This teaser was damn intense at the game awards. I was very much like “what is even going on” and feeling pretty uncomfy. Incredibly gruesome, gorey and explicit.

And then it showed “Larian Studios” and I understood. What a reveal!

A lot of my friends have said they prefer girth, fwiw.

Jokes aside, that’s a good point. HDMI/DisplayPort, like USB, pass digital signals over many small cables in a bundle. With how much data uncompressed high res images consist of, I doubt there’s a lot of redundancy or parity the way there may be for Cat6 cable using TCP. At a certain point, without a powered repeater cable, the image will probably not work (or not reliably). Idk if that would appear as “no signal” or dropped frames, though.

Passive adapters don’t have much power to work with for signal processing… Idk how different the image signals themselves are between HDMI and DisplayPort, but I know from working with EDIDs that there’s many optional modes and features for both, like multiple audio/videos streams (3d video, surround sound, hdmi arc), different colorspaces, HDR and VRR. I’d be surprised if any passive HDMI-to-DP adapter supports more than the most common modes and features.

FWIW, the game has some gorgeous volumetric lighting, fog and effects. I do think it looks more current-gen than many other games, and it doesn’t rely on heavy raytracing options to do it.

It’s still ridiculous though, especially considering the game doesn’t support any modern algorithms for upscaling, but defaults to upscaling anyways.

Though, I know it didn’t have the budget of many AAA games and the engine has been long-since unsupported, so props to Arrowhead for doing as much as they have!

I’m on Arch, with Hyprland as my Window Manager. I use an RTX 3070.

For Wayland specifically, the driver was next to unusable for a while. I jumped ship from Windows in Sept. 2023. Beginning with driver 560 iirc, it got a lot better, plus their engineers pushed a lot of changes across the Wayland ecosystem to implement explicit sync support (a net positive, but before this, Nvidia was too stubborn to implement implicit sync, so bad screen tearing was unavoidable). Also there’s been a slow migration to using the GSP processor on newer cards. They claim it can improve performance, which may be true, but I also recently learned it helps them keep some more parts of their code closed-source, which is likely why it’s required to use the open source kernel modules.

At this point, though, it does feel very smooth and I can play games like The Finals at competitive framerates!

But relative to my performance under Windows, it’s still worse, mainly in average framerate. Like others have said, DX12 games seem to be hit hardest. I sometimes have to run lower settings to compensate. Also, if my VRAM gets filled, Xwayland apps all break, so I have to be very careful with higher quality texture quality especially.

Anyways, to answer your question, I think an average gamer doesn’t notice the degraded performance, without benchmarking or comparing framerates back to back— it still runs pretty smooth and framerates are still pretty high. If they aren’t happy with it, they’ll drop quality settings or resolution, just like they’d do under Windows.

Yep! The article title is a bit misleading, as the Steam Machine is still x86_64. Which is good imo: that’ll have better compatibility and the power draw/thermals matter less there than in a handheld or headset.

The Frame is the arm-based hardware Valve is going to be shipping.

But their work on FEX is taking ARM compatibility into the future, much like how their work on Wine/Proton has taken Linux compatibility to a new level.

Anyways, I agree with the article, that it’s going to extend to more than the Frame as support matures. ARM CPUs (or RISCs in general) are the future for non-desktop processors; I’d argue Apple has already been there with their M-series laptops, though not to nearly the same extent with gaming.

I feel like this is a good argument for drm-free games and stores like GOG. Not that you as a consumer can always choose that, as many games don’t offer that option, but for the ones that do, there’s less barriers towards playing it in the future or in environments where it’s not originally intended.

There is steamcmd, an official command-line tool— I’ve only used it for game servers, and I don’t know if it includes the Steam runtime/resources, but I know it lets you download games.

You could look at Goldberg Emulator too. I know it’s used often for piracy, but idk about its legality on its own.

Minecraft with 512 chunk render distance or 2048px resolution textures is gonna be fire tho

You’re strawmanning their comment— I’d imagine they’d have the same, if not more, issues with snap.

