Quoting: Pengling

What have you been playing mostly over the last month?

Checking my 2024 list so far, 40 out of the 54 games I've played so far this year have been emulated titles, so aside from regular stuff like Stardew Valley [External Link] (Native Linux) and Super Bomberman R 2 [External Link] (Proton), I mostly haven't been playing anything recent, or really many PC games at all! :shock:

That said, highlights have been kicking off the New Year with Bomberman [External Link] (NES), getting nostalgic about Darkwing Duck [External Link] (NES), finally completing Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards [External Link] (Nintendo 64) (a game which I constantly had problems getting through over the course of many many years, because every time I've tried to play through it, random nonsense would come up and prevent me from finishing it), re-playing the charming and weird Star Parodier [External Link] (PC Engine Super CD-ROM²), reclaiming all my base in Zero Wing [External Link] (Mega Drive), getting hooked on Dr. Mario [External Link] (NES) all over again, and revisiting the original boomer-shooter, Space Invaders [External Link] (Arcade). title

Out of curiosity, what emulators do you use? RetroArch?

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: pbOff-topic but it would be really cool if all f2p games had the "free to play" tag automatically applied. I have a dynamic F2P category wherein I have all the games with "free to play" tag, but half of the f2p games are outside of it... Alternatively maybe Valve could add it directly to the filters...

In my humble opinion, there's two totally different kinds of games costing 0 bucks: "Free to play" (we'll charge you in-game) and "Gratis" games. How would they automatically tell one from the other?

Steam makes the distinction between free and free to play. See for instance:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/570/Dota_2/ [External Link] (genre is also listed as free to play on this one)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/380840/Teeworlds/ [External Link]

The wording above the "play" button is different.

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Quoting: elmapul" allows dynamically selecting the backend too"
that means switch between openGL and vulkan without rebooting godot and the godot game/app ?

I imagine. In theory that means the engine should also be able to survive a Wayland compositor restart, or in theory dynamically selecting the Wayland display (Wayland socket). That would be awesome :)

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Interesting. I also note that ucrtbase causes desyncs in Halo: MCC as well. I'd like to investigate Wine's DLL at some point.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: TiZNot even one? I have an easy one. First, Steam is proprietary. Valve does do a lot of great FOSS work, and they are generally trustworthy, but Steam itself is still proprietary at the end of the day. And it has made catastrophic mistakes before. Containerizing it limits the scope of the damage it can possibly do.

That's not it, either. I have about... 800+ additional reasons, at least in my Steam library. A whole litany of proprietary, closed-source games. Only a fraction of them are native, and would have hypothetically unfettered access to the whole filesystem when unsandboxed, but that's enough to prefer to be safe rather than sorry. Steam does have its own container runtimes, Soldier and Sniper, but most native binaries don't use them. Proton is their main consumer, actually.

I love open source software as much as anyone, but let's be real here. There are plenty of super serious bugs in OSS applications, too. Saying that anything proprietary is untrustworthy by design is a bit over the top. With your logic, you'd need to containerize EVERYTHING, and the result of this would be a a fairly unproductive and ineffective system. I get containerization for high-risk applications (yes, like the internet browser), but locking software from trustworthy vendors inside a container is a bit much on the paranoid side.

I didn't read the whole comment thread, but let me give you a more specific example: try to play an online match of Unreal Tournament 1999 (on Steam). It will download a few DLLs from the server when connecting, then happily execute whatever code is inside. Remote code execution by design! Great for server-provided mods, isn't it?

As someone wrote above, games are usually not written with security in mind, especially decade-old games. They often connect to the network, and are quite often never updated past release, except maybe to fix game breaking compatibility issues. I believe even Steam is looking into containerizing games (possibly with thermal Linux runtime?), even on Windows.

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Ah, interesting, I didn't know it was an actual game.

I had come across the listing, and thought it was satire, especially with the poaching and slavery bits.

Good on them for making an actual game. I just hope it's actual satire and don't take themselves too seriously. The description reads promising on that bit, at least.

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A nice workshop feature would be the ability to scope subscriptions per machine: I don't necessarily want hundreds of GB of mods on all my machines, including the Steam Deck. Multiple subscription lists would do it.

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Quoting: TheRiddickNow if we can get proper HDR support for Plasma Wayland then things will be looking up for the standard.

Then my next bucket list items needed is NVIDIA Reflex and FrameGen support.

Currently forced to use Win11 to play CP77 and Witcher-3 (assume I want RT and playable fps, :tongue: )

Well, this has existed for a while for nVidia reflex, I think it even gives better results in some cases: https://github.com/ishitatsuyuki/LatencyFleX [External Link]

Not upstreamed though.

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Quoting: StalePopcornI'm sure it (HDR) requires using Game scope!?

Or a compatible wayland compositor, I think KWin (KDE) recently made sole progress on that front, at least for full screen games.

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Quoting: GuestGiven that most of what I do on Linux is gaming, a lot of the time I would be using XWayland, so there's no point in using Wayland for me, not until it becomes impossible to live without. There are other issues too, and it's simpler to stick to the same thing I have been using all these years.

This is coming from an AMD GPU user, by the way. It's not like gaming is impossible on Wayland, or anything, I chose not to use it.

It's sooo nice not to have applications randomly modeset your monitor, grab your mouse, hide windows, steal focus, refuse to full screen or resize. Especially with a tiling WM. That alone was worth the hassle when I switched to Wayland CA 2018.

Now, that development is interesting. It's no secret that Linux is big in the entertainment industry, with a lot of professional tools (the renderer from Pixar, Davinci Resolve, etc) supporting Linux. I guess HDR work is for them, first and foremost.

But in the EDA (electronics design automation) industry for instance, most vendors and users are elbow-deep in the X11 pie, so it's a bit hard seeing this work out (thankfully xwayland works pretty well these days, but they will have to adjust some tools like IBM LSF, which can be used to run GUI apps on a remote machine in a cluster). That said, the industry moves slowly, and RHEL8 is slooowly gaining traction, so there's still some time to adapt.

Overall there's very little X11 can do that Wayland can't be made to do better. For instance, one could imagine sharing an interactive window among multiple remote users, thanks to multi seat support, perhaps even with mixed DPI. Wayland is easier to extend with new protocols.

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