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Indeed - I’ve seen more people recommend Hannah Montana Linux (apt-based) than any of those for newcomers recently.
You are entirely right that a Linux distribution is really just its package manager, the default packages installed, and some remote repositories which may (or may not) have had some customisation applied, which will have been pulled and built from a source repository somewhere. All that’s really needed to swap between eg. Arch, Manjaro or Cachy is to update the repo files and issue a package manager update command, although I’d probably like to verify my backups and get a stiff drink first.
The House of Linux is built out of bricks, and the bricks aren’t that scary - you can take them to bits and look at them if you like, they’re usually zipped-up folders of text files and the binaries you’d get from compiling them yourself. But if that’s not what you’re used to, then yeah - 🤯 .
In all seriousness, I wish that most distros had art half as good as what Void Linux has - got some really gifted people, there.
True, but network effects are important to that.
There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
Games which run on Vulkan / OpenGL don’t have any GPU translation overhead, and some run straight-up better via Proton than they do on Windows. Doom 2016 does for me, for instance.
Of course, that game is so well optimised it’s the difference between 140 fps and 200+ fps, which is not terribly obvious, but even so.
From the article, sounds like the company founder is a complete bell-end, had no clear vision and kept changing his mind on everything. Half the games developers in Edinburgh probably used to work for Rockstar and will know all the ins-and-outs of developing a GTA clone, but if you keep fucking them around then you’ll end up with a mess.
From the reviews, sounds like even when it’s not being a buggy mess, it’s boring and the plot is completely stupid. You can hotfix the bugs and performance issues away, but if the underlying concept is shite then you can’t really polish that into something good.
Well, there are some ‘poorly optimised’ games out there. Am able to run eg. Cyberpunk 2077 near maximum (non-raytraced) settings and it happily trundles along at 80+ fps. Would really like to play Mind Over Magic, just my kind of game and which looks like it was done on the Quake3 engine, and I’m struggling since it runs like absolute ass regardless of what the settings are. Think that’s the joy of Unity, though.
I think a lot of the problem is that we’re long past the point where diminishing returns kick in. Doubling the amount of processing required for a few percent more lighting fidelity, that kind of thing. Half Life 2 was expensive for its day, mostly due to its extended development - about $40m then, equivalent of ~$70m now - but it still looks great, mostly due to its strong art style. (I realise Valve keep sneakily updating the engine, so things like the water effects are much better now than they were on release.) There’s games that cost ten times as much and which don’t really look a lot better, but which will get tagged as ‘badly optimised’ since they’re chasing the very latest graphical shinies.
I think the sheer price of producing all of those HD assets is a significant risk to any studio, and means that we end up with a lot of cookie-cutter AAA games where the industry is very cautious about taking chances of any kind. Maybe I’m not the main target for the shiniest of graphics, but my Steam games with the most hours - Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, the Dark Souls series, Crusader Kings - run the gamut from ‘charmingly simple’ to ‘functionally realistic’, but I’d not describe any of them as great because of their graphics.
InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.
Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.
In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.
Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.
No need to hold your breath for Bloodborne on PC, get yourself over to https://shadps4.net/ and get ready to slay a few beasts. It’s for your own good.
Even better with 0.10.0:
The big new feature this release brings with it is readbacks, which emulates shared memory on the PS4 by reading back memory that was modified on the GPU back to the CPU side, …, fixing vertex explosions in Bloodborne and similar games
The harpoon works just fine too, one-hits the stick insects and does her some damage as well if you can line it up. She’s not very dangerous if you know her moveset, but that’s an education learned by many runbacks.
Doesn’t say they’ve fixed the comedy bug where if you look at the map while on one of the collapsing platforms, then when you fall through then the game stops accepting input, Hornet just stares at it forever. Only glitch I’ve found, quite impressive for a day one purchase.
It’s an RPG set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland after the world has been destroyed by nuclear war. You set up your initial character with a fairly conventional set of RPG stats, plus a set of skills that you’ll use as you play. Some of these are combat skills, like conventional or futuristic energy weapons; some of these are thief skills, like sneaking and lockpicking; and some of them are just complete bullshit that do nothing, to punish you for not using a guide.
As you progress through the game, you’ll meet other characters that you might want to recruit into your party. Some of them are much more useful than others. It is a good idea not to hand them automatic weapons, as they’ll squander all your precious ammunition on the first rat that they see. There are a lot of random enemy encounters.
There’s a technologically advanced group who cling to the remnants of civilisation, who you can grab some very decent gear from if you play your cards right. The final boss is part of the children of the citadel, a cult that has sprung up in the wasteland. He has plans to convert humanity into a new hybrid species to better cope with the world after the nuclear war. You cap his ass.
Although it was a very influential RPG in its day, certain aspects of it - the UI, more than anything - have aged really badly. The plot still holds up, though, and it’s a lot of fun to play if you can push past the jank.
Think you could take it back a step there.
- Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
- Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
- Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
- Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
- Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.
Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.
Resident Evil Village uses that, doesn’t it? If you obtain a, ahem, Denuvo-free version, it’s absolutely buttery smooth. Makes a great job of interiors, exteriors, character animation, and particle effects - especially smoke and fire. It just stutters like fuck to the point of unplayability if you try and run the version that you’d get through Steam.
I’ve found that disabling VSync in games entirely and then letting MangoHud do the limiting works a bit better. Some of that will be because I’m using Proton on Linux, which has DXVK as a translation layer. Games will be trying to limit their frames the DirectX way, whereas MangoHud is limiting them the Vulkan way and is ‘closer to the monitor’ for keeping the pace right.
Also, MangoHud has an ability to set fps_limit in a per-game way that generally results in much smoother frame-pacing than most games achieve by default. That’s awesome for eg. Dark Souls / Elden Ring, which are stuttery at 60 fps but buttery at 59 for some reason, but also for random strategy games which would be just fine at 30 fps but instead have all the fans roaring to render at 144.
Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.
It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(
Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.
They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.
Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.
Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.
There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.
Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.
Three months of using Arch and you’ve not included your ‘btw’ when claiming to use it? Most suspicious.
But yeah, agree completely. I made a new-years resolution about five years ago to try ‘Linux only gaming for a month’ rather than dual booting; worked so well that I wiped Windows a few months later and have never missed it for a minute. That was for Mint, which is great but hard to keep cutting-edge. Decided to try Arch instead, and after a couple of false starts (hadn’t read the install guide carefully enough to have networking after restart, that kind of thing) it’s been absolutely superb - rock solid, got everything I want at the very latest versions for work and games, best documentation of any distro.
Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.
Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.
Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.
I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.
Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.
Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.
Awesome interview as well, @[email protected] - a really interesting read.
The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.
Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.
Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.
What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.