Flatpak doesn’t integrate well with all systems. For me personally, on Arch, I have to update and store Flatpak versions of some dependencies, like proprietary Nvidia drivers, separately from the rest of my system and its package management system. And it does take up some space to store the runtime too.

Also Flatpaks may require some extra set up and/or workarounds due to their sandboxed environment. That’s not inherently bad and has some big security upsides, but it’s a consideration.

Also I don’t know how well it plays with immutable distros, but I’d imagine there may be similar integration issues there, too.

It’s still probably a lot easier for devs to have a consistent distribution format though, and they are typically more secure, so I’m not saying there’s not merits to only providing a Flatpak. Just pointing out that your reply here was misguided, imo.

I know I’m late to reply here, but I’m with you on your edit… I think Lemmy specifically has a demographic that overlaps very little with AAA FPS players, as compared to other platforms. I think the user base tends to be older and less into live-service games. But also, Lemmy/the threadiverse, being FOSS, has a big user base that’s passionate about FOSS software. And that often correlates with being critical of big corporations, products, etc.

Also many of those users use Linux, which this game notably won’t work on because of its invasive anticheat. So many of these replies may be fueled by that, too: Either jealousy of being able to play it, or “moral high ground” for choosing not to. (Note: I am in this situation and my preferred OS is a big reason I am not buying this title).

I don’t generally find it productive, though, to blame any individual consumer for funding a corporation. We live in a capitalist society, and we all have to participate to some extent to even live, often including to the benefit of mega corporations with poor morals and ties. I feel there exists better ways of fighting back against those practices, inequalities and abuses (though the government angle, at least in the US, has been falling real short there lately).

And, honestly, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect anyone to forgo major goods and services from their life, including entertainment, for the sake of morals.

If you thought the game was worth the price, it’s fair to buy it. And tbh, there’s a lot of hype and (imo) good changes with this title, so I don’t blame you.

That doesn’t make the game immune from criticism either— if you couldn’t play it whatsoever at launch because of server capacity and always-online requirements, that’s worth criticizing! And I agree with your post, always-online requirements are such BS for games with singleplayer content. I understand the motivation for the company, but it’s incredibly anti-consumer nonetheless.

Lastly, your post absolutely belongs in a gaming community— FPS games are one of the biggest genres in gaming, and pretty synonymous with “gaming”. And this is a massive release! Sorry that the general response you got wasn’t very positive or kind, though.

I love Bluetuith! It’s my go-to for Bluetooth device management in my setup, since TUI applications tend to integrate really well into my existing theme, since I’ve set up my preferred terminal colors already.

I can imagine this would be a great option now for Windows users who already use the terminal frequently, like devs!

As we already expected, NSFW games being a target was only ever going to be a first step. There’s always more to it.

Well said. This is a good part of why I took issue with the initial removals on Steam… tbh I wasn’t effected, as I don’t tend to play porn games, and if I was going to, I’d probably avoid some of the extreme themes those original removals had.

In my opinion, adults should be able to consensually interact with whatever media they so care to! Still, it’s in a platform’s rights to choose what they allow or deny… so I appreciate Steam being so open to mature content.

But payment processors should have no say in what is allowed on a platform. As long as it’s legal, they shouldn’t be policing transactions at all!

sanitising parts to be in accordance with console standards or censoring the game, depending on who you ask.

It’s censorship, I don’t really see how one could argue (well) that it’s not. Self-censorship is still censorship, and seeing as the rationale for this change was specific platform policies, I think it’s absolutely fair to view the change happening on PC critically.

Honestly, the story and gameplay is still very dark and gritty, so I don’t think these changes would’ve had much backlash had they been this way from the start. Sometimes explicit content isn’t strictly required to get a point across, and can make a game less accessible, so I can understand games having a warning with a toggle.

