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Latest Comments by boltronics
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided looks like it may be getting a Linux & SteamOS release
24 Aug 2016 at 12:58 am UTC

Feral did the Mac port of Human Revolution back when a GNU/Linux port wasn't an option, so I don't find this news all that surprising. It is awesome though. ;)

I haven't played Human Revolution, but I do have it in my Steam library. Seems to work under Wine, so I might give that a go in anticipation of Mankind Divided getting a GNU/Linux release.

No Man's Sky has been shown to work rather well in Wine on Linux
18 Aug 2016 at 3:15 am UTC Likes: 1

Nice to see more developers selecting OpenGL over DirectX. OpenGL games generally run perfectly under Wine, in my experience (eg. the recent Wolfenstein games).

Slightly off topic: I got FarCry Primal and Fallout 4 the other day because they were dirt cheap in the store. FarCry 3 ran beautifully under Wine, but I haven't had much luck with either of these new titles. Apparently they have some new copy protection mechanism on them, so it could be that, or it could just be due to Wine lacking the necessary bits of the DirectX 11 API. Normally I wouldn't purchase games like this (I don't have a Windows install), but they are two titles I really want to play and they were very cheap on sale (even cheaper since EB Games messed up the price on one of them, which neither of us initially noticed).

Certainly I did not want to go back to dual-boot, so I thought of running Windows 10 in a virtual machine. I already had a Windows 7 retail license in VirtualBox which seldom use but upgraded to Windows 10 during the free upgrade... but VirtualBox does not support GPU pass-through. So I replaced that with virt-manager/libvirt+KVM+OVMF which did... and that kinda sorta worked. My R9 285 that I was passing through to the guest would crash the VM if I booted it a second time (although soft-rebooting of the guest was fine). The work-around was to power off the host completely, and then power it on again... but okay, at least Windows 10 is relatively isolated in a VM and won't nuke my GNU/Linux partitions with an update or whatever!

But then came the time to activate Windows 10, and it turns out that the Windows 10 free upgrade is basically just an OEM license. If you change any of the hardware, it can't be re-activated. I spent about an hour with MS support, and they understood that it was still just a VM on the same physical machine and that I'd already nuked the VirtualBox copy so it was all in compliance with licensing, etc... but they simply could not get the license to activate and said I'd have to spend AU$299 on a new key (approx 10x the cost of the games I wanted to play). Yeah right...

So I nuked that and went back to my Windows 7 Ultimate retail DVD and installed that into the guest (again with the R9 285 GPU pass-through). That worked... less well. With Windows 7, even a soft-reboot would cause the guest to lock up, and Windows seems to require a reboot for *everything*. Even when I did finally get it all ready, I wanted to test a game prior to activating the Windows license, and that ran for a few seconds and then the guest rebooted. The technology is too unreliable. I also tried my other graphics card (a Fury X), and that had the same problem.

I have an ancient Nvidia card (an 9800GT) which worked somewhat better (but it only supports BIOS mode), but that card is too old to play the two games I wanted to play.

So in the end, my adventure was kinda a waste of time. At least I got a fresh reminder of just how much Microsoft sucks, and why you should never even *consider* using any of their software for anything. Even Microsoft support couldn't get past it's own evil DRM to let me use my legitimate license. Absolutely pathetic! But it could have been worse I suppose... I could have decided to dual-boot and get that Windows update that people were saying a couple of weeks back that nuked their GNU/Linux install...

Killing Floor 2 release date announced, Linux version to be post-launch
18 Aug 2016 at 2:46 am UTC

That was the first (and the last) game I'll ever pre-order that said would have GNU/Linux support. I would never have imagined that it would take so long to be released. I used to be such a massive Killing Floor (1) fan, and now I hate the game because all my friends have been playing it without me. Well, were playing it... I don't think I know anyone who plays it these days (on my Steam friends list at least).

At this point, I'm amazed the game is ever going to get a release... but I'll be even more amazed if KF2 for GNU/Linux is released before it's completely playable under Wine. KF2 actually does run under Wine already at this point, but the corrupted graphics due to unimplemented bits of the DirectX 11 API make it unplayable for the moment.

