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Latest Comments by jarhead_h
41 of Steam's most played games in 2018 are supported on Linux
28 Dec 2018 at 3:36 am UTC

Quoting: SpykerI'm curious to see if a significant amount of players leave Steam this month in order to play some Epic's exclusives... What will be the effect on the Steam Linux share ?
EPIC won't syphon off any players. After all, you can't take your Steam games with you. But EPIC just might peel off a few game devs because money talks and they look and see Fortnite's fanbase within a few clicks of their own game.

The Black Mesa team have pushed out a new Linux beta
19 Dec 2018 at 6:29 pm UTC

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: ChiKinWill this fix the sudden, terrible frame drops that make the game unplayable?
Possibly, if that was related to memory use then it might help quite a bit. Can't really test myself, as my main unit is NVIDIA and my laptop is Intel but a bit too low powered for such testing. I really need to get my hands on a nice AMD GPU next year...
I noticed the same issue. It's a Source engine game running on my 1060 6GB and it's dropping framerates down into what has to be the 20s or teens. Granted I'm running a TV as a monitor so I'm limited to 60FPS, but I quite literally never experienced this issue with DOOM(2016) on this exact rig running via SteamPlay, but a game running a ten year old engine is having this issue in a native build?

And no, the dev team stopped getting a pass the minute they started charging money. I'm all for them charging money, because this was a massive endeavor, after all, Valve itself couldn't be bothered, but the minute you switch over to being paid you become professionals and have to be judged accordingly.

Editorial: An open letter to Valve on why they should keep on embracing Linux
9 Dec 2018 at 11:14 pm UTC

Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: jarhead_h
Quoting: mao_dze_dunThere are tons of Steam only games. Why is all of a sudden Epic evil for having 3rd party esxclusives?
Exactly. Epic is just doing what Valve did way back when with the launch of Steam.
When did Valve EVER pay for 3rd Party exclusive games?
Okay, then EPIC is just doing what SONY and Microsoft did with the PeasantStation and the XBONE. K, great, whoopie-do. Big picture, that's a blip, barely worth noticing. EPIC isn't going to rival Steam anymore that EA rivals steam, or Battlenet rivals Steam, or GOG rivals Steam, or UPLAY rivals Steam. If Valve's gambit with Proton works then it's inevitable that all the AAA devs port their catalogs over, if only inside a WINE bottle which by then will be seamless, thanks to Valve.

The real thing we should be focusing on is the upcoming convergence of big tech around Linux. Take a look around, we're going to "win."

Windows is on it's way out and in ten years will be a legacy OS. Apple will continue on it's merry cultish way while slowly dying without Jobs to steer it, unless for whatever reason the Chinese government adopts it(as an example). Google's Java on top of the Linux kernel owns the mobile space. Even Microsoft's IoT OS is running the Linux kernel, and Windows 10 actually has a Linux subsystem. It's possible that the next PeasantStation ends up running BSD again, but the 3D API it will be using is Vulkan, and it and the new XBONE will running exclusively AMD hardware which will also guaranty Freesync(if we're very lucky AMD will bake multiGPU into both, forcing all future game devs to support sli/Xfire).

The problem with all of this is that Linux was supposed to free us from these corporations. Instead they are going to use it to chain us in.

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: jarhead_hQuite frankly I think that if I were Valve reading that I'd be pretty pissed.
Eh? Not sure why you came to that conclusion. I fully agree with BTRE here, especially the point on taking even a 1-2% cut if a developer does a multiplatform game. Not just to help foster Linux games, but to support a healthy developer community to give them just a little more support for branching out.

Have absolutely no clue why you would think Valve would be "pissed".
I was gonna say something about ingratitude or perhaps our being too greedy because we are less than 1% and do not justify the current level of support let alone that too, but I think my response up above gives a better representation of why I think Valve is doing all of this.

Editorial: An open letter to Valve on why they should keep on embracing Linux
9 Dec 2018 at 10:13 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: mao_dze_dunThere are tons of Steam only games. Why is all of a sudden Epic evil for having 3rd party esxclusives?
Exactly. Epic is just doing what Valve did way back when with the launch of Steam.

Quoting: sub
Quoting: LeopardThough ; i don't think Valve needs our suggestions at that point. They know what to do. Only need is time to see what will happen next.
Not necessarily our suggestions.