But I’m very against total censorship. This reminds me a lot of when Superhot VR removed multiple scenes 4 years after the game’s release, because they were related to self-harm or suicide. Note that the game had a warning on launch as well as a toggle for this content. The linked article does a great deep dive on it, but imo I think the change really does affect the game. I got done with it (post-censorship) and did not see the hype. The game wasn’t very long and didn’t have many “whoa” moments. But shooting yourself… that’s something that you can only really do in VR, assuming it’s not coded in to a flatscreen game. And it would’ve fit into the game’s plot and themes very well.

I think the concept of Game Pass works best for older or smaller games. Charging $60+ for a game makes people expect a certain level of quality and amount of content.

Putting games like that on it though? Especially day-one? Of course their sales are gonna take a hit!

Hi-fi Rush would be my example of a super polished game with a solid amount of content. It reviewed incredibly well; so much so that I bought the game on Steam because of the hype. But most people with game pass just played it there… and they ended up shutting down the studio.

I think for brand new releases, some kind of demo or limited access could work. Give players the Call of Duty campaign, give us the opening chapters of story-driven games, or give us a limited selection of levels for games formatted like that. Leave some incentive, though, for players to buy the game, especially if it’s a good game that players would be convinced to buy by playing a bit.

Did something similar to this with one of those “speed up silence” plugins. It was hard to notice cuz dialog was still 1x…

Sorry for the late reply. Also @Cricket’s response is great and actually references a source!

Anecdotally though, as a user, I’ve noticed that some things require extra permissions. Usually there’s a prompt from the operating system that’ll ask for permission capture the desktop, which lets me specify which window or monitor to share. It uses the “XDG Desktop Portal”, which was already what allowed Flatpaks to securely access OS resources, and it has a whole bunch of different requests for resources and permissions. It’s similar to a web browser, where it’ll prompt you for privileges when an app wants them.

The hardest pain point for me has been that an app cannot detect keyboard input if it isn’t focused. This could prevent key loggers, but it also makes global shortcuts not work. There is a protocol that allows an app to request a key be forwarded to it, but it’s not widely implemented in apps (discord, for example) and I’ve had to rely on workarounds.

All good! You’re still totally right; outside of the context, Linux has quite the user base with servers, embedded devices, and even phones, if we count Android. I think that’s relevant because it means we can’t rely on “security by obscurity”.

I haven’t heard of any such cases, but it is a smaller pool of users. Also, many desktop Linux users know more about using a computer than other operating system users, since it’s less common for Linux to come preinstalled. So that may affect it, too.

I imagine vulnerabilities with the Linux kernel or common utilities do apply to desktop users as well, which is a good reminder why staying up-to-date is important. But to my understanding, exploiting remotely would need a way of sending data to the target. And most desktop computers won’t have ports open to the internet for anyone like servers will.

I know that Wayland’s design does make it more difficult for a user-mode program to act maliciously, like as key-loggers or reading the clipboard.

You don’t see that everyday on PC! I don’t really mind it personally… at very least, the game’s got bigger issues on the horizon imo. Life service and EA~

Yeah… Apex Legends dropped Linux support a while ago and that’s one of the reasons they cited; and tbf, there were publicly available Linux cheats that ran under proton.

But there’s also loads of publicly available “external” cheats that run the way you described. Some run through a virtual machine even. It’s just not a robust solution for preventing cheating, and mostly hurts the legit Linux players.

Yeah, that’s not bad! Now, that is with quality upscaling, so not at native 1080p. And on low settings, which we’re yet to see how that looks.

But yeah, compared to most of the industry (even themselves with AW2), this is a pleasant surprise! It makes me more open to trying it, since I find shooters on kbm to benefit greatly from higher framerates.

Anyways, I’m not expecting call of duty or cs2 framerates. Lower quality options in those games tend to look pretty presentable, and framerates can get past 120 fps depending on the rig and settings. This game isn’t PvP, though, and I think this middle ground between performance and quality is a great fit for PvE. Helldivers II is where my mind goes (except this game will have half-competent upscaling).