuck would they want to let themselves be fucked by Red Hat (see: CentOS and the insanity that legacy boot removal was even proposed) and Gnome team (see: literally everything that happened since Gnome 3). Sure, they might want to make their own DE later on, but not even system76 did that out of the gate and even Canonical failed, and if they aren't doing that, then KDE is the only sensible choice over using yet another Gnome fork that stagnates.

Is FF7R a GNU+Linux native game? No, it's a Windows game running via a compatibility layer.

Remind me again how Valve are "getting away from Microsoft"?

If Valve genuinely cared about GNU+Linux, they wouldn't require every game sold on the Steam Store to have a Windows executable.

They wouldn't effectively block GNU+Linux native only games from being sold on the Steam Store.

Microsoft could, if they wanted, acquire Valve or make it so upcoming Windows games break Proton compatibility.

• You don't need Windows to play FF7R. Sqeenix even boasted about the fact it's steam deck compatible as Liam noted in the FF7R article.


• Yes, Valve require a Windows executable, but again, that doesn't require Windows.


• I'm not aware of Valve blocking Linux native games - what are you referring to here?


• Microsoft can't "acquire" Valve because it's not publicly traded. Maybe they could make GabeN a huge offer? Maybe? But he's already worth nearly $4Bn, so money isn't his motivation.


• Finally, maybe Microsoft could (yet again) be anti-competitive and try to break proton compatibility, but since Proton is based on Wine and wine is based on re-implementing Windows itself... that's a tall order. Honestly though, they already do this - secure boot, anti-cheat, TPM chips, it's not really there to protect consumers. It's there to put barriers in front of people like us who want to load their own O/S on a PC.