Quoting: Nanobang

Quoting: AnzaI would suppose there's difference if port is done internally or by external porter. If port is done internally, game developer can interpret the numbers as they see fit. They get exactly the same amount of money for each sale anyway. Though there's no absolute guarantee that port will ever leave the beta stage.

For external porters, it sounds like that at least Feral Interactive has contract where they get money only from Linux sales.

Thanks Anza, that answers part of my concern: who gets the money. But the other part of my concern --- who gets the credit? --- remains a mystery. What will the port be tallied as a Linux version on Steam and so add (however incrementally) to Linux's overall reported market share? Or will it add a drop in Window's already oceanic reported market share?

Statistics that game developers see are usually not revealed publicly.

Pretty much only publicly available Steam statistics are the ones gathered in the Steam survey. For that you can't do much more than to keep using Steam only on Linux and hope you'll get selected for the survey. AFAIK SteamOS doesn't count as Linux, so to be on the safe side, stay away from that.

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Quoting: NanobangThat looks ... nice! Very, very nice. Third "person" underwater action with strategic cutaway noodling. I'm intrigued.

My one hesitation with this beta, as indeed with all Linux betas on Steam, is I simply don't want the purchase to count as anything but a Linux purchase --- but to be honest, I don't know if it would or not. I've been following the Brotherhood lads as they work to bring STASIS to Linux, but I've not bought that either, for the same reason. Now I'm wondering if (and frankly, hoping that) I'm all wrong and buying these games but only playing the Linux beta will count as a Linux purchase. Could someone please enlighten benighted old me about this?

I would suppose there's difference if port is done internally or by external porter. If port is done internally, game developer can interpret the numbers as they see fit. They get exactly the same amount of money for each sale anyway. Though there's no absolute guarantee that port will ever leave the beta stage.

For external porters, it sounds like that at least Feral Interactive has contract where they get money only from Linux sales.

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: F.UltraLooks like most negative reviews comes from fiddly controls. Hopefully that is something that they can and/or will improve.

Fiddly controls, camera issues, bad interface, unpolished, multiple bugs... To quote Destructoid:
"I can't remember the last time I had to go to a game's forum to get a bug resolved just so I could advance. It's a lesson in wonderful concept and poor execution."

https://www.destructoid.com/review-diluvion-422788.phtml

I ignored the comments about bugs due to the "to get a bug resolved", too me that sounds like the devs are active and are fixing the bugs as soon as they are found.

Sounds like developer just didn't do enough testing. Pretty good game for somebody who actually enjoys finding bugs :)

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While programming is hard, also estimating is hard if you're doing something that you haven't been already done several times. And on top of that working on foreign code makes things even harder.

With you own code you should understand what it does...

Not announcing deadlines publicly seems to be pretty good strategy. In very ideal case everything is actually ready when deadline comes, but in real world that's not usually the case. So in order to keep the deadline, something has to give. Cutting features works, but doing that in the last minute is risky. Though if only Linux port is missing the features, Linux users will not be happy...

Another casualty of with keeping the deadline no matter what is quality. Some bugs found in internal testing might not be fixed before the release. Also if testing is lagging behind, plenty of bugs might have not been found yet.

So keep that in mind when you demand immediate release...

Based on the interviews though, there's plenty of experienced developers in Linux porter community. Pretty interesting stuff in every interview.

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As said ports are varying quality. Saints Row 2 has pretty bad performance, which is bit of shame as that one was best open world game of the available ports. What I have read is that having game on SSD or even in RAM helps somewhat. Also Gentlemans Row mod should fix some issues. I haven't tested any of that myself.

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell has audio issue: https://github.com/virtual-programming/saintsrowgat-linux/issues/1

Workaround is to restart the game.

As for continuity, now it's at least possible to play them in correct order. Saints Row IV was one of the first ported games and that makes lot of references to older games.

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[quote=Skiski]

Quoting: Anza

Quoting: SkiskiI've just updated to kernel 4.10 (4.10.8-100.fc24.x86_64) and I have way less stuttering. I don't know if it's thanks to the new kernel or the latest patch of the game.
I haven't tried today, but I've been able to play the game without stuttering just by using the offline mode of steam. I don't why this solve the kernel problem or even if it is related. But in offline mode, I was able to max every setting and I'm never under 40 FPS and usually between 50 and 60.

