I hadn't heard of this game before the announcement, which is a shame.

I wonder how their flight model compares with FlightGear? I guess it's a bit worse, as it is probably more focused on orbital mechanics. Maybe one could merge both engines up to a degree?

Here, the game has a client-server architecture, so it's mostly the client renderer that's outdated. I wonder how complicated it would be to replace it with something more off-the shelf, like something done with Godot, OpenSceneGraph or even that new lumberyard-based open engine? Maybe even FlightGear's graphical engine?

I see a lot of potential here, if the OSS community picks it up, and maintainership follows.

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Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: MayeulCThe portals are interesting. I think they had this as some point in Quake World?

Weren't there some in Quake3 Arena?

Maybe. I'm more of a UT person TBH.

I think I wrote this because I recalled videos [External Link] of raytraced Quake Wars with some portals in them.

Teleporters have been a longtime feature in games, even Halo has some in multiplayer maps (but they are a cheap trick, and there's less and less of them). Here, I think the distinction is that players can place them on walls themselves.

I remember playing a lot of UT2004/99 CTF with handheld "translocators": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBA5EhbPxkc [External Link]
I think it's a cool concept and improves mobility quite a bit.

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Certainly looks interesting, I look forward to trying this one. I'd say it looks more like UT than Halo in terms of gameplay. The portals are interesting. I think they had this as some point in Quake World?

That map definitely gives me DM-Idoma vibes from UT.

Plenty of players it seems: https://steamdb.info/app/677620/graphs/ [External Link]

I hope they can put out the fire from their servers before every other big game company starts to copy the concept.

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If Linux gaming takes off (for example, because Steam Deck becomes a huge success), then we'll have a reason to consider not-so-low-on-resources port

Interesting point, which I've considered in the past. That's definitely a possibility. I can at least see game devs, in order:

• Revisiting old titles to add support for Steam Controller APIs


• Testing against Proton like No Man's Sky seems to do (were they aware of the deck?) and providing support for it


• Integrating natively with DXVK like portal does


• Providing native builds targeting the pressure vessel runtime and better tuning for the deck (think march=native)


• Moving to another cross-platform API for their next games

Any one of these points would be a win, and current porters can probably help with all of them, especially the native build.

OK, now two more thoughts:
- is it possible to override a builtin DXVK version like we can with SDL? I'm going to ask that on GitHub. [External Link]
- A friend of mine is looking into Linux distros. I think SteamOS 3.0 might fill a gap when it comes to well-supported desktop OSes. I can't really recommend Debian/Ubuntu because graphics drivers (and generally software) tends to not be upgraded often, plus it's hardly the best showcase of Linux tech (though it works and is generally stable, but a bit hard to fix). Nix feels a bit too alien to recommend. Arch needs a deep dive. Manjaro... is so full of hacks it makes me uncomfortable. Fedora might be a pain to get help for, though silverblue is interesting. SteamOS 3.0 might strike a good balance between Arch and Ubuntu, depending on how they handle software updates for the desktop part. Will this be the OS for Linux on the desktop? :P

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Quoting: pageround

Quoting: MayeulCSorry for the rant:

More marketing bullshit. MTr/mm² (million of transistors per square mm) was actually a nice unit. Spitting out stuff vaguely related to a number of nanometers, I can see myself needing to continue to explain for decades to come that no, gate lengths are still about 20 nm and the nanometers you are sold are just a proxy for transistor count (thanks to more and more 3D integration).

Plus, this reads like 20 Amperes, not 20 Ångströms. The symbol is Å. Granted, it's harder to write than to type on most keyboards.

OK, besides my gripe about marketingspeech, I'm glad to see they keep investing at the cutting edge. We need more competition!

I agree that a different unit makes more sense. The nm and Å make sense if youre assumimg a 2D layout. Maybe we'll settle on something more general like # gates / logic volume, hopefully with a simple abbteviation. Also, I just want to point out that 2 nm == 20 Å.

