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Latest Comments by MayeulC
Valve catches a break in the Steam Controller patent trial versus Ironburg
30 Aug 2021 at 8:07 am UTC

Quoting: CutchuSlowI have a third party PS3 controller with buttons on the back. Got that way before 2013.
What is the brand? It could actually help if you find mention of it from before 2013 or 2011, like the website you might have ordered from. I also quoted that one from scuf gaming, but missed that earlier review.

Splitgate to remain in Open Beta 'for the foreseeable future', adds 2v2 Ranked mode
24 Aug 2021 at 2:16 pm UTC

Quoting: WilldrickAre you guys able to play the native version? I used to run it via Proton but it seems that the EQU8 anticheat thingy now is blocking us.

Native is giving me a UE4 crash reporter dialog instantly, and discord is full
I experience crashes and freezes sometimes, but otherwise it's running fine natively (AMD/flatpak, see my profile info).

Splitgate to remain in Open Beta 'for the foreseeable future', adds 2v2 Ranked mode
20 Aug 2021 at 11:43 am UTC

Also, the beta playlist ends on the 24th of August.

I've been playing it a lot recently, it's quite fun. If anyone wants a referral code, here's mine: E5YY8B ;)

It's hard to believe Selaco is running on GZDoom in the latest 3 minute trailer
16 Aug 2021 at 1:35 pm UTC Likes: 1

Wow, it's gorgeous. Reminds me a bit of void bastards in some way, though void bastards got repetitive rather quickly, so I hope there's a lot of various content in this one!

I had a look at their steam page though, and the flashlight could be improved... Perhaps with a raytracing mod at some point? :P

Proton 6.14 GE-2 and Wine 6.14 GE-2 are out, easily update Proton GE with ProtonUp
3 Aug 2021 at 11:43 am UTC Likes: 3

Well, if you use the Steam Flatpak, you can download Proton-GE from there [External Link]:

 
flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam.CompatibilityTool.Proton-GE

Orbiter Space Flight Simulator goes open source
2 Aug 2021 at 10:31 am UTC Likes: 1

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Here, the game has a client-server architecture, so it's mostly the client renderer that's outdated.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.

Splitgate gets an extended Beta, developers raise $10M
29 Jul 2021 at 8:58 am UTC

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.

Splitgate gets an extended Beta, developers raise $10M
28 Jul 2021 at 5:51 pm UTC

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.

Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
28 Jul 2021 at 4:15 pm UTC Likes: 4

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

Intel Accelerated - new roadmap, goodbye nanometer and hello new node naming
27 Jul 2021 at 5:44 pm UTC Likes: 2

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.