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Latest Comments by roothorick
The latest Steam Hardware Survey shows Linux market-share has declined again
3 Oct 2017 at 5:47 am UTC

Quoting: GuestI have been using Steam in Linux ever since it was available, and I've never filled out a survey, nor seen one for that matter. I can't be the only person this is happening to, so I have to question how many Linux users there really are. I would guess double to triple what the reports are saying, or maybe even more.
Funny thing, I got a survey prompt while booted into Win7. There was only two options: submit now, or not participate.

Thanks, Valve, for helping me be represented correctly.

Quoting: gurv- Valve does not seem to push Linux recently but to be fair they kinda have to wait for their previous efforts (Vulkan, help with AMD drivers, SDL, etc.) to bear fruits before making another push. Just think that Unity only offered Vulkan as a stable backend very recently. And no game has yet activated it and no other game engine has stable support. These things unfortunately take time.
Oh, if you've been paying attention to the SteamVR update news you'd know they are ABSOLUTELY building up to something. SteamVR Home (crossplatform) and Linux are getting the bulk of their VR software team's attention.

Game developer 'Atlus' issues a DMCA takedown against open source PS3 emulator
28 Sep 2017 at 1:30 am UTC Likes: 4

Fun fact: Atlus actually opened themselves to lawsuit. This is a pretty unambiguous case of DMCA abuse; people have sued DMCA claimants under similar circumstances and been awarded substantial monetary damages.

PR disaster AND massive legal liability? Ooh, heads gonna roll.

That said, I still expect a public apology and material goodwill gesture if they want me to consider the implied PC release.

Setting a primary monitor for launching games in a dual monitor rig
26 Sep 2017 at 4:28 am UTC

GNOME 3 sets the primary flag on boot. Half the games out there seem to ignore it anyway...

Whatever. I tend to run games windowed because with the pixel saver addon, the top bar is really unobtrusive and it's nice to see the time onscreen.

Epic Games looking to make Vulkan the default API for Linux games in Unreal Engine
5 Aug 2017 at 5:16 pm UTC

Said it before, will say it again. OpenGL will quickly go the way of FORTRAN: only good for legacy code (but still a valuable skill because of legacy code). Developers leaving their GL codepaths to rot as they focus on Vulkan is just a sign of the times, and I personally don't see any issue with it.

Quoting: etonbearsVulkan ( and D3D12 actually ) are properly supported only on Windows 10, but not other Windows versions. Eventually Vulkan will have broad WIndows support, so it will be interesting to see if D3D12 then gets a magic backport to older Windows versions.
Eh, not really. Nvidia and AMD have already backported their Vulkan implementations all the way back to Win7. I don't know about performance compared to Win10 but they're plenty fast measured in isolation.

DX12 is indeed restricted to Win10, however, and the response to this has been most developers continuing to support primarily if not exclusively DX11, even on Win10. X-Bone may require DX12, but the low-level nature of the API combined with the strictly fixed hardware means it takes far less effort to make a DX12 renderer tooled specifically for the console than it would to make a DX12 renderer targeting the PC. Thus, developers usually only use DX12 on the console, and opt for a single renderer backend on PC -- which is usually DX11.

I really hope that MS stubbornly clings to restricting DX12 to Win10; that would be a huge boon for us, pushing developers towards Vulkan, which would dramatically increase compatibility with Wine and make native ports easier. Their bullish disregard of complaints and concerns about Win10 suggests there's a good chance they will.

Site Update: New GPU Model database for our user PC info & statistics system
31 Jul 2017 at 12:35 am UTC Likes: 4

Think you can throw in VR stats next? Just "Own a VR system? yes/no" for now, maybe break it down by system if it ever gets over 5% people having something.

Reminder: Update your PC info for the next round of statistics updates
1 Jul 2017 at 6:52 am UTC

What do you think about adding VR systems to the survey? Curious how many fellow Linux Vivers are out there.

Wine Staging 2.9 released with improved support for anti-cheat and DRM
1 Jun 2017 at 6:13 pm UTC

Does anyone know if any anticheat/DRM systems actually function in Wine now, and if so which? If we can identify any particular middleware solutions, then it'll be easy to make a list of "these use now-working anticheat/DRM and should be tested again and appDB updated" games/apps.

The Linux port of Xenonauts is not supported and was only made for 'legacy customers'
13 May 2017 at 4:53 pm UTC Likes: 2

I strongly prefer this over the status quo, which is "we don't want the overhead of supporting Linux, so we just won't port at all". I hate that attitude so, so much, but the vast majority of developers not already porting are taking EXACTLY that stance. There is a significant minority that are stuck with only D3D-based renderer options or a custom engine making the port far from trivial, but in the modern day that's usually not the case; making a functional binary on some common version of some common distribution really is as simple as hitting "build".

We can take care of ourselves, come on, throw us a bone! We'll figure out ourselves how to make that one very distro-specific binary run elsewhere, we've gotten pretty good at that. If we run into an issue we can't work around, we'll document it a lot better than virtually any Windows user and make it a lot easier to fix, and that's all we want -- feature parity and the occasional bugfix.

I feel that taking offense to this approach will push them towards the above attitude and drastically reduce the odds of the sequel being ported.

Looks like Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope for Linux will be coming soon
7 May 2017 at 3:30 pm UTC

Quoting: bubexelYes, there is latency. About rbdoom3 i saw a screenshot of it working in extended mode. But on direct mode crash. Maybe only works on extended mode.. no idea.

Btw, vive on linux is not evolving, nvidia driver vulkan beta with direct mode won't compile on kernel 4.10 without patching it manualy. They didn't update the driver patched, dunno why. That driver is a must to work with vive. Valve is updating steamVR but all patches are for windows, directX. Zero stuff for opengl, vulkan and linux. I'm glad to know that serious sam team is pushing it at their way. Thank you guys! :*
The README on Github needs updating, the Vulkan beta is old news. The necessary extensions have been folded back into Nvidia's main driver tree as of 381.09, which works with up through 4.12.

And SteamVR is getting updates on Linux, just not as quickly, because the slimmer library means there's less exposure to catch bugs. They're currently looking closely at the latency issue.

Looks like Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope for Linux will be coming soon
5 May 2017 at 4:29 pm UTC

It's worth mentioning that Valve considers the current version of the Linux SteamVR runtime to be for developers only, unfit for consumer use as of yet. For one, there's still a significant latency problem that needs to be ironed out.

Quoting: PyGuyIf you like Serious Sam enough to have that be your only VR game for the time being
Not true; we also have Munch, Locomancer, Destinations, Dungeon Hero, the Doom 3 VR mod, the Dota 2 VR spectator mode, and Vivecraft. And it's speculated that Spermination can be made to work with some minor modifications to the Linux port.

And OpenGL works, it's just that submitting frames to the compositor from a GLX/EGL context is extremely slow and unoptimized, making it unplayable in most cases. I think Vivecraft is using OpenGL on Linux, and gets away with it due to how simplistic and light Minecraft is on the GPU end. Not sure what Doom 3 is doing.