Quoting: clatterfordslim... How do you persuade these companies to even consider Linux? ...

Remember, a wishlist is what is being asked; so actually anything is a valid request... it's rather that feral needs to know to which guys it does make sense to talk to as there's enough potential customers... so, enough requests/demand and feral making a good offer regarding implementation and support and anything might happen... as you already mentioned, feral managed to get some very fine stuff on linux, so why not hope they are able to manage to get a great deal again for other popular games / franchises?

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in no particular order:

Elite: Dangerous
Witcher 3
Mass Effect Series
Battlefield 5
DCS World
Assassin's Creed (at least everything after Black Flag)
Assetto Corsa
Project CARS 2
Train Sim World 2020

I'm not really following new releases / announcements that are windows-only, so I don't really know what new cool stuff's out there. But (action) adventures, which can be played as single player, with a good story, will always get some attention by me (something like the Tomb Raider Reboot, Deadfall Adventures, Saints Row, Dreamfall Chapters, etc.).

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So, they're still having separate releases for the new Vulkan and standard stuff? So you have to decide which fixes you want to have/are more important to you? For how long is this now? .... way too long...
Anyway, I don't care; at the moment the openSUSE repository is broken/unsafe (problems with signature/gnuPG-key), so updating whichever branch is actually not a good idea right now..

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Quoting: Mountain ManIn fact, X-Plane uses system resources very efficiently. I just booted up X-Plane 11 for a quick test flight, and all 12 of my CPU cores were kicking, so your claim that it "runs on only one CPU core" is false. Furthermore, I did a test flight over New York City, one of the more demanding scenery dense areas of X-Plane 11, and the simulator took up no more than 10GB of RAM of the 40GB available on my machine, so your claim that it "will suck up every drop of memory and manages it poorly" is false. Finally, I checked my GPU usage, and it never fell below 90%, so your claim that X-Plane 11 "barely utilizes the GPU" is false.

In its current state, X-Plane 11 is very well optimized and makes full use of whatever hardware it has access to, so anybody expecting miracles from Vulkan needs a reality check. Vulkan will simply allow Laminar to add some extra polish to an already well-running machine.

Well, based on my own experience I have to object.
Regarding CPU usage: XP makes use of all when loading new terrain-tiles. But during the rest of the flight it barely uses 2 and the sim-fps stay very low; I have 8 + HT, so there could be a better and more precise simulation of flight dynamics.

Regarding GPU usage: my RTX2080Ti is usually at around 40% utilization; but my framerate never gets higher than 25 or 30fps; so the way the rendering is currently taking place isn't optimal. Hopefully Vulkan can improve that.

With memory consumption one has to consider what is being displayed / cached. Especially if you want to have a nice view of the terrain in high altitudes you need lots of data. There were in XP10 already complaints that it got extremely blurry within the view distance and they implemented the option to have more detailed drawing, which of course needs more detailed data about ground structures, etc. And if you're additionally using the (U)HD-meshes of alpilotx this of course will have a major impact on your mem-usage. But I'm fine with that part of their implementation as you can nowadays easily upgrade to very high amounts memory; but a poor CPU or GPU usage can not be that easily addressed.

Quoting: iiariI'm glad MS is coming out with their new sim as I think it'll give LR a real kick in their complacency.

Well the preview look nice, but as I got it, their terrain data comes from the internet and considering how much of it you need during flight, I don't think it will look that good at home. Unless you have a GBit internet connection with a low-overhead-protocol like myrinet or something like that... So I don't expect the impact to be too high...

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Well rewriting a render engine takes a while, and as it's constantly updated I don't expect Vulkan support soon. Though it would be nice to have the full graphics quality in the Linux client too.
But for a while now I face a bigger problem. The launcher is crashing when focus is transferred to a different application, also during update downloads... And the game itself also doesn't run at all..... Send the crash report a couple of times now, but no reaction so far and no update fixed it....

Quoting: 14I have more general questions. Is the game just constant chaos? Are there "instances" of battles that have a beginning and end (skirmishes)? Commanders? Just wondering what you fight for. Is it one big world like EVE Online and you fight for territory and keep it until someone conquers you? Many servers?

Most of the stuff is more like games insurgency/battlefield/etc. just with planes, tanks, etc. There's two teams. The goals usually are: destroy enemys artillery and/or airports, capture and hold some areas/airports. Each game is time limited (30min), each team has a specific number of tickets and each player also has only a limited number of respawn. So you can either hunt others or destroy stuff. If time's up, a team has no tickets or respawns anymore, the battle is over. Usually a game takes 10 to 20 minutes.
There's also those large battles with combined armour. But haven't played those, so don't know what they're like.
Also there sometimes are special events like air races (I especially love those) which can be lots of fun.
VR is also included. Really adds something to a game like that. Helicopter flying in VR is fun! But tried it only once and I don't know if it was Linux or Windows. So can't tell right now if it works on Linux.
Another cool thing is: you can play either arcade style (quite demanding already), realistic style and simulation. So if you have the equipment, you can try out simulation to see how good you really are.
There's only the official servers, for several regions. Normally there's enough players to be found quickly (within a minute) and connection to the servers is usually pretty good (in germany at least). What may be harder to find is, if you've ranked up and have planes/tanks/ships of higher levels, it may be harder to find a game, but they've included bots at some stage, so you can still have battles.

And the best of it all: it's free and it's definitely no pay-to-win! You really need skills to be successful at this game. (There's some training stuff in there to get you started)

Hope that helps to get a small insight into the game.