Yet, Valve seems to have developed a kind of hubris that does not make believe they "know what to do". At least not like the did 15 years ago.
I think at this point Valve is committed to keeping Linux alive and well on Steam. I DO NOT think that Valve is going to dump this many resources into it and then take a smaller percentage of revenue as the open letter suggests that they do. Quite frankly I think that if I were Valve reading that I'd be pretty pissed.The article itself points out that Linux is less than 1% of Steam, and that the resources Valve has poured into it are absolutely not justified when viewed in a short term context. We won't know if Valve was smart to bother with supporting Linux like this for ten years.

I think that with the moves Valve has made and the continuing abuse of users that Microsoft, Apple, and Google continue to perpetrate, I think that Linux has a chance of overtaking Apple in marketshare in the next ten years. In fact, I think that Linux is the only non-Microsoft OS that can do this, specifically because of the abuse by big-tech mirrored by the support from Valve. Which is why when Microsoft, Google, and IBM start buying into the Linux Foundation and buying up the large players in the Linux world I think we're in a great deal of trouble.

EPIC deciding to put Fortnite behind their own pay wall is a paltry concern next to all of that. In that context, it looks like Valve is doing all of this specifically because big tech has decided to standardize on Linux within those same ten years, which means that Linus's dream of taking over the computing world is about to become horribly true.

NVIDIA have now made PhysX open source
3 Dec 2018 at 10:21 pm UTC Likes: 2

And if they had done this five years ago PhysX might still be a common thing.

Valve have adjusted their revenue share for bigger titles on Steam
1 Dec 2018 at 8:40 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Termy
Quoting: MayeulCWhat would be interesting for them is to take a (slightly) lesser cut if the game is cross-platform. Everyone would be happy about this, I think, especially bean counters :)
now that is one of the best ideas i've heard in a while to boost Linux-acceptance among the devs...too bad valve is not looking into this comments xD
I guaranty you that the conversation that we're having now is just a replay of the ones that already happened before this announcement.

Quoting: ageresSo, big AAA publishers will pay a lesser share than indie developers? Nice move, Volksvagen, very fair. Epic Games lowered their cut for selling UE4 assets from 30% to 12%.
Why, YES. If you can deliver a larger payday, you get to keep a greater percentage, because 25% of a much bigger pie is a much bigger payday than 30% of a smaller one. Not all game devs are equal, so they get paid accordingly. If you want a bigger share you have to EARN IT. You make a game that enough people actually WANT and then deliver it in a playable state so that it's not a headache for Valve, and you get a bigger cut.

To celebrate Half-Life turning 20, Black Mesa released a trailer for Xen
21 Nov 2018 at 7:44 am UTC

I haven't played the original Xen levels in twenty years. I played through them exactly once with my original copy. That's coming from someone that spent the day before bootcamp playing Half Life and the Day I got home from School of Infantry playing Half Life: Opposing Force.

This actually looks awesome. Dig the music. The visuals pop and are actually interesting. I liked what they did with Black Mesa, mostly. Looking forward to this.

Reports: Valve making their own VR HMD and apparently a new VR Half-Life
13 Nov 2018 at 1:57 am UTC

HL-VR is a PREQUEL? Oh, COME ON!

There is a ten-year old cliffhanger that needs to be resolved and instead we get to force fail through the Combine invasion?

Embrace, extend, and protect? Microsoft joins the Open Invention Network to 'protect Linux and open source'
10 Oct 2018 at 6:30 pm UTC Likes: 9

If Microsoft wants to "protect" Linux, it's because they think that they can control it. As Linus stated rather famously, the desktop is the ONLY area of computing that Linux does not dominate. On the desktop that would be Windows. Now Linux has matured enough that Windows is about to have competition.

Microsoft bought it's way into the Linux Foundation, and months later there was basically a coup which removed Linus. The LF is calling it a sabbatical, but he's not coming back if they can help it. They have implemented a CoC which directly panders to identity politics over quality of code, which has had the desired effect of splitting the community down left/right lines and could well destroy it. And it's just a coincidence that Microsoft bought their way in a few months earlier. Oh and Microsoft bought Github.

And now this.

Linux will not survive this as Linux. Microsoft will either control it or break it into a thousand pieces. Red Hat and Cannonical might even be on board. Google sure as hell will be.

According to Kotaku, Microsoft is close to buying Obsidian
9 Oct 2018 at 10:25 pm UTC

Sadly, if Microsoft is going to continue to offer Obsiddian native ports to Linux, then they are in fact playing by the rules. Here's Tux, where's bux? So at that point it's a matter of whether the game is any good or whether Microsoft has milked it for everything possible but continue to stamp out new ones like with the Halo series