Witcher 3 Wild Hunt GOTY is $10 USD on Steam, GOG, and Humble. Seems lie a good time to pick it up if you have been waiting for a sale.

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Thanks for the heads-up! Going to go grab this, its been years since I played through these.

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I'm wondering how these new Xe laptops perform with gaming. I've seen a review of ~30 fps for recent AAA games at 'medium' 1080p settings. I guess we'll find out more soon.

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I think its a brilliant move. USBs are cheap enough that valve can give them away during promotions or large enough that users can buy high speed 1TB drives. It sounds like with the persistence, you'd also be able to install other things to the USB drive. Which would mean GOG and other games / tools. I welcome the next generation of Linux gamers. I hope it results in more people enjoying the games that they want, the way that they want, with more control over their hardware.

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Quoting: cwbutcher

Quoting: pageroundI own all of Beamdogs games on steam. I am playing through BG for the first time thanks to them. I'm loving it. One thing to note, if you opt into the beta you will not unlock achievements. Saves were compatible between the current and beta versions for me.

That's odd as I'm opted into the beta on Icewind Dale and getting achievements okay.

Thanks for that info. I was using the beta for a while and noticed i missed the "Victory Is Mine" achievement, which is a main-storyline achievement. Granted I might have missed something as it is my first time through. :)

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I own all of Beamdogs games on steam. I am playing through BG for the first time thanks to them. I'm loving it. One thing to note, if you opt into the beta you will not unlock achievements. Saves were compatible between the current and beta versions for me.

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I am happy AMD are contributing code, however I've been sticking with Mesa+RADV on my 5600 Fedora laptop as its been working great. Plays everything I can throw at it. Maybe with this change I'll try out AMDVLK in the future. Thanks for the heads up, Liam!

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Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: EikeWhy are game makers using Bink video that much, instead of say MPEG-23 (or whatever was/is available at the respective time)?

There's two things that make Bink a prime candidate for video games:

1) The API reportedly very easy and comfortable to use for games. It is, after all, specifically written for games. That alone is already a very good selling point. If you can just drop the library in and hook it up to your rendering code without having to rewrite your own engine, that kind of friction-less support is worth a lot

2) Bink (*) has several optimizations and block types to specifically support videos found in video games. Namely, hard edges you'll find in animated or 3D-rendered graphics. Other general video formats are tuned for real life video captured by a camera, where hard edges and wide stretches of the exact same color are scarce, but gradients and noise that needs to be filtered are frequent

To elaborate point two a bit, you might be familiar with how screenshots, webcomics, etc. shouldn't be saved as JPEGs. The hard edges, also around text, produce artifacts, weird block-like things. That's because JPEG is meant for photographs, not drawings. The same is true for most general video codecs, including the MPEG families.

Of course, newer codecs are more complex with more features, so this isn't that pronounced anymore, but with Bink, drawn and rendered sequences are a main focus, not a distant consideration.

(*) At least Bink 1, which I have read the RE'd ffmpeg sources for. Bink 2 isn't yet in ffmpeg, but it has been RE'd, however I haven't looked at that yet. Too much to do, too little time. But I do expect this point is also true for Bink 2

EDIT: To make it clear, I don't work for RAD nor is this supposed to be an advertisment for them, and they don't pay me. :P

Interesting, thank you for the insights. I've also read that Bink video worked really well on processor constrained consoles and that they were able to render video on PS1 with very little CPU usage. I guess its less of an issue today.

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I went through what I spent in the past year on vidya games. Roughly 70% Steam, 20% GOG, 10% Humble. I love that I can download drm-free, offline installers from GOG, which is something worthy of support in my opinion. Maybe Steam could offer drm-free, offline installers for those publishers that wanted to provide them. The best of both worlds!

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I've purchased Star Traders on Google/Android and Star Traders: Frontier on Steam/Linux. I think they work pretty hard on their games. I've gotten a couple dozen hours out of both.

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