And I'm really enjoying the game so far.

Too bad Steam crashes when I try to enable offline mode. I would have been nice to test if offline mode workaround would work too.

I disconnected from Internet (and that was horrible, but I guess in the name of science sacrifices have to be made). Performance problem was gone though.

Strangely when I plugged back in, threads started switching cores again, but that didn't cause as severe performance problem as before. I checked again with Steam in online mode just in case and problem was back.

That's pretty odd. It would be interesting to know what's the actual root cause.

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Quoting: SkiskiI've just updated to kernel 4.10 (4.10.8-100.fc24.x86_64) and I have way less stuttering. I don't know if it's thanks to the new kernel or the latest patch of the game.
I haven't tried today, but I've been able to play the game without stuttering just by using the offline mode of steam. I don't why this solve the kernel problem or even if it is related. But in offline mode, I was able to max every setting and I'm never under 40 FPS and usually between 50 and 60.

And I'm really enjoying the game so far.

Too bad Steam crashes when I try to enable offline mode. I would have been nice to test if offline mode workaround would work too.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Anza

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: HollowSoldierOfficial patch notes:

"Marketing strategy didn't work. F...k."

I can't believe Feral did that on purpose and tought nobody would notice the regression. They might have made a mistake and it made it to the release (because the goal of the beta was to implement Vulkan in the first place) and they got caught in their enthusiasm. I hope it is such.

Anyway, all I'm hoping for is for them to fix the fps drops that many are experiencing. Every 10 seconds or so I see skipped frames and then it's buttery smooth again. Really annoying. And it doesn't seem to be linked to sudden heavy burdens... It's just random, in the middle of nowhere, while driving with nothing in sight (example) and it cycles again, ±10 seconds later.

If you have 4.9 kernel, it might be problem that threads keep moving between cores which causes massive framedrop while that happens. It's possible to verify if that's the case with htop as it shows threads by default and also shows assigned core for each thread.

I made script that can be used as workaround: https://github.com/anzah1/task-affinity-balancer

I think I'll made sure that Feral Interactive is also aware of the issue as fix should be relatively simple. Problem might have been there with earlier kernel version, but I don't think it was this frequent.

Thanks! I'll give it a shot. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04. Who knows, it might be something they backported from 16.10...

Looks like Ubuntu has 4.8 kernel, which I didn't test. I upgraded actually from 4.4 to 4.9, so it's entirely possible that problem appeared in some kernel version between those two.

It would be interesting to know if earlier kernel is also affected. Or maybe problem root cause is something else.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: HollowSoldierOfficial patch notes:

"Marketing strategy didn't work. F...k."

I can't believe Feral did that on purpose and tought nobody would notice the regression. They might have made a mistake and it made it to the release (because the goal of the beta was to implement Vulkan in the first place) and they got caught in their enthusiasm. I hope it is such.

Anyway, all I'm hoping for is for them to fix the fps drops that many are experiencing. Every 10 seconds or so I see skipped frames and then it's buttery smooth again. Really annoying. And it doesn't seem to be linked to sudden heavy burdens... It's just random, in the middle of nowhere, while driving with nothing in sight (example) and it cycles again, ±10 seconds later.

If you have 4.9 kernel, it might be problem that threads keep moving between cores which causes massive framedrop while that happens. It's possible to verify if that's the case with htop as it shows threads by default and also shows assigned core for each thread.

I made script that can be used as workaround: https://github.com/anzah1/task-affinity-balancer

I think I'll made sure that Feral Interactive is also aware of the issue as fix should be relatively simple. Problem might have been there with earlier kernel version, but I don't think it was this frequent.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandleI am running Manjaro and have noticed on kernel 4.9 this game stutters terribly, with frame rate wildly fluctuating. I booted up with kernel 4.5 and all of a sudden it's smoother than suppository dipped in Vaseline.

I also noticed that performance got lot worse with 4.9 kernel. After digging little deeper I noticed that threads were moving between cores quite frequently. So far htop has been best tool for debugging this as it shows which core thread uses and even shows threads by default.

I made a script that locks threads to dedicated cores and that helped quite a lot. Vulkan is now pretty smooth nearly all the time.

I uploaded the script to GitHub: https://github.com/anzah1/task-affinity-balancer

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