Quoting: Eike

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGames that aren't open source are normal, and there are various reasons that isn't likely to change unless our whole economic system changes. Game engines that aren't open source . . . I kind of hope gradually become eclipsed by ones that are. But emulator things for making old games work that aren't open source are . . . problematic IMO. Especially when there's just one guy doing it. He loses interest or gets hit by a bus and then it just quietly rots because nobody can ever update it again, and so much for preserving the game. Not a basket I'd want to be putting my eggs in.

Amusingly, even if something is open source, if someone doesn't maintain the code, it'll stop working. Xkobo is an example, the C source is out there, but modern gcc doesn't like it too much. It's still built for NetBSD 9.0 though!

Yes, but if anybody is interested enough, they can take over.

It is rarely that easy though. It is the beautiful lie about open-source we tell ourselves to sleep well at night, but when a project grows to the point slaapliedje is talking about people have already moved on.

Past a certain point there is so much work involved that you are better off paying an expert to do it for you anyway, like GOG or the man, the legend: Ethan Lee (@flibitijibibo).

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Quoting: mr-victory

Quoting: shorberglaunch date driver bugs

Isn't this still a thing with AMD for GPU launches and both AMD and Nvidia for new games?

Yeah...

Perhaps next generation will have that sorted. Or the one after that. Surely the one after that will have games work the day they are released on standard hardware!

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Quoting: GBGamesI should probably get around to playing Psychonauts.

I'm looking forward to watching this docuseries. I've seen some behind-the-scenes videos that are so distilled and compressed that it barely shared anything at all, but this looks like it will be a much more intimate look at the people behind the game.

Not sure how well the gameplay holds up after all these years, for me nostalgia probably makes up for a lot of shortcomings, but the humor and charm is top-notch if you like that style!

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Quoting: mr-victoryAs I read the comments, a few things make me feel weird:
1. Most of you are Linux users for a long time, while I use Linux since 2020 and play on it since 2022.
2. Despite only recently starting gaming, it was nowhere near an OOB Just Works experience. I dealt with forcing games to use Nvidia GPU, any Vulkan application freezing due to a driver bug, Apex Legends stuttering even with GPL and mod problems with HOI4. I even patched Proton (only a week ago!) so Paradox Launcher would well behave.
3. In 2 Steam accounts around only 5 games were purchased in total (and only 1 pirate game which I can't acquire in a different way) while everyone else here has hundreds if not thousands.

Welcome! Glad to have you amongst us!

Regarding 2, yeah things are relative for us old-timers, our lives were so miserable back when that things like nVidia driver bugs and the occasional launcher misbehaving makes us feel like OOB experience. (especially when one remembers that was the case on windows as well back in the early to mid 00's)

There is still much improvement to be made and if a newer generation never have to learn about DLL-hell or launch date driver bugs, then that would be just swell!

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Quoting: KohlyKohlI still remember seeing Quake in a game store in 1999.

Before Steam it was very difficult to get games running under Wine. I remember breaking my system many times, especially in the early 2000s, trying to compile the right libraries and still not being able to get most games working right.

Cedega existed to try and make it easier to run Games (and software but that was an even worse experience) and even that only worked slightly better than manually trying to get games working.

In the end, I mostly just played Blizzard games because those were the ones that worked mostly out of the box with Wine.

It is really impressive today that I can play just about any game I want without having to do anything to make it work under Linux.

Yeah, those were the days alright. Some games like City of Heroes though ran better under Wine in Linux than on Windows for me. When I discovered that I would always reboot into Linux before starting a session of crime fighting.

There is this strange sense of nostalgia and adventure whenever a game requires fiddling with Wine to function these days. Digging through stack dumps and logs, hours spent digging through forums and Microsoft documentation... Ok, it wasn't great. But it was educational!

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Quoting: sarmadSomehow Valve's games continue to be popular. L4D, Counter Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Dota. For some reason people don't seem to get bored of these games.

Kinda like fast food, I guess?

It isn't the most exciting food around but it is comforting and you know what you get.

Also helps that the games are very just-pick-up-and-play™. You can just fire it up, play a couple of hours and get the full experience immediately. We played a lot of L4D on a whim like that back in the day.

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Quoting: hardpenguinStill fun and also you can play it in split-screen - there is a mod to be downloaded from the Workshop that enables it :)

Sweet!

Now if only I can find somewhere to download another player.

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Dink Smallwood!

Man that takes me back... Used to love that game as a kid.

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Quoting: dibzI appreciate the explanations. Though, my use of "Borderline Autistic" is actually close to home for me. Without airing my laundry on the internet, I will say that I used the term in the context that I learned it in the first place -- in a healthcare setting when diagnosing one of my children who I could absolutely see being a "strongly opinionated linux user" like many of us, heh.

Fair!

If you feel it appropriate and you think your child would like it, say "Hi!" from me. You do not have to state your decision on this on the public forum.

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Quoting: CyborgZetaI am not a software developer or a progammer; I am just a regular computer user. So please do not get angry at me for asking this, as I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

But wouldn't running games, and programs/applications in general, inside containers fix this kind of issue? Isn't that one of the goals of Flatpak?

A great question CyborgZeta!

Yes and no. It is really quite overkill to use something like flatpak for the use cases we are talking about, the industry have dealt with this issue for decades and the solution (which is typically used on the windows platform) is to bundle your dependencies either statically in your binary or as dynamic libraries next to your binary.

There are pros and cons to that, for something like a game it is usually "good enough" to bundle only some dependencies given the non-critical nature of games. Programs written in Go(lang) are built as independent static binaries by design. As far as I know this means that they will run pretty much on any system as long as the architecture is compatible (linux x86, windows x86, linux arm, etc).

For drawbacks there are three big ones, one is size. Statically built binaries are larger in size since they bundle everything the program needs inside the binary itself. Another is that if the assumptions those dependencies made about the platform were to change they would still break. Lastly, security. If my program uses curl dynamically and a security flaw is discovered in curl that can be updated independently of my program.

Containerised solutions share the same first two drawbacks and has the third built in "by design" (both good and bad).

Another one you can make a solid argument for is that containerised applications like flatpak add a lot of unnecessary complexity to an already complex chain.

An advantage that a statically linked binary have over a container is reduced resource consumption and a smaller size on disk. A container needs the entire runtime to be present, which will include a ton of stuff the program won't need. Granted, if you install enough containerised applications that rely on the same runtime the differences go away.

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