The cynic in me expects that's what TripWire was planning all along, which is why the game took so long to finish (since they were working on other games in the meantime anyway). Soon Tripwire will be able to get away with a Wine wrapper. And honestly, KF1 under Wine had less bugs than the KF1 GNU/Linux builds, so it totally makes sense they would just do that.

Project Cars official twitter confirms to me there are no plans for it on Linux now
8 Aug 2016 at 2:34 am UTC Likes: 6

Valve should really do something about this situation. Maybe if SteamOS support is advertised anywhere on upcoming titles on Steam, the game can't be released for any platform unless it supports SteamOS on day one.

That way, developers will have to make a hard choice. Do we not advertise SteamOS and miss out on pre-orders from GNU/Linux users (especially since users will then be relatively safe to pre-order), or do we advertise it and make extra sure that SteamOS builds will be ready on day one?

In this case it probably doesn't matter since I'm not sure if Project Cars advertised upcoming support for SteamOS on Steam... but if Valve implemented this system, it would make it clear to end users if the company was serious about SteamOS support or not. Unfortunately Valve seems terribly lazy, and I doubt would ever do something like this.

Three retro Disney games are now on GOG with Linux support
6 Aug 2016 at 10:10 am UTC

I remember playing a demo of Aladdin and the Lion King back in the day, from the cover CD of a computer magazine (PC Format I think). At the time I found the game to be quite charming, and it could barely run on my machine and movement was quite slow.

Since the retail versions of these games were not sold anywhere near where I lived, I could only ever play the demo over and over until I got bored of it. It's interesting to be reminded of these games and I'd likely pick them up just for a look since they are for GNU/Linux... if the price was more reasonable.

I agree with everyone saying the price is too high. If all three games were AU $10 instead of AU $12 each, I'd be very tempted. But at AU $12 a pop, I think there's better ways to spend my time and money. I could get Near Death (released just a few days ago) for AU $17.71 for example, which I think would be significantly more entertaining.

But who knows, maybe when a good sale comes along the price will be right? I'm not going to infringe on copyright just to play them, so I just won't play them for now.

Total War: WARHAMMER is still coming to Linux, being ported by Feral Interactive
4 Aug 2016 at 11:19 am UTC

Nice. Just got this included with a new MSI motherboard purchase.

Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell and Overlord II (new port!) released on Steam for Linux
31 Jul 2016 at 2:57 am UTC

Quoting: darkszlufthe game does not work on MESA Radeonsi, you'll need fglrx or amdgpu-pro in order to play it.
That bug has been fixed. https://github.com/virtual-programming/overlord-linux/issues/2 [External Link]

Progress on our User Statistics Page has continued, feedback requested
25 Jul 2016 at 3:41 am UTC

I have 3 machines running Debian, and two running GuixSD (or three if you count my spouse's Windows machine which I secretly made a dual-boot system). :)

I mainly game under Debian GNU/Linux though, although this might change over the next year as GuixSD gets better tooling support and I get better at Scheme. Being a FSF distro, it's never going to support or assist in running proprietary games. I hear NixOS has Steam support though, which is a similar distro.

Dave Airlie has been working on an AMD Vulkan driver
24 Jul 2016 at 11:15 am UTC

I haven't noticed any issues here with AMDGPU-Pro, but I'm mostly using the AMDGPU-Mesa stack from git. The only game in my collection which I need AMDGPU-Pro for is Dying Light. AMDGPU-Pro is also nice for testing DirectX 10 and 11 games with Wine, since Wine is making use of those newer extensions to support such DirectX API calls. However it should be noted that only a handful of DirectX 10/11 games have just started working in recent weeks, and I expect the AMDGPU/Mesa stack will achieve OpenGL 4.5 support well before Wine is ready for use with most DirectX 11 titles.

So in practise, AMDGPU-Pro isn't too useful by this point for post people that know how to compile Mesa. I also have no interest in keeping an AMDGPU-Pro installation around just for Vulkan, and will happily wait until the free software stack is in good shape. There are no Vulkan-only games around right now, and it should be some time before they make an appearance.

Life is Strange released for Linux & SteamOS, some thoughts and a port report included
22 Jul 2016 at 2:33 am UTC

Added to my wish list. I have a lot of games to get through and I'm not sure this is my kind of thing, but I do like that they have tested AMD GPUs with a recent Mesa release, which is what I prefer. I recently upgraded my R9 285 to a Fury X, so I'm well covered.