Nice to have it in Steam again. Yeah, I was impressed when I saw with a recent wine version that Titanfall and Titanfall 2 where finally working. Especially Titanfall 1 being an online only game. I used Lutris for it and had this 1s hiccup as well. Looks like Origin is writing a file to disk every second. I got rid of it by moving the prefix to SSD and the game files symlinked from HDD.
If Titanfall 2 works now via SteamPlay, I guess the other games I've been playing recently via Lutris should work in Steam now as well? Like Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 1 and 2, Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 (the new EA ones), and Crysis 3.
Well, I got those games quite a while ago, and I do not intend to buy them again. It's shame they're not automatically available to buyers like GoG connect does it with games.
Who would've thought EA would ever go back to Steam...

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Quoting: randylThe demo runs really well. It took me a little while to get used to the controls. I started with a DS4 but switched to KB/M for better aim and flight control. The controller worked well but I preferred the keyboard and mouse more.

The current demo is in fact the prototype kickstarter backers got. It runs ootb with Proton, as it's using DX11 as default renderer.
Unfortunately that's not the case for the closed alpha, which defaults to DX12 now. And DX12 support in Proton/Wine needs to mature a bit more. But there is help, just pass -dx11 as launch option, and it's using DX11 again which makes it playable via DXVK *phew*
More details over at protondb [External Link].

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Quoting: FaalhaasLately I have been sucked into the YUR community. Closing the fitness center due to corona was a big enabler, but now I am becoming addicted. What YUR stuff can you actually do in Linux (besides Beat Saber and Discord)?

Atm only Beat Saber, Synth Riders and OhShape have the YUR integration. Beat Saber through a mod for YUR, but Synth Riders and OhShape have this YUR.watch thing integrated. Those are the ones that I'm aware of, and do work on Linux.

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Not many games this weekend, but those two are currently my most favorite ones:

• GTFO:
  
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  This is a very interesting one, from former Payday 2 devs, a 4 player sci-fi based horror, stealth and very difficult fps game. Interesting about this is, they call the current set of levels "rundown", and they re-use the assets for new levels, but cannot maintain compatibility with the old levels. So when a new rundown is released, the old one gets replaced. If you were not able to complete all the levels, you're out of luck. And you have to beat the early levels to unlock the later ones. Of course the difficulty increases with each level... we have to hurry a bit, as next Thursday the new rundown gets released, and we have still 2 level to beat :dizzy:
  



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  One of the killer apps for VR (well, nowadays the VR killer app has to be Half-Life: Alyx tbh) ;) A great community, for streamers a great integration for streaming services to request custom songs and replace notes with bombs, which explode into the name of the viewer who triggered the command.
  
  Honorable mentions are Synth Riders, OhShape and Pistol Whip. All nice rhythm based music VR games, which give you also a nice workout. There is even YUR integration for BS, SR and OhShape from within the game, to count your burnt calories. And the Synth Riders as well as the OhShape devs are looking into a configurable 3rd person cam by my request, so a mixed reality stream would be feasible.
  

Yeah, not native Linux games, I know, but GTFO works flawless (platinum rating) and Beat Saber is whitelisted by Valve for Proton.

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Quoting: XpanderQuake Champions runs super smooth™ now. Compared to stuttery mess it used to be on every new map.

I can confirm. It took my PC about half an hour though to get the Vulkan shaders processed. But it was totally worth it, it runs now without any suttery, which is pretty cool!

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As if you would "own" any PC game nowadays that's distributed via any digital drm gaming platform, be it Origin, UPlay or Steam. Just Epic (afaik) and GoG are distributing drm-free games, so once you downloaded them, they still work offline.

Stadia is just the next level of how technology advances. More and more people are getting better and faster Internet connections, if you don't belong to them yet, well... maybe in the future though. Maybe then this is not for you yet.

I'm impressed by Stadia and how well it works. Performance overhead? Maybe that's coming through the fact the game is not running on your local computer, has to be encoded, transmitted and decoded again. I haven't realized any bad performance so far, it works pretty well for me. I'm using FullHD resolution only, as I don't own any 4K device.

Not all games on Stadia are native Linux ports? I doubt it, Doom Eternal sure is, as ID software was mentioning in their tech talk on how they ported Doom 2016 to Stadia. As Metro Exodus shows signs about a native Linux port for the end user, I'm pretty sure that's based on the Stadia Linux port. And didn't Ubitsoft state that it wasn't too difficult to port their portfolio over to Stadia? Even if it's not native, I don't see an issue there, as long as it runs well.

But most engines support Linux nowadays, there are rumors that e.g. Battlefield as a native Linux build, it's just internal and will probably stay this way forever (like the new Doom ports). So it seems really feasible to create those native ports.

Doubting that Stadia will have a positive effect for Linux gamers? Having Vulkan versions of the games on Stadia is very helpful, because even if no native Linux version for end users are released, Proton/Wine will be able to easily run it as they don't have to wrap around any DirectX API. Also more Linux devs are needed, and whenever they switch jobs after finishing a Stadia port, their will want to use their Linux-focused knowledge on other projects. The benefits might not be that straight forward nor obvious, but in the long run I'm sure it will improve things for Linux gamers.

