I played through the game ECHO, and boy what a unique gem. So sad that the studio behind it went out of business. It flopped at release due to lack of marketing. If you like stealth games, it's definitely something to put on your wishlist.

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So, in the near future, our DX12 support is already pretty decent, but our 'God-tier' coders, our very own Linux 'Avengers' are working on improving it's compatibility and performance, Guy's MediaFoundation work which fixes MF issues in games will be hopefully ready to merge with Wine, [External Link] and now Guy and David have got EAC working and now just need to clean up/improve/merge this back into Wine, and Valve just needs to put out another Proton update, combining all these goodies together...

... and then after all that is done, that pretty much puts our overall game compatibility with Windows at what.. 90%?

I imagine this will definitely result in a boost of gamers to Linux, combined with a boost from other sources, such as the fact that Steam is coming to ChromeOS..

Good times ahead folks.

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A comment from one of the developers on reddit responding to my comment where I mentioned how good Linux gamers are as beta testers:

Linux gamers are often very familiar with the process of testing software, creating reproducible bug reports, experimenting with options to find out the cause of a problem, etc.

You are so right - looking at a lot of the reports we got from the beta group, you'd think they worked in professional QA!

Go us! :grin:

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: gradyvuckovicI'm wondering how well this mixes with SSRR (screenspace raymarched reflections) and regular SSAO (specifically ground truth AO). Because in theory if those two screenspace effects could be used primarily, with SDFGI used for whatever can not be raymarched in screenspace, then it should permit very accurate reflections and local GI for fine details, while always being able to fall back to SDFGI for anything not in screenspace.

In my opinion, with those three things combined, SSRR + SSAO + SDFGI, with support with dynamic objects too, would equate to virtually identical results to raytracing in most situations, but with amazing performance. I can't wait to test it out with a few scenes.

If this is as good as it sounds it could even turn out to be Godot's “killer app feature”.

It would certainly make Godot a very appealing option to any indie game dev looking for an engine. A free engine that easily can give near-raytracing quality graphics with awesome performance that's MIT licensed? Hard to say no to that!

Godot is going places, it just needs time to get there.

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I'm wondering how well this mixes with SSRR (screenspace raymarched reflections) and regular SSAO (specifically ground truth AO). Because in theory if those two screenspace effects could be used primarily, with SDFGI used for whatever can not be raymarched in screenspace, then it should permit very accurate reflections and local GI for fine details, while always being able to fall back to SDFGI for anything not in screenspace.

In my opinion, with those three things combined, SSRR + SSAO + SDFGI, with support with dynamic objects too, would equate to virtually identical results to raytracing in most situations, but with amazing performance. I can't wait to test it out with a few scenes.

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Quoting: Alloc

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääWhat's good too, is that it's not an actual kernel driver with root permissions?

This driver seems running in user mode so it thinks it is in the kernel, but actually in a user mode process.

It can also be seen as bad. This effectively means that EAC is being kept happy while it's not being able to what is happening on the system. If it is now possible to create some sort of cheat outside of wine, then it would essentially an exploit. If this is possible on Linux, it would be possible on Windows as well. At best EAC would try to fix that. At worst, they decide that they might switch to more drastic options. While it's pretty cool that they managed it this far, I'm still not hopeful for the future.

I feel the same.
From a technical perspective, this is pretty amazing.
But it really doesn't solve the problem in a way that would make EAC happy, does it? It isn't hard to imagine Wine keeping EAC happy, while you run something else neither Wine nor EAC has access to on your machine.
In the end, it would probably only serve to increase the pressure on anti-cheat devs to either fully support or fully block Linux.

And I don't think any of us would like the result of that decision, at least not at the current market share.

Asked EAC what their thoughts are on this. I fear the same as Ehvis, namely that this is basically a working EAC bypass that needs to be fixed instead of supported.

Also note that EAC *does* fully support Linux. There are games that do that just fine, only game devs that don't care about releasing for Linux are affected as Wine is what's not supported, as that's "neither" Linux nor Windows. I suppose the only way EAC *could* be supported in Wine would be if EAC designed an EAC client module specifically for that purpose, that's basically closer to the Linux module but interacting with the Windows runtime of the game.

I always imagined that being the solution which we'd end up with. The native Linux version of EAC, installed and running, but communicating to the Windows version of EAC running in Wine via some kind of bridge.

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Loving this sale, it's great! Just got like 6 games for less than what I'd normally pay for 1..

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Including the somewhat controversial decision to block Snap packages and snapd being installed unless you do it manually.

I love that the Mint team did this. If I want to install Snap, I will do so, and I don't have any major objections to it, but I don't like it when something installs itself silently like that in a 'sneaky' way. It should be something I am aware of and choose to install rather than something just getting quietly slipped onto my HDD in an apt package.

Probably thing things I'm most excited about are the nemo performance improvements and the new options for monitor configuration and desktop scaling.

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Loving these quick updates to get little issues sorted out as fast as possible.

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Woohoo!

Regarding when Proton will update to a newer version of Wine, I imagine Valve are waiting until the regressions are sorted out in upstream Wine, we'll probably see another major update for Proton soon as they are.

Which is logical, Proton represents the "stable" solution, it should be the most reliable choice for most.

It's a really hard problem too, because with Wine/Proton, there's no "Stable" in the traditional sense for software. Because Wine is incapable of running all Windows software flawlessly and likely will never be capable of doing so.

I like that Valve is trying to maintain a great UX here for each type of user and the different degree of 'stable' they would want.

Zero-Click Users: Users who want the most out of the box experience possible don't have to do any additional work. Valve maintains a whitelist of games that run reliably via Proton. Just click install and play like normal if the game is compatible. If a game is not whitelisted, wait until it is or play it on Windows. Here stable means "you don't ever experience errors".

One-Click Users: Users who want to go a step beyond can enable all titles, just continue to use the latest version of Proton, try out which games work and don't work, and form their own list of compatible games. Little bit of extra work but it opens up the door for more games to be played without needing Windows. Here stable means "if you can get a game to work, then it won't break with a future Proton update" because Valve is trying to prevent regressions in Proton.

Bleeding Edge Users: Users can test out the beta of Proton updates before they're released, giving them an opportunity to identify problems before release and report them so they're fixed. Users can run their very own custom versions of Proton using the latest version of Wine and other tweaks to get the highest level of compatibility they can achieve through trial and experimenting. Here stable means "you can experiment as much as you like, but you have sane defaults to revert back to if you have any problems".

It's a great approach, it offers the best experience possible for each type of user and any additional burden is taken on by a user choosing to accept it, rather than that burden being forced on them. It makes experimenting with Proton 'fun' more than tedious.

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