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Latest Comments by gradyvuckovic
Google plan over 120 Stadia games this year, 10 coming to Stadia before other platforms
18 Jan 2020 at 3:56 am UTC Likes: 2

Exclusives, are annoying at the best of times.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, is enraging.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, and requires buying new hardware and paying a subscription to access, is insulting.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, and requires buying new hardware and paying a subscription to access, and officially only available in US/Canada/parts of Europe, is trolling on a corporate scale.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, and requires buying new hardware and paying a subscription to access, and officially only available in US/Canada/parts of Europe, and a game streaming platform with minimum latency and speed requirements,... is downright cruel.

Slow clap for Google, Thanks Google! For locking 10 games behind a virtual wall that prevents the majority of the planet from being able to buy or play them.

The only positive is that at least the exclusivity is timed, so eventually the games will hopefully come to platforms that everyone in the world can access, hopefully a very short period of time, like 3 months.

It's fine for those who live in regions with fast connections who happen to live the US/Canada/parts of Europe and happy/able to sign up to Stadia, but for those who don't live in those areas, it seems we're just going to get shafted out of game streaming when combined with exclusivity. If there was any chance of me paying for Stadia when it eventually comes to Australia, it disappeared the moment Google decided to shaft me, just because they don't want my money 'yet'.

DXVK 1.4 released boosting this Vulkan layer to support D3D 11.4
22 Sep 2019 at 12:30 am UTC

Quoting: linuxcityOk valve the ball is in your court
What do you mean by that?

Roberta, a new Steam Play compatibility tool to play games with a native ScummVM
25 Aug 2019 at 4:22 pm UTC Likes: 8

Ya know what we need next?

Lets get these Steam compatibility tools on steam.

If Valve could make it possible to upload compatibility tools as an app, you could just bring up the store page for 'Roberta' and click 'Install', and it's added. Then when there are updates you'd get them automatically too.

Facepunch Studios confirm their plan for the Linux version of Rust, to be split from Windows & Mac
9 Aug 2019 at 11:53 pm UTC Likes: 4

Yes this game was a total flop on Linux, and frankly it's entirely Facepunch's fault.

It's amazing there even was Linux players left for this game considering how the Linux customers were treated. Considering the Linux version of the game wasn't marketed at all, was poorly ported with almost zero effort by developers who appear to know nothing about Linux at all, rarely if ever tested and poorly optimised, and had a laundry list of bugs that weren't fixed for a long time, it's amazing anyone persisted with that.

Yes Facepunch was going to have difficulty supporting Linux, when they're making decisions like committing to middleware that is overtly incompatible with Linux, and not even testing their game or even running it on Linux, until Linux players report massive bugs, and not even attempting to learn anything about how the Linux platform works or how to develop for it. They seem convinced that they should be able to treat supporting Linux like just exporting a song into a different file format, like they should be able to just click Export in Unity, pick Linux, and call it a day.

Unsurprisingly when you treat the Linux platform like that, it shouldn't be surprising when your game is a total flop on Linux. If you put in zero effort, you should be grateful you get any sales at all. This isn't a report card on Linux gaming, Linux gamers bought this game at launch and played it, and they were let down by the abysmal support from Facepunch, and thus sales/player numbers reflect that. This is just a case study on how not to develop/publish/support a game to any platform.

And really if Facepunch are going to disconnect Linux version of the game from the Windows/Mac playerbases, and freeze it's development, they might as well just remove the Linux build entirely, since that just basically made the Linux version of the game absolutely worthless. Because otherwise Windows gamers converting to Linux who use to play Rust, will get their hopes up only to discover the Linux version is broken, and just have a terrible experience as a result.

Not The Wine O'Clock News is now showing at 4.13
3 Aug 2019 at 11:41 am UTC Likes: 5

Frankly I switched to Linux for Liam's Wine puns.

Blender 2.80 is out, a major advancement for this FOSS 3D creation suite
31 Jul 2019 at 1:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

Honestly, I give up on GIMP, Krita all the way!

Also

YAY!

*Happy Blending Noises*

^_^

The developer of Streets of Rogue recently commented about supporting Linux
15 Jul 2019 at 2:18 pm UTC Likes: 16

Looking at the long term, like say, 5+ years, I think it would be worth our effort to heavily support Godot and any open source middleware as a means of encouraging more Linux games.

An open source game engine like Godot gives 1st class equal support to Linux as it does Windows, which makes targeting Linux dead easy. Plus, because it's open source, any Linux related bugs can be easily fixed up, and performance can be thoroughly optimised to match or exceed Windows, so the degree of Linux support isn't decided by financial motivations of a corporation. When we're at the whims of proprietary game engines and middleware, if they don't support Linux, or they have Linux related bugs or performance issues that are deemed low priority, then there's nothing much we can do to correct that situation. When the game engine is open source, the open source community can 'steer the ship' to an extent.

Another reason to support Godot and open source middleware, is because long term, it could become the most attractive solution for game development. With no licensing fees and it's MIT license, Godot could be adopted by everything from indie game devs to AAA studios eventually, if the industry gives it support. If that happens, you have game development largely occurring within a software package that can export to Linux with a click. And leans game development towards open technology (Vulkan, open file formats, etc), instead of closed technology. That's a huge win.

It will take years for Godot to get there of course, first Godot needs to hit it's 4.0 milestone and get it's Vulkan based renderer, which will add a lot of necessary functionality to Godot to make it suitable for larger scale games. That can be expected to occur around sometime early next year perhaps. But beyond that, there's no reason why it can't catch on. It would be far cheaper for the industry to adopt Godot too, than to rely on proprietary game engines and licensing.

DXVK 1.3 is out with some fun sounding new features for this Vulkan translation layer
13 Jul 2019 at 7:30 pm UTC Likes: 13

You're amazing Philip Rebohle! Great work! =D

Ubuntu LTS releases (and so derivatives too) to get updated NVIDIA drivers without PPAs
12 Jul 2019 at 1:50 pm UTC Likes: 2

This is fantastic, having to add via a terminal a PPA just to install some bloody drivers was a fugly thing, and not clearly explained anywhere. It's just one of those things that you have to learn by talking to other Linux users. That's a terrible first impression for a new Ubuntu user finally giving Linux a go after spending years trying to convince them "You don't need to use the terminal or do anything weird or technical to use Linux" and "Ubuntu is a super user friendly Linux distro for beginners!".

Excellent, anything that makes Linux more user friendly for beginners is always good to see. Smoothing off any sharp corners of a new Linux user's first experience with Linux is really important for growing the size of our ranks.