In fact, I just want to play games. Where I play them, I don't mind. Well, that's not completely true, as I want to play them on my Linux PC, but if it's distributed by Steam which can be shut down any time (very unlikely, I know) and I lose all my games there, or on Stadia... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can't resell my games on any of those platforms, I do need an Internet connection for all of them, even if I'd buy a retail version, I have to activate it online, download day once patches online, etc.
I don't really see a big difference between Steam and Stadia, except the hardware, where the games is rendered. From a non-technical aspect, they seem to have more in common than they differ.

There are even good reasons for Stadia: Devs can develop against a certain piece of hardware, no need for supporting a vast variety of hardware setups. You don't have to deal with cheaters, as they have no access to the files or the machine itself to alter its memory. Both means devs can save a lot of money. Of course that doesn't work for each kind of game, e.g. streaming a VR game is atm not possible. And not being able to mod certain games is something I would miss. I don't think that Stadia would replace PC gaming anytime soon, but I think it's a nice addition, giving people who don't want to spend more money on hardware upgrades than on games the opportunity to play latest AAA titles. It's bringing a new level of convenience, and that's what many people like.

It's how the technology evolved, it does have some concerns to know about, but in fact companies want to earn money, and due to the competition on the market their interest is to deliver a good service, so they can attract and keep the customers. Remember when always-on was a hot discussed topic? No one complains about that any more. Or when DLCs became a thing? No one complains about that any more either. Or even when Valve released Half Life 2, forcing people to use a client to activate and install the game, and look how people now prefer Steam over everything else? Turns out, all these things haven't been that bad. There are exceptions of course, like loot boxes, but here the complains have been heard and they seem to be a thing of the past.

Time goes on, things change. Give new things a chance, if it's not good, people will complain and hopefully give good feedback so it can be improved.

To be fair though, I haven't spend any money on Epic yet, and have not bought any game on Stadia so far, though I do have the pro subscription.

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Nice read!

For Linux gamers the last few years since Valve officially started to support Linux with their client have been getting better and better. Though I guess that even the Humble Indie Bundles have to be taken into account as well. And of course all the other games that have native Linux version even before all that (e.g. ID software).

But even though we had quite some games to play natively on Linux, barely AAA titles have been among them. To play those, we ware mostly depending on wine.

I remember when John Carmack stated a few years back that the focus for games on Linux should be to improve wine compatibility, and have a look where we are at now. Not that only Valve has integrated wine via Proton, also Lutris is doing an amazing job getting games easily running for non-tinkerers. Yesterday I've been playing Titanfall again on Linux, the first one, that's only multiplayer! And it worked very well.

The impression I get now about Linux gaming is, it's becoming normal. It's not that difficult any more to get something up and running (ymmv) and thus not creating this special feeling to have done something extraordinary. Which is good!

Though we have now so many games to play, and it's that easy to play them on Linux now, it will still take a long time for more people to migrate to Linux. The majority of people is "lazy". Not meant as an offence, it's more like, why putting energy into something that works well enough and would cost me a lot of effort to make a change to. That energy maybe spent better elsewhere. But as Pierre-Loup Griffais stated, they see an equal amount of new users to Steam coming from Linux as from Windows.

On the other hand, there are still so many quirks and hurdles to overcome for an enjoyable experience on Linux, which still puts off many people. It's mostly all depending on the official support. It's getting better and better and is better than ever, but still. Personally, I miss the support of the Browser Source in OBS right now. Or having Linux support for mixed reality VR from e.g. LIV. It's nice to see though, that devs consider implementing a freely configurable 3rd person cam for VR games (at least OhShape and Synth Riders do) after requesting it.

After all, I'm happier than ever with Linux and with the variety and amount of games I can play now on Linux. Though we might be annoying, I guess we should not stop nudging devs about Linux support in a friendly way. There is still a long way to go, so we don't have to ask for Linux support any more, be it native or wine-wrapped.

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Oh man, I could just shortly start it up right now, as my Controllers where dying after that 4h Beat Saber session... but oh my! This is so smooth compared to the proton version. Seems though that my save state didn't survive the transition from proton to Linux, but who cares?

I'll replay this tomorrow and try the gnome run :D

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The Egosoft devs are very cool people. I've met them at gamescom last year and could thank them personally for the native Linux port of X4. It was never a question for them to create the Linux port (though it came after the initial release), and using Blender seems like a confirmation of this statement to me.

If you want to learn more about Egosoft and other space game devs, there is the documentary (narrated via interviews) space.games.film [External Link] where not only people from Egosoft, but also from Rockfishgames (Everspace!), from Deadalic (Long Journey Home), from Robert Space Industries and more are interviewed.

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Quoting: PatolaNice. What other VR software do you use? Do you know anything that can get input from the VR controllers to e.g. create screenshots?

I also have OVR Advanced Settings installed, and autostarted with VR. There you can rebind any button to whatever you want. I thought though there is alreay a keybinding for screensots... but with the rebindings, you can assign that to any button you want I guess (I haven't rebound anything yet).

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