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Latest Comments by eldaking
Alen Ladavac, co-founder of Croteam has left to join the Google Stadia team, plus other Stadia news
7 Oct 2019 at 1:11 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: ShmerlAnother detail was clarified, Stadia is using amdvlk.

I don't plan to use it, but I'm interested in how developers who release for Stadia view their options to release their games for regular desktop Linux in result, since Stadia will bear the heavy lifting of the porting work. Interviewing some developers about this could provide interesting insights.

We can probably dismiss legacy publishers right away. Even with above, they simply don't care about Linux users so I don't expect any of them to change their nasty stance because of Stadia to which they run for Google's money. However other developers (for example Paradox) can be more Linux friendly, and since their concern was expenses (rather than greed for more profits), Stadia can provide them the justification to release for Linux proper.
I think there is a small group of developers that stand in the intersection between "it isn't worth it to port our engine to Linux or move away from D3D" and "we would be willing to support a desktop version of the game for the small Linux user base". Oh, and of course, also those that make heavy enough games to justify using Stadia.

For those that already use Unity or Unreal and still don't release for Linux, this won't matter.

For those that don't release on Linux because the support costs are too big, this won't matter either.

Frankly, I expect that more people are going to just say "if you use Linux, just play on Stadia instead of buying the game" than releasing for Linux. Which is stupid, as there are way too many reasons to not use Stadia, not everyone will have a good enough connection and it won't even be available in every country.

HopFrog is removing Linux support from Forager and MacOS is not coming now either (updated)
5 Oct 2019 at 4:47 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: GuestI'll start with this line, quoted from the Steam forum:
"You bought a completed game and that is what you got, it's yours forever!"

The problem I have there is that although not labelled as early access, it's clearly not a completed game. Digital distribution services have made it easy now to release a game for money now, patch in features later to "complete" the game. By and large this is a good thing, but there are some gotchas mostly centered around the game originally bought is no longer the game that is available.
Some of this the digital distribution service could help with. Some of it the developer must directly have a hand in. An update breaks the game? Oh, sorry, we don't support the game (which was paid for) anymore, too bad - and there's no way to obtain the original working game. That's really not customer friendly, even if it's unintentional.
There is a simpler way of putting it: if the game is "completed", why would you ever release an update/patch?

And does any developer actually want a model where the first version they release is definitive, with no chance to ever fix any bugs found? Are they capable of doing enough QA for that to work?

For a long time now, post-release support is an integral part of any software. It is expected and necessary. No, an outdated build of the game is not enough. No, "it works in Proton" is not the same.

HopFrog is removing Linux support from Forager and MacOS is not coming now either (updated)
4 Oct 2019 at 2:06 pm UTC Likes: 5

This is particularly bad. If you say you are dropping Linux support because of Apple's policies on their system, you sound ignorant on top of unreliable.

Yes, supporting more platforms can be hard, it's not always worth it. Developers have to decide that before you actually start selling it for that platform, though. An then HopFrog goes on to tell people that developers are leaving Linux en masse because of some bullshit that Apple is doing (which is bullshit alright, but they should have known about that before...).

Paradox are updating Crusader Kings II to bring 64bit support, plus a new Paradox game coming
2 Oct 2019 at 2:34 pm UTC

Quoting: chr
Quoting: SupayIf the new launcher is there when it updates, I am going to cry.
In the latest EU4 dev diary [External Link] among the very few things they said was
Some Linux users find the game failing to start unless they launch the game directly, which is a high priority for us to fix as soon as possible.
Yay! We're a high priority as soon as possible!
Today they released a hotfix for EU4 that supposedly fixes the issue. I won't be able to try for a while (not today, maybe not until Saturday), but I assume it will be fixed for next release.

The clever Steam 'Deep Dive' experiment has a big update with a new matching system
2 Oct 2019 at 1:06 pm UTC Likes: 1

Yeah, for SteamPlay the way to go is to treat whitelisted games as "Linux" and non-whitelisted games as... not.

No Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for Linux but Ashes II and future Stardock titles should be
1 Oct 2019 at 12:41 pm UTC Likes: 1

I don't particularly care about Ashes, and I think they were transparent enough in this case.

But if their next games are indeed built with Linux support (rather than ported afterwards), that would be very exciting. Stardock makes some pretty good strategy games, and are one notorious gap in the otherwise great niche of "Linux strategy gameing".

What's that? Another Steam Client Beta update? With a Linux platform filter? Yes it is
26 Sep 2019 at 7:35 pm UTC Likes: 1

Nice. I was a bit afraid that the option to filter by OS was deliberately removed for some reason, but it seems they were at least willing to add it after they noticed we (and I think it was pretty much everyone that uses Linux) missed it. But I wish they did consider the official support even with SteamPlay though (not necessarily native-only, whitelisted games could show up as well).

I also liked the Home button a lot, while not strictly necessary it was very convenient. Hoping they bring it back in some form.

Looks like the grand strategy space game AI War 2 could release in October
25 Sep 2019 at 12:19 pm UTC Likes: 2

I didn't quite realize it was this advanced in development. Once in a while I fired it to give it a try (and see if I had any feedback), but I couldn't get to grips with the early-stage builds because they were even less welcoming than usual (since obviously tutorials and such would come later) and clearly unfinished and not very fun. However, it did always work well on Linux (look at that, support even during alpha/beta/early access!) and the improvements were very visible every time I tried.

I'm really looking forward to the "release version" of this game (and whatever happens afterwards as well). It has the potential to fix many issues of the fist AI War, which is a great game already. I hope it can get more traction when it releases, as it has slipped through the radars a bit during crowdfunding and development...

Steam's top releases for August 2019 are out, here's our usual look over
24 Sep 2019 at 2:29 pm UTC

Quoting: MordragWell i am kinda of a different opinion. Steam Play should be primarily for users who dont want to mess with wine to run a game. So if you need to apply workarounds to even play a Game that is clearly for me borked.
If the Game is playable but has Graphical Glitches or occasionally crashes that is silver.
If the Game runs good but minor Glitches can occur, or the game doesnt really perform as good as native its gold.
And Platinum is like Native.
What you are talking about is more like the Wine Rating on winehq, but Steam Play is also for linux/wine noobs.
ProtonDB adopted the wine rating system. If you mouse over the ratings, it shows the description according to that - gold says "runs perfectly after tweaks". If in the current system you report a game that doesn't run perfectly as gold, or one that runs perfectly after workarounds as borked, it is simply a wrong and misleading report.

I agree that SteamPlay should be more friendly to noobs, which means we need Platinum and not just Gold; games should simply work (which is exactly what Platinum is).

Steam's top releases for August 2019 are out, here's our usual look over
24 Sep 2019 at 11:47 am UTC Likes: 1

Looks like AoW Planetfall with Proton only has the bug with Paradox Launcher, that can be bypassed making it gold-rated (works perfectly with workarounds); the rating is brought down by the borked reports that didn't know how to fix it.

I'm not a fan of how ProtonDB averages ratings, as that is not how they work... silver isn't an average between gold and borked, it means it works but not perfectly. And gold isn't an average between platinum and whatever either, it is the same as platinum but workarounds needed. It would be best to say something like "50%Pl/30%G/0%S/20%B" to indicate the breakdown.

I'm also a bit annoyed by the Age of Empires remake not working at all. Because the old games worked, so in a way the remakes are a huge regression.