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Quoting: 14

Quoting: peta77Also noticed it uses lots of VRAM (at 4K and set to highest quality nvidia-smi reported a usage of 6.5GB of video memory!); on largest map size though. But when having enough memory it runs good, interaction is very smooth.

Unused memory is wasted money! :D

Excess resource usage wastes a lot more money in the long run. I don't want to say they did a bad job, I don't know the code. But for people who don't have most current high end hardware that might be problematic if all of it is needed or the usage is not adaptive regarding available hardware resources and current game situation. Already had that in the first version where long running free games where you have lots of infrastructure built would slow down (in some situations very significantly), but can't tell right now about v2 as that requires lots of play time. But anyway, I like it that you can build up those giant structures, so I'm very happy they've increased the maximum map size.

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Finally! :D
Had pre-ordered it due to their previous Linux support and even having a Linux version in the beta version and luckily wasn't disappointed with it.
Runs good most of the time but I also noticed some drops in frame rate at situations you wouldn't expect. So some more optimizations would be nice. Also noticed it uses lots of VRAM (at 4K and set to highest quality nvidia-smi reported a usage of 6.5GB of video memory!); on largest map size though. But when having enough memory it runs good, interaction is very smooth.
Just have to figure out to what place they've moved some features / information. But so far (after about 4 hours of playing) it looks like a good evolution for the series. No giant step ahead but a reasonable improvement which made it worth the money.

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Quoting: Sil_el_motSince the latest update steamvrdoesnt work anymore for me.
wtf?

Having issues too: library/game selection won't come up anymore, vr-home is sometimes replaced by simple environment picture, ...
Have to start & end (why do developers in vr tend to omit a quit option in the menu?) games from the desktop and then can go on in vr.. that kind of works for me... but the vr-interface before running a game is pretty broken at the moment...

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Quoting: Arten

Quoting: peta77

Quoting: Arten

Quoting: peta77I don't like streaming stuff, requires a very good internet connection and I don't want to have screen resolution in the game restricted by any server. Also for single player games it doesn't make any sense to make an online connection a mandatory to be able to play. So I hope there's no upcoming titles which are exclusively available through cloud gaming. Would significantly throw back desktop gaming.

From Stadia, yes, google plan this. But from steam, i think and hope, they don't planing de jure exclusivity for cloud, but is there posibility for de facto time limited cloud exlusivity, because they can use better CPU, more cores,... and then nobody without today threadriper can play it localy, but in some time, it can be posible.

The only thing that would make sense regarding hardware capacity would real-time-raytracing, like that old remote-rendering i.e. SGI did long ago, where your render CPUs/GPUs would be somewhere in the basement and bigger than your appartment. But other than that, for gamers with high-end hardware it would just be a giant step back. I understand that such things are good for tablet or smartphone gaming, but not for the desktop. I don't want to go back to dumb terminals that rely on tons of external hardware and a hyper reliable high bandwith network. I'm pretty happy with having a "supercomputer" under my desk, even if it costs a bit more.

I don’t think so. You thinking only on graphics, but there is more. Your high-end gaming rig can have bottle neck on RAM, CPU or both. There are games with coplex physical simulation, like kerbal space program, where more compute power can be great benefit for developers and players. In KSP, you have physical time warp with all physic calculated and High-speed time warp, which stops all physical calculation except gravity and collisions. With epyc CPU with enaught cores (and multithread physical engine) you can have Physical time warp for higher warp. Yes, if you have high-end PC, but you can buy Epyc/threadripper with 128GB RAM or more and use it at home for gaming and call it gaming high-end...

Sure you can do more complex/extensive simulation with such an amount of computing power in the background. But also think about the target audience size! Real physical simulation is very complex and takes a lot of time, especially if you want to have results (somewhat) comparable with reality. Then it may take i.e. 50 CPU-hours to simulate a quarter of a second (in non-linear industrial quality simulation). So don't set your hopes too high to gain more or even as much as you can get when have a pretty recent ryzen or i7/9. That would require some pretty powerful HPC-cluster (or something similar) which you wouldn't want to pay for. Also, while most simulation problems are quite good parallelizable, it has its limits (due to communication of boundary regions, etc.; it's a science by itself...). Running a simulation on 100 CPUs/cores can actually be slower than running it on eight. The more so if the cores aren't on the same node, even if you use high-bandwith, low stack network protocols.
So, as mentioned before, it surely will increase the quality for mobile devices, but I wouldn't expect any improvement for the desktop. I guess, only effect for the desktop will be that you can significantly downgrade your hardware if you are willing to rely on cloud services only.

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Sounds pretty much like the sandboxes in Solaris or side-by-side-installations on MS(-xerox-apple...)-Windows. Actually a good way to keep applications running without interfering with each other, especially if you have common lib-dependencies but need different versions in order for the app to operate correctly / not to crash.
But long term it can still be a problem, i.e. when a special soundsystem isn't sound supported anymore at all, but only through wrappers (think about OSS). The same might apply to graphics, input devices and other stuff at some time. So I hope they understand that for this to work they will in the end need to write and maintain some wrappers to keep the old games going. Unfortunately OpenSource doesn't help here very much as some system stuff surely does change significantly over time and you won't be able to simply recompile without touching source code. But lets be optimistic and keep fingers crossed that it works out somehow.
Sure this can be also used for efficient/save cloud services. But it also will help you a lot the more apps/games you own that quickly aren't updated anymore for newer OS versions. It can significantly increase the amount of time you're able to use your stuff, hopefully until a point in time where you're actually not interested at all anymore in those games/apps.
Conclusion: as long as the steam desktop client stays alive, with local installation and hardware use, I think this is a very nice step forward.

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