Wow... somehow it feels like that level of invasiveness is not what a tiny game dev team of 3 should be looking into for a 3rd-party off-shelf solution for AC

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imho the China market is probably the only where the Steam Deck isn't an obvious pick

afaik they have enjoyed a bunch of PC-like portables that never took off elsewhere, at unusually competitive pricing

it's also a place where replacing SteamOS 3 for Windows might happen more often due to how disproportionally adverse that market is to linux, riskng this become a more well established trend... it was smart of Valve to use windows support on the hardware as a safety net feeling for prospective purchasers that are windows gamers, but we do not want that to change into a "go to" choice anywhere

maybe Valve is trying to make a stronger name for the Deck worldwide before taking a chance there

meanwhile their linux devs keep hammering perf gains for the linux driver stack and making a stronger case for "better with linux" (this is already a thing, which my past self from 10 years ago probably wouldn't believe if my current self walked out of a time machine and showed him some current news... even after believing time travel is real, nonetheless)

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things I'm growing tired of:

1) exclusives

2) exclusives

3) exclusives

4) studio launchers

5) drm

6) anti-cheat

7) stuff that makes me use windows at home (I'm already fuming angry with more and more windows issues on my work machine, I need a safe distance from it while gaming, or it will feel like a chore)

8) "i'll think of crossplatform support later" (and proceeds to use a buch of stuff that will make it impossible), then later "it's too hard to support linux" (and proceeds to blame the OS instead of their own lack of foresight)

9) games that use players as beta testers without warning them it's a beta test (and proceeds to cut Q&A jobs including the ones that would process player reports into dev insights on what to fix)... SKYRIM, I'm staring right at you!

10) huge open ended games (that's a personal issue, I'm a casual player + completionist + short on time, so big games are a recipe for disaster before finishing the main story... if there even is one, and I like when there is one... see the problem?!)

I think I'm getting objectively and subjectively *old*, LOL

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it speaks volumes the anount of times "fixes EA launcher/app"appears in Proton changelogs

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Quoting: ArehandoroI have an RX 5700 (Not sure if XT), that means it does not have Ray Tracing cores, right? Would I lose a lot of performance if I were to enable it on a game? I mainly want to play Cyberpunk with it.

if games with RT support get too heavy on your machine, you'll still be able to toggle RT off via in-game settings

and most likely the driver will get a flag to force-disable RT too, since it's such a resource hog, in case a game doesn't let you tweak it the nice way

you should test it and see what happens

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Quoting: ripper81358For DirectX 12 titles running through proton one might still need to set a startup command to get Raytracing enabled.

Why would Valve limit this on their end now that it "just works" if they're the ones pushing forward a lot of this upstream development effort in the first place?

Proton Experimental is usually ready around the time the upstream features land, unless the Wine/Proton bits that need to be developed are particularly complicated...

...and where DX12 is involved, this development falls in the VKD3D lib, which translates DX12 to Vulkan and iirc has been very busy with RT already (after all the features where already around to use, just hidden behind flags)

for now it's hidden behing a flag in upstream VKD3D, but Valve can patch the copy shipped with proton or pass the flag automatically
https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/releases [External Link]

VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr now enables DXR 1.1 as well. dxr11 is kept for compat
[...]
NOTE: VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 is required to enable DXR 1.1 for now.

and they clearly have DXR 1.1 available already, just not sure if with any missing bits

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Tricky Towers is my favourite 3rd-party spin on the Tetris concept... the goal is piling up the blocks instead of destroying filled up rows, and 2D-physics is applied so the tower of blocks tends to get unstable, the blocks can fall irregularly, etc

This one looks so different too! It definitely made me want to play it :)

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arguably the first "solid-state active cooling" solution ever sold is peltier, but it's very W intensive and doesn't get rid of the air renewal issue around heatsinks which this targets

there is also a very cool air-movement by ionization and electric attraction/repulsion method (corona effect) that was technically solid-state... it has proven a bit problematic, especially near eletronic components
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03447-w [External Link]

where do they explain the working principle for their thing?
edit: the datasheet pdfs have more info in how it works... pretty clever

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I'm so glad I finally found >1 people who know and played Stars!

It's obviously a niche game, but pretty awesome for its age

IMHO it actually even aged well when considering game mechanics and ease of interaction... but yeah, the UI was ugly even back then (a bit better in the newer versions, which it had many)

It's a pity New Stars really isn't an improved Stars!, because I'd definitely like a refreshed version of it.

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Gaming is in dire need of FOSS platform-agnostic vendor-agnostic SDKs for multiplayer, achievements, save sync, etc, somewhat like libretro did for emulation.

Maybe something modular that has a general implementation which the game interfaces with and a module that turns that into stuff each vendor-specific server-side of their SDKs can understand, plus a vendor-neutral module with a corresponding server-side implementation anyone can deploy (like NextCloud does)

And by the way libretro does do a couple of those things aleady so...

On the other end there could be modules for games that expect a vendor-specific SDK, to translate their needs into the general implementation, which could work as a compatibility layer, like Goldberg Emulator does as a replacement for Steam API

Put both together and you could use a game that has implemented Steam API over a private server or maybe even be able to make it easier for a game dev to implement a single API and not have to recode parts of the game to get it published on Steam and GOG using each platform's services.

Anyway I imagine a good chunk of the work for something like this to exist is probably doable by working atop Comet and Legendary, maybe it's possible to integrate into libretro and then apps like Mini Galaxy and etc would also have an easier time keeping several distribuition platforms in good shape in their projects, pooling efforts together as much as possible.

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