It used to refer exclusively to gate length. While gate length was shrinking, you could just reduce every feature size, voltages, and call it a day: enjoy your free energy efficiency and frequency boost. This is the era of Dennard's scaling [External Link]. Every one was happy with this idea, investments were planned to keep up the pace (Gordon Moore was more of an economist, "Moore's Law" is a businessplan).

Unfortunately, you can't just ignore physics. To better control transistor gates at small voltages, you need to make the gate less thick. But this has limits. So we stopped decreasing gate thickness and voltages, and power consumption shot up.
Now we need to make smarter devices: more transistor, more cores, smarter power usage. But we're not really making the gate length a lot smaller, due to a lot more issues [External Link].

Gate length remains relevant in 3D, but it won't change a lot anymore.

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Sorry for the rant:

More marketing bullshit. MTr/mm² (million of transistors per square mm) was actually a nice unit. Spitting out stuff vaguely related to a number of nanometers, I can see myself needing to continue to explain for decades to come that no, gate lengths are still about 20 nm and the nanometers you are sold are just a proxy for transistor count (thanks to more and more 3D integration).

Plus, this reads like 20 Amperes, not 20 Ångströms. The symbol is Å. Granted, it's harder to type on most keyboards than it it to handwrite.

OK, besides my gripe about marketingspeech, I'm glad to see they keep investing at the cutting edge. We need more competition!

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: MohandevirWhat is making me wonder it's the fact that Microsoft and Nvidia always walked hand in hand, when it comes to gaming... What is happening?

I guess they also just want to be future proof. Nvidia is working with Valve (enabling DLSS on Proton) and Nintendo on the Switch etc.

Sure, but a PC gaming laptop powered by ARM... It's directly playing on Microsoft's turf. Or is Microsoft trying to gradually abandon the said turf? Afterall, the new Microsoft did say that they envied Google's position...

Totally unfounded and speculative from my part... And probably wrong too (more a wish than a reality). :happy:

Well, remember that nvidia wants to buy (or bought) ARM? Probably related! I'm all for it if it's good for the ecosystem, but I think that nvidia has always been a bit on the greedy side...

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Will you be buying one?

Liam, could you make this a question in the survey? Yes/Yes, reserved/No
Or perhaps: No/64G/256G/512G + a deposit checkbox.

I ended up putting a deposit for the middle one. It's quite a bit more expensive, but 64G feels very limiting... Even though there's an SD card, so I might change my mind on that one.

Edit: changed to the low-tier one, as I should be able to upgrade the SSD :)

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: MayeulCAnybody knows what 6.js could be?

It's the file that contained the SteamPal strings, which got noticed, which let the cat out of the bag about their hardware plans.

Ah, I thought something along these lines, thanks. So it's not an ARG :P

Edit: I wish this thing had a second headphone jack at the bottom :D

I wonder if they're planning on shipping Wayland or X, Pulseaudio or Pipewire?

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BTW, I *love* the montage they did there: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/fauxrassic-park.jpg [External Link] (they even wrote "Steam Pal").

“Hold on to your butts!” -> "It’s a Linux system, you know this!" on This page [External Link]. Anybody knows what 6.js could be?

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Will you be buying one?

I think, yes. I'm in the market for a new laptop since the one I currently have dates back to 2008 (excluding pro. laptop).

Hook up an external keyboard, and this should be enough for doing some sysadmin on the go. Dock it up, and you have a home computer.

I wish they made the form-factor more modular (upgradeable motherboard? Storage?). I might wait for a teardown to see if the nvme drive is user-replaceable. (edit: they explicitly say in a FAQ video that HW will not be upgradeable). I wonder if it will be natively compatible with Steam Controllers and xbox controllers, or require bluetooth (the latter I guess).

Now, I'm a bit disappointed that it's a standard PC. That's fine, mind you, but I would have liked something a bit more battery-optimized, like an ARM+x86 coprocessor (for instance, only half of the cores are 32bit-capable on latest ARM chips), or a big.little x86 like Intel is working on, (while running the kernel on both might be hard, a x86 coprocessor could assist with "emulating" games for x86). Of course, that would require quite a bit of effort and engineering, and maybe revisit FatELF, possibly with some LLVM target to create "battery-optimized" games (that target a more efficient arch)?

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