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Latest Comments by MayeulC
Humble has a big Spring Sale Encore, save on Humble Choice
22 May 2020 at 10:49 pm UTC

Eh, the last floor offers me to play games from the family sharing library, which are mostly dumb choices. One of them isn't even shown when I click "show in library" :/

Mindustry the Factorio-like tower-defense game is now on Steam
19 May 2020 at 8:26 pm UTC

Wow, I just heard about this one. It's also on F-droid. I really like it :)

I might not have missed it, had the article title contained "open source" :D

Manjaro Linux 20.0 Lysia released with Xfce, KDE and GNOME editions - Snap and Flatpak support included
27 Apr 2020 at 7:14 am UTC

I hope they fixed the contrast for the mute button in the taskbar for KDE. Almost impossible to see when Firefox is muted, this confuses both me and my parents to no end... :/

Reminder: Update your PC info for the next round of statistics updates
25 Apr 2020 at 9:10 pm UTC

Quoting: BotonoskiMan, I really need a proper upgrade, it's been years.
Problem is I kind of have to throw the baby out with the bath water here, I can't upgrade the CPU without getting a new motherboard, and I can't use my current RAM in a new motherboard. Plus the front IO on my case is borked, and while the PSU works, that's only due to a slightly hacky fix I did to it maybe a year ago.

Still I can hardly justify an upgrade when it's a very stable system capable of playing all the modern titles I'm interested in.
At least change the PSU, it's the single most critical component of your system (the heart, if you want), and can be carried over to your next build (even better so if you choose a modular one).

I once had a slightly undersized PSU explode on me, it took the GPU with it. And I was lucky.
Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: x_wingNever mentioned it but: The driver selection for AMD GPUs is debatable. You can actually use proprietary and OSS drivers at the same time. Anyway, I can't remember the last time that I used proprietary for gaming (normally I just stick on it for OpenCL).
The proprietary driver question is essentially just restating the GPU question again.

The 32-bit question is not super relevant any more, either. I'm sure that each of those 3 people using 32-bit gaming machines are doing so for a very good reason, but it's not like that number is ever going to trend upwards.
Ha! Pretty sure it was two people a while back. Percentages are weird, though, so I don't know if they changed.

Steam Play Proton 4.11-10 out, mouse handling improvements and Halo: The Master Chief Collection works
22 Apr 2020 at 10:38 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: DanglingPointer(snip)
Ha, I saw your comments on the issue tracker :)

I'm on the fence for this one. I'm more or less in the same case as you (having bought an x360 for halo). That said, I don't have much time for playing, so I'll wait an probably buy the full collection at a discount (plus there's no splitscreen support for now, what a shame).

How-to: upscale old games on Linux
13 Apr 2020 at 4:46 pm UTC

Quoting: Dunc
Quoting: MayeulCAs for CRTs... I definitely agree on there being something to their quality. It could be multiple things, like the non-square grid pattern (some recent phones have this), but what I really think makes a lot of difference is the ultra low persistence of the display.
I think it's more to do with the fact that they're analogue. There's no native resolution, so scaling and (to an extent) AA are, effectively, done in hardware for free. I've never used a 4K monitor for any length of time, but from the experience of my (now rather antiquated) phone - 720p in about 4" - I think the extremely high DPI levels we're beginning to see in LCDs will help. Although obviously you run into the sort of problems that we see in the OP. (Yay, back on topic! :D )
Well, it really depends what kind of screen you are talking about... You are right if talking about monochrome CRTs (or the old "vector") displays (though there is definitely a resolution limit imposed by the beam width), but look closer at RGB CRTs, and you'll see color stripes, that make "RGB" pixels. So you have a horizontal resolution at the very least (though pixels could blend a bit into the neighbouring ones if the beam is too wide, some LCDs also have this issue). And most monitors I've seen also have those grouped in horizontal lines (sometimes arranged in a non-square grid, as I wrote above):
Spoiler, click me

So there's also a discrete vertical resolution. What's more, I don't recall the specifics, but I am pretty sure that the beam is actually controlled by the monitor (with vblanks, hblanks, etc to give it time to go back at the start of the screen/line). The only analog thing might be the intensity of the electron beam, and monitors can already approximate this quite well.
Another difference might be that only OLEDs can surpass the blacks of a well-tuned CRT (the phosphor layer will give something of a permanent fluorescence) :)

This video [External Link] neatly illustrates low-persistence of a CRT, and there are a couple that track moving objects on screen to illustrate persistence influence on motion blur. You can easily do so yourself by running glxgears and tracking the edge of a cog with your eyes. A lot easier to do on a CRT! (Or for an illustration, the big gear is already easier to track as it's turning slowly, thus persistence has less of an effect on it).

How-to: upscale old games on Linux
11 Apr 2020 at 10:06 pm UTC

Quoting: Linas
Quoting: MayeulCI'm considering buying a monitor with strobed backlight to imitate this (AKA blur reduction, or ULMB).
Is this something like the flickery backlight dimming on some panels? Because that messes me up quite bad. Cannot look at it for more than a few seconds. :sick:
Yeah, that could be it, though it should be imperceptible, depending on the frequency. Some specific conditions can make this worse (freesync with huge spikes in framerate, special content). Do you see lights flicker at 60Hz? (Though the waveforms are different, 80Hz seems to be the point where flicker starts to disappear to our eyes [External Link].
It can also be unrelated, with some crappy pulse-width-modulation applied to the backlight to dim it.

How-to: upscale old games on Linux
11 Apr 2020 at 9:12 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: FaalagornI think the same can be achieved with gamescope [External Link]? This DXVK discussion [External Link] led me to this idea, though I didn't manage to figure out how exactly achieve this on my Wayland (sway) display, but maybe I didn't try hard enough (sadly gamescope lacks documentation).
It would be trivial to add a mechanism for a wayland compositor to upscale a given window. Maybe we should ask for a feature request?

I'm using xpra almost daily. My use-case is that I have a piece of software (a big EDA tool I won't name) that I have to access over the network with X forwarding. Fine for LAN, but a lot less so over long distances. Xpra allows me to tune the quality/responsivity balance to my needs, and handles disconnections quite well, whereas X11 would just close the client application. So much for "network transparency"... Xpra makes X forwarding closer to vnc or wayland, it's a bit like GNU screen for X.

As for CRTs... I definitely agree on there being something to their quality. It could be multiple things, like the non-square grid pattern (some recent phones have this), but what I really think makes a lot of difference is the ultra low persistence of the display. I'm considering buying a monitor with strobed backlight to imitate this (AKA blur reduction, or ULMB). High framerates help, to an extent (it reduces the ceiling on the persistence value, but not as much as CRTs or strobed backlights).

Free and open source voxel game engine 'Minetest' has a new release up
9 Apr 2020 at 9:00 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: EhvisThey should really do something about the default game though. [...] Thing I noticed is that the world was dead. No animals, no enemies, nothing happening.
Yeah, I agree, though this can also be said about Garry's mod, for instance. I was also interested in contributing, but I must say that I find some members of the community maybe a bit... childish? (I had the same issue with SuperTuxKart, though I think it's better with minetest)

Quoting: EhvisAlso noticed that there was no off hand to hold a torch in. But it turns out that doesn't matter because holding a torch doesn't actually provide light.
Is that a thing now in Minecraft? That was a bit annoying, but not a dealbreaker, and leaving with enough to build stacks of torches, as well as putting some everywhere, quickly becomes second-nature :)

Reminder: Update your PC info for the next round of statistics updates
22 Mar 2020 at 7:45 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: tmtvlAnd they haven't fixed it for Wayland. I can imagine sway working well, though, as it's basically just i3 for Wayland, and i3 doesn't work like KDE and GNOME do.
Yeah, it's basically one virtual desktop per screen. I can just switch the focused one to the right/left/top/bottom screen with a shortcut (I chose ctrl-meta-arrow, meta-arrow is to move focus, meta-shift-arrow to move the window around. I like my shortcuts nice and consistent :) ).

Where it differs from i3, though is that (to my knowledge), i3's screen setup is managed trough xrandr/xorg.conf, whereas in sway it's there in the config file, which makes it quite easy and reliable. I also have shortcuts to rotate the screen in there... Though I guess you could achieve the same with xrandr, it makes it easy to apply something on the focused screen. The lack of a "primary display" hasn't bothered me at all.

Thanks for the bits on KDE and GNOME. With more time... :D