When it comes to the whole packaging thing, why anyone would really want a packaged version of a commercial game as an RPM or a DEB or something in this day and age is beyond me. Now, maybe this is because I come from a Fedora background, but I do not like mixing my commercial software with my clean system stack. All of the software I have managed through yum is free software - and that is how I want it to remain.

Games are also incongruent compared to the rest of my software due to their large size - I do not appreciate getting my system updates and having one game pop up which is more than three times the size of the rest. This is why I have several games that are in fact in the Fedora repositories installed through Desura instead. Much better for me to have a proper interface optimized for games and leave the legitimate goodness of command line yum (or PackageKit if you prefer...) for my system packages. I have no idea how the USC on Ubuntu handles all that, but I have the feeling I would have the same criticisms.

Plus there are all kinds of games on Desura which could not and should not be packaged by Fedora for a variety of reasons. In fact, I think several games should be simply ripped out of the Fedora repos, so they no longer have to deal with that stupid auto-downloadeder kludge. And if people are complaining about Desura's licence agreement, I suggest they take a look at some of the other software they are running. It is two thirds free software now, in the same boat as Google Chrome and its ilk, and if you are willing to play a commercial game I really do not get the complaints at any rate.

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Hmm... ever played Hexen II at all Alex? ;)

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Myself, I already have enough Cheese on me.

In Dredmor. And I am a vampire. Where the hell is Brax when you need him? :P

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Quoting: "KIAaze, post: 3321, member: 16"What's the difference between playing a game through Flash or NaCl and using Wine? (Desura even sells GNU/Linux games using Wine)

Well, NaCl is a bit different, as it simply launches from the browser. It then uses your native system to actually execute the game in a similar manner to QuakeLive. Or at least, that is the impression I got from what I read.

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Indie Royale is competition to Humble Bundle, which has firm policies about Linux support and brings new games over. Indie Royale only has a Linux game in its list due to serendipity. Plus, I think the Bundle clones are getting a bit out of hand.

I support Desura, it is Linux friendly. Indie Royale is not. I do not care if they are from the same company.

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I am sorry, I would not support this. If it takes a bit more money to buy it straight from Desura itself, I would say go for it.

Still, you can all do what you want...

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It has been on Desura for awhile actually.

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All right, I took you up on your offer.

Carry on with your day everyone. :p

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Well, I only play native games for the most part, so yes my requirments are quite different than yours.

I do use WINE for some things, but mostly for my old Windows games that I still have lying around. The newest title I have played with through WINE is Star Wars: Republic Commando which was released in 2005. With that I was playing it a 1280x1024 with full effects on and everything was working well. There was some trouble with dynamic shadows back when I was using Fedora 13, but that was fixed with the switch to Gallium3D when I installed Fedora 16.

I somehow doubt I am experiencing such a big jump from what you had two months back though. Your results are really incongruous with mine, and that has been true for a while now, even though we are both using a similar sized screen and my card is older than yours. Even on Fedora 13 with the classic Mesa drivers I was getting pretty good performance. Now, on Fedora 16 I do have Colour Tiling and Page Flip enabled through Xorg.conf and I have turned off Swapbuffers Wait, which does help quite a bit, so maybe that has something to do with it?

At any rate, sorry for taking this off topic Liam....

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Quoting: "Xpander, post: 3259, member: 92"its not worth to use them if u dont get the power of ur hardware..not to mention th broken power management of open source drivers no Anti Aliasing support and so on.

Okay, let me stop you there. There are plenty of reasons for someone to use FOSS drivers:
[LIST=1]

First and foremost, the fact that they are Free Software. Maybe I am just old fashioned, but the main reason I jumped ship to Linux was because it was a free (as in freedom) system and drivers are an inherit part of that system. As such, it is not really a truly free system if you have a blob on it.

Just like the new Network card I installed last night, I should just be able to slap my video card into my machine and Fedora should just see it and work. Why does the network card work like that? Because it has free software drivers that are upstream and available to any Linux system out there right now. Graphics cards should be no different, and thanks to efforts from various different groups, they don't have to be.

I like to stay relatively current with my system, which is why I use Fedora, and blobs no matter how much protective packing you place around them will always get in the way of that. Granted, I will admit that this is somewhat motivated by wanting to see the latest advancements in the free graphics drivers themselves, but it is something I had been doing before I was even concerned about such things anyway.

It is kind of fun watching things develop and just by using them you feel like your a part of a massive project, especially if you engage with the developer community.

The free software drivers are genuine Linux drivers that interact genuinely with your Linux system. The AMD and Nvidia blobs are Windows drivers with some Linux compatibly and some features sprinkled on top. This is why the free drivers have features like KMS that the blobs still don't.

Once you are on the free drivers, you do not have to worry about using older hardware. Even my old R200 cards are still getting some love from the radeon developers.

[/LIST]
I will also like to point out that I am not on R600g as a Catalyst refugee. I have used the blob and as far as these things go, it is fine but still not a real Linux driver. Same goes for the Nvidia blob, which I have also used. Both drivers are about the same, and have had the same similar problems.

Here is the state of the free drivers for me today:
[LIST=1]

I get about 40-60 FPS in Doom 3 on Ultra at 1024x768. The same applies to Quake 4, Prey, and the like.

Trine, Shadowgrounds, and Survivor all run fine and are fairly smooth on my system.

The same goes for Penumbra and Amnesia. And Steel Storm. And Postal 2. And Darwinia. And Alien Arena and Xonotic.

In fact, I have yet encountered a game that I own that I could not get to run on my current system.

[/LIST]
As for some of the features you mentioned, well MLAA is available for my card upstream now. Power management is slowly developing, but it is not a real handicap for me as on Catalyst with this card I get about 45-50 degrees Celsius, while on R600g I get about 50-60 Celsius. So yes, a bit warmer, but not a real problem for me. Plus there is all the other stuff that is still waiting to be finished, so there is no shortage of nice surprises for me.

Also keep in mind this is only on a $40 single-core Sempron. Considering at this point the drivers are still fairly CPU reliant, just imagine what I could do with a Quad Core clocking over 3.00 GHz!

Now, you are happy with the blobs and that is fine. That is good. But do not assume that everyone would be as well.

Quoting: "Xpander, post: 3259, member: 92"about screenshots... dunno from where u checked..but it looks pretty damn good for an indie game.
specially the lightning and shadows.

I don't know, it is nice and it is polished, but I am not going to say it is that impressive. For a phone game I guess it is kind of extraordinary but on a computer it still looks like a Shockwave game on steroids. To